Tett: Student demonstrations protesting the genocide against Palestinians have been organized in many universities around the world. How did it start at Tilburg University? How did students find each other? How did you start organizing?

Rami: At Tilburg University (TiU), there was already an active Palestine solidarity student group for a little over a year, and in May it was this group which called for an emergency assembly, initially with the intention of finding an alternative, more manageable action to an encampment. This emergency assembly attracted a massive turnout of people ready to immediately encamp, and it was at this point that the few main organizers of PST took the decision to encamp based on the turnout and enthusiasm of the crowd. It must be noted that this occurred shortly after brutal police violence was employed on encampments in Amsterdam and Utrecht, which shocked many students in the Netherlands and drove them to join the encampment movement. Once the encampment was set up physically, it took upon its own role as a shared space for like-minded students, those who refused to be silent, to meet, discuss ideas, plan actions and form a community in solidarity with Palestine.

Panka, when and why did you decide to join Palestine Solidarity Tilburg? And more generally: how does individual conviction and will to act evolve into collective action?

I joined PST this April, but I’ve learned of the organization after I joined a reading group that one of my professors created in response to the genocide that Israel has been committing since the 7th of October. Growing up in Hungary and being in the Hungarian education system most of my life, I got a very narrow picture of Israel.

In our History books the terms ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘apartheid’ are never mentioned,

and we get a quite one-sided perspective whenever the conflict is discussed. It is mentioned that „in 1948 the independent Israeli state was created, but the neighboring Arab countries did not accept that and decided to attack Israel.” This sentence itself is very interesting, because it implies that the creation of Israel was a peaceful process which was not accepted by the neighboring countries.

The language used when talking about the Nakba – which was one of the most horrifying beginning chapters of the genocide that was imposed upon the Palestinian people, where 15,000 Palestinians were killed and more than 750,000 were expelled by Israel – is also very telling. The atrocity of almost a million people losing their homes, their country, their roots is acknowledged in one sentence: „[Israel] has expanded significantly and hundreds of thousands of Arabs have been displaced.”

After joining the reading group and learning about the situation in a more nuanced way, I realized how grave the situation was. When we learn about injustice, we can either choose to accept it and not do anything, or to resist.

A quote from Hungarian author Mihály Babits comes to my mind, „among sinners, the silent are accomplice.” It resonated with some of my Hungarian friends when I explained it to them this way. If we learn about something that’s wrong and we stay silent, we become complicit. That’s why I knew the only moral choice is to join the Palestinian solidarity movement at my University.

 

You say Hungarian textbooks gave you a distorted, one-sided picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is this rooted in?

I think firstly the way history is taught in the Hungarian education system is inherently flawed and it’s almost always employing a very Eurocentric and colonial perspective. This is not necessarily a problem specific to Hungary, but it’s still worth mentioning.

When we learn about colonialism, we learn about the politics of colonialism from the perspective of empires.

I remember always wondering what the people who had to suffer the consequences of these politics would have had to say when I was in high school. We never hear the perspectives of the people who had to suffer from the actions and crimes of colonial empires and this type of education makes us numb against the injustices around the world. It makes us accept systems that let down people, or systems that are in reality very harmful to us. It makes us less empathetic towards each other. We just learn to accept that genocide or ethnic cleansing is tolerable in certain cases and situations which is terrible.

Secondly, the remaining independent Hungarian newspapers also legitimize the genocide against Palestinians under the pretense of „combatting terrorism.” I’ve read countless articles this last year that dehumanize Palestinians and justify their genocide in the Hungarian free press which is horrible. Of course, there are outliers, like Mérce, but sadly that’s a small minority.

Alongside that, there is a very prevalent element of racism – the unquestionable right of states to use violence.

So, people resisting occupation are called terrorists, but the soldiers who are committing war crimes are not.

Lastly, on a more human level, I can understand people whose primary reaction is to want to „see both sides” because it is hard to accept that the whole world has been watching ethnic cleansing being committed against Palestinians and no one is doing anything to prevent it. That is devastating. That is heartbreaking. It’s also extremely frightening. But that doesn’t justify looking the other way or not speaking up about what is happening and not condemning the actions of Israel.

 

Learning is almost a self-evident part of participating in collective political action. Can this also be said in your case?

Panka: The encampment itself was such a great learning experience and opportunity, something that feels almost unimaginable at a Hungarian university. Professors came to our encampment to do teach-ins which was a very valuable experience and a much more democratic way to both teach and learn. The professors who came sat in the grass with us in a circle, which created a space that felt so much more equal than a standard classroom. Input from students was appreciated and there was room and space for lively discussion and exchange of ideas.

It is also different to just read the stories of people being abused and murdered by the state of Israel and then actually hearing stories from people whose lives are very heavily affected by the genocidal machine.

When you make friends who are from neighboring countries that are also being attacked by Israel (like Lebanon for example) you understand on a more human and deeper level just how important this struggle for liberation is.

Ultimately, I think one of the main takeaways from these classes was that the only way to fight for freedom is to understand that the struggle for liberation must be collective. We are all oppressed by the same system – we have to resist it together.

 

Students from many different countries took part in the protests. In what ways were the diverse backgrounds reflected in the individual positions? How did this affect establishing a common position, a common set of demands?

And concerning your demands: In May, 76 Spanish universities issued a joint statement calling for the suspension of relations with Israeli universities that do not respect international humanitarian law. As Tilburg University’s administration did not issue such a statement, you submitted a petition. What were your demands? Did you coordinate this petition with protest groups from other universities in the Netherlands (or elsewhere)?

The demands established by the encampment were, at that point in time, extremely obvious and not open to much interpretation, for two reasons. Firstly, they were essentially a mirroring of the demands of the broader encampment movement across the world – to disclose all ties with Israel and then divest from these ties –

with the added demand of „no police on campus” in direct response to brutal police violence on other Dutch campuses

which we sought to avoid in Tilburg (but were nonetheless prepared for both legally and logistically). Secondly, the demands were part of the longstanding campaign for an academic boycott of Israel at Tilburg University, kickstarted by Palestine Solidarity Tilburg on May 15th 2023, the commemoration of the Nakba in 1948. For these two reasons, it was very easy for students from many different nationalities and backgrounds to rally behind these well-established, ostensibly obvious, and basic uncomplex demands without any disagreement.

 

Since your demands were not met by the university administration, you launched various actions with the aim of informing and mobilizing people at the university. Please tell us about these actions.

Rami: We held many actions on the campus of Tilburg University, with two main goals in mind, the first being to increase pressure on Tilburg University to accept our demands by damaging its public image, and the second being to raise awareness about the situation in Palestine within the general student population. Examples of some actions we undertook are:

• Banner drops: Multiple times, we dropped banners off of a bridge at Tilburg University displaying the names and ages of all the Palestinian children that had been killed by Israel in Gaza since our encampment had begun. As time passed, and very somberly, we had bigger and longer banners, as the number of murdered children’s names increased.

• Die-ins: We held two simultaneous die-in actions, wherein student protestors wore white shirts covered in fake red blood and lied down on the floor of key entrances or spaces at the university, essentially forcing passerby to either step over „dead bodies” or study in their presence/vicinity.

• Checkpoint: In a simulation of Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank, which add hours to if not entirely hampering the daily commute of Palestinians trying to reach their schools/jobs/homes, we set up our own car checkpoint at the main parking entrance of Tilburg University. Greeting people with the phrase „Tilburg University is implementing a new policy of mandatory identification to enter campus, in solidarity with our Israeli partners who implement the same policy on their campuses.”

We also held protest marches on the campus and noise protests inside buildings.

  

Similar encampments were set up on several other Dutch university campuses; some were strongly opposed by their university administration, others not. Could you tell us a bit about these?

Rami: Encampments with a blockade of university space were launched at the University of Amsterdam and at Utrecht University.

At the University of Amsterdam multiple encampments had been set up; these were all taken apart by the police using brutal violence and heavy machinery at the request of the University management.

At Utrecht University, much like in Amsterdam, the encampment was taken apart by the police at the request of the University management.

Encampments that did not blockade the university space were organized on many campuses:

At the University of Groningen and at the University of Nijmegen, encampments were disbanded by the police at the request of the university management after gradual escalation in actions by the encamping groups.

At the Technical University of Eindhoven, the encampment was disbanded due to a lack of capacity/energy.

At the Technical University of Delft, the encampment was disbanded by the police after students decided to enter a building.

At Wageningen University, the encampment is still active.

 

At the end of the exam period, as the summer holidays stared, the participants of your group decided to end the encampment – without achieving your primary objective of getting Tilburg University to take a stand against the genocide in Gaza. What has changed at the collective, university level as a result of your protest?

At the university level, Palestine is now on the agenda, albeit much more during the encampment but even today, behind the scenes, academics and administrators have the Palestine file to address, which they did not before. There is an active Advisory Committee on Collaborations with a specific Israel/Palestine working group currently formulating an advice to the Executive Board of Tilburg University on its ties with Israeli academic institutions.

On a collective level, the campus is now an open space for political discussion.

Before Palestine Solidarity Tilburg’s previous protests and the encampment, protests were unheard of on campus for long decades: large actions like the encampment had not taken place since the „Karl Marx University” occupation of TiU in 1969.

 

How did the collective action affect participants, on an individual level?

Rami: On an individual level, there were dozens of students which took it upon themselves to protest, make their voices heard, refuse to be silent during a genocide and sacrifice their energy and academics for Palestine. These students found and grew a beautiful community of likeminded individuals, and truly discovered that they were not alone in their moral stance, their opinions, and their willingness to fight for Palestine at TiU.

Panka: I found the encampment very inspirational, especially the connections I made and the community I found. I feel like it’s very easy to feel alone in Hungary when you care about something like this, because people either don’t have the capacity to care or they simply just don’t. It was very inspiring to find people from all over the world who cared this much about human rights. I think I am much braver to speak out now and I feel an immense amount of hope despite how horrible the situation is – all thanks to the people I met at the encampment.

It was nothing like I had experienced before and it changed my life in many different ways.

 

You can follow Palestine Solidarity Tilburg (PST) here, and the Hungarian page „Szabad Palesztina” (Free Palestine), inspired by PST, here.

 

Interviewer: Attila Piróth.