Thanks to Ian Drummond for this.

On the evening of Tuesday 13^th January a group of students at the School of Oriental and African Studies occupied the Brunei Gallery Suite at SOAS. This room, and the entire Brunei building it is in, is subcontracted to the company Sodexo, which also provides catering for the US army at Abu Ghraib prison (where standards infamously slipped after the end of Saddam’s regime) and runs brutal immigration detention centres in Britain. The company charges £1000 a night for the Suite, permanently pricing out the Student Union and student societies, but had given the space for free to an exhibition sponsored by the Ministry of Defence, aimed at schoolchildren, on ethnic minorities in the British Armed Forces from colonial times to the present.

The exhibition effectively glorified what largely amounts to the fact that some colonial subjects fought their own people and other peoples like them on behalf of Britain, in which they had no interest and by which they were oppressed. The most sympathetic figure commemorated was Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian princess who died in Dachau for working with the French Resistance; theirs was the same legitimate struggle against occupation as that in Gaza today. That such an exhibition, sponsored by the blood stained MoD and supported by a company despised in SOAS for its role in the War on Terror, happened to be on campus during the massacre in Gaza, provided a perfect storm for students wishing to make the leap from being angry to taking a concrete stand of solidarity.

The occupation began immediately after the end of the Student Union’s monthly general meeting, during which every single relevant vote had been won by the side in solidarity with Palestine. These included a general motion on the Gaza slaughter, a motion in support of global non-violent direct action against Israel’s crimes, (in which the section on the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance, which some sought to remove, was explicitly affirmed) an emergency motion against the MoD exhibition, and 2 emergency motions on the issue of a lecture series celebrating Tel Aviv University, denouncing the series and the conduct of the police when called onto campus to make sure the lecture went ahead.

After locking ourselves in the room we wrote a statement, put placards in the windows and slept overnight in the room. The following day more students joined the occupation through the windows and came and went throughout the day. We were covered by al Jazeera and other news agencies. When the schoolchildren turned up they were not allowed by their teachers to see the exhibition under our occupation as we had specified that the MoD guides were not allowed in; they were enthused by our action but the teachers attempted to keep their exposure to us down to a bare minimum.

There were negotiations with the school throughout the day and eventually a deal was reached which amounted to an overwhelming victory. In return for the students agreeing to unlock the doors and cease the occupation, we would be allowed to use the space, previously denied to us, for the rest of the week, to hold events to raise awareness of and show solidarity with Gaza. The MoD would be allowed in the room for only one purpose: to remove their exhibition forthwith. No student who took part in the occupation is to suffer any consequences, the school is to open negotiations with Sodexo to secure times for students to use the space, and any future military presence on campus must be agreed with the Student Union.

There was a comic epilogue to our struggle as representatives of the School, in a display of bureaucratic logicality, didn’t allow us to end our own occupation and unlock the doors until they saw a signed copy of the agreement. We later held an anti-Zionist meeting in the liberated space and are arranging an intensive series of events for the next 2 days. Other universities are planning similar actions, as it becomes clear that the movement for Gaza must be taken to a new level of concrete, radical solidarity action.