Over the past year, more than 61,700 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel.* In spite of the popular student movement to cut ties with Israeli universities, Radboud has violently suppressed us, refused to take action, and has chosen to stay complicit in genocide. We, the students of the encampment, have a message for the CvB.
Since October 2023, through May 2024 when we created the encampment, and now in April
2025, thousands of Palestinians have been murdered with the aid of our university and its
partners. The CvB’s solution remains the same: ‘we’re waiting for the committee.’ Now, they
resolve to further delay and deny, while Israel prevents all aid from entering Gaza, starving the
population to death.
After these 17 months of delay, denial, and cowardice, Radboud’s own ethics committee has
told us what we already knew: that Radboud’s partner universities are actively contributing to
the ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestine. These institutions are complicit in human
rights violations, deeply embedded in the Israeli military-industrial complex, which benefits
from university benefit from programmes specifically designed to produce soldiers for the
genocide in Gaza. Palestinians are subject to military technology researched by Tel Aviv
University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and its other partners. As such, Radboud
University must cut ties with them all.
This was as clear in 2024, in 2023, as it is today, after the death of thousands more. An ethics
committee that tells us what was already known is illegitimate: a stalling tactic for performative
accountability.
Throughout this time, the CvB has unleashed state violence against its students, its staff,
attempting to crush dissent. It started with Radboud’s own security staff breaking the law by
touching students. It led to police on campus, romeos and spying on students. It escalated with
arbitrary arrests, racial profiling, and riot police with violent arrests. Then, there were
kidnappings by police on the orders of Radboud security for crimes we did not commit. Then
the CvB decided to deploy police dogs.
Radboud and the CvB have not held back in trying to suppress our movement calling for an
end to a genocide, but has threatened us at every turn.
In spite of this overwhelming violence, we continue to struggle for the people in Palestine.
When we are complicit in the “gross violation of human rights,” (says José Sanders herself) of
mass murder and breaches of international law, we are obligated to resist. So long as the
College van Bestuur refuses to act, they force us to react.
Until Radboud cuts all such ties with Israel, students continue to take action. Each second that
Radboud maintains its ties with the genocide, we are forced to escalate. In solidarity with the
people of Palestine, we will not rest while our university contributes to the genocide.
People in Gaza have no time.
In pursuit of freedom, justice and decolonisation,
Signed, the Nijmegen Student Encampment
* This is a very conservative estimate. Other estimates say over twice this number.