The pro-Palestine movement’s alternative campus

The Soas Liberated Zone is offering the London university’s students a different kind of educational experience.

On 17 June, I visited the Soas Liberated Zone. It is a complex of tents occupied by Soas students, which has existed in multiple forms on and outside the School of Oriental and African Studies campus since 6 May 2024. This makes it the longest held of the student encampments that sprang up in Britain following the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, whose occupants were demanding their university divest from Israel. The day of my visit, Israeli forces had opened fire on crowds of Palestinians in Gaza waiting to receive crucial aid. They killed at least 70 people. Al Jazeera called it “Gaza’s deadliest day at aid sites”.

Inside the large tent that serves as the living-cum-dining room for the encampment, I met Ayah, a Palestinian Soas alumna who recently completed her masters in comparative literature. We have returned to an attitude of silence, which serves to normalise an ongoing genocide in Gaza, Ayah told me. It has gone on so long that people are becoming numb or even apathetic in the face of the daily roll call of Palestinian people who have died under occupation. “Encampments are a way of saying this is not normal and we will not go on with our normal lives,” she said.

The current encampment has about 20 regular members who take it in turns to sleep outside, between a church and a row of pop-up food stalls, only a few minutes’ walk from the university. It’s a space that feels lived in and cared for: packs of biscuits and an ashtray on the table, a daily to-do list written on a whiteboard. This is their third location; the first two were on Soas property, the second removed by enforcement agents on instructions from the University of London. Ayah and other members of the encampment whom I would meet once they returned from a protest at BAE Systems Rochester have been here since the start. After the war on Gaza began, Ayah withdrew socially from the university because, she said, it offered her neither the support nor the solidarity she needed. Once the encampments began, she actually felt “integrated into the community”.

I came to the SOAS Liberated Zone after watching The Encampments, a documentary that tells the story of the Columbia Encampment, and the unfolding student movement it sparked, through the voices of those who were fundamental to its mobilisation. This includes Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian refugee born in Syria with a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, who became one of the key negotiators for the encampment in their demands that their university divest from companies with ties to Israel. In the documentary, Khalil addresses his university by stating, ‘We’re literally giving you back your university to be a moral university.’ Bteween March and June, Khalil was held at an ICE Detention Centre in Louisiana by the Trump administration, as part of the president’s crackdown on international student protestors engaging in what he calls “un-American activity.” Knowing how soon Khalil would be arrested for attempting to hold his university to moral account only makes the footage more vital and indelible.

Those who had been at the protest outside BAE returned: Haya, a second-year student and political refugee from Egypt; Tara, a third-year student; and a fresher called Qasim who told me he joined the encampment after learning that Soas invests in companies linked to Israel and has a partnership with Haifa University. “Once you find that out, you really only have two choices,” he said. “Silence or do something about it.” Both Haya and Tara are suspended and prohibited from entering the campus for the rest of the academic year, at minimum, for their roles in pro-Palestine activity on campus. (A Soas spokesperson said that protest and dissent can take place at the university “as long as it remains peaceful and does not undermine the safety and security of all within our community”.)

Haya and Tara are two of the named defendants on an injunction the University of London had approved by the courts late last year, which has temporarily guaranteed that students cannot hold protests on university property unless they seek permission from the relevant authorities 72 hours in advance. “But things happen overnight!” Ayah cut in. “How can Soas continue to declare that it supports free speech and decolonial rhetoric when it’s actively suspending students for doing those very things?” Tara asked. For the last year, student encampments like this one have functioned to expose the hypocrisies at the heart of universities as institutions. On Soas’s website it says that its undergraduate degree is for “those who want to re-examine preconceptions and not just accept the status quo”. And yet, it is choosing to suppress student protest unless management first ordains it.

I asked Ayah what she now thinks university is for; she replied sardonically, “A fancy degree!” To Tara, what is beautiful about the encampment is the way it has made free education possible. Not just financially, Tara clarified – they make the seminars and screenings held available for free online as well as free from censorship.

What they learn here seems more transformative than what you might discover in the classroom: not just political theories, but the ability to apply them in practice. After the start of the war, Haya told me a lot of students were pro-Palestine but in quite a passive way. “It’s our responsibility to reach out to them, to get them to join us, to provide political education,” she said. This space has provided students with an alternative form of university experience: it is where they come to study, make sense of the world and discover how they might become forces of change – things they ought to have received from inside the university gates.

In court during the injunction case, the students, as defendants, were reminded that they were still free to protest on social media. To Tara, this illustrated that the university is not threatened by online activism. Suspending its students is a university’s attempt to cut them off from community and action. Instead, these Soas students have spent the last year constructing a sustaining, galvanising and educational community. The point of encampments is that they exist as obstructive, disruptive, physical reminders of institutional and societal failures when it comes to Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Soas Liberated Zone has seven demands – along with divestment they include an end to the repression of Palestinian solidarity activism on campus. They tell me they will stay here for as long as necessary.

[See also: Jeff in Venice]

Note: after this article was published a SOAS spokesperson commmented on June 27th that the land on which the first two encampments appeared was not SOAS property, SOAS has not suspended any students for pro-Palestinian views and that SOAS’s ehtical investment policy is “among the most ethical in the university sector.” They added that their partnership with Haifa University is currently suspended in line with the universities risk assesment policy.