An honorary doctorate awarded to the recently deceased Shimon Peres remains an obscenity at a time when his controversial career is back in the spotlight
Post-January exam classes had just started and the mornings were grey and chilly in London. The 2008 Gaza massacre had ended in a unilateral ceasefire on 18th January 2009. The toll was 4,000 homes destroyed, over 1,300 Palestinian dead and many more thousands injured. This destruction was to last, as is common with every Gaza onslaught. According to the UNCHR, 75 per cent of the houses were never rebuilt.
It was the morning of the 20th of that same month, as students made their way to lectures, that a group of 40-strong students entered the Nash lecture theatre at the Strand Campus of King’s College London with banners, placards, slogans and strong resolve. By the afternoon, their number had doubled to 80 students and their online petition had reached 500 signatures. This was the tipping point. The university had awarded Shimon Peres with an honorary doctorate of Laws for his “peaceful solution to conflicts in the Middle East” a mere month before the onslaught started. At the same time, the serving principal, Rick Trainor, decided to stay silent as people were being butchered and put under the rubble.
Students were declaring an occupation to demand that King’s College London (KCL) revoke the honorary doctorate awarded to Peres, alongside demands that included building links with Palestinian universities, providing scholarships for Palestinians to study in the UK and divesting from arms companies. In doing so, they joined the London School of Economics (LSE), The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Essex University in their movement of solidarity with Palestine. Regular rallies and protests outside the Strand and at the Principal’s Office, streams of news reports, and panels with academics from King’s and other universities, characterised the occupation.
The occupation ended with students declaring victory and creating the KCL Action Palestine (KCLAP) society. Its proclaimed aim is: “[to] continue to fight for the end of the siege of Gaza and a Free Palestine on campus and raise awareness about the need to keep building the movement.” Eight thousand pounds were raised to support educational institutions in Gaza and computers and medical equipment were donated do the Islamic University of Gaza. This was in addition to the establishment of scholarships for Palestinian students.
But not all the demands were met. King’s College was vociferous in its refusal to revoke Peres’ honorary degree. Being unable to uphold the honours it initially paid to him, King’s responded to the student protests by arguing that such a revocation, “would have a very negative impact on the College’s ability to be a centre of expertise on Middle East affairs including the peace process itself.” Instead, it opted to write to him directly about the “concerns noted regarding the conflict”. This reaction falls well within the mainstream western narrative, in which famous Zionist politicians are praised as “men of peace” while Palestinians and other victims have to bear seeing such figures pass without any accountability for the crimes they have committed. Failing to revoke his degree was not a way for KCL to retain its expert status – it was a political statement.
Then there were other promises (and half promises) that KCL never delivered. Up until this day, there have been no efforts to create links with Palestinian universities, yet KCL has a working relationship with the Herzilya Institute in Israel, almost secured a year abroad with the Hebrew University, and in 2010, had to end an academic partnership with the Israeli cosmetics company Ahava after significant student pressure. Furthermore, the university never sought an investment policy that would avoid arms companies until the creation of the Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee thanks to renewed student pressure from KCLAP and Fossil Free KCL societies in 2015.
Shimon Peres: a man of colonial pacification
Shimon Peres’ praise as a man of peace stems from his role in the drafting and signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. This is based on a misunderstanding of what the Oslo accords were designed to achieve – the further entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the theft of land under the false guise of a state in the making. Alongside another eulogised and even martyrised figure, Yitzhak Rabin, Peres scored three victories for Israel: the pacification of the first Palestinian intifada, the deposition of arms and the armed struggle by Fatah, and the relegation of Israel’s responsibility to look after the well-being of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while still retaining absolute control over these lands and resources.
This can’t be more obvious when it was the very same Peres who actively supported the establishment of the first Zionist extremist groups that settled in the West Bank and who were to gain considerable political power in Israel, such as Gush Eminum and Hilltop Youth. Groups that even his “colleague of peace” Rabin described as the Trojan horse for illegal settlers. It was also Peres who, until the end of his life, continued to thwart any measures that attempted to sanction the settlements. Not dissimilar to the apologism of KCL, Peres justified his position in the name of protecting the “peace process”.
Perhaps most striking of all, is the unwavering standing of this praise in spite of Peres’ brutal shelling of Lebanon which led to the Qana massacre, just two years after he was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize. Even though he tried to distance himself from the crime, a later UN report highlighted that, as prime minister, Peres was repeatedly warned that the Qana camp was packed with refugees taking shelter. Not only that, but Israel knew the camp well – it had a drone that hovered the camp and had occupied it for years after 1982 invasion.
Among Peres’ tainted legacy is his reputation as the architect of Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal in the 1950s, as well as his leading role in the 1956 invasion of Egypt, alongside France and the UK, to establish Israel’s control over the Sinai Peninsula and hand the Suez Canal back to its old colonial masters. During Israel’s repeated Gaza massacres in 2008, 2012 and 2014, Peres acted as a global ambassador for Israel. And as KCL students embarked in direct action against Peres’ eulogisation during Operation Cast Lead in January 2009, Peres dismissed calls by Israeli human rights groups to halt the invasion and he regarded the “national solidarity behind the military operation” as “Israel’s finest hour.” It seems that the letter that King’s College London offered to send him wasn’t at the top of his reading list.
It is for this reason that the student movement, from the National Union of Students to student associations like KCL Action Palestine, UCL Friends of Palestine, and the LSE Palestine Society continue their work and campaign to end their institution’s complicity with apartheid. Year on year, we demand the building of educational bridges between King’s and Palestinian universities, through scholarships and partnerships, and we demand the democratisation of our students’ unions in order to vote BDS resolutions without being censored – and finally, we wish to end our own complicity with the crime of apartheid by working towards full divestment from arms companies and terminating associations with figures like Shimon Peres. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes our campaigns fall to deaf ears. But if Palestinians can keep fighting, so can we.
For peace, justice and equality.
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