On Friday, a group of pro-Palestinian protestors occupied the Radcliffe Camera, the most famous part of the University of Oxford’s central library system. In an uncharacteristically decisive move, the Oxford leadership briefly attempted to negotiate, but soon handed the issue over to the police. Shortly after, the building was cleared out and several protestors were arrested, perhaps signalling an end to the University’s hands-off approach towards student occupations of its property.
The occupation began at approximately 9 a.m., when members of the student-led group Oxford Action For Palestine (OA4P) entered the library. According to witnesses, the people already studying or working in the Radcliffe hurriedly left the building when the protestors arrived. It is unclear if they were chased out by the would-be occupiers or if they simply did not want to stick around for all the chanting and shouting.
In a statement shared on OA4P’s social media sites, they declared an end to the nearly 300-year history of the Radcliffe Camera, announcing that it had been renamed The Khalida Jarrar Library. According to the statement, Jarrar is a “political leader, activist, and scholar” and one of 90 Palestinian prisoners released as part of the latest ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
Besides her regular career as a Palestinian lawmaker, Jarrar also allegedly dabbles in some extracurricular terrorism. She is accused of playing a key part in a 2019 bombing that killed 17-year-old Rina Shnerb and wounded her brother and father while the family was hiking. She was also sentenced to prison for being a member of the PFLP, a terrorist organisation responsible for multiple plane hijackings and attacks on civilians, including on October 7.
Apparently, Oxford’s management had not been consulted on this rebranding of their most iconic building, and soon after the occupation began, University officials arrived at the scene, hoping to convince the protestors to abandon the project. By then, however, several students had climbed out of the windows on the first floor of the Radcliffe Camera and were busy shouting through a megaphone that they would not leave until all their demands had been met.
Their demands were clear and concise, though a little lacking in originality. They included a full disclosure of the University’s financial assets, divestments from all arms companies, more ethical restrictions on future investments, a boycott of all Israeli institutions (including exchange programmes with universities in the country), no more banking with Barclays, and official efforts to rebuild Palestinian institutions of higher education.
As these demands were being yelled at the steadily growing crowd around the library, members of the fire brigade and the police arrived at the scene. Meanwhile, University staff could be seen shouting at the protestors to get back inside to avoid the risk of falling off the building. The occupiers did not heed this advice, but insisted that they would stay in place and only negotiate “publicly or through phone or email”.
According to reporting by the student newspaper The Oxford Student, officials from either the University, the police, or both entered the building and had a brief negotiation with the protestors around 11 a.m. These efforts were clearly unsuccessful and around noon several police officers entered the building, as the protestors all gathered on the ledge outside the library’s windows. Around this time, the University management issued a statement through a spokesperson, saying that it “thoroughly condemned the disruption and distress caused to members of the University by the actions of these individuals”.
The statement went on to say the protestors were “in breach of University regulations and policies and we will be enforcing the University disciplinary policies. […] We are currently working to safely remove the protestors and ensure that normal studies and services can resume as soon as possible”.
One of protestors at the window announced to the crowd below that Oxford now considered “this matter [to be] out of the hands of the University”, warning that arrests could follow. The student added that “we are not afraid of arrests”, while labelling the warning from the University as “retribution”.
Soon after, more police entered the building, some carrying climbing gear. Around 2 p.m., the Oxford Action for Palestine announced online that some of the protestors had been arrested. As more protestors gathered outside the library, some attempted to block police vans, while chanting “Over 40,000 dead, you’re arresting kids instead”.
As the afternoon progressed, more protestors emerged from the building in police custody. Some were walked out the front door, while those outside the windows were abseiled down by police officers. Despite reports of a brief skirmish between police and some of the protestors outside the library, the arrests appear to have happened with minimum physical resistance from the would-be occupiers.
The skilled efforts of the police ensured that none of the protestors were injured during the incident, despite the unconventional and risky move of occupying the outside of a building. Likewise, the decisive actions of the University ensured that students could return to studying inside the library in a matter of hours, bringing an end to the short but thrilling history of the Khalida Jarrar Library.
While police abseiling down the walls of the Radcliffe Camera made for better pictures, the scene was otherwise reminiscent of another attempted occupation back in November at the University of Leicester. Then, after protestors declared a “liberated zone” at the Attenborough Tower, the University also decided to call the police and clear out the building. Perhaps these events signal that several universities are fed up with certain excessive forms of student protest.
Writing in The Spectator, another current student at Oxford noted that compared to “how long it took for the encampment outside the Pitt Rivers Museum to be removed last year, [Friday’s] protest was seen off fast”.
Even the OA4P seemed surprised by the swift action to remove them from the library. Following the arrests, the group’s Instagram account posted that rather than negotiate, “the University of Oxford chose to abscond its legal obligations as a charity and institution of higher education, abandon its duty of care to students, and arrest the actionists”.
Although some despair over the quick end to the experiment in making “the very heart of the University of Oxford Palestinian” (as one protestor put it) is understandable, the OA4P seems to have misunderstood a great deal of things.
Neither charities nor institutions of higher learning have a “legal obligation” to allow masked protestors to occupy their buildings and refuse access to others. Moreover, Oxford did not “abandon its duty of care to students”, but rather did its very best to uphold it. This goes for both the duty to protect the physical safety of the student protestors and to secure educational resources for those students who are more concerned with passing end-of-term exams than with protesting Middle East regimes.
In case it needs reiterating, CAF fully supports the right of students to protest anything they want, including the investment strategies and institutional affiliations of their universities. None of the students gathered on the grounds outside the Radcliffe Camera did anything wrong, and they should absolutely not be punished (nor has Oxford indicated that they will be).
However, forcefully taking over University property and barricading the doors to fellow students and employees is against the law. Oxford not only has the right to alert the police to such actions, but also the duty to ensure that other students can continue to access the resources essential to their education.