January 24, 2025 - 4:50pm

Radcliffe Square, Oxford

Pro-Palestine protests have dominated my short time as an Oxford student. Activists interrupted my matriculation ceremony in October with an impassioned plea on behalf of those affected by the war in Gaza. The railings put up to monitor the encampments around the Radcliffe Camera have blemished the University’s most famous and beautiful library. And today, news that protesters representing Oxford Action for Palestine (OA4P) had stormed, climbed and occupied the Radcliffe Camera greeted me when I arrived for my politics lecture.

A single line of firefighter tape strewn between a bench and the lamppost enticed more spectators than it turned away. Halfway up the building, activists stood and sat in groups of threes, holding the Palestinian flag and donning what has become the cause’s international uniform: a mix of keffiyehs, medical masks and balaclavas. At ground level, a shoddy barricade of chairs, desks and other library paraphernalia stood as a deterrent to University authorities. “Do you think they’ll let me return my books?” a first-year historian joked.

But for all the vigour of the 9am takeover, the scene two hours later was lacklustre. The few signs draped from the side of the building suffered spasms in the wind; even when still, their slogans were far too small to be read by passers-by. I managed to decipher that one said “divest”, which was echoed in the response I received from an OA4P representative on the library’s ledge. In a statement this morning, the group condemned the University’s “deplorable financial and material support” for Israel’s “occupation and apartheid”.

Overall, the activists seemed to have hoped for mere disruption, operating under the assumption that everything else would follow naturally from there, while onlooking students commented on attempts that were rather amateurish in comparison to the scenes of last summer. OA4P claimed that it had renamed the building the Khalida Jarrar Library, after the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — which is designated as a terrorist organisation by the US and the European Union.

Waning enthusiasm for the movement means the University has faced few real tests this academic year. The anniversary of the 7 October attacks was hardly observed at all, in part because Oxford’s shorter terms meant that much of the student population was still moving in. Disruptions to matriculation ceremonies two weeks later consisted of singular students marching into the Sheldonian Theatre, only to be apprehended and removed a few minutes later.

Today, I heard one completed call-and-response in the 45 minutes I stood in Radcliffe Square. There were cries of “Occupation no more” and “Israel is a terror state”, which have rung out since October 2023. Otherwise, there was probably more ridicule of the protesters’ actions — and that the library had been closed until further notice as a result — than there was genuine support for the cause. Even spectators sympathetic to Palestine wondered whether a protest that only disrupted the lives of students and left University officials unperturbed was the best course of action.

A smattering of police officers and University security staff were dotted around the square, with one assuring me that there was a “process in place” in the occasion that escalation became necessary. Another declared the police’s commitment to “facilitating lawful protest”. Even when protests began to pick up around 2pm, police hardly dictated events. A lone member of security staff on the other side of the RadCam informed me that he thought the University’s lethargic response was inadequate going forward, given the significance of some of the books that the library houses.

Most striking of all was that student crowds were unmoved for hours. Whether burrowed away in some other library or simply uninspired, the most activism-friendly group in politics didn’t show face until lunchtime. Police and University officials did eventually make substantive moves to remove protestors, but perhaps a quick response was unnecessary. Oxford’s first major protest of 2025 lacked the nous, scale, and spirit of those prior, and Palestine activism on campus appears to be diminishing fast.


Nathan Osafo Omane is a student at the University of Oxford.