Oxford and Cambridge students have initiated protests by occupying lawns with pro-Palestinian camps, joining a series of demonstrations across United States universities condemning the actions of the Israel Defence Forces and the Israeli government in Tel Aviv, which have resulted in the deaths of over 30,000 Palestinians, including innocent men, women, and children.
According to reports from British media outlets, tents appeared outside the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday morning. Organizers claimed that the museum housed “a disturbing hoard of artifacts stolen from colonized peoples across the world.”
Similarly, on the lawn of King’s College at the University of Cambridge, students established an encampment, citing the university’s alleged support for Israel’s actions in Gaza as their motivation.
Cambridge for Palestine, an organizing group, shared a video on X (formerly Twitter) showing their members marching onto the renowned lawn with tents, supplies, and sleeping bags, asserting their refusal to remain passive while the university purportedly backs Israel’s actions in Gaza.
At Oxford, camp leaders have displayed a board listing six demands addressed to university officials. These demands include a call to “boycott Israeli genocide, apartheid, and occupation,” disclose all financial dealings, cease banking with Barclays, aid in the reconstruction of Gaza’s education system, and “divest from Israeli genocide, apartheid, and occupation.”
In a statement, the organizers emphasized, “There is no university in the history of human civilization that is more complicit in violence, dispossession, and the building of destructive colonial empires than the University of Oxford.”
