WHAT HUMAN RIGHTS MEAN TO ME EXPOSING COMPLICITY IN APARTHEID


Jack Farrar explains why he is among the staff and students challenging their university’s investment in Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians.


I grew up just outside Belfast in the north of Ireland, a politically vibrant place where public space is rich with dissident aesthetics, murals, art, music. Symbols


of politics, violence are everywhere.


I went to a mixed school (over 90 per cent of schooling is still segregated by religion) so I grew up with friends on both sides. I remember, as a young boy, feeling the heat of a Loyalist bonfire, wondering why it was draped with Irish tricolours and Palestinian flags; and later finding myself at a similar bonfire, covered with Israeli flags and British military symbols. For a child, the complex web of allegiances was confusing, but that ignites the appetite to understand what it all means and find your place in it.


Nowadays, I study human rights at the London School of Economics (LSE). To me, there is more to human rights than legal frameworks. A purely legalistic


approach to rights can


perpetuate violence if it ignores the history and structural foundations from which differences between people and groups emerged. It needs to be about justice and equality, not just the law. Activism


in Palestine, the UK is important


in resisting colonial violence and occupation in Palestine. The UK has been part of the colonisation of


from the Sykes-Picot


agreement, when Britain and France divided up the region for imperial interests, through to the current phase, where Britain sends arms to Israel. The genocide of Palestinians requires


the material and financial complicity not only of governments and arms


religion and


Launching the Assets in Apartheid report, May 2024


companies, but also of institutions. The LSE says it cannot take a stance on ‘complex geopolitical matters’. But universities have already taken a stance through repeated investments in companies involved in human rights abuses – and not only in Israel and Palestine.


At LSE students set up an encampment on 14 May, the day before the annual commemoration of the Nakba, when Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948 to make way for the State of Israel. We released a 116-page report, Assets in Apartheid, based on months of research by students and staff to expose how the university is implicated in human rights abuses in Palestine and elsewhere. It showed that LSE invests £48.5 million across 80 holdings in 53 companies implicated in crimes against Palestinians: companies like BAE Systems that work with and supply the Israeli military, and businesses listed by the UN Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights as involved in illegal settlement activities such as Airbnb, Alstom and Delek Group (parent of Ithaca Energy). We lobbied the university to divest


from companies implicated in human rights abuses, and not only in Israel and Palestine. Amnesty supported us with expertise, publicity and pressure. A review of LSE’s environmental, social and governance policy is now under way. It seems the university is warming to the idea of divesting from weapons companies, and maybe fossil fuels too. But on Israel, there has been little movement, which is disappointing. There are literally no universities left in Gaza, in part because of the financial activity of universities here in the UK. And once we understand that, and look at our campus buildings funded by investments linked to the destruction of similar buildings in Gaza, it’s hard not to be moved to action.


Jack Farrar is a postgraduate student at LSE and Amnesty International UK’s country coordinator on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.


Assets in apartheid: LSE’s complicity in genocide of the Palestinian people, arms trade, and climate breakdown can be downloaded at lsepalestine.github.io/


WINTER 2024 AMNESTY 37


© Mark Kerrison


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