Palestine

Two students at the University of Melbourne could be expelled and two others suspended for participating in a pro-Palestine protest last year, in what rights groups are calling an unprecedented crackdown on political activism in Australia.

All four students plan to appeal the penalties if they are enforced, according to a report by The Guardian.

The protest took place in October 2024, when demonstrators briefly occupied the office of a university academic allegedly linked to partnerships with Israel's University of Jerusalem. Protesters called for the university to disclose and divest from collaborations with Israeli institutions, citing Israel’s human rights record and occupation of Palestinian territories in alignment with the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

One student, reportedly facing expulsion, told The Guardian they were present for "no more than 10 minutes" and had not engaged in harassment or intimidation. Nevertheless, the university pushed for expulsion, citing the "seriousness of the breaches" and the student's prior conduct record.

In the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since I’m a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didn’t think much of it.

I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane O’Brien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and O’Brien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.

Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed.

The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security. There has been no legal process for this decision, and none of us have a criminal record. The reasoning in the letters continues with vague and unfounded accusations of “antisemitism” and supporting “terrorist organisations” – referring to Hamas – as well as its supposed “front organisations in Germany and Europe”.

This is not the first instance of Germany weaponising migration law. Since October 2023, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has unlawfully frozen the processing of all asylum seekers from Gaza. And on 16 April 2025 a federal administrative court in Germany will reportedly decide on a case that could set a precedent for the German state to increase deportations of asylum seekers to Greece.

These extreme measures are not a sudden shift or solely a fringe rightwing position. They are the result of a more than year-long campaign by the liberal Ampel coalition – the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens – and the German media, calling for mass deportations, widely seen as a response to the growing pro-Palestinian movement, and targeted predominantly at the Arab and Muslim German population.

On 27 March, some 20 police officers burst in on a group of young women at a Quaker’s meeting house in central London and arrested them on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

The women were activists who had gathered for an open meeting of Youth Demand, a pro-Palestine and climate justice movement demanding an end to UK government arms sales to Israel and new fossil fuel licensing. The group emerged in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.

“It was a publicly advertised talk,” said Lia, 20, who attended the meeting. “It was a low turnout - six people in total.”

The women were sitting in a circle drinking tea when Lia looked up to see a large group of police pressed against the window.

“Their hats were tapping against the glass,” she told Middle East Eye. “Then, there was a big thud. They kicked down the door, and then the whole room was full of police.”

The officers seized the women’s laptops and phones, and led them off one by one, some in handcuffs.

“None of us were resisting arrest,” Lia said.

Three of the women were taken to Bromley police station, the others to Kingston, where they were held incommunicado and interrogated in the middle of the night.

The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 stipulates that detainees are permitted an initial phone call, although this right may be delayed in cases relating to serious organised crime, terrorism or espionage.

It is a tactic increasingly deployed against pro-Palestine activists.

Simultaneously, police officers conducted overnight raids on their homes with the keys they confiscated from the arrestees.

Ella Grace Taylor, another one of those arrested, said she came home to find her room ransacked.

“My bed was stripped. All my things were lying across the floor,” she told MEE.

“We were left this piece of paper that acknowledged they’d been there. It said in small print on the back: ‘If you want to know what's been taken, you have to come to the police station.’”

“We’ve all been having nightmares. When we hear a noise outside or a van go past, there is this sense of paranoia,” she added.

The police are still withholding the women’s phones, laptops and university coursework. 

Connecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

[…]

Perversely, the plan to establish a concentration camp inside Gaza may reflect Israeli leaders’ realization that the much-touted “voluntary departure” of the population is not realistic in the current circumstances — both because too few Gazans would be willing to leave, even under continued bombardment, and because no country would accept such a massive influx of Palestinian refugees.

According to Dr. Dotan Halevy, a researcher of Gaza and co-editor of the book “Gaza: Place and Image in the Israeli Space,” the concept of “voluntary departure” is based on an all-or-nothing principle. “Consider this hypothetical,” Halevy told me recently. “Ask Ofer Winter [the military general who, at the time of our conversation, looked set to be tasked with heading the Defense Ministry’s “Voluntary Departure Directorate”] whether evacuating 30 percent, 40 percent, or even 50 percent of Gaza’s residents would be considered a success. Would Israel really care if Gaza had 1.5 million Palestinians rather than 2.2 million? Would that enable the annexation fantasies of Bezalel Smotrich and his allies? The answer is almost certainly no.”

[…]

Whether or not Smotrich, Katz, and Zamir have read Halevy and Shafer Raviv’s articles, they likely understand that “voluntary departure” is not an immediately executable plan. But if they truly believe that the solution to the “Gaza problem” — or to the Palestinian issue as a whole — is for there to be no Palestinians left in Gaza, then it will certainly not be possible all in one go.

In other words, the idea appears to be: first, corral the population into one or more closed-off enclaves; then, let starvation, desperation, and hopelessness do the rest. Those locked inside will see that Gaza has been completely destroyed, that their homes have been leveled, and that they have neither a present nor a future in the Strip. At that point, the Israeli thinking goes, Palestinians themselves will begin pushing for emigration, forcing Arab countries to take them in.

When two young American Jews raised to support Israel unconditionally witness the way Israel treats Palestinians, it changes their lives. They join a movement of young American Jews campaigning to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel and reveal a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity. Israelism sparked huge debate on American campuses even before the events of October 7, 2023.

It follows Simone Zimmerman, who visited Israel as a teenager, and Eitan who joined the Israeli army after graduating from high school as they discover the reality for Palestinians and radically revise their views. It includes interviews with academics and political activists, including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Lara Friedman and a former director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman.

Contributors suggest the narrative that young American Jews are fed almost entirely erases the existence of the Palestinians through education and advocacy, sometimes involving groups that organise free trips to Israel partially funded by the Israeli government.

This film describes how influential this narrative is in shaping attitudes to Israel, not just in the United States but across the world.

There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’ They remind us that ‘sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.’ Interplay, interaction, co-construction are concepts widely used in the biological sciences. And, in turn, the biological sciences have made considerable contributions to gender theory, where Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, has long argued that biology interacts with cultural and historical processes to produce different ways of naming and living gender.

The language of ‘immutability’ belongs more properly to a natural law tradition in which male and female kinds are established by divine will and so belong to a version of creationism. They are immutable features of the human, as Pope Francis has affirmed. Trump speaks in the name of science, but the cameo appearance of the gamete theory notwithstanding, he does so effectively to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes, and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more, either to echo the word of God, or to represent his own word as the word of God. Religious doctrine cannot serve as the basis for scientific research or state policy. But that what is happening in this executive order.

[…]

When authoritarians promise a return to an imaginary past, they stoke a furious nostalgia in those who have no better way to understand what is actually undermining their sense of a durable and meaningful future. We find this in the discourse of the AfD in Germany, the Fratelli d’Italia, Bolsonaro’s followers in Brazil, Trump, Orbán and Putin. But we also see the anti-gender animus among centrists hoping to recruit support from the right in order to stay in power. When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society, progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill. The result, as we have seen in recent years, can be that popular support ushers in authoritarian powers who promise to strip rights from the most vulnerable people in the name of saving the nation, the natural order, the family, society, or civilisation itself. Ideals of constitutional democracy and political freedom are regarded as dispensable in the course of such campaigns, since the preservation of the nation must be put before all else: it is a matter of self-defence.

The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, the terrifying machine of industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous. These assaults will be committed, as they are in Gaza, in the name of progress, Western civilization and our supposed “virtues” to crush the aspirations of those, mostly poor people of color, who have been dehumanized and dismissed as human animals.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law.

The message this sends is clear: You, and the rules that you thought might protect you, do not matter. We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that would cancel visas and deport international students who have expressed support for Palestinians — the administration’s latest effort to both target immigrants and crack down on free speech, particularly on college campuses.

[…]

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” states the order, first obtained by Reuters.

The president said that he would also cancel the visas of students he considers “Hamas sympathizers,” describing college campuses as “infested with radicalism.”

[…]

Trump’s executive order is pulled directly from the “Project Esther” report created by the Heritage Foundation, the same group that put together the massive Project 2025 playbook. The former is also a blueprint for the Trump administration, focused on using the authority of the federal government to dismantle first the Palestine solidarity movement, and subsequently other progressive social movements.

Her only reference to Gaza was a line in which she credited Harris with “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bring the hostages home.” The moment was quickly clipped and posted to TikTok by the Harris campaign—a clear attempt to use one of the most popular young, left-wing politicians in the country to win over younger, left-leaning voters concerned about Gaza. “💙 @Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” the campaign account commented.

But Ocasio-Cortez’s statement was simply not true. There have been no indications that Harris is playing a central role in any ceasefire negotiations. And there is mounting evidence that those negotiations are more fantasy than reality.

[…]

Reasonable people can disagree about the value of Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to work a more inside track within the Democratic Party. There are undoubtedly benefits to having someone like her moving up the ranks, and she could very well help elevate a whole host of progressive causes.

But Gaza is not just any cause. It is a red-line, defining issue of our time, and Ocasio-Cortez has found herself on the wrong side of it.

While serving as a contractor and senior adviser for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Alex Smith had a broad mandate.

He was tasked with offering insight on issues concerning gender, infectious disease, nutrition, and the health of mothers and children.

And all of those issues converged in Gaza, as Israel’s siege unfolded. […]

As he reflects upon his time in the Biden government, Smith notes a stark contrast between Biden’s support for war-torn Ukraine and his lack of support for Gaza, where entire neighbourhoods have been levelled.

“When we talk about Ukraine, we can condemn the bombing of hospitals. We can talk about the resilience of the people who are being attacked. We can talk about the perpetrators who are attacking them,” Smith said.

“But when it comes to Gaza, we don't talk about those people. We don't plan for their health systems to be rebuilt.”

When he voted in the 2024 presidential race, Smith knew he could not back Biden’s vice president, Harris, fearing a continuation of the president’s policies.

His home state of Maine employs a ranked-choice system, allowing residents to offer support to multiple candidates. Smith used his ballot to rank Harris as his last choice, behind the third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein.

Smith explained he has a grim view of Biden’s legacy will be perceived in the years to come. “He will be remembered as the US president who manufactured a genocide against children in Gaza.”