Swiss high school students strike for Palestine on the initiative of young communists

A few weeks ago, comrade Adam Barbato Shoufani, General Secretary of the Swiss Communist Youth, the youth wing of the Communist Party (Switzerland), had an intuition: to build a student mobilization across all the high schools in the Canton of Ticino for Palestine. That this topic would spark interest among young people was beyond doubt, and their sensitivity and solidarity are well known. What was less certain was the possibility of actually convincing students to go on strike, abstaining from classes, organizing a self-managed morning on campus and an afternoon demonstration. 

The Communist Youth generously put itself at the service of this cause, doing so without waving its own flag, but by helping through the commitment of its militants within the united committees coordinated by the Independent Union of Students and Apprentices (SISA), led by comrade Ismael Camozzi, in order to gather as many students as possible. 

Yesterday it was a success: a great display of responsibility. In the morning - despite some school administrations showing very little intellectual courage - in many high schools, with the help of journalists, teachers, historians, and researchers, the students deepened their understanding of the Palestinian and geopolitical question (they even discussed relations between China and the U.S. in connection to the Middle East). In the afternoon, many of them took to the streets in Bellinzona with very advanced slogans whose clarity and correctness strike us positively: 

1) the problem is not Netanyahu and his genocidal government, but Zionism as such: the opening banner rightly read “anti-Zionist students and apprentices” (this is the strongest demand of all, and the one that must be emphasized today); 

2) Swiss neutrality must be defended, not abolished, in the sense that it means recognizing the State of Palestine and protecting our country from its current subordination to the Zionist Entity; 

3) the Palestinian question is not merely a humanitarian issue but an absolutely political one: Palestine must be free “from the river to the sea,” meaning the struggle is for complete national liberation and not for stopgap solutions such as “two peoples, two states”; 

4) all military, commercial, and academic cooperation between Switzerland and Israel must be suspended (our sovereignty is also at stake, against Zionist infiltration within our army and university system); and 

5) the students certainly did not forget local struggles: they actively supported the VPOD union’s petition against the cuts to public services planned in the 2025 Budget, and they invited people to sign the referendum to Save civilian service (in solidarity with conscientious objectors to military service).