Well we've all been working really hard over the past week but I guess that we're still students at the end of the day: this morning we overslept our scheduled meeting time by 15 mins before somebody woke us up with Rage Against The Machine. We got stuck straight into our schedule, reviewing and finalising our response to the management and it was sent out to them this afternoon.
After a bit of lunch, the rest of the afternoon was taken up with organising in our working groups and catching up on all our jobs ready for tomorrow morning. A delegation attended the visiting conference of the model United Nations and were received with interest and enthusiasm. After a bit of feedback in the afternoon, we watched a dispatches documentary on the Israeli control of media coverage of the war on Gaza and then (after an awesome curry and surprise home-made apple pie) the rest of the evening was spent chilling out with some songs.
Its been an intense and pretty inspiring week with everybody working together to establish an accessible and organised occupation, not to mention all the solidarity and support that we have received, excellent educational talks, and the news of new university occupations around the country reaching us sometimes more than once a day and the feeling generally is one of positivity and strength.
We've got silent occupations of lectures for most of the day tomorrow and Tuesday so please do come along and sign up to the rota if you have an hour or two in your day. Then tomorrow evening at 7:00 we'll be hosting an open discussion on the question of boycott (point 3 of our demands) with invited speakers representing four different perspectives on the debate. We look forward to seeing you there!
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I was a technician at bristol university for 15 years and a strong trade unionist and member of the joint unions cttee. I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see students taking radical political action again. Don't let anyone tell you that you have no power. If you put 'Gaza demo' into YouTube you see some of the thousands of solidarity demonstrations around the world. So when Blair talks about 'the international community' you can see you are in tune with the real international community. It isn't right to murder people and steal their land - no matter what has happened to you. Paul Mason's excellent 'Live Working/Die Fighting' shows how large sections of the Jewish community vehemently resisted the arguments of Zionism. Keep it up! Will Brown
ReplyDeleteYou all seem to think that you know what is meant by "Zionism". My understanding of that term is the movement that arose in the late 19th Century in Europe that took the view that freedom from extreme and irrational persecution of the Jews could only be achieved by means of a nationalist movement. Other Jews at that time took the opposing view that persecution would be best overcome by integration and by disolving into the (mostly) European Christian host nations. The latter view prevailed until the Nazi Holocaust, which taught the majority of Jews a lesson never to trust anyone but themselves with their existential safety. A similar lesson was taken by the Sephardi Jews of the Middle East, north Africa and Central Asia, who were stripped of their material possessions and expelled by their millions.
ReplyDeleteSo what is your definition of Zionism?