A large group of pro-Palestine students delivered their demands to Cambridge University officials, as the Cambridge for Palestine (C4P) encampment enters its second day.
Around two hundred protesters marched from the camp outside King’s College to the Old Schools, University leadership’s central offices.
Protesters carried six envelopes, each addressed to a senior member of the University’s leadership, detailing the campaign’s demands for Cambridge to cut ties with companies investing in “genocide” in Israel.
The letters were addressed to vice-chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice and pro-vice-chancellors Professor Bhaskar Vira, Professor Kamal Munir, Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith, Professor David Cardwell, and Dr Diarmuid O’Brien.
Vira and Munir met protesters at the gates of Old Schools, and took the envelopes from one of the march leaders.
The protesters held a rally before marching towards the Old Schools, chanting “how many kids have you killed today?”, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, and “shame” after each of the six addresses names were listed.
The group also held a rally yesterday, during which a first-year student was reportedly pushed by protesters, and was filmed having an Israel flag ripped out of his hands by a member of the public attending the rally.
C4P have since issued a statement on their Instagram page, calling for those in the encampment not to engage with counter-protesters. The group wrote: “We ask that all members of the public joining our protest respect our community’s principle of not engaging with counter-protesters”.
One speaker at the rally which preceded today’s march reiterated these calls for those attending not to confront “anyone that seems angry”.
The encampment, described as a “liberated zone” by C4P, was set up early yesterday morning outside King’s College. The camp has since grown to about forty tents and the group has held a bill of events including a de-escalation workshop.
One member of C4P who is camping outside King’s College said they had joined the protest as they “don’t want to be at a University that’s funding genocide,” saying they wouldn’t “participate in it’s complicity until that changes”.
“Look how we just drew the vice chancellor out. If that doesn’t show you we can make a change then I don’t know [what will]” they continued.
The University has issued a statement in response to the ongoing protest, saying it is “fully committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law”, and that it “will not tolerate antisemitism, Islamophobia and any other form of racial or religious hatred”.
