2
0
After 21 months, bombs still rain on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Mothers are forced to scrounge up flour from the dirt to feed their children, as the entire Gazan population has been systematically starved, and has reached critical risk of famine. Schools, hospitals, and homes have been reduced to rubble and dust. Over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed. Countless more have been injured, permanently disabled, or left homeless.
This has come with the support – direct or indirect – of every government and institution in the West. Apart from the Israeli government actively committing this terror, governments that purport to be advocates of freedom, democracy, and equality have, at best, stood back and watched as the systematic starving and killing of Palestinians has raged on for almost two years. This has been normalised, in one way, through ties between weapons companies and universities across the globe. UQ is one of those universities.
The most obvious example of this is the Boeing Centre located in the Hawken Engineering Building. In UQ’s own admission, this is the first Boeing centre in the entire Asia-Pacific region that has been set up within a university, showcasing how deep their connection is. This comes with an extra $5 million that the university has spent on various agreements with them just in the last year, as well as two scholarships sponsored by Boeing!
It’s also not hard to see the connection Boeing has with Israel, as Boeing has boasted that “the relationship between Boeing and Israel goes back more than 75 years. According to a Reuters article, the company has sold weapons like the F-15 fighter jets as recently as November of last year, as part of a $5.2 billion deal signed by the Israeli defence ministry. Any collaboration with a company like this serves to normalise their crimes against ordinary people. Especially when the university lets them have their own room to advertise how great their innovations in the next machines of death are.
UQ is also in lockstep with Lockheed Martin. Though they don’t have their own advertising space on campus like Boeing does, UQ has spent over $4 million on their own agreements with Lockheed Martin in the last year. Worst of all, UQ has admitted they helped to innovate on titanium components for the F-35 fighter jet, confirmed to have been used in an Israeli massacre on the Al-Mawasi ‘safe zone’ last year. Lockheed Martin calls them ‘essential to securing air dominance and ensuring mission success across every domain’. By dominance, they mean instilling fear in ordinary people into complete submission, including Palestinians, as jets like this drop bombs indiscriminately. And our university helped in making that plane, knowing this would be the outcome.
UQ should cut ties to any and all weapons companies. Universities should be spaces to learn freely and find how to make the world a better place for ordinary students and workers, not to be funnelled to work for a company that profits solely from creating death and human misery. But we cannot just wait and hope that these ties will end anytime soon on the volition of the administration. They have held onto them for years, decades even, and they don’t seem keen on stopping anytime soon. That is, unless we fight for it.
Anyone who supports Palestine should come to the forum organised by the UQ Union on the 5th of August. We need to make sure our voices are heard, and that these companies should never be allowed at our university. If you have a class on then, skip it! How can we study like nothing is wrong when the onslaught of Palestinians has been continuing for almost two years? We must take a stand, because if we don’t, who will?
Written by Emma McCarthy
Author
Views: 12