• Student protests in support of Palestine have reached Italy too, where some universities have been occupied with tents — the symbol of what is being described as a student intifada, or uprising.
• Around the world, police responses to the demonstrations have in some cases led to evictions and violence.
• These mobilisations encourage participation, dialogue, and the demand to put an end to the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The geography of the student intifada is spreading, with occupations, demonstrations and sit-ins weaving a dense web of solidarity around the globe for Palestine. From the United States to India, from Lebanon to Canada and all the way to Australia, there are many universities around the world where student protest has made itself heard, and Europe is no exception. The occupied campus in Leipzig, Germany, has already been cleared, as has the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where police showed no restraint in their violence and aggression against students. From Spain to the United Kingdom, through France, Ireland, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland and Spain, the demonstrations are igniting without interruption.

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine @ColumbiaSJP

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Videos of police brutality and arrests at @Columbia University. You can see cops callously throwing items down the stairs. Is this not property damage? Is this not a “clear and present danger” to safety? “Safety” does not apply to POC, Jewish, Palestinian students at Columbia.

♥ 1157💬 125 1 mag 2024 · Apri su X →

The demonstrations in Bologna and Milan

Italy too, amid sit-ins and demonstrations, is seeing its first occupations. As in Bologna, animated by a fervour that grows more intense as you approach the university. The signs of the occupied space announce themselves from the surrounding streets — a sheet hung up bearing the day's programme in green and red. Then the Palestinian flags, necks wrapped in keffiyehs. And finally the stall with the information point, the table of shared food, and the assembly space made up of benches arranged in a circle, framed by the arcades of the Alma Mater.

Behind it, filling the square, dozens of tents — a flowering of polyester — transform Piazza Scaravilli into Piazza Occupata, occupied for Palestine. A material solidarity that claims the space of education as political and educational ground, coordinated and led by students.

"We, as students of the University of Bologna, have now had our tents up for three days, responding to the call and the demands made by the students of Bir Zeit University, who have renamed the transnational movement the students' intifada," explains one of the people organising and managing the space.

"The mobilisation in Bologna is part of a path we have been pursuing for years towards academic boycott over the relationship between the arms industry and the University of Bologna, but it now also connects to the context of the mobilisations we have long seen animating American campuses and which are spreading like wildfire. This student mobilisation crosses national borders — and even oceans in this case — because occupations are multiplying on British, French and Italian campuses alike. We express our full solidarity and solidarity with the American students who have suffered the harshest repression at the hands of law enforcement."

Students occupied the lawn of the Università Statale di Milano © Martina Micciché

Hundreds of students took part in the demonstration © Martina Micciché

Some students planted an olive tree in the courtyard of the Statale di Milano © Martina Micciché

Bologna will not be the last Italian city to find itself with an occupied university, with the rector's office under student scrutiny and the academic senate, finally, held accountable. On this point, one activist tells me how important it is to draw attention to this body, "otherwise it ends up looking as if universities just make decisions like that," when in fact there is a process, a system, and responsibilities too. What universities all too often project, however, is an image of irreversible decisions that seem to have appeared from nowhere, handed down from above, almost by spontaneous generation.

In recent days, in Milan, students from the Università Statale di Milano occupied the Festa del Perdono courtyard in anticipation of the academic senate meeting on 14 May. Dozens of tents have also been pitched in front of the Politecnico, in Piazza Leonardo. The wave of "la acampada", in addition to Rome and Palermo, has today also reached Turin and Padua, with Venice and Siena announced as next to join.

Students hope that in this way the attention of university institutions, and beyond, will take into account their wishes and the need to take a stance in support of the Palestinian people who, according to data updated to 12 May, number at least 35,034 dead — including 14,500 children — 78,755 injured and more than 10,000 missing.

On 8 May, the occupied space at the University of Bologna hosted a series of educational and cultural events run on horizontal lines. This means that in addition to listening to invited speakers — Judith Butler, Patrick Zaki and Rachele Borghi — students are free to take the floor. Not just to ask questions, of which there is no shortage, but to have their say and to be heard. It almost seems like an unprecedented act, and yet, in spaces of student occupation, political demands lead to the experimentation of alternative forms of teaching that — for all its quirks — proves far more stimulating and inclusive than the traditional classroom with its lectern and desks. Here there are benches, chairs and floor space. No one stands a step above anyone else.

The occupation of the University of Bologna in support of Palestine © Martina Micciché

The occupation served as a venue for meetings with lecturers and experts © Martina Micciché

Discussion in the courtyard of the University of Bologna © Martina Micciché

The purpose of this day fits within the occupation model: to create an environment of constructive dialogue, in which to think and rethink the struggle, certainly, but not only that — also the future and one's own role in building a collective one. "We talk about Palestine, about what is happening in the world, and together we build reflections." During the first conference, several of the university's female professors are also visible, present and engaged, seated alongside and among those who, during ordinary lectures, are their students, sharing their struggle and commitment.

The students' demands are clear, consistent with those being voiced internationally.

"We want the genocide to end, we want our institutions to sever ties with the state of Israel, which is a state founded on ethnic cleansing, a state that has reached a fully genocidal stage in its colonial trajectory. And to achieve that, to put pressure on our academic governance and obtain the rescission of research agreements with Israeli universities and companies such as Leonardo and Eni, which are Italian, and have the blood of Palestinian people on their hands."

The student intifada

Hands and bank accounts soaked in blood, swollen by territorial partitions born of a violence whose genocidal intent is not always acknowledged, as philosopher Judith Butler recalled when she intervened to show solidarity with the student occupation movement — in her words, "students are clear," students are aware, they know what is happening and are rejecting the mainstream media narrative, the very media that waver gravely in acknowledging responsibility and refuse to use specific terms. Universities are confronting an active student body that demands an end to complicity with the war industry, which in practice monetises and militarises research, work, education and the very time of those who pass through lecture halls. Rather than being controlled, rather than seeing their studies directed towards the profitable output of the war and fossil machine, students would like to live on campus in peace, being heard in a space of care.

Sarah Walker @StowSarah

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Very moving student speeches &
Judith Butler @ #Gaza solidarity encampment Bologna:
"I see hope all around me"
"You see injustice"
"You see genocide"
"You see University complicity in genocide"
"Israel does not represent all Jewish people"
"Israel is an apartheid state"

♥ 3 8 mag 2024 · Apri su X →

Awareness and the sharing of information are an integral part of this encampment, which physically reminds the university and governments of the promises they are breaking. The atmosphere is committed, serious, but also solidary, capable of generating a sense of shared strength that gives hope. It is a reminder of Palestine and of the importance of taking part in what, looking at the global picture, is becoming the largest student mobilisation in fifty years. Smiling, the person who spoke with me also recounts the convivial side of the occupation, which perhaps conveys the power of the solidarity that has grown: "we have little dinners, little lunches, we spend time together and talk about Palestine."

Because in the end, this crisp, breezy air is steeped in political will — above all in the choice to not remain inert, watching events with individualistic detachment, but to mobilise, organically, to exert pressure, to try to bring a genocide to an end and to remind those who are complicit in it that resistance is also testimony.

Students are communicating with the institutions that represent them; now it remains only to be seen how those institutions will respond, and whether their responses will be adequate.

"We are here because, in the face of the intensification of Zionist violence in Rafah, in the face of the intensification of Western solidarity around Israel, we believe it is important that there be a physical encampment of people who, here, with their bodies, remind our entire society that collaboration between the West and Israel is the shame of our time — that when this page of history is written and these months are recounted, it will be said that once again the Western governments were on the wrong side of history, on the side of the genocidal force."

All that remains is to take part and to see whether the responses will be those that one day, written in a book that will probably circulate through those very occupied universities, will be judged to have been right.