Over the past year, Finnish universities have witnessed a surge of activism in solidarity with Palestine. Student groups across the country have organized walkouts, teach-ins, vigils, and petitions calling for an end to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and highlighting Finland’s complicity through arms trade and research collaboration. This movement has grown alongside wider mobilizations against government austerity, creating a generation of students well-versed in organizing occupations, writing collective statements, and asserting themselves as political actors on campus.
Yet this renewed wave of solidarity has been met with mounting repression. Across Finnish higher education, universities have invoked rules of “apoliticality,” “safety,” and “neutrality” to suppress expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, even while taking clear stances on other international conflicts, notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Posters have been removed, banners confiscated, events canceled, emails censored, and peaceful gatherings disrupted by police intervention. What emerges is not neutrality, but a selective silencing that reveals both institutional double standards and the deep entanglement of academia with broader political power structures.
The Weaponization of Safety, Neutrality, and Offense
Administrators frequently justify restrictions by appealing to the need to keep campuses “safe” and “free of politics.” At Aalto University, for instance, “Free Palestine” banners were taken down on the grounds that they violated rules against political displays—despite similar banners supporting human rights in Ukraine being allowed to remain. The appeal to safety was further weaponized when administrators claimed that Israeli students felt threatened by pro-Palestine messages, effectively pitting communities against one another while erasing power asymmetries between occupier and occupied.
At UniArts Helsinki, the rector argued that mailing lists could not be used to share political messages about Palestine, even though the same channels had been used to circulate calls for solidarity with Ukraine. The language of safety and equality became a managerial tool: by framing political expression as a threat to an abstract “university community,” administrators turned Palestine solidarity into a problem of “comfort” rather than of justice, thereby obscuring the structural violence being protested.
A similar tactic appeared at Åbo Akademi University, where a critical post contextualizing Israeli attacks on Gaza was deleted from departmental groups after complaints of “offense.” Here too, “offense” was defined in ways that privileged some voices over others, rendering Palestinian solidarity unacceptable while tacitly accommodating pro-Israel sensibilities.
Academic Freedom and the Politics of Repression
These dynamics echo broader trends across Europe and North America, where critics of Israel face surveillance, harassment, and professional retaliation. The European Legal Support Center has documented how the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism has been mobilized to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, chilling free expression and fostering anti-Palestinian racism. While Finnish universities rarely invoke the IHRA definition directly, they deploy a parallel logic: criticism of Israel is treated as dangerously political, while support for other global causes is framed as humanitarian or moral.
The consequences are unevenly felt. Precarious staff, international students, and racialized groups—especially Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims—bear the heaviest risks. Some have been investigated for social media posts, threatened with dismissal, or warned against participating in demonstrations even outside of working hours. In one case, a researcher at a state-funded institute lost their position after refusing to stop posting in support of Palestine. Others have faced smear campaigns labeling them as sympathetic to terrorism, a form of “political bullying” designed to exhaust and isolate those who speak out.
Corporate Universities and Neoliberal Governance
To understand these dynamics, it is crucial to situate them within the corporatization of Finnish higher education. Since the 1990s, universities have been restructured to operate on managerial and market-oriented principles, with rectors and boards wielding increasing power over governance. This shift has weakened traditions of community democracy, replacing them with corporate-style strategies that prioritize reputation management, risk avoidance, and external partnerships with industry and government.
In this context, Palestine solidarity is disruptive not only because it challenges Israel, but because it challenges the university’s self-image as a neutral space of knowledge production aligned with corporate and state interests. By contrast, expressions of solidarity with Ukraine or Iran can be framed as consistent with Western geopolitical priorities, and therefore permissible. Academic freedom, as Steven Salaita notes, often evaporates when it confronts state violence, colonialism, or systemic racism.
The Broader Stakes: Whose Voices Count?
The repression of Palestine solidarity reveals a deeper question: whose safety, whose voices, and whose humanity are protected within Finnish universities? By silencing students and scholars advocating for Palestinian rights, institutions reproduce broader hierarchies of race, empire, and global inequality. The discourses of neutrality and safety mask a political choice to side with dominant geopolitical alignments and to exclude perspectives that threaten those alignments.
At the same time, students and staff are refusing these terms of engagement. They continue to hold teach-ins despite bans, rehang banners that have been confiscated, and build networks of solidarity that transcend institutional constraints. In doing so, they echo broader struggles for decolonization and social justice, connecting Palestine to wider critiques of neoliberalism, racism, and authoritarian governance within academia itself.
Conclusion: The Politics of Refusal
The repression of Palestine solidarity in Finnish higher education is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a global pattern where universities act as enforcers of geopolitical orthodoxy and corporate logic. Yet it also highlights the resilience and creativity of student and faculty movements that refuse to be silenced.
The question, then, is not only about protecting academic freedom in the abstract, but about asking: what kind of universities do we want? Institutions that suppress dissent in the name of neutrality, or spaces that foster genuine debate, solidarity, and responsibility toward global justice? The struggle unfolding in Finland suggests that the answer will depend less on administrative decrees than on the courage of those who continue to resist, organize, and imagine otherwise.
