Greetings from Occupied Sheffield

Submitted by Daniel_Randall on 16 March, 2009 - 11:48 Author: Daniel Randall (pc)

I write to you from inside a student occupation.

For obvious reasons, I don't have a great deal of time to write a comprehensive report right now but just to update people initially, our occupation at the University of Sheffield has started strongly and we have taken control of two lecture theatres in the Hicks building, one of the main academic buildings on campus. We did this following the breakdown of a process of negotiations between a coalition of student activists and the university over the question of the university's response - or lack of one - to Israel's invasion of Gaza.

Although more conservative elements within the activist milieu at Sheffield tried at every juncture to prevent an occupation from taking place (more on the politics of this process later!), they were eventually sidelined and the initiative was taken up by radical activists from various political backgrounds.

Demands placed on the university include low-level demands around the donation of old academic equipment to educational institutions in Gaza, as well the demand that the university issues both a statement in condemnation of Israel's attack on Gaza and in solidarity with Israeli students who faced jail rather than serve in the IDF. This last demand is particularly pertinent given that Israeli refuser Tamar Katz addressed a meeting of nearly 100 people at Sheffield University just days before our occupation began, providing renewed impetus for internationalist-focused solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Our demands also raise questions of university democracy and campus workers' rights, and the occupation has already begun establishing links with both academic and non-academic workers at the university. The University of Sheffield management is particularly corporate-minded, maintaining extensive links with the arms industry, dishing out honorary degrees to Middle Eastern despots and spending tens of millions of pounds on new buildings that, while they win fancy architecture awards, are inadequately resourced and have insufficient teaching space. Against such a management, our occupation stakes a claim for an alternative model of running the university.

Whether or not our demands our met, the experience of building for and running an occupation will provide student activists with a living vision of how our universities - and beyond them, our society - might be run in interests other than those of the corporate profiteers who currently control them.

UPDATE: Tuesday 17th

We opened up communication with university management early this morning. They reported that they would meet internally to decide their attitude to our action, after which they would get back to us to open formal negotiations. At 11:31, we're still waiting...

The university's decision to unilaterally move all lectures scheduled in the spaces we're occupying was a set-back for us; we said from the beginning that we were happy for lectures to continue as we did not want to disrupt students' education or the working lives of academic workers. Management's decision is clearly intended to allow them to portray us as disruptive - something reflected in an outrageous statement ratified at an emergency meeting of our Students' Union Executive Committee (allegedly drafted by our SU's New Labourite General Manager) that condemns the occupation for "disrupting the academic work of our students". The statement was ratified by five votes to three, with only the President, Education Officer and Women's Officer voting against.

The other side of this coin is that lecturers and students who didn't get uni management's memo about the relocation of lectures (and therefore mistakenly arrived in our occupied space) have been almost universally supportive and even those who are ambivalent about the politics of the issue have commented that they found the occupation an entirely welcoming and non-intimidating space.

We've produced leaflets to distribute around campus announcing the occupation, and we're building for an open meeting tonight which will discuss the occupation tactic in general terms in an attempt to bring some wider layers on board who might as yet be a bit wary about taking such radical direct action.

We've also managed to build up an excellent relationship with university workers such as porters, security workers and cleaners and have incorporated solidarity with their struggles against cuts to jobs, pay and conditions into our demands.

For more info, visit our website.

UPDATE: Tuesday 17th (11:20pm)

Uni management finally got back to us at around 4pm this afternoon; it wasn't good news. They delivered a letter announcing that, because of the SU condemnation of our action, they would refuse to negotiate with us. We were later served with notice that, if we were still occupying at 9am tomorrow (Wednesday), they would seek a court injunction against us.

We spent the rest of the afternoon lobbying SU officers to change their positions, as we felt that getting the SU Exec to reverse its line was our best hope of getting uni management to budge. That lobbying is ongoing.

We've sent a call-out for all supporters to gather at Hicks at 9am in order to bolster our numbers. It's unclear how long we're going to be able to hold on, or if we'll be able to force our Union Officers to change their line, or if uni management will actually budge if they do. The only certain thing at this stage is that none of us are ready to stop fighting.

UPDATE: Wednesday 18th

It's been a slow and frequently frustrating day within Occupied Sheffield. Our assessment was that Uni management was unlikely to budge without a shift in the SU's position, so we put some signficant impact into eliciting a change there. For various reasons that I hope to discuss(/expose) in the future, that as yet has not been forthcoming.

Formally our situation is still the same; we know that the head of building security went to court this morning to seek an injunction. We don't know whether he managed to obtain one, so technically he could turn up at any time to announce that unless we agree to leave, he has the right to call the police.

We still managed to do a good day's work in terms of building the occupation by sending people outside to talk to students, and by 4:30pm our numbers had swelled to around 70. Until today, we'd spent our entire time discussing tactics and strategy so tonight it was refreshing to have a bit of a political discussion around some of the issues facing the Palestine solidarity movement. Perhaps unfortunately, the discussion was dominated by left groups and the contributions split three-ways between anarchist comrades (pushing a "no nations, no states"-type line), AWL members (arguing for a two-states settlement as an immediate step towards workers' unity) and SWPers and others (arguing that Israel is simply America's watchdog in the Middle East and exists as a bulwark to the anti-imperialist bloc represented by Iran and Syria). The discussion was far from perfect, but it was a good start.

Tonight's general meeting is set to discuss what we can do to apply pressure on management, as well as how our occupation can intersect with struggles around wider demands such as free education.

UPDATE: Thursday 19th

Last night, our SU President Dave Hurst released a personal statement expressing his support for negotiations, which - while not quite going as far as many of us would like - is a significant step forward.

We also released a statement of our own in response to accusation of anti-Semitism and intimidation towards Jewish students leveled at us by the University Jewish Society. This statement reads:

We are writing as Jewish activists from within the occupation in response to fears and concerns expressed by J-Soc. Although we regret any feeling of victimisation on the part of any Jewish student, or any student of another ethnic minority, we wish to make it entirely clear that our occupation is unambiguously opposed to anti-Semitism, which we believe can play no positive role in any movement to fight for peace and justice in the Middle East.

Unlike some, we do not dismiss out of hand the notion that anti-Semitism exists within the Palestine solidarity movement; however, many of the activists involved in our occupation have been at the forefront of fighting those elements and attempting to build a movement in which Jews who oppose the Israeli state's oppression of the Palestinians are made to feel welcome.

The motivation behind this occupation is ultimately anti-racist: we feel revolted by the callous attitudes which see Palestinian lives as disposable, and it is exactly this feeling of solidarity that leads us – and our gentile comrades – to oppose anti-Semitism wherever it occurs, whether inside or outside the movement. The very first principle of our code of conduct clearly states that racism (as well as other forms of discriminatory behaviour such as sexism and homophobia) is unacceptable and will not be tolerated within the safe space we have created.

It is also not the case that our occupation is hostile to Israeli-Jews as a people. Our opposition is to the Israeli state and its oppression of the Palestinians and occupation of their land; far from expressing hostility to Israeli-Jews, one of our demands is that the university expresses its solidarity with those brave Israeli students who have faced jail rather than serve in the IDF in what they feel is an unjust and immoral war. We stand in solidarity with progressive, democratic and radical forces across the world – including within Israeli society.

We cannot see any reason why any of the slogans raised by our occupation would be seen as threatening or anti-Semitic; however, if students do have genuine concerns about feeling threatened, we invite them to explain what their problems are, so we can work our concerns out together and clean up any misunderstandings that may have arisen. Any student with concerns about the impact of our occupation is welcome to visit our occupied space to discuss with us without any fear of intimidation or harassment.

Without wishing to trivialise or dismiss any concerns our fellow students may feel, we would also wish to invite anyone who feels intimidated by the sight of a few solidarity banners in a building to take a moment to think of the plight of Palestinian students attempting to study under military occupation, as it is this sense of compassion for people who are having their educations – and their lives – disrupted which drove us to this course of action in the first place.

We are proud to identify with a long, varied and rich cosmopolitan tradition of radical diaspora Jews, from Emma Goldman to Albert Einstein, and thoroughly resent the idea that an identity as diverse, multifaceted and gloriously indefinable as Judaism should be tied to a narrowly nationalist, militaristic ideology, with diaspora Jews asked to either silence criticism of Israel or else be made to feel somehow “less Jewish”. Furthermore, and as we have said, a considerable opposition movement – comprising working-class forces, refusers, anti-war activists and others – exists within Israel itself, which sees no problem with combining Jewish cultural identity with criticism of, and opposition to, the Israeli ruling-class.

Finally, we disassociate ourselves entirely from the incident in which a 'boycott Israeli goods' sticker was placed on the J-Soc noticeboard. Our occupation has no policy on the question of a boycott and many activists within it oppose the tactic. We wish to reiterate our total opposition to all forms of racism (including anti-Semitism), our commitment to internationalist solidarity with the Palestinian people and our support for Israeli-Jews struggling for peace and justice for all peoples in the Middle East.

Yours -

Jewish activists within the occupation (in personal capacities)

Today, the best news so far; the VC has caved. He's prepared to "get round the table", as it were, and we've spent today discussing the basis on which we want negotiations to take place. The occupation objected to the VC's proposed model for the negotiations (picking off a few individual delegates from various groups including the occupation to negotiate with in private), and proposed open negotiations instead. We're still waiting for his response. Keep checking the blog for more.

UPDATE: Monday 23rd

One week and counting. We've expanded into a new space in the newly-built and super-expensive Jessop West building. We've specifically selected this space because of what it represents politically; the Jessop West building cost over £20 million and is tipped for various corporate architecture and design awards but has been criticised by both staff and students for its lack of resources and adequate teaching space.

Jessop West is a very expensive reflection of the University management's priorities; to run the University as a business that puts corporate interests ahead of the interests of education.

Within this context, we find it obscene that the University will spend such amounts on such buildings and won't even discuss the prospect of making donations to give practical aid to students and others suffering extreme oppression in Palestine.

Jessop West represents the University management's idea of how our institution should be run - from the top down, by unelected businessmen, in the interests of profit. Our occupation represents an alternative model - one of a university run from the bottom up by students and staff in the interests of education, social justice and global solidarity.

We've expanded our occupation because of the VC's refusal to convene the negotiations he previously agreed to. It's possible he's trying to wait us out until the end of term but we have no intention of backing down. The political culture in the occupation has also increased a little, with discussions taking place in the last few days on issues like the boycott and the history of the conflict. AWL members have been intervening to argue for our working-class, internationalist perspective against those in the occupation who oppose national rights for Israeli-Jews and rule out any progressive potential for the Israeli working-class. Our comrade Ed Maltby will address a meeting in the occupation tomorrow entitled "Direct Action Gets The Goods" - a discussion of the experience of other student occupations and direct action campaigns elsewhere on a range of issues.

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