Protestors call on Imperial to cut ties and “take a stance”

Activists congregated on Wednesday afternoon to put pressure on the College to stop its work with arms companies that they allege have contributed to the IDF’s activities in Gaza, and called on Imperial to better represent the student voice.

“We are in the right and [our government and management] are in the wrong,” a member of Imperial UCU said over a megaphone to a group of 30. 

Protestors claimed that Imperial was “supplying one side [of the war]” through the research it conducts with companies such as Caterpillar. “Your labs are drenched in Palestinian blood,” they chanted. Imperial “likes to claim it doesn’t take a side when it in fact is supplying one side,” said one.

Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, has attracted the ire of human rights groups such as Amnesty International for supplying the IDF with DC9 armoured bulldozers, which the IDF has used to destroy Palestinian homes.

There is no indication that Imperial has broken the law in its relationships with Caterpillar, and the company itself has said it has ‘neither the legal right nor the means to police individual use of its equipment.’

A protest organiser called the IHRA’s antisemitism definition a “false conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism”.

Imperial UCU has called for a discussion on the IHRA definition, and a 75-year-old Jewish member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network present at the protest agreed that the definition “should not have been accepted”. “Being Jewish and being a Zionist are very different things,” they added.

A spokesperson for Jewish Society called the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network a ‘radical fringe group’, claiming that the ‘vast majority of Jews are Zionist’ and support the ‘Jewish people’s right to self-determination, and Israel’s right to exist.’

They called Wednesday’s protestors hypocritical, saying they had failed to properly acknowledge the events of 7th October when Hamas orchestrated a terrorist attack on Israel, kidnapping and killing civilians.

Over 28,000 people have been killed in Israel's retaliatory attacks on the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.