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After thousands of university students in the US had paved the way for a new stage of diaspora escalation in support of the Palestinian people in Gaza over the past few weeks, pro-Palestine student groups in Vienna joined the global efforts with an encampment on the campus of the main university on May 6. Dozens of participants set up their tents and hung banners to establish a permanent protest and voice their political demands toward Austria’s largest university.
While the full disclosure of university spending, the boycott of and divestment from Israeli institutions, and the end to academic research being funneled into the military and state affairs are similar to the demands made by student protests elsewhere, Austria-specific ones included the cessation of cooperation with the state-funded “Documentation Center for Political Islam” (DPI) and the removal of the so-called “Islam Map”.
The DPI is a pseudo-scientific (mis-)information-gathering project that serves as a vehicle for state repression. Its work is predominantly targeting (Muslim) components of the Palestine solidarity movement in Austria by publishing and disseminating inciting reports, accusing individuals and groups of supporting and aiding “terrorist organizations” and initiating serious prosecution for many. The DPI’s prominent “scientists” are well-known Zionist propagandists who made their careers at and still hold lecturing positions at universities.
The DPI also served as a theoretical foundation for “Operation Luxor” in 2020, a violent large-scale police raid that attempted to criminalize Egyptian and Palestinian communities in Austria. Despite the police operation’s complete failure in terms of criminally charging even a single individual after destroying their properties, freezing their bank accounts, and destroying their professional reputations, the shock in the communities cut deeply.
Part of the DPI is the “Islam Map”, a publicly accessible tool that maps out mosques, Islamic social and cultural associations, and charity organizations, making it easy for everyone from neo-Nazis to Zionists to attack them. The map was launched in cooperation with the University of Vienna.
Voicing the demands through social media channels, banners, and loudspeakers was a distinct part of the student encampment’s communications, yet not a single Austrian media outlet nor authorities from police to politicians to university representatives mentioned them. Instead, the same slanderous tropes of “anti-semitism” and “extremism” were circulated while Zionist students and institutions were handed the public floors to cry over not being safe on campus – a tactic globally used in the course of the ongoing “students intifada” and beyond. The numerous Jewish activists taking part in the encampment naturally felt differently but just like in other Western settings, Austrian officials prefer to parade Zionists supporting the “Israeli” genocide, presenting them as the true representatives of Jewishness to further their political interests.
Earlier on the day of the clearance, the Zionist student union called for a counter-protest on campus, leading to less than 30 protesters showing up with Israeli flags and a banner reading: “Rape is not resistance.” Their chants remained barely audible due to the students’ slogans and went quiet completely when the encampment held a lecture on Palestinian literature with an Irish professor from the Department of English. As small as the zionist turnout was, the police presence protecting it was massive. The whole campus was closed off by countless barricades and officers, and people could barely get in and out of the encampment and had to be allowed by police to visit the public bathroom.
The step to bring the movement against the genocide in Gaza into the university cannot be understood without knowing about the general state of Palestine solidarity activities on campuses in Austria – or rather, the lack thereof. Austrian universities are a place of severe censorship and both social and institutional repression when it comes to Palestine. Staff actually educated and willing or rather able to teach accurately about it are very rare. Student representatives are extremely Zionist except for one smaller faction, the students’ association of the Communist Youth, which is shunned and defamed continuously by all other factions and the parties and institutions behind them.
Palestinian and anti-Zionist speakers and events have been canceled and prohibited long before October 7, but recently, even an online lecture with UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was smeared ruthlessly by Zionist media and political institutions. It did take place, however, and was met with great interest.
The general student body in Austrian universities has not been very political throughout the last decades, and actual defiance of repressive measures and militancy against injustices carried out by the Austrian state or the EU/NATO alliances abroad were hardly of interest among the students as a class.
Notably, many of the student activists, having taken on the issue of Palestine on campus more visibly since shortly after the genocide in Gaza began, are studying in Vienna on Erasmus/exchange programs from universities in other countries. Shocked by the staggering Zionist apathy in the spaces of higher education they had often encountered as progressive and entangled in social movements at home, they started mobilizing as a student bloc at the weekly protests in support of Gaza, organized by the small but long-standing Palestine solidarity movement in Vienna. A challenge for the foreign students especially was of course their unfamiliarity and lack of experience with the local peculiarities of the Austrian movement and the aggressively Zionist political scene and media, on the other hand.
After setting demands towards academic boycott, holding rallies in front of universities, street blockades, and other interventions, the activities under the larger students’ banner culminated in the establishment of the encampment on the university campus, following the example of their counterparts in the US, following the call from Gaza to escalate actions globally.
After 54 hours, at 11 pm on May 8, dozens of police vans and hundreds of officers with dogs and drones entered the campus and immediately enclosed the students and supporters remaining in the vicinity. All witnesses from outside the encampment were forced to leave the wider area, obstructed to document the police raid. Outside of the campus area, a large number of solidarity activists had quickly gathered for an emergency protest against the dismantlement of the encampment. Adjacent streets were occupied and blocked. The protesters changed places more than once, so numerous police forces had to regroup and change tactics several times until they withdrew completely in the morning. Chants in support of Gaza and against “Israel” and the complicity of Austria were heard for hours in the densely populated district. The Omar al-Qasim Brigades of the DFLP in the Gaza Strip sent their greetings to the protesters that were read out through a loudspeaker, accompanied by cheers and applause.
The unity in defiance and militancy that was displayed during that night had not been seen in Vienna since October 11 when a massive unauthorized demonstration for Gaza filled the central square in the inner city with hundreds of riot police being unable to control or disperse the masses for several hours – to the discontentment of Zionist media and other observers.
In the case of the protest against the clearance of the student encampment, one protester and four student participants of the camp were arrested in the end, one of them after bravely remaining on a tree until around 8 am, single-handedly trying to make the police operation as time-consuming and costly as possible. A crane had to be ordered.
When speaking about the state’s handling of such affairs, we should not only address the shameful moral component. Yes, the fact that peaceful protesters opposing and demanding sanctions against “Israel” due to its seven-month-long genocide that has claimed the lives of more than 40.000 Palestinians – wounding and maiming tens of thousands more and displacing and starving millions over and over again – are being violently refrained from doing so is unacceptable.
Yet, the continuous defeat of the Zionist entity both militarily and in terms of public opinion alongside the victories of the Axis of Resistance constitutes a material threat to Western hegemony and its geopolitical interests, which is why the repression against the growing pro-Palestinian tendency among even the people in the Global North is escalating and tightening. The broader and more defiant the movement for Palestine becomes, the harder the coordinated crackdown of state forces, Zionist institutions, and media is and the more effort they have to put into delegitimizing and threatening its further consolidation. Keeping police busy all night is a win. That they had to turn up in the hundreds again on the next day to protect a Zionist event with a settler from occupied Palestine speaking about October 7 is another one.
The reason the police gave for their decision to clear the encampment was stated in a press release afterward. In it, they said that after monitoring the demonstration closely, intelligence forces concluded that illegal activities were carried out within the encampment. According to them, due to slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and the calls for an “intifada”, it was confirmed that the encampment supported the Palestinian Islamic Resistance movement Hamas – which is on the “terror list” in the EU. Therefore, the encampment, as per the statement, constituted a breeding ground for “terrorism” and a “threat” to public safety. It was the same argumentation that has been used since October 7 and before to vilify the Palestine solidarity movement in Austria as in most parts of the Western world.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of activists all over Austria have been criminally charged with sedition, incitement, and “condoning and/or promoting terrorist acts” for voicing “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” since the genocide in Gaza began, with the police quickly setting up a decree that reached the public only several months later to make the slogan illegal. So far, nobody has actually been brought to court for it, but it is certain that someone in the movement will fight this out in front of a judge, as it has been done in Germany and the Netherlands.
Recently, two people received a sentence of six and three months probation, respectively, for expressing mild and rather indirect support for the Palestinian Resistance Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. One of them, a female student, was commenting on a social media post about Oct, 7 positively and got three months, while the other one, a long-term activist in the movement, Michael Pröbsting, who was prosecuted for a speech he held at a protest, got six months. They will most probably not be the last ones to be convicted for their support of the Palestinian liberation struggle that is being waged now more than ever against the Israeli occupier in Gaza.
So, when speaking about the dismantlement of the student encampment as a turning point or rather a pinnacle in a series of unprecedented escalations in the Austrian scene, the decisions and actions taking place in the two weeks before must be highlighted as well.
Apart from the weekly demonstrations, info tables, and events throughout the country, some rather unusual incidents shook the zionist normality in the country. Not only was Palestine by far the dominant issue at the traditional socialist May 1 rally, but the one of Zionist and autonomous “left” was also “disturbed” by pro-Palestine protesters. The night before, graffiti had appeared along the buildings of the previously published route of the Zionist rally, targeting a travel agency specialized in trips to “Israel”, among other places, and reading “Death to Zionism” and “Victory to Palestine.” Zionist institutions and media were in a day-long frenzy about the “antisemitic threats” on the walls, culminating in official on-site photo-ops with the president of the Austrian Parliament and social media condemnations from the Zionist Ambassador to Austria to the Foreign Ministry of “Israel” itself.
Also, on the yearly memorial event on May 5, celebrating the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, the communist PdA (Partei der Arbeit) raised a Palestinian flag to remind the exalted audience of what the widely misused and desecrated anti-fascist slogan “never again” must mean now.
What happened in Austria over the past two weeks clearly happened in conjunction with the escalation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the execution of the long-threatened ground invasion of Rafah, and the constant unwillingness of the ruling powers to stop the carnage even after seven months of the whole world witnessing the relentless slaughter. People see the final solution of genocide being carried out in 5K by the Zionist settler-colonial project of “Israel” against the Palestinians who yet refuse to claim anything but victory in the face of inconceivable terror and loss.
The collective task for the Austrian solidarity movement is now to not let the momentum slip, to adapt to the new circumstances it managed to set, and to organize to further escalate until the genocide in Gaza ends. The massive potential that emerged throughout the night of May 8 – which is celebrated as liberation day from Nazi fascism in Austria and other European countries – certainly poses a chance for the consolidation and expansion of the movement.
