Luton Sixth Form College suspended its student council after a walkout, amid scrutiny of links to an arms major that supplies critical weapons to Israel.
Luton, United Kingdom — At exactly 11am on a Saturday in mid-November, hundreds of students from Luton Sixth Form College streamed out of their school, gathering outside in a sea of black, white and red keffiyehs and Palestinian flags.
They carried banners and placards saying “Bombing kids is not self-defence” and “This is no ‘conflict’ it’s genocide”, referring to Israel’s war on Gaza after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel. Student organisers of the rally read out speeches against the war, in which Israeli bombs and artillery fire have now killed more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 8,000 children.
Yet Israel wasn’t the only target of criticism at the rally: The students were protesting against their college’s links to an arms company that had supplied weapons and advanced military platforms to Israel.
The walkout was organised by the school’s student council after its chair, 18-year-old Hassan Sajjad, was approached by students critical of the senior leadership at the college, who some students felt had failed to address or acknowledge strong student sentiment towards the Israel-Gaza conflict.
But a week later, Sajjad and the other council members were informed by the school leadership that their entire council had been disbanded, months before their term was supposed to end in April 2024. Their student council email communication was also suspended.
“It shattered my understanding of democracy in college, and the idea of freedom of speech and ‘British values’,” Sajjad said in a statement.
Since the beginning of the war, there have been unending rallies in the United Kingdom pushing the government to declare a cease-fire. However, as students in schools, colleges, and universities across the UK joined the chorus criticising the war, they have been chastised, gently or overtly, for their pro-Palestine campaigning in numerous instances, raising issues about free speech.
Luton, a town less than 48 kilometres (30 miles) north of London with a 75% ethnic minority population, has been at the focus of that argument in the aftermath of the students’ walkout.
It all started when students discovered that their school had played host to a weapons giant with ties to Israel’s military.
‘Protest to have your voice heard’
Though Israel is today a major arms exporter, it continues to import weapons from the West. The United States is its biggest military partner and the source of 83 percent of Israel’s weapons imports between 1950 and 2020.
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