Inside the Palestine solidarity campaign at Finland’s universities

Inside the Palestine solidarity campaign at Finland’s universities

Students in Finland are demanding that university authorities take tougher action against Israeli institutions, which they say are complicit in the war in Gaza.

At the University of Helsinki, the largest in the country, dozens of protesters have been camped outside for more than three weeks to highlight the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and their fellow students whose colleges and universities have been destroyed or badly damaged in the ongoing Israeli military offensive - actions that United Nations human rights experts have called “scholasticide.”

“For us, the motivation to be here is seeing all the things happening in Gaza, and overall the Palestinian situation over the last 75 years,” explains student Kevin Soovik.

“We’re trying to pressure our own institutions, the very institution where we study, to stand up to their own values and follow the lead of the International Court of Justice and say non-state actors have a crucial role to play to stop the genocide. We just want the university to follow their own ethics guidelines,” he tells Finland Insider.

Helsinki University’s code of ethics says, inter alia, that they “promote the universal human rights declared by the UN in all our operations, and strive to ensure that they are not violated.” International campaigners have long accused Israeli universities of working hand-in-hand with the military to develop weapons, which are used against civilians in Gaza; and of institutional complicity in Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists breached a security barrier around the Gaza enclave and attacked Israeli villages, army outposts and a music festival in the south of the country. Some 1200 people were murdered and around 250 hostages were taken in an assault that was as brutal as it was unprecedented.

According to the United Nations some 35,000 people have already been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza in the conflict which followed, more than half of them women and children. Israel claims it has killed 14,000 “terrorists” and only 15,000 civilians.

Helsinki University’s first response

After seven months of pressure from student activists, the University of Helsinki this week released a statement saying it would suspend “exchange agreements with Israeli universities” but would not pull out of any joint research ventures nor divest financially from Israel, noting that no international sanctions had been imposed on the country.

In practice, student exchanges have been halted since last October anyway on safety grounds, but the university did say it was “shocked by the civilian victims of the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas as well as the catastrophic deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

But in an Instagram post, students said “this is not enough” and are demanding a thorough investigation of where any university resources might be invested in Israeli companies, perhaps through endowments or pension funds.

“Morale at the camp is good, but there are questions about whether we are putting enough pressure on the university,” says Kevin Soovik.

There are similar, smaller, camps also at universities in Oulu, Jyväskylä and Tampere, and pro-Palestine activism can be found on every large school in the country, students say.

Reaction from the Israeli Embassy

The Israeli Embassy in Helsinki tells Finland Insider they find the decision to stop student exchanges “very unfortunate.”

“Student exchange programs serve as a significant opportunity to create discourse and bridges between societies. By being unwilling to continue facilitating these exchanges, Helsinki University shows there is no room in its halls for diverse and different opinions,” the Embassy says in a statement.

“University students in Israel come from diverse backgrounds, religions and all walks of society. Together with their counterparts from other countries, they are the future of the region. One example for this diversity is Naama Levy, whose video being kidnapped to Gaza from her base together with four other young female Israeli observers [soldiers] was published [Wednesday] evening.

“In the footage Naama tells her captors, in those horrible moments, she has friends in Palestine. As a youth, Naama participated in programs of youth for peace, meeting and befriending other youths from the region. This is one voice Helsinki University is not willing to hear.”

Previously, Ambassador Hagit Ben-Yaakov raised concerns on social media about a banner at the Helsinki University encampment which reads “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

“The slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ means wiping Israel off the map in its entirety. We have a message for you, especially on Holocaust Memorial Day, ‘we are here to stay’”, the ambassador wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The statement is indeed controversial, and while Israeli officials and some human rights defenders have framed it as hate speech or even a call to genocide, The Associated Press reports that it is more nuanced than that, and certainly not so black and white.

“Like so much of the Mideast conflict, what the phrase means depends on who is telling the story - and which audience is hearing it,” the AP writes.

“I think collectively we feel the interpretation of that phrase as being genocidal towards Jews, or antisemitic, is ill-willed,” explains Soovik, who has faced counter-protests from a small group he describes as “Zionists”, who play Israeli songs and dance around.

“We have tried to explain to people who pass by that we wish for Palestine to be free and have equal human rights from the river to the sea. We are especially trying to emphasise that Palestinian lives are not equal and not free,” he adds.

Criticism versus antisemitism

Alexander Vahera-Chibnik, a student at Aalto University, says while antisemitism is clearly wrong, it shouldn’t be conflated with criticism of the Israeli government.

“Personally I come from a Jewish family, I am a Jew, and I need to say something about this. There is legitimate criticism of a state but now you're suppressing students’ freedom of expression, that’s how I got active in the university context,” he tells Finland Insider, citing an example on campus last autumn where Aalto University authorities removed a ‘Free Palestine’ slogan on a window at the Otaniemi campus, but kept a ‘Slava Ukraini’ slogan next to it.

“The university said to me there is a safety issue, some students feel unsafe. The subtext was insinuating there's something antisemitic about the stickers,” he says.

“The good-faith reading into this is that there’s a misunderstanding. And the bad-faith reading is that globally there’s an effort to conflate the two things, so legitimate criticism of Israel is suppressed.”

In November, Aalto students gathered more than 700 signatures to show the university’s administration they had broad support for cutting ties with Israeli institutions based on the university’s own Code of Conduct which says they’ll only partner with organisations which share similar values and which are “committed to complying with international standards on human rights.”