In a few weeks, Vice-Chancellors will be discussing a request by a group of federal politicians to endorse the latest weapon in Zionists’ longstanding bid to suppress criticism of Israeli apartheid on campus—the highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Their decision will constitute a watershed moment for universities’ already somewhat threatened credibility as centres of independent analysis and truth-telling.

Palestine student activists are being reprimanded for refusing to take on the coloniser’s truth at a time of supposed decolonising of academia. That is the situation we expect them to navigate without demanding accountability or critical scrutiny.

The Nakba is ongoing. However, our story of dispossession is not unique, but rather forms part of the many stories of Indigenous populations being uprooted, murdered and having their lands destroyed by violent colonial regimes, including the land we live on.

Three weeks ago, students at the University of Melbourne passed a motion in solidarity with Palestine and with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Since then, the student union (UMSU) and the students involved with drafting and passing the motion have come under sustained pressure from Zionist individuals and organisations, including a class action lawsuit threatening to take the union to court if it does not retract the motion.

We, the undersigned staff members at Universities across Australia, support the University of Melbourne students who passed the recent motion ‘UMSU Stands with Palestine – BDS and Solidarity Policy’. We also support University students across the country who take a stance on Palestine in the face of an orchestrated campaign by Zionist groups who attempt to slander them for standing against settler colonialism, apartheid, and racism in Palestine.

Despite attacks on freedom of speech concerning Palestine at universities, students and staff are resisting and continuing to campaign for the rights of Palestinian people. Prevent has built an environment of silence and fear and although some students and staff may self-censor or limit their involvement, others refuse to shrink back. Students continue to speak out and put their education and bodies on the line as they occupy buildings, intervene in boardroom meetings and oppose former Israeli soldiers or regime representatives speaking on campus.

In the context of Palestine, failing to adopt an abolitionist lens and, instead, focusing on apartheid isolates the Palestinian question from the broader settler colonial project of which it is subjected, and ignores what we know about the use of prisons and incarceration in older settler colonial projects.

We resist through BDS so that we can return to and rebuild villages like Safsaf. We resist through BDS to stop forced ethnic displacements in villages like Sheikh Jarrah. We resist through BDS to create a unified Palestine where our rights and sovereignty are realised and respected. We resist through BDS to organise communities around the world to dismantle the systems that oppress.

Palestinian Economic Week is an opportunity for allies to shift from performance politics to genuine economic and political support for Palestinians. People are finally talking and questioning where their food is coming from.

We, members of the Disability Justice Network of Australia, want to express our anger, sorrow, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. As both Indigenous and non-Indigenous disabled people living in so-called Australia, we recognise and understand the violent and disabling nature of settler-colonialism, an ongoing structure that relies on the othering, dehumanisation, and disposal of our bodies and lives.

This is a historical moment. Palestinians unite in protest from Sheikh Jarrah to Gaza, from Haifa to Ramallah, from Shatila to New York. Our voices come together in a chorus that echoes through time, calling, as we always have, for a Free Palestine. Now stand with us on the right side of history.

The May 18 general strikers asked for boycott because it ‘can directly help to throw a wrench in the economy of settler colonialism’. Deciding whether to support them isn’t some boutique, special-interest question, but a question of how far we’re prepared to contribute to a global struggle for justice for a viciously oppressed and dispossessed people – one that has brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets around the world.

Tapping into a deep history, in May 2021 Italian dockworkers refused to load weapons onto a ship headed for Israel. A few days later, Palestinians held a general strike across all industries, the largest since 1948. Only 150 of 65,000 Palestinian construction workers in Israel showed up to work.

Headlines about Palestine and Israel are rarely pitched in context, especially in Australia. In the small moments of the everyday, Israel is the aggressor. When we judge the enduring situation from an objective human rights perspective, there is no competition for responsibility: Israel is the heavily resourced military and governing power of both societies, the transgressor of international law, the enforcer of Apartheid, and for historical and political reasons, it’s the main recipient of western governments and media sympathies. This must change.

Within a globalised landscape where protest poetics and aesthetics are vital tools in the fight against white supremacy, Palestine solidarity has found shelter in new places within which to breathe and exhale.

In Israel, as in Australia, colonisation is the context without which nothing else makes sense. The Israeli state depends on the dispossession of Palestinians, and so, by its nature, will constantly create and recreate violence, just as the Australian settler state did.