Cambridge University Palestinian Society joined with students across the country on Monday’s Student Day of Action for Palestine (29/11), to call on universities to “end their complicity in Israeli apartheid.”

The society demonstrated outside Great St. Mary’s to express its solidarity with the Palestinian people and its opposition to the University’s “complicity” in their oppression.

The society has reiterated its demands made in May, during a period of high-conflict between Israel and Palestine in which many civilians were killed by airstrikes in Gaza. These demands include that the University conducts a review of institutional ties “with all corporations implicated in illegal Israeli policies” and “immediately severe formal links and partnerships with BAE Systems, Caterpillar and all other companies or institutions deemed complicit.”

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has found that UK universities invest nearly £500 million in companies “complicit in Israel’s grave breaches of human rights”, which includes companies supplying weapons and military technology to Israel, “used to oppress Palestinians”.

“It is shameful that the University of Cambridge is amongst those with the highest investments”, PalSoc stated, “standing at an estimate of £120,780,000.”

The society has also called on the University to support Palestine student activism on campus, “including, but not limited to, holding our university accountable for violations of academic freedom.”

The society highlighted the increasingly common “systematic attacks” on Palestinians by the Israeli government in recent weeks, including the criminilisation of six Palestinian human rights and civil society organisations. It also references mass arrest raids across Palestine, specifically on university campuses like Birzeit University, where hundreds of student activists were targeted with arrests by the Israeli government. “Palestinians have always pushed back against this repression, and university students have always been at the heart of the Palestinian anti-apartheid struggle”, PalSoc stated.

“On the Student Day of Action for Palestine, we call on our university again to support the emancipation of the oppressed, not their further subjugation and oppression. We want the University of Cambridge to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. We want our institution to be on the right side of history.”

Varsity has contacted the University for comment