Joseph Brown

The traditional LSE stance on social justice has survived through the ages, and it continues to manifest in the student activism of today

George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas and Sydney and Beatrice Webb would certainly be proud of us today.

The founders of the LSE had looked to change the world, but not in some Irish-rock-band-never-takes-his-shades-off kind of way. These visionaries wanted to create an arena where students and professors alike would engage in critical, thorough and forceful searches for the answers to society's greatest woes. This would be achieved, not by simply investigating the actuality of the world like many institutions of the time, but actively making normative judgements and analysing the most effective means of applying their research and themselves to the world. While counting ballots at last week’s election night, I realised that their vision still lives on.

For Honorary Students’ Union President, we elected Aung San Suu Kyi, the world-renowned Burmese prisoner of conscience and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose struggle for democracy has led the Burmese dictatorship to place her under house arrest for much of the last two decades. As for the Vice-President, LSE students again followed in the School's tradition of social justice and chose to elect another victim of an unjust imprisonment, Khaled Al-Mudallal.

Khaled's case is the less familiar of the two. The Palestinian student from the University of Bradford has been trapped in the prison that has become the Gaza Strip and  been prevented from resuming his education here in the UK since Israel began its siege of Gaza in June. While the Israeli government claims Khaled can leave whenever he wants, this has been shown not to be the case by groups like the Israeli human rights group Gisha: the only shuttle bus service out of the Gaza strip has been stopped since September 6 and current waiting lists to get out of Gaza are controlled by the Israelis. They would keep Khaled (Number 4845 of 6400) trapped and deprived of his studies for another year and a half – by which time he should have graduated.

Our justice-seeking founders would probably be triply proud of us as the Student’s Union has stood up for the rights of Palestinians in three separate democratic declarations of solidarity in a single year. Khaled’s predecessor as the Honorary SU Vice-President was Huda Ghalia, the 10 year old who watched her father, step-mother and five siblings die in Gaza after a barrage of Israeli shells slammed into the beach upon which they were picnicking. More recently we have seen the twinning of our School with An-Najah University in Nablus on the West Bank, and an expression of support for Palestinians' right to education. The question now becomes: where should we go next to honour our university traditions and the people of Palestine with whom we have thrice democratically decreed we stand beside?

First things first, we must understand that we are not to give in to the demands of the small minority of students at the LSE who reject our foundations of social justice and seek to support the occupation of Palestine at our university by any means necessary, be it fallacious procedural complaints or illegitimate claims of victimisation. Take, for example, the demands for an apology over a statement by the Union to our incoming freshers regarding the restrictions against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The supporters of the injustices of the occupation first claimed the letter was sent unconstitutionally. Once the fact that the letter was sent under a secure mandate from the democratically passed UGM motion was made clear, the anti-justice movement shifted their stance - they claimed they were ‘offended’ by the ‘partisan’ letter and demanded an apology for the offence. Such a request is ridiculous. Apologising for making a political statement would leave politics in an unending spiral of saying “sorry”, leaving no position a firm base on which to act.

I am proud to say that the LSE is still the home of those who want to build a better world and use their school to do so. It has consistently offered its support to the plight of the Palestinian people and fairly beaten back those who support their continued persecution. Where do we go from here? There are many avenues through which we can continue to support and promote the Palestinian cause in the traditional, fair and intellectual LSE way. We should begin by taking guidance from Shaw when he tells us that “the people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”