Yolande Jansen is Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and a Professor by special appointment for the Socrates-foundation at VU University.
18 April 2025Universities should respond to the legitimate demands of their students instead of letting the police beat them up again, argues professor Yolande Jansen.
‘One of the students was hit on the head, is there a medic who can look at it?.’ Staring at the message sent in the signal group for VU Staff for Palestine following the evacuation of BelleVUe last week, I was triggered of memories of police brutality during last year’s encampments and occupations at the UvA, which I attended.
Students had occupied BelleVUe on April 8 to demand that VU disclose information about the extent of their cooperation with Israeli universities. Reports later followed of arrests and of a student being assaulted by someone from VU security itself.
On Wednesday afternoon, May 8, during the forceful evacuation of the BG4 building, I saw three students with blood dripping down their faces and the back of their heads after being beaten by police. This was two days after the life-threatening nighttime evacuation with two bulldozers of the encampment on Roeterseiland, and the bruises suffered by colleagues during this evacuation on my mind. Extensive records and/or film footage of all these events are widely available.
These memories combined with those of two of my kindest students, who, fearing police dogs, jumped into the water of the Roeterseiland complex in 2019 when they had set up an encampment with about 50 students; the images of a student from Groningen who protested the dismissal of colleague Susanne Täuber in 2021 and was pulled down the stairs lying down by an officer, banging his head on the steps; the story of one of the students who was assaulted in Utrecht last year, also pulled down the stairs lying down, and who was still in a wheelchair months later because they could not stand for more than ten minutes, and with whom I was in regular contact afterwards. People from the Christian Collective against Genocide helped them get from one demo to another – and who in November, in their wheelchair, was again beaten by the police during the demonstration on Dam Square that was banned by the municipality.
I also remembered the selfie sent to us by a 75-year-old American Jewish lady with Dutch roots. She had gone to see the BG4 on May 8 and had suffered a black eye and a broken nose from the beating by the police; the black eye of a colleague of mine, a bleeding head of another colleague a few days later during the next eviction, videos showing police ramming – and students, invariably unarmed though occasionally shouting something that would startle the ‘civilised’.
I bring these memories to the surface, not to highlight the minor trauma that I myself may have suffered from this – that my body without even thinking about it shakes with fear every time I see police, which is now standard at every protest at universities, and that this also happens at the presence of silent policemen or the new ‘facility services’ employees from whom we have already seen the necessary violence. All of which I share with many Palestine demonstrators, who continue to go to every demonstration. Nor do I share the memories of the traumatic episodes of violence inflicted on many of my students to seek sympathy for them, although as I said, there are those among them whose functioning is still impaired six months after the events. The students see their own injuries as relative compared to those of the people in Gaza whose suffering and resistance they often follow daily and for whom they risk their future. Noteworthy here, is that while no deaths have yet occurred, this is quite possible. Data from Control Alt Delete show that since 2016 in the Netherlands someone dies every month during an arrest, and that this happens to people of color 11 times more often than might be expected based on their proportion of the population. It is rather a miracle that no student death has occurred yet.
I write all this, because what matters to me here is: the realization that you, as university administrations in the Netherlands, especially Amsterdam, have so far been willing to send the police (who regularly make racist or just plain cruel and vindictive remarks during the evictions and arrests) on students every time. While you yourselves don’t even dare to utter the word ‘genocide’, or take the responsibility that should come with the realization that we are assisting to make this genocide possible. When will you talk to your colleagues and students who have already lost half their families, their parents, their friends, will you be able to face them?
There is great distance between you and the moral and political source of deeply felt injustice from which the students get all this courage – to organize and protest so passionately and sustainably despite all the opposition. The students with all that courage are consistently attempting to take the responsibility of our universities’ complicity in genocide, other atrocity crimes and fascism.
The step you can take now is: prove them right, say that they are the heart of the university, and that they have been listened to. That ties with Israeli universities, all complicit in genocide and/or other atrocity crimes, will be severed until all human rights obligations to the Palestinians are met, including the rights of refugees.
Let me be candid, as I stood in BG4 last year, the university building occupied by the students, it was not without a sense of unease. I too, found it challenging, pallets everywhere, loose stones, students chanting, students with face coverings for protection against the doxxing and secret police, not only students, but they were by far the majority. I stood in that building because I stood behind their cause and I wanted to see it up close – an action far from the ‘anti-revolutionary’ (as the Dutch Protestants called themselves) and ‘civilised/colonial’ habitus I was raised into. I saw a bunch of guys trying to get the door of OMHP open, a university building nearby, and I secretly hoped they wouldn’t succeed – too much! Imagine if those symbols of colonial glory, Barlaeus, Vossius (whose statues are in the garden of OMHP) were allowed to get damaged – terrifying. Like you, I too ‘went to school’, to speak with Woutertje Pieterse (a schoolboy in a story by Multatuli, who also wrote the anti-colonial Max Havelaar novel).
But this occupation was also a moment of the most unified collaboration of students of most colors and gender identities I have ever seen together. Chains of students standing to pass streetstones, everyone tough but also tense about what was to come, with the threat of another eviction and the police brutality of two days back still in their bodies. What bound them together was the commitment to justice for Palestine, that something was going to succeed just as in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, a moment of ‘sous le pavé la plage’, under the stones lies the beach; ‘the people, united, will never be defeated; brick by brick, wall by wall, the occupation has to fall.’ The same verdict as the one by the world’s highest court, the ICJ, based in The Hague, which our government simply ignores. This is what is at stake in these student occupations.
During the eviction last year, students were not just hit on the head. They was no final warning to leave, and bystanders were hit by police. Students were also kidnapped by kefiyehs wearing romeos, arrested and dropped far from Amsterdam without glasses or medication, and with pounding headaches from the blows. One was nearly run over by the bulldozer that was also deployed here – everyone who has ever heard of Rachel Corrie (more students than policepeople probably) knows the deadly danger these clearing machines are – Caterpillar is high on the boycott list for a reason. The student (non-Dutch background, studying at VU) who wanted to prevent this from happening and who was standing on the bulldozer was taken off again by the police with brute force. She received a two-month jail sentence and is now on appeal. Yes, many queer and Jewish and Muslim students, as well as Chinese and Turkish and other fabulous students from authoritarian regimes were there!
Most of Dutch society has ‘no active memory of this’, the expression our former prime minister Mark Rutte, now Secretary General of NATO, used each time he didn’t want to talk about past injustices. ‘There was resistance at the universities to the situation in Gaza, that ended in violence, which of course is also reprehensible, some students no longer felt safe at the universities, is the university still a sanctuary?’ This is how the journalist Pieter Jan Hagens, in the quality journalism show Buitenhof, recently summarized what had happened during the protests last year. It is the pattern that anyone who knows anything about colonial violence unerringly recognizes: resistance to extreme state-sanctioned violence, blamed on the very victims of this state violence because of a few actions that got out of hand. The victims of this state-sanctioned violence are then labelled as the violent ones and the state violence rendered invisible. The “safety” of those who did not participate in the resistance and could walk past everything without harm (except perhaps moral) becomes the justification for the next round of violence. The result, serious journalistic failure that seamlessly merges with the failure of Dutch society to end its complicity in Israel’s grave human rights violations against the Palestinians.
You, as a university administration, can count on this colonial aphasia, it will happen again when you call the police. And when possible damage to buildings provides the reason to break up a classic form of student protest, an occupation, again with police deployment.
But you have not yet dared to take a step, despite the clear advice of the ethics committees in Tilburg, Nijmegen, UvA, Rotterdam after a year of procrastination. The delay would have to be called dizzying if it did not have the mobility of a stone. The small step the UvA seemed to be taking, cutting ties with Hebrew University, has already become uncertain. At least no one can say they didn’t know. The students made sure of that.
I just got the message that the Maagdenhuis is occupied, my letter feels old already but the plea not to call in the police, and instead to accede to the demands of the students, which are morally and legally the right ones, and to talk and negotiate with them until a morally acceptable settlement is reached, is more than topical – it is essential. No police but social justice. Do the right thing.
Yolande Jansen
This letter was written just before and during the occupation of the Maagdenhuis on April 14, 2025, following the eviction with police of BelleVUe on April 8, 2025. Translated from Dutch by Eleri Connick.
Afterword. On Monday April 14, during and after the occupation of the Maagdenhuis, the police was called. For images and accounts of what happened, see the Amsterdam encampment, Utrecht encampment accounts on Instagram, Left Laser, or the LinkedIN accounts of Michiel Bot, Mounir Samuel and others.