The Electronic Intifada 14 October 2025
Students want University of Edinburgh to divest from companies complicit with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 28 March, during a Palestine rally at the University of Edinburgh, a student protester was physically attacked by a man with a retractable knife in front of university security.
The student suffered cuts to his face, yet security stood idly by. When students reported that the man had a knife, they were dismissed by security members.
Over the last year, student protesters at Edinburgh have called for a reduction in policing on campus, a demand which, according to student organizers, has been rejected by the administration on the grounds that a security presence at rallies ensures the safety of students.
But the 28 March incident instantly disproved the administration’s position. It was a moment that shattered any illusion of safety or institutional neutrality.
Following up with Edinburgh’s Student Association, students learned that security staff’s non-reaction – watching the scene unfold from a safe distance with their hands in their pockets – is in fact protocol. University security staff have a hands-off de-escalation policy that instructs them to disengage at the threat of a physical altercation.
Although security failed to make any attempts at de-escalation in the first place, they technically fulfilled their exact jobs by not intervening once the staff, including head of security Nial Moffat, were informed about the weapon.
But if it goes against security protocol to intervene when physical violence happens before officers’ eyes, what are they there to do?
Ripple effect
This question remains unanswered. The university evaded responsibility in not addressing students’ concerns about security directly, and then pivoting to blame student organizers for some previous social media posts demanding that the university stop “platforming” Israeli soldiers.
This lack of accountability led to an inevitable ripple effect at the University of Glasgow.
While planning to host a talk with their rector Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, Glasgow students said they were approached by security requesting a full list of names and emails of all attendees scheduled to appear. When students initially refused, security cited the knife-attack at Edinburgh to justify their request and threatened to cancel the talk if they did not receive the requested list.
It did not matter that the University of Edinburgh failed to provide any reasonable explanation for how the security presence protected its students. It did not matter that the University of Glasgow – most likely operating a similar hands-off policy – could not explain how a list of attendees would improve security. After all, it seems unlikely that someone would register for the talk as “Knife Attacker” for the security staff to preemptively act on.
Security’s failure at Edinburgh was therefore used to justify expanding student surveillance at Glasgow with the same tired line about concerns for student safety.
This was not the first lie concerning campus safety. In a November 2023 meeting with Edinburgh students, the university administration rejected a student demand of no police presence on campus, claiming the administration had nothing to do with the police presence at every demonstration, protest and rally to date.
A Freedom of Information request shared with Edinburgh University’s Justice for Palestine Society revealed, however, extensive email communication between security staff and police in which they shared the details of protests happening on campus, none of which included discussions of student safety.
This isn’t just about a single attack or policy. It’s about how our educational institutions weaponize the language of safety to curtail precisely the kind of student activism that opposes and exposes their investments in and profits from the very weapons used to kill Palestinians.
According to a report in The Guardian earlier this month, in fact, universities in the UK have gone so far as to collaborate with arms and defense companies to actively surveil students’ social media ahead of career fairs in order to preempt protests.
Invested in genocide
The University of Edinburgh has the dubious distinction of being named as one of “the most financially entangled” educational institutions in the UK in the UN’s recent report on corporate and institutional complicity with Israel’s occupation of Palestine, its apartheid system of control and its genocide in Gaza.
This includes over $31 million invested in Amazon, Alphabet, IBM and Microsoft – corporations that provide the Israeli military with crucial technological support, including AI and facial recognition systems used to surveil and target Palestinians.
University management will never readily divest from profitable investments, even if this means profiting off a genocide. The idea that divestment can be won simply through reasoned argument is an illusion that is upheld by the web of lies university administrators spin to appease students.
The only language administrators really understand is pressure. And pressure is brought to bear when our presence is large enough to shape even the conversations we are excluded from. When we are silent or sporadic in our actions on campus, they have little traction. But when we are strategic and consistent, the results speak for themselves.
Last year, Edinburgh University Justice for Palestine Society’s disruption of the university-hosted career fairs ultimately resulted in defense companies ending their participation in such events at the University of Edinburgh.
This was not only a win, it emphasized JPS’ persistent messaging: where a university fails to make decisions in favor of boycotts and divestment, the decision will be made for them.
A university’s investments do not exist in a vacuum. Education establishments in the UK contend with a legacy of colonialism. Edinburgh’s complicity runs deep. The university “played an outsized role” in promoting racist “scientific” theories and profited handsomely from transatlantic slavery.
On Palestine, there is a direct line: Arthur Balfour was chancellor of the university in 1917 when he issued the Balfour declaration, promising away land that was never his or the British Empire’s to give.
That legacy still shapes attitudes to Palestine today. It is upheld by our institutions, entrenching us in their complicity. Hence our struggle must transcend the day-to-day battles with university administrations and confront the very system of power that allows such corruption to take root.
Numbers and strategy
As students living in the UK, witnessing a livestreamed genocide, we are perfectly positioned to make real cultural shifts in how to address Israel and Zionism. We must not be afraid to name our enemy clearly, and abide by our thawabet – or fundamental political principles – faithfully.
Incidents like the knife assault in March make us fear for our safety, even while we recognize that every threat we face pales in comparison with horrors unfolding in Palestine. Without accountability, it sets a dangerous precedent, where student lives are disposable, where protests are portrayed as inherently unsafe, and where institutional silence in the face of the atrocity goes unchallenged.
That is why we need each other. Our universities play sinister games. They take part in the ongoing genocide through both financial investments and research collaborations. But rather than defend their actions, they deny their impact or their own responsibility and play an endless game of bureaucratic snakes and ladders.
Our actions must be guided by this knowledge and by the knowledge that suppression is becoming ever more acute, not just at universities, where students have been expelled and free speech curtailed, but in the country as a whole, where the government is now talking of curbing lawful protests.
Mapping strategy and escalation require that we can sustain our movement, on campuses and beyond, past this moment. And not only in terms of safety, media strategy and legal support but with political education that emboldens us to challenge our institutions’ core alignment with settler colonialism and imperialism.
Until Palestine is free, every action, every demonstration, every victory is an act of repentance for our universities’ complicity in genocide and our own complicity by extension. Liberation will only come from Palestine, but as students we have a duty to break our universities’ financial complicity, another cog in the killing machine.
And the pressure is working. The grounds for divestment are indisputable. Divestment is an inevitable reality.
After two years of watching Israel commit unimaginable atrocities in our beloved Palestine, we will not be ones to hide at the threat of violence, nor will we try to rely on a system designed to fail us.
Through every act of defiance and every call for divestment, from campuses and from the streets, a future Palestine, free and unbound by occupation, is imagined. Our solidarity must not be subdued. It is firmly grounded in a struggle for justice for the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to return home and live freely.
Suha Omar is a student organizer and University of Edinburgh alumna.
