Here’s a difficult question: how exactly are any of us meant to react to genocide? Earlier this week, major news outlets reported that the official death toll in Palestine’s Gaza strip reaches 42,000 — with untold thousands unaccounted for, or homeless and starving, suffering from disease, trauma, and unimaginable grief and loss. In these circumstances, words truly fail. So, students made a memorial for the dead of Gaza — and the university tore it down.
The Martyrs’ Memorial, in the Old College quadrangle, was the work of EUJPS (the Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society), in awareness that some Palestinian students were memorialising their own families and communities. On two occasions, the university requested the Security team take it down, so the society rebuilt it a third time during Welcome Week. It did not last long: the Security team made haste to dismantle the memorial, with a spokesperson for the university described its presence as “threatening”. An alternative site for the memorial has not been offered. It is simply not to be erected again.
Now, animosity between pro-Palestinian movements and the university is nothing new, and to some extent, it’s expected. There’s enough opposition already in our politics, media and institutions to demonstrate that the consideration of Palestinian lives and the expression of outrage at the repressive, violent horror of occupation is taboo. And of course, the university will oppose protests that criticise its business practices, and its lack of care towards its own students.
But more broadly, too, there is an understanding that protests are expected to be a political hair-trigger. Think about it: a march cheerleading a cause will attract detractors, regardless of how popular that cause is. Visibility leads to noise, and (increasingly) towards attempts to silence noise. This is part and parcel of protest. But a memorial?
For context, our vice-chancellor Peter Mathieson recently hosted the Israeli Deputy Ambassador, and has not, on the contrary, spoken to anyone from the Palestinian Mission to the UK. Surely this is a far more deliberate, partisan geopolitical statement than erecting a memorial is? And in the same vein, surely, isn’t tearing it down one too? It’s an intriguing quandary: why are we, as students, expected to view a memorial as threatening, but tearing down a memorial as not threatening? The implication is clear: we are to ignore the death toll as it spirals out of comprehensibility. We are supposed to ignore the violence. Our university has shown what provokes its contempt.
It’s certainly not having Scotland’s highest levels of sexual assault, of gender-based violence propagated against students, who — as national news outlets have reported —crowded, heroes, outside Teviot Row and McEwan Hall in impassioned droves, protesting for simple, effective, compassionate change that it is entirely within the university’s power and interests to achieve, only to be met with blanket resistance every time. It’s not the culture-warriors from outside the university who descend on George Square, provoking and harming our own trans and non-binary students and forcing queer staff to leave their jobs here, as the Sunday Times reported in April this year (at the time, Mathieson told student critics: “It’s not the case that we’re not listening, it’s the case that we disagree”).
No: it’s bouquets of supermarket flowers, rain-spattered picture-frames, and sheets of A4 displaying the names of countless murdered children, sellotaped into the ornately crenelated recess of the Old College quadrangle. That’s “threatening”.
It’s funny. Netflix recently used that same quad as part of its flashy reimagining of David Nicholls’ gooey rom-book One Day. The university was happy to sell its image to the world: posh students in black ties, getting plastered, flirting, and slurring their words in the confines of the square and steps. But sober reflection — a place for students to remember, think, and mourn — is not to be tolerated.
As Facilities staff strip pro-Palestinian posters from PhD lecturers’ offices windows, and the university prevaricates to silence its critics, I reflect on the concept of “free speech and debate” (which so often rears its head in defence of those external anti-trans campaigners). I imagine a security guard taking, from the Old College wall, the flowing white laboratory coat with the names of countless murdered Palestinian professors and academics scrawled all over it: a moving tribute to the dedication and curiosity of intellectuals who put their lives on the line, who persisted and spoke aloud even as they were systematically targeted by a military regime. I imagine him taking it down, and shoving it in a bin somewhere.
Tearing down a monument to the dead is an historic new low. It is just staggering, scandalising, and utterly inhuman. But one will reappear, and in the meantime, perhaps the university could contemplate constructing their own memorial of sorts.
Because this is where academic values come to die.
Since this article was written, University leadership have reiterated their refusal to provide a space for a memorial to lost Palestinian lives. A University representative told EUJPS that “No site will be provided”, adding: “a memorial of this nature is not in line … (with) the need for the University to be a community for all”.
“Old College, Edinburgh University” by dun_deagh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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What the loss of the Martyrs’ Memorial means
Here’s a difficult question: how exactly are any of us meant to react to genocide? Earlier this week, major news outlets reported that the official death toll in Palestine’s Gaza strip reaches 42,000 — with untold thousands unaccounted for, or homeless and starving, suffering from disease, trauma, and unimaginable grief and loss. In these circumstances, words truly fail. So, students made a memorial for the dead of Gaza — and the university tore it down.
The Martyrs’ Memorial, in the Old College quadrangle, was the work of EUJPS (the Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society), in awareness that some Palestinian students were memorialising their own families and communities. On two occasions, the university requested the Security team take it down, so the society rebuilt it a third time during Welcome Week. It did not last long: the Security team made haste to dismantle the memorial, with a spokesperson for the university described its presence as “threatening”. An alternative site for the memorial has not been offered. It is simply not to be erected again.
Now, animosity between pro-Palestinian movements and the university is nothing new, and to some extent, it’s expected. There’s enough opposition already in our politics, media and institutions to demonstrate that the consideration of Palestinian lives and the expression of outrage at the repressive, violent horror of occupation is taboo. And of course, the university will oppose protests that criticise its business practices, and its lack of care towards its own students.
But more broadly, too, there is an understanding that protests are expected to be a political hair-trigger. Think about it: a march cheerleading a cause will attract detractors, regardless of how popular that cause is. Visibility leads to noise, and (increasingly) towards attempts to silence noise. This is part and parcel of protest. But a memorial?
For context, our vice-chancellor Peter Mathieson recently hosted the Israeli Deputy Ambassador, and has not, on the contrary, spoken to anyone from the Palestinian Mission to the UK. Surely this is a far more deliberate, partisan geopolitical statement than erecting a memorial is? And in the same vein, surely, isn’t tearing it down one too? It’s an intriguing quandary: why are we, as students, expected to view a memorial as threatening, but tearing down a memorial as not threatening? The implication is clear: we are to ignore the death toll as it spirals out of comprehensibility. We are supposed to ignore the violence. Our university has shown what provokes its contempt.
It’s certainly not having Scotland’s highest levels of sexual assault, of gender-based violence propagated against students, who — as national news outlets have reported —crowded, heroes, outside Teviot Row and McEwan Hall in impassioned droves, protesting for simple, effective, compassionate change that it is entirely within the university’s power and interests to achieve, only to be met with blanket resistance every time. It’s not the culture-warriors from outside the university who descend on George Square, provoking and harming our own trans and non-binary students and forcing queer staff to leave their jobs here, as the Sunday Times reported in April this year (at the time, Mathieson told student critics: “It’s not the case that we’re not listening, it’s the case that we disagree”).
No: it’s bouquets of supermarket flowers, rain-spattered picture-frames, and sheets of A4 displaying the names of countless murdered children, sellotaped into the ornately crenelated recess of the Old College quadrangle. That’s “threatening”.
It’s funny. Netflix recently used that same quad as part of its flashy reimagining of David Nicholls’ gooey rom-book One Day. The university was happy to sell its image to the world: posh students in black ties, getting plastered, flirting, and slurring their words in the confines of the square and steps. But sober reflection — a place for students to remember, think, and mourn — is not to be tolerated.
As Facilities staff strip pro-Palestinian posters from PhD lecturers’ offices windows, and the university prevaricates to silence its critics, I reflect on the concept of “free speech and debate” (which so often rears its head in defence of those external anti-trans campaigners). I imagine a security guard taking, from the Old College wall, the flowing white laboratory coat with the names of countless murdered Palestinian professors and academics scrawled all over it: a moving tribute to the dedication and curiosity of intellectuals who put their lives on the line, who persisted and spoke aloud even as they were systematically targeted by a military regime. I imagine him taking it down, and shoving it in a bin somewhere.
Tearing down a monument to the dead is an historic new low. It is just staggering, scandalising, and utterly inhuman. But one will reappear, and in the meantime, perhaps the university could contemplate constructing their own memorial of sorts.
Because this is where academic values come to die.
Since this article was written, University leadership have reiterated their refusal to provide a space for a memorial to lost Palestinian lives. A University representative told EUJPS that “No site will be provided”, adding: “a memorial of this nature is not in line … (with) the need for the University to be a community for all”.
“Old College, Edinburgh University” by dun_deagh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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