The Cides stand with OxActForPal (OA4P)
After 63 days of encampment, weeks of protest suppression from the University, and a pending legal order for their removal, OA4P has chosen to end their Gaza Solidarity Encampment action at the Radcliffe Camera.
OxActForPal is a student-led collective joined by faculty, staff, and the wider Oxford community, all of whom are dedicated to the liberation of Palestine.
They are calling on the University to divest from and boycott Israel's criminal regime, end its complicity in scholasticide, and repair the injustices it perpetuates through a commitment to supporting Palestinian-led rebuilding of education in Gaza.
In the past two months they have built a historic coalition for Palestine across Oxford, and their movement grows stronger by the day. Rather than addressing its complicity in Israel’s genocide, the University has chosen to target those protesting genocide instead. Oxford has sanctioned police violence against its own students, resulting in 17 arrests and dozens of injuries; caged protestors in the Pitt Rivers Museum encampment for 48 hours; desecrated their Gaza Memorial Garden; and now, has forced them out of the Radcliffe Camera encampment with threats of legal and disciplinary action.
The scale of the University’s attacks, dehumanisation, and backlash against their encampments has become untenable in recent weeks. In the interest of their members and of the movement for Palestine, they have decided to redirect their momentum towards other forms of action, organising, political education, and the continued growth of their coalition.
In their founding statement on 6th May, they outlined the ethos of their Liberated Zones: the Arabic word Nidal, embodying and describing Palestinian values and struggle. Nidal, to persevere, to fight for freedom, and to defend with pride.
النضال الفلسطيني كان وسيبقى النضال الذي نقتدي به، وسيحررنا جميعاً
The Palestinian struggle was and will always remain. We look to the Palestinian struggle; it will free us all.
With pride, they close this chapter in order to build the next phase of their movement. With pride, they continue to fight for a new world: one where their Universities refuse to invest or associate with the Israeli occupation, and where “educators” do not profit off of genocide.
It was once unthinkable that Gaza would be on the agendas for both Council and Congregation, the University’s chief sovereign bodies. It was unthinkable that motions of support for Palestine and for a Gaza Solidarity Encampment would be passed in more than half of the University’s college common rooms, drawing support from several hundreds of faculty members, thousands of students, over fourteen area trade unions, and dozens of community organisations.
The University thought it could erase this power by targeting their encampments, but the power they had built through the student intifada extends far beyond a physical space. Their next steps will be bolstered by a greater political coalition, deeper moral conviction, and a collective vision for the movement that they did not have before May 6th.
In a University that deliberately fragments community with tall gates, gilded halls, and walled-off colleges, their Liberated Zones created a rupture. They claimed the Radcliffe Camera, Oxford’s beating heart, as a site for Palestinian liberation. Students, faculty, staff, and city residents sustained relentless disruption of the status quo in the city centre, forcing the University to reckon with its enabling of Israeli genocide, occupation, and apartheid on a daily basis. The days when the University could ignore their movement – and their own complicity in Israel’s genocide – are long over. The new status quo is a free Palestine within our lifetime.
Shortly after disbanding camp, OA4P members picketed the Administration offices of Wellington Square.
In the coming weeks, they will be organising assemblies with the students, faculty, staff, and Oxford residents ready to carry this movement forward. They will continue to educate, agitate, build community, and contribute to the ongoing global fight for a free Palestine. Their efforts are not only a moral imperative; they are an inevitability.
For 275 days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we have watched as Israel starved millions of Palestinians; murdered and disfigured children; killed journalists by the hour; and annihilated Gaza’s infrastructures of education, religion, and culture. International condemnation of Israel grows stronger by the hour, and it is only a matter of time before the University of Oxford acts on their demands. They will not rest until that day comes.