Stand up for people speaking out on Gaza

What is happening in Gaza is a state-sponsored atrocity – and one of the states sponsoring it is the UK.

Many feel it is their moral obligation to say so. But we know what it means to speak against Israel’s genocide: you will be pilloried by the media, defunded by sponsors, sacked by employers and threatened with prosecution.

When the rector of St Andrews, Stella Maris, wrote to students about Israel’s actions in Gaza in 2023, she decried bigotry and hatred, condemning Hamas’s “terrorist” attack as the “largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust”. But she also spoke of the need to speak of “acts that are internationally regarded as humanitarian and war crimes”.

Her email was compassionate and balanced. But she was removed by the university. The principal of St Andrews, Sally Mapstone, said that her email had jeopardised a £2m donation to the University from the Wolfson Foundation. The foundation denies the donation was ever at risk.

Stella fought back, and the chancellor reinstated her over the objections of the University Court. But her very public removal was a direct assault on our ability to speak out. It makes it all too easy to challenge speech that people think might go against some group’s treasured beliefs. She is bringing a discrimination claim against the university and that there was a breach of her right to free speech.

If free speech means anything, it is the right to speak hard truths to those with power.

Good Law Project has agreed to meet Stella’s costs of bringing her claim against the university. And we have agreed to act for another high-profile victim of the campaign to silence critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But these cases are costly, and we need your support.