UPDATE – Monday evening, pro-Palestine protesters disrupted a lecture by Israeli author Alon Penzel. For over an hour, demonstrators banged on the windows of the Spinoza Building, just a day after voluntarily dismantling their encampment behind the Huygens building.

Around 25 protesters gathered outside the venue, chanting slogans like ‘Free Palestine’, ‘Cut the ties’, and ‘All Zios are racists’. They were also banging on the windows of the Spinoza building for over an hour. The event had been organized by Israeli and Jewish students.

According to a spokesperson for the Nijmegen Student Encampment, about twenty activists had also entered the lecture hall. One by one, they interrupted the event before being escorted out by campus security.

Eyewitness accounts

Penzel is a former spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the author of a book featuring eyewitness accounts of October 7, 2023. At a recent talk hosted by Christians for Israel in Barneveld, he called the Israeli army ’the most humanitarian in the world’. The visit of Penzel sparked intense protests and even physical altercations afterwards.

No such confrontations occurred in Nijmegen tonight. The lecture ended about an hour after it began. As attendees left the building under security and a single police officer’s watch, protesters chanted ‘Shame on you’.

Barricaded

Penzel’s talk was only one day after the encampment behind the Huygens building got dismantled. All that remains are tracks in the grass and various slogans on the building and canopy behind it such as ‘All zios are racists’, ‘Cut ties’, and ‘Boycott Israel’. On the back of the large stones bearing the name of the camp, Yahya Sobeih, named after the Palestinian journalist who was killed in an air strike on Gaza, a message has been added: ‘We will be back’.

The protesters left on their own on Sunday evening. They barricaded the back entrance of the Faculty of the Faculty of Science building with tables and chairs. This morning, the furniture had already been cleared by the University. The various entrances to the Huygens building, which had been closed for the last few weeks for security reasons, are once again open.

‘We have been protesting in this way for 20 days, but the Executive Board is trying to ignore us just like they are ignoring the genocide in Gaza’, a spokesperson for the Nijmegen Student Encampment told Vox. ‘Not only do they not address our demands, they literally shut down the building so people could not see us. We therefore decided to increase the pressure in a different way. Just because the tents are gone doesn’t mean you won’t be hearing from us again.’

The tents were standing on the lawn behind the Huygens building since 13 May. The encampment was a response to discontent surrounding the Executive Board’s decision to freeze university and faculty ties with Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University. The protesters feel that this measure does not go nearly far enough; they want Radboud University to ‘sever all ties with Zionist institutions and companies, otherwise it will remain complicit in the system of apartheid, colonialism, and genocide that oppresses the Palestinian people’.

Olive tree gone

The olive tree that the protesters planted last October on the lawn next to the Maria Montessori building also disappeared this weekend. The trunk appears to have been sawn through. It is unclear who is responsible for this. ‘It is outrageous,’ responded the camp spokesman, who vehemently denied having anything to do with it. ‘It was a monument to honour the martyrs of the Gaza genocide. It’s madness that anyone should do such a thing.’

In reaction to the felling of the olive tree, protesters have planted three new ones on the lawn right next to the Maria Montessoribuilding.