Oxford has had enough of its Gaza protests

The ceasefire in Gaza may be holding, but student activists aren’t happy. Yesterday, ten students from the Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) protest group stormed the Radcliffe Camera, the eighteenth century library, ‘occupied’ it and founded the ‘Khalida Jarrar Library’ named after a Palestinian activist and one of the 90 freed as part of the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel. The rationale, one member told me, was that the building was the centre and ‘heart’ of the city, would ‘make it Palestinian’ and would ‘attract the most attention’.

Just as the students took over the building, the protesters delivered a press release to The Oxford Student which explained why they could not accept ‘business as usual’. The ‘absolute brutality of the Zionist settler project’ has been aided by the ‘technologies developed by Oxford University’, and arms giants have given the university ‘tens of millions of pounds’ for research.