On March 26, 2025, the UTS Students’ Association held a protest for Palestine as part of the National Day of Action. We gathered on the Alumni Green with UTS students, staff, and supporters, before marching to USYD to join a larger collective action. The protest was one of many held nationwide in solidarity with Palestinians enduring genocide, occupation, and apartheid under Israeli control.
What would follow was something no one expected from the peaceful event: a months-long legal review into whether our protest had caused a “psychosocial safety risk.”
What triggered this investigation?
A comment made by a speaker at the rally: Peter Slezak, an anti-Zionist Jewish academic from UNSW, who said:
“Jews in particular should feel uncomfortable, and it’s our duty to make them uncomfortable… Of course, we bear a special responsibility which we can’t evade, because Israel is doing its crimes in our name–we can’t simply be silent.”
I understood Peter’s comment as a self-reflective challenge to moral complicity, the same kind of call you hear at Invasion Day rallies when white Australians are urged to confront the ongoing impacts of colonisation and recognise their privilege. Importantly, Peter included himself in the statement. But apparently, a few of the usual Zionist attendees–the same people who show up early to our rallies, film from the front, and scour the footage for soundbites to post out of context–claimed to feel “unsafe”.
That’s all it took for UTS to launch a full external investigation, hiring corporate law firm Bartier Perry to conduct interviews with students involved in the rally. Meanwhile, just days later, a student society on the same campus hosted two active Israeli Defence Force soldiers for an event, complete with a “virtual reality” simulation of October 7.
We contacted university management to emphasise that permitting this event to proceed would cause severe distress and pose a serious safety risk to many Palestinian students, including those at UTS on humanitarian scholarships recognising the hardships they have endured under the IDF. But the university allowed the event to go ahead, citing “freedom of lawful expression.”
While UTS claimed to have taken measures to “ensure safety” at this event, those measures served to protect only the IDF guests and event organisers. Registration, ID checks, controlled entry and a last-minute location change all ensured the event’s smooth facilitation–carefully designed to prevent any oppositional “lawful expression” from taking place nearby.
When we asked why the circumstances around this particular event didn’t also warrant an external investigation (or at least inclusion in the ongoing investigation into our protest), we were told by the Bartier Perry lawyer that he “hadn’t been paid for that.” Instead, the lawyer proceeded to cross-examine myself and other students, asking questions like:
“Does the Students’ Association conduct events for both sides?” and
“What is Intifada?”
We finally received the report from the investigation on August 6. It confirmed that the rally had been peaceful but flagged one chant as crossing the line: “There is only one solution, Intifada revolution.” Apparently, that chant “arguably moved beyond ‘uncomfortableness’ and could create a risk to safety.”
The investigation also concluded that there was ‘no evidence to suggest the AUJS event was in breach of any UTS policies and was “held consistent with policy, including freedom of expression”. This finding was made despite the fact that no Palestinian students, nor any representatives from the UTSSA, were interviewed about the IDF event or given the opportunity to provide evidence regarding the psychosocial impact it had on them.
The entire process was a theatrical and absurd demonstration of bureaucratic “neutrality,” where only one side of the story was scrutinised. UTS paid for a report that determined a chant calling for resistance to occupation posed a safety risk, while the presence of soldiers involved in a state’s genocide and occupation, and a VR simulation of a massacre, were deemed acceptable.
This ordeal has been a surreal window into how deeply universities will contort themselves to avoid confronting injustice. The only recommendation given to the UTSSA at the conclusion of this investigation process was that we needed to “be conscious of the optics of supporting causes that may alienate or offend a group of students that it is funded to represent”.
While I agree that opposing genocide seems to make some members of the UTS community feel ‘alienated’, I don’t believe the UTSSA’s political stances are the real threat to safety on campus. The far greater danger lies in the failure of UTS to uphold its responsibilities, both to its members and to broader society, in the face of global atrocities.
When our educational institutions choose to stand with the powerful rather than the powerless, they erode the very foundation of justice and freedom of expression that they claim to champion.
-