TENTS have been erected outside an Oxfordshire museum as a community group establishes a ‘liberated zone’ in solidarity with Palestine.

Oxford Action for Palestine (OAP), a collective of University of Oxford community members who are dedicated to Palestinian liberation, have set up an encampment on the lawn of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in on Monday (May 6).

About 70 students and activities have pitched up camp so far.

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It is part of a worldwide protest which is seeing over 145 universities across the globe setting up their ‘liberation zones’ – including Cambridge University

Writing about the protest online, the OAP said: “The Oxford encampment sits in front of the Pitts Rivers Museum, a materialisation of the relationship that Oxford has to colonial projects throughout human history.

“The museum, which ‘acquired’ items from across the globe through imperial expansionism, displays the erasure, dispossession, scholasticide, epistemicide, and cultural pillaging that define Oxford's legacy.

“These processes are mirrored in the ongoing struggle of the Palestinian people and connect us to colonised peoples everywhere.”

It continued: “We are here after exhausting every other means of protest at our disposal. We have organised demonstrations and marches, signed countless petitions, and made all possible efforts to work with the administration in realising our demands.

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“We have been met with inaction. We have escalated accordingly.”

Speaking to Socialist Worker, Amy Tess, a PHD student at Oxford University, said she was feeling ‘very uplifted’ by the turnout of the protest.

She said: “We’re here today for a few reasons, one is because of the genocide which is actively ongoing in Gaza, it’s been seven months now and the bombing has to stop and we know that as residents of the United Kingdom, whose country is deeply complicit in it, we need to be causing disruption.

“So we’re here today to say enough is enough and we’re going to stay here and we’re going to keep doing actions until Palestine is free.”

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THE OAP states that, at the encampment, they have established a ‘political-educational space for everyone to engage freely in learning oriented towards liberation’.

It added: “We welcome all to engage in discussions, teach-ins, poetry readings, and artistic performances as we learn from and care for one another."