Western Sydney University grassroots committee denounces arrest of anti-genocide student protesters

The Western Sydney University (WSU) core committee of staff and students strongly condemns the arrest of at least three WSU students last week for participating in a peaceful sit-in against the expansion of Israeli massacres in Palestine and Lebanon.

Police arrest Western Sydney University student for anti-genocide protest (Photo: WSU 4 Palestine Collective)

We demand the immediate dropping of trumped-up charges against students for assaulting or resisting security officers or police. It was the police who violently arrested them and also physically attacked the students and staff members who tried to intervene.

This is a serious attack on fundamental democratic rights and the right to protest the US-armed and US-backed Israeli genocide, not only on college campuses but everywhere.

This is a university with a high proportion of students from working class and Middle Eastern backgrounds. This marks an escalation of attempts by state and federal Labor governments to suppress dissent against escalating Israeli crimes, which these governments fully support.

Widely circulated mobile phone video footage of the arrest of two students shows police dragging them from the EB building on the WSU Parramatta South campus. One student was thrown against a wall and the other was mauled to the ground.

Undercover police officers, disguised as students, displayed their weapons to prevent students and staff from coming to the students’ rescue.

Two days later, on Friday morning, another student was arrested at her home, apparently for resisting a police operation. After being detained for hours, she was released on bail later that afternoon, but her bail conditions undemocratically prohibit her from contacting any member of the WSU4Palestine collective.

Many students and staff were shocked and outraged by the arrests and police mobilization, the largest ever seen at WSU.

Well before the protest began, large numbers of riot police and other armed units had been deployed to different parts of the campus in the morning, confronting students and staff at the sight of rice carts ready to take away those who were to be arrested.

On Friday, a rally protesting the arrests was again surrounded by dozens of police and campus security officers. University security locked down buildings and ordered students to show their IDs to enter their classes.

Far from the protest events that caused disruption or safety fears among students and staff, it was the aggressive and violent police operations that caused this phenomenon. Police state measures have created an atmosphere of intimidation against students and staff, particularly against all those who oppose the genocide in Gaza.

The first protest last Wednesday was directed at the continued refusal of the WSU administration, led by Vice Chancellor George Williams, to sever ties with Israeli-linked companies and arms manufacturers. Documents obtained through Freedom of Information laws show WSU investing in armed aircraft, naval weapons and deadly drones.

After a rally and march, about 25 students moved into the EB classroom building and sat in a corner of the lobby to ask to see Williams, whose office is upstairs. They weren’t stopping anyone from using the EB building, which hundreds of students and teachers were doing, but the police attacked them anyway.

Later, the remaining students were threatened with arrest for “public nuisance” if they did not leave the large four-story building, even though they and other students had classes and study areas there. inside the EB.

Police assaults are clearly the result of high-level decisions made by the New South Wales (NSW) state Labor government, which controls the police force and works in partnership with the university administration.

This was effectively confirmed by comments published in the Murdoch-owned newspaper. Australian newspaper last Friday by WSU Chancellor Jennifer Westacott. She falsely accused anti-genocide students of “anti-Semitism,” “hate speech,” “violence,” “intimidation,” and “fear,” without citing a single example of such conduct.

“We will not tolerate this behavior on our campuses,” she said. “This is now a police matter and we are cooperating fully with the police investigation.”

His accusations were supported in the pages of Australian by two leading Zionist organizations, the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin outrageously accused the students of being “only interested in war and destruction Jews.”

Furthermore, the WSU arrests are part of an intensifying offensive by the federal and state Labor governments to vilify, threaten and attempt to shut down protests against the rapidly escalating Israeli assaults.

A week earlier, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, New South Wales Labor Premier Chris Minns and Victorian Labor leader Jacinta Allen each issued statements demanding that protests against the spraying of Gaza and Lebanon stop. will not continue on October 6 or 7. mobilizations.

In other imperialist genocide-supporting countries, such as the United States, Germany, and Canada, peaceful anti-genocide protests on campus were smeared as anti-Semitic, although they were joined by many Jewish students anti-Zionists, and encountered violent police repression, during which thousands of students were arrested.

Israeli barbarism in Gaza and Lebanon and the accompanying offensive against democratic rights are part of the broader eruption of US-led militarism that is escalating into a world war. This includes the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the transformation of Australia into a central base of operations in the conflict with China, identified as the main threat to hegemony American.

We condemn the silence of campus unions, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), on the student arrests, which is in line with their opposition to any action aimed at ending the genocide and a wider plunge into war.

This is also part of NTEU’s efforts to block any fight against job destruction and pro-business restructuring at WSU College, which serves as a model for the transformation of the university as a whole.

WSU’s experiences further show that the genocide in Palestine, the massacres in Lebanon and the broader war campaign of imperialism, including the accompanying restructuring of universities, cannot be stopped by issuing appeals to university managements, union bureaucrats or governments responsible for these historic crimes.

To fight against genocide, war and attacks on democratic rights, university staff and students must turn to the working class as a whole, the only social force capable of ending the nightmare by overthrowing the governments responsible. This means political struggle against Labor governments, imperialist war on a global scale and the capitalist profit system itself.

We support the resolution advancing this powerful perspective that was adopted by a WSU student general assembly last Tuesday, convened by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE).

The WSU Core Committee will discuss the arrests, in addition to our ongoing campaign against the restructuring of WSU College and our opposition to WSU’s “Green Paper” transformation at our next meeting this Wednesday evening. If you would like to get involved, please contact us at: [email protected]

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