The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has “warmly welcomed” the decision on June 4 by Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to cut institutional ties with the Israeli state, and with universities and companies complicit in Israel’s genocide. Queens University in Belfast made a similar announcement the next day.
Siobhán Garrigan, TCD academic and long-term member of Academics for Palestine (AfP), told Green Left that the decision is “very significant”. She said the College is the “first university in the West to take this stand and it sends a strong signal that illegal settlements and human rights abuses will not be tolerated in our project partners”.
Garrigan, a former head of the School of Religion, Theology and Peace Studies, said the decision comes in the wake of a “long-term campaign” by staff to get “TCD to take BDS measures against Israeli institutions”. Last year, this was bolstered by the student encampment movement against Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“It was in response to the student encampment that TCD agreed to set up a Taskforce to create a set of principles and procedures to guide how it ought to deal with project partners who were accused of association with human rights abuses or war crimes,” Garrigan said. “Wednesday's announcement emerged from the work of that Taskforce.”
Omar Barghouti, who co-founded the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (as part of the BDS movement), welcomed TCD’s decision. The academic campaign is based on long established evidence of complicity in apartheid, and now genocide, by Israeli universities, and follows guidelines to ensure that individuals are not targeted on the basis of their opinions or identity.
“We call on universities across Ireland, Europe, and around the world to follow Trinity’s example and stand on the right side of history,” Barghouti said, referencing the success of this tactic against Apartheid South Africa. “No institution truly committed to justice and human rights can remain complicit in the crimes of a regime that systematically violates international law and human dignity.”
National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) activists in Australia have welcomed the move.
Jonathan Strauss, outgoing assistant branch secretary of the Queensland NTEU, who helped push the successful 2024 NTEU National Council motion calling for BDS in universities here, told Green Left that the work of the Ireland campaigners “will also be important for making similar progress here”.
Vice-President (academic) of the Sydney University NTEU branch, Nick Riemer, told Green Left that if a “famous university like Trinity can boycott Israel, everyone can”. Boycotting Israeli universities is increasingly being accepted as the only moral course, he said.
Riemer believes there is already a “widespread de facto boycott” underway and there is now “no excuse for university leaders not to make this official”.
“Their colleagues in Palestine have been asking them to do this for over a decade. How much more obscene violence will Palestinians be made to endure before universities in the global north act?”
Riemer pointed out that many Australian universitieshad made disclosure undertakings in the wake of last year’s student encampments, but these have “still not been honoured”.
“Academics and other university workers need to recognise that the genocide in Palestine is, along with global heating, the defining political issue of this generation”, Riemer said, adding we need “boycott committees on every campus, working with students and the community to pressure university managements”.
Garrigan said “the next steps are to make sure that Trinity implements the positions agreed on Wednesday and, later, once Israel ceases its violations of international law, rebuild relationships with Israeli institutions”. She believes that other universities will follow suit pointing to the example of Queens University. “I expect many others will follow, because, as with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, once international solidarity gains a voice, it tends to grow quite loud quite quickly.”