Cllr Alexi Dimond supported the student encampment as the University took them to court.
Here is his speech.
So right now in Palestine, the ultimate crime of genocide is being committed with weapons supplied by arms companies with which the University of Sheffield has significant relations, holding multi-million pound contracts for research and development.
And for the last two and a half months brave students have camped on their campus, seeking to raise awareness of their University’s ties to the arms industry, and have requested a meeting with them todiscuss the University’s level of complicity with genocide, apartheid and deadly oppression, and what the University will do to end this.
But rather than meet their own students, the University seeks to use the legal system to evict them from their own campus in order to avoid scrutiny.
In the shadow of the Holocaust, UK’s lawyers had a substantial role in writing the Geneva Convention and setting up international courts with the supposed intention of preventing further genocides.
You might imagine that brave students would have the backing of the legal system, but not so.
The legal system is being used to target those who are trying to end an unfolding genocide.
We live in a sick society where most, if not all, of the institutions we are told are the pillars of a so-called civilized and mature democracy.
The courts, the state, national and local government, pensions, universities, businesses, the media, are facilitating a genocide in Palestine. Many of these same institutions are also being instrumentalized to silence or crush those who try to prevent or expose crimes against humanity, and more widely, the destruction of the entire natural world.
In the future, the brave and dedicated students of the encampment and all protesting around the world against the genocide in Palestine will be commemorated alongside those who struggle for causes such as an end to the Vietnam War, for civil rights in the US, for the end of apartheid in South Africa, for an end to fossil fuel extraction, for the repeal of Section 28.
Future generations will wonder why it was largely left to young people to oppose the brutal and racist murder of men, women and children.
Meanwhile, those who supported this genocide and tried to silence those trying to stop it will be condemned, whether they face justice or not.
It is not too late for those who govern the university to change course. Discover your moral compass, discover your humanity, feel compassion for the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of victims of Israel’s current genocide and their families, some of whom attend your university.
I say to the university, meet with your students, hear their demands, and discuss possible resolutions. The university should be proud to have such principled students and can certainly learn a lot from them.
Find out more about the attempted eviction of the camp here.
