Opinion

Note: The following is an open letter from several of the individuals who were arrested in front of AUC during the protests that occurred from 25 to 28 March.

Dear AUC community,

We are writing to you as a group of students who were arrested for peacefully protesting our university’s complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people and its ties to “Israeli” universities and institutions in the last week of March. The police violence and criminalisation we encountered at the picket of the AUC Academic Building (AB) has shaken our community and exposed the university management’s willingness to put their students at the risk of physical and mental distress in order to crush demonstrations and protect their investments in “Israel”‘s military occupation. In the aftermath of these events, and as we try to grapple with the tensions and contradictions of attending a university that authorises the arrests of their own students, we want to clarify to our larger community the context of the picket, tell our version of our arrests and our experiences of detainment, and place them within the larger context of military violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

We have frequently been asked how it could have gotten to this point – what happened that led to the blockade of the AB, the deployment of Dutch police, and ultimately our arrests? We want to make it clear that this picket was the culmination of a series of failed attempts to negotiate with AUC management and to make our demands heard by the larger student body. Since the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on 7 October, students have been putting up flyers to spread information about the situation in Gaza and to show support for the Palestinian cause. These early attempts at showing solidarity were met with suppression from AUC, including threats of consequences for individual students. In response to this, the student movement AU Free Palestine (AUFP) was formed to outline a set of demands for AUC to address its complicity in the advancing genocide of the Palestinian people and allow students to express themselves politically on campus (a full list of the demands can be found in AUFP’s zine at this link). Peaceful sit-ins were organized to convince the university’s management of the urgent necessity to meet these demands. Already on the day of the first sit-in, the police were called on the protestors by the management team. Subsequent attempts at negotiations between AUC management and AUFP were unsuccessful, and were shut down by management themselves – you can read more about this process in AUFP’s zine. As the need for our university to act in the face of genocide has only become more urgent, AUFP’s actions have become more disruptive. The decision to block the entrances to the AB was a direct result of management’s continued unwillingness to seriously consider AUFP’s demands, after months of organised actions such as sit-ins, teach-ins, walkouts and more. We are aware that students have experienced uncertainty and disruption to their education as a result of the picket. At this point, it is worth mentioning that, within the first 100 days of its military offensive on Gaza, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has systematically destroyed every single university on the strip (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/24/how-israel-has-destroyed-gazas-schools-and-universities). Still, it was never AUFP’s initial intention to deny their peers in Amsterdam their education, but AUC’s continued unresponsiveness has left students in solidarity with Palestine no other choice but to resort to disruption. AUC has repeatedly claimed to be and cited their duty to represent a “neutral place of knowledge production.” However, as an educational institution with a primarily international student body that prides itself on its valuation of academic freedom, social justice, diversity and excellence, this university has failed to uphold its responsibility to act in accordance with their principles. While they claim to “commit to challenging systemic racism, discrimination and social injustices and aim to create an environment where every member of our community feels safe and knows their contribution is valued” (Mission and Values statement), the actions of AUC’s management in response to the blockade of the Academic Building paint a clear picture of their stance: Under their false cover of “neutrality,” AUC continues to repress pro-Palestinian voices and refuses to enact an academic boycott, thereby continuing to support the ongoing genocide​​​​​​​.

From the beginning, the picket was explicitly peaceful, and the participating students never threatened or caused harm to anyone. Despite this, the police were called to disband the protests on four consecutive days. On Monday, five of us were illegally handcuffed and violently arrested, despite not resisting the police officers. A van was driven into the crowd of witnessing students and staff, and several students from this crowd were forcefully pushed and beaten with batons. This was a clear attempt to intimidate students and crush protests in support of Palestine, but AUC’s management failed to take into account their students’ commitment to the cause, and the outrage their repression would cause amongst students and staff, who came back to support the picket in even larger numbers the following days. Despite the shocking display of police violence on the first day of the blockade, AUC continued to threaten its students’ safety by openly coordinating with and authorising the police to arrest students the following three days. In total, 17 students were taken into police custody, some of us handcuffed, some dragged across the ground in front of our university. Footage from the picket, documenting the actions of the police, will soon be uploaded to AUFP’s Instagram page.

It is important to us to note that this violent suppression of our peaceful protest is not random. Expressions of solidarity with Palestine in the Netherlands and across Europe have historically been met with extreme repression. This is because these countries, built on centuries of colonial exploitation, have deep ties to Zionist settler-colonialism. These ties include academic collaborations and funding which directly channel money into the development and production of weapons and surveillance technologies deployed in the genocide of Palestinian people, by our own universities, UvA and VU – although they have not been transparent about the full extent of these ties, information about some of them can be found in a post on AUFP’s Instagram. AUC’s complicity in maintaining these ties, and its reluctance to seriously address its students’ demands to cut them, compel us to take action. 

In the days of, and following, our arrests, we have received countless expressions of concern and solidarity from our peers and lecturers. While we are grateful for this support and understand the outrage at blatant police violence and criminalisation of political expression, the focus that has been put on us as arrestees has made us feel uneasy. We fear that the conversation is shifting away from Palestine, and that the larger context of settler-colonial occupation is missing from these discussions. Although our arrests were difficult to live through, and despite systemic parallels between the criminalisation of protest at AUC and the acts of the “Israeli” occupying forces in Palestine, our outrage cannot be only in reaction to the temporary discomfort we experienced at the hands of the Dutch police – it has to foreground the living conditions of Palestinians. The Zionist occupying power has built a “carceral state” (Khalidi, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2014.43.4.5), characterised by a vast prison structure to suppress those who contest the legitimacy of the settler-colonial project. But even “free” Palestinians are living in what has been called the world’s largest open-air prison, displaced from their homelands and restricted in their freedom of movement through illegal settlements, walls, fences, and checkpoints, to the extent that one Palestinian prisoner has described that “living at home under occupation and living in prison are the same, the only difference is the locality; whereas at home you live in 1967 occupied Palestine, in prison you are in 1948 Palestine [Israel]” (Abdo, 2014, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=5390599).

The carceral conditions in the Netherlands we experienced as privileged students of a European institution are nothing compared to the fate of Palestinians detained and incarcerated by the “Israeli” regime. Since 1967, over 40% of the male population of Palestine has been imprisoned in Israel at some point in their life (Meari, 2014, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sumud%3A-A-Palestinian-Philosophy-of-Confrontation-in-Meari/7156f26e1a6edde48c02e698568a5bcb07a53736). The occupation authorities systematically and persistently target Palestinian university students for arbitrary arrest and detention, often under the pretence of involvement with “illegal” student groups. You can watch some of the testimonies from students at Birzeit University who have been subjected to systematic attacks, raids on campus, arbitrary detention orders, and torture and ill-treatment here. Alongside other universities, as well as the Palestinian Boycott, Divest and Sanction initiative, Birzeit University has called on international academic institutions to take concrete action to stop the genocidal war on the Palestinian people and to end Zionist settler colonialism – these calls are at the root of our demands for AUC to enact an academic boycott. Even though the suppression of our protest by the municipality and the Dutch police is unacceptable, what should really enrage us and fuel our fight are the conditions Palestinians, including Palestinian students, live through under occupation.

After our arrests, we were held at a police station, some of us overnight, for purposes of identification and interrogation. While these were uncomfortable moments to live through, being confined to a small cell and isolated from our comrades, intimidated by police officers and manipulated to reveal our identities, our attention should be on the realities of Palestinian administrative detainees held without charge or trial in “Israeli” prisons (read more here) and the torturous methods used at interrogation centres such as al-Mascobiyya (more information here). Pressured by police officers to give incriminating statements or admit to a crime, we had to demonstrate some perseverance in the face of the seemingly overpowering presence of the military industrial complex – but our experiences of refusal are decidedly different from those of Palestinian detainees, who are faced with the embodied order of power that structures the colonial relation in interrogations by the “Israeli” Security Agency Shabak. Their refusal to cooperate and provide a confession has been described as a practice of resistance against the settler-colonial relation itself – the practice of sumud, or steadfastness (read more in Meari, 2014, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Sumud%3A-A-Palestinian-Philosophy-of-Confrontation-in-Meari/7156f26e1a6edde48c02e698568a5bcb07a53736).

One of the most striking experiences for some of us was the complete loss of control over accessing necessities, such as food and fresh air, during our time at the police station. Still, we were fed and let outside into a fenced off courtyard – while Palestinians are continuously targeted and murdered when seeking much-needed supplies and food from humanitarian aid deliveries. We should be watching with horror as tragedies such as the “Flour Massacre,” when more than 100 civilians were killed and 700 injured in an attack on Palestinians awaiting an aid delivery on 29 February, are perpetrated by “Israel” (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/09/middleeast/gaza-food-aid-convoy-deaths-eyewitness-intl-investigation-cmd/index.html).

One of us was denied access to their medication for the duration of their detainment. While the actions of the police officers on duty are disgraceful, this treatment is nothing compared to the medical negligence and disregard for Palestinians right to life that are standard in “Israeli” prisons: Since 7 October, 15 Palestinian activists have been reported dead from their jail cells. Just last Sunday, author, academic, and artist Walid Daqqa, the longest held Palestinian prisoner, died resulting from the Zionist occupation refusing him access to treatment for his bone marrow cancer (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/israel-opt-death-in-custody-of-walid-daqqah-is-cruel-reminder-of-israels-disregard-for-palestinians-right-to-life/). “Israel” will continue to hold his body until the end of his prolonged prison sentence in March 2025 (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/09/middleeast/walid-daqqa-palestinian-prisoner-dies-38-years-in-israeli-custody-intl/index.html). It has been made clear that, through mass incarceration, Zionist prisons seek not only to contain Palestinian resistance, but to destroy the bodies of those who oppose their violent occupation. By withholding the body of Daqqa, and those of the hundreds of other martyrs dead behind bars, “Israel” is using the corpses of innocents as leverage material against the resistance, and as vengeance against the failures of its overarching colonial project. Although the outrage at what has happened to us is justified, we are saddened that it has taken the arrest of 17 mostly white, privileged university students to generate any kind of meaningful and sustained solidarity with students standing in solidarity with Palestine at AUC. This is not an unfamiliar pattern: The death of seven non-profit workers from the World Central Kitchen organisation, whose convoy was hit by an “Israeli” drone-fired missile despite having coordinated their movements with the IDF, has recently provoked international condemnation from the general public and from elected government officials, “testing their solidarity” with the occupation regime in a way that the death of over 30 000 Palestinians since 7 October 2023 has not (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/03/middleeast/world-central-kitchen-workers-gaza-israel-strike-intl/index.html). We refuse to play into a narrative that is appalled at the mistreatment of white, Western subjects while continuing to dehumanise Palestinians and disregard their suffering under settler-colonial occupation. From our prison cells, we heard many of you gathered outside of the station, loudly demanding our release – we hope you scream as loud for a free Palestine.