On Monday, July 15, over 100 staff, students and community members gathered at the pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Newcastle’s Callaghan campus.

They had come to defend the site from being forcefully evicted after the university deemed it unsafe and directed the protesters to take it down.

This encampment was one of many student-led pro-Palestine camps following the actions of students at Columbia University, a show of protest in response to the increasing violence and disproportionate deaths from the Israel-Hamas war.

University security security loomed around the tents, but nothing happened when the 5 pm eviction deadline came and went.

It looked like a win for the protesters.

The next morning, security dismantled nearly all of the tents before the sun was up.

Anjali Beames, one of the student protesters in her first year of study, chained herself down to a couch in one of the remaining tents.

She explained that the move by security meant the protesters had to “escalate means of resisting”.

“We did know that there was a risk for those of us who were chaining ourselves to the couch. That’s quite an identifiable thing and a person could be blamed,” she said.

At the time, protestors were meeting with university management to negotiate their demands that the university disclose and cut any partnerships with weapons companies and Israeli universities.

With most of their food and blankets confiscated, the remaining protesters packed down after the university agreed to reveal its partnerships with weapons manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing – two of the largest defence companies.

“We’re pretty grateful and feel pretty empowered that we’re even getting disclosure to the extent that we want it,” Beames says.

“That’s a pretty big win for us.

“So while it does feel like we’re kind of fighting an uphill battle when we go to these meetings, we’ve won our first demand and we’ve got a process for hopefully winning the second demand.”

They also want the university to divest from these companies and stop working with Israeli universities.

“There is a path to victory that we can see.”

Universities Deep in the Defence Industry

Many Australian universities are connected to the defence industry and protesters see these partnerships as complicity in the war.

There has been a “concerted effort” to join defence, industry, and academia together, described as the military-industrial academic complex, according to Dr Sian Troath, a leading researcher of Australian defence policy at the Australian National University.

This concept expands on the phrase first used by former U.S. president Eisenhower to describe the connections and mutually beneficial relationship between government military spending and the defence industry.

At Newcastle, Lockheed Martin and Boeing sponsor the Science and Engineering Challenge, a STEM engagement program for primary and high school students.

Protesters point out that the 2019 Altitude Accord partnership allowed Lockheed Martin to influence course curriculums, and Boeing has funded two academic scholarships.

Lockheed Martin builds parts for the F-35 fighter jet, an aircraft used by the Israeli military fleet who have carried out airstrikes in the region and Boeing makes Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) – a remote guidance system attached to bombs that have been found in the rubble of destroyed homes of Gazans.

Troath’s research looks at how the university sector has joined this relationship.

“They fuel each other,” she said.

“So they’re all sort of groups that are being expected to do more with less, or they’re seeking to grow, or both. So economic factors are driving them together, strategic as well. And then there’s this real focus on the pursuit of new and emerging technologies.”

“The dream that technology can be a silver bullet to problems is one of the key things driving this.”

A big push to get defence and universities working together happened in 2016 when the Turnbull government commissioned a $90 billion deal (the nation’s biggest defence contract at the time) to build 12 military submarines in South Australia.

The deal was scrapped and relaunched five years later as the AUKUS pact; under this, the government invested over $5 million in university placements to help with shipbuilding.

The United States plays a big part in this industry collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense, having committed over $240 million to Australian universities since 2016, and the number of research contracts has more than tripled.

“Once you see a value in academia as being a source of ideas or new technologies or people and resources that maybe you don’t have or you don’t perceive that you have enough of, it’s natural to start then looking to your allies,” Troath said.

The details about these defence partnerships are hard to find and sometimes not public.

At ANU, staff and students obtained an investment report through a Freedom of Information request.

This document shows the university has more than $1 million in shares with eight defence companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

“It’s probably the tip of the iceberg compared to the research partnerships,” Troath says.

Troath says there are connections between people in high places across these industries and their interests have fostered the “perfect storm”.

For instance, Newcastle’s Vice-Chancellor Alex Zelinsky used to work as the Chief Defense Scientist and his successor, Tanya Monro, came from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor role at the University of South Australia.

There is nothing to prevent these moves, but Troath says the far-reaching ties between universities and defence steer research, influence the pathways for students, and “limits the questions you can ask”.

“It affects what research can be pursued. It affects what teaching will be done, what industry placements might be available to students, and what areas they might get pushed into pursuing,” she said.

“It means we’re focused less on more complex transnational issues like climate change in favour of a very narrow view of defence … It fixates attention on war rather than peace.”

Calls for Peace Leading to Hate

“I think Jewish students became, in the eyes of the pro-Palestinian movement, spokespeople for the Israeli government and army, when we’re not,” Mia Kline, a Jewish ANU student, said.

Kline says antisemitism has amped up since the conflict.

“We’re not war strategists, we’re not policymakers, we’re Jewish students who have strong ties to Israel because it’s inextricably linked to our Judaism,” she said.

“We don’t represent the government of the day. So feeling unsafe on campus has been a very real emotion for me and a lot of my friends at ANU.”

She says that before the October 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack, it was “a less inflammatory environment to be in as a Jewish student,” but she still faced discrimination.

She remembers one night she was at a bar with friends when a guy approached her and gestured to her necklace with Hebrew writing and asked, “Are you Jewish?”.

“Yeah, good pickup,” Kline said, wondering where this is going…

“Wow, you’re pretty for a Jewish girl,” he said.

It was her first week of university.

“And then I’ve had the classic conversations of ‘do you really need to be working a job whilst at uni? Surely your parents can provide’ making jokes about Hollywood and media power, everything like that.”

Back in May, she was sat down by her two housemates – also students.

They started off saying, “We know that the past couple of months have been really difficult for you”.

“But we feel like we’re fundamentally opposed because of this conflict, and we can’t reconcile your views with our values, so we can’t live under one roof.”

Kline broke into tears.

“I knew that it meant it was the end of the share house, which was this lovely, warm environment. It’s a girls’ share house and it was the best,” she said.

She has stopped wearing the jewelry her grandparents gave her when on campus; she gets too many questions about it and doesn’t “want to be visibly Jewish”.

“I hear stories like from my grandparents about my great-grandparents who are Holocaust survivors. They survived the worst that we can imagine because of their Jewish identity. And then when my grandparents came to Australia, they kind of pushed down their Judaism,” she said.

“So it feels like we’ve reverted back to a society that isn’t as socially accepting as we thought.”

Kline says the anti-Zionist rhetoric in the student movement goes too far and that universities aren’t doing enough to support Jewish students.

“To the average young person, supporting Palestinian people in this conflict is the morally correct right thing to do,” she said.

“So I would be there. But when the encampments go into the territory of Israel as a Jewish state does not have the right to exist, or Israel is partaking in ethnic cleansing and using really heavy-handed language not so long after the Holocaust, that’s when it becomes really questionable.”

A senate inquiry into the universities across the country found that management has tragically failed to address the situation – echoing the history of poor responses to campus sexual assault and harassment.

After rounds of negotiations with protesters at Newcastle, the university posted a list of its defence partnerships on its website.

It shows the university has seven sponsorships, 12 research projects and over $200,000 of investments with defence companies.

The next day, the university released a campus policy that banned encampments and placed restrictions on protests.

“Just because the physical encampment no longer exists, the campaign hasn’t stopped. The fight hasn’t stopped,” Beames said.

“We’re still prepared to mobilise should we no longer think that these negotiations are going anywhere.”