20/05/2024
A forum led by your Education Officers last Thursday, ‘Sydney Uni: School of War’. We delved into our university’s ties to Israeli higher education institutions and its partnerships with arms companies that make it complicit in Israel’s genocide of Gaza. These are the ties that we are protesting against with our encampment and the ties that we are demanding be cut.
USyd has four partnerships with Israeli institutions - Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Technion Institute of Technology, and Bezalel Academy. For each, we explored how these institutions are on occupied land and how they materially support the IDF and contribute to the research and development of the weapons they use. On any level, these partnerships legitimise the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel, but these particular institutions are also highly involved in the propaganda and violence enacted by Israel.
Similarly with USyd’s partnerships with companies that contribute to weapons development, we outlined the University’s pride in ties to arms companies that normalises a culture of war and imperialism. With a Memorandum of Understanding and PhD scholarships with Thales (the sixth largest weapons company in the world), research on campus going towards Lockheed Martin and L3Harris, and our US Studies Centre aiming to create a “social license” for nuclear weaponry - our University is complicit in many of the world’s current conflicts. Worse, the University is encouraging and incentivising students to join them, and is prioritising such unethical partnerships over investment in our University services, staff, and education.
