In coming together, we will mark one year of the on-going genocide in Gaza. We know that the past months of violence are not an isolated temporal event but are part of the brutalising conditions of Israels settler colonialism. These conditions include cycles of injury, maiming and murder, as well as the destruction of vital Palestinian infrastructures including in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. At the same time universities in the Global North have remained largely silent, while also being complicit through investments in the arms trade and in their collaborations with Israeli universities. It took student encampments and protests to intervene in the business as usual veneer and to centre not only the imperatives of BDS campaigns, but also Palestinian liberation. In taking stock of the past twelve months our focus is on liberation and solidarity building in the new academic year, holding together the meeting points of devastation, hope and political imagination.
