The National Union of Students (NUS) like so many virtue signalling organisations, vows to be a place of tolerance and anti-racism – except if you are Jewish.
Amid the antisemitic incidents uncovered in yet another inquiry (there have been eight reports since 2005, such is the scale of the issue and the union’s apparent inability to deal with it) are the case of a religious student who was banned from a bar at the NUS conference because of his kippah (head-covering), an NUS national executive member referring to the ‘Final Solution’ when it came to getting rid of a Jewish executive on an anti-fascist committee, a nasty but well-received conference speech against marking Holocaust Memorial Day, which denied the Jew-hate at the centre of the genocide, and Jewish students being told they were agents of Mossad.
Jewish students who complained about antisemitism were either mocked, told they were making it up, or even attacked as racists.
None of the stories in Rebecca Tuck KC’s independent investigation into antisemitism in the NUS will be surprising to British Jews, even if her clear-eyed conclusion that the NUS is ‘a hostile environment’ for Jewish people was welcome, as was the NUS’s full-throated apology which said; ‘We apologise without reservation to the Jewish students who have been let down by the very organisation that should be protecting to them.’
For years Jewish adults have discussed with their children which universities are ‘safer’. My alma mater, the University of Leeds – which had a sizeable Jewish student population – still tried to ban our Union of Jewish Student (UJS) branch for being ‘racist Zionists’ when I was there 30 years ago. There are some universities which are so notorious that we joke about them – the School of Oriental Studies (SOAS) has had such persistent problems with anti-Jewish hatred that it is nicknamed ‘the School of Antisemitism’.
Ms Tuck found that despite all the previous reports insisting action had been taken, the problem persisted. And, I hate to be cynical, I don’t think this latest report will have the impact that I, as a Jewish parent, would like. I know that when my boys are ready to go to university, I will need to warn them about the hatred they are likely to encounter – although they have already had some experience of it at school.
Universities are the frontline when it comes to British Jews facing antisemitism. But the problem mainly isn’t confined to students – many of whom will never have met a Jew – but sometimes to teachers too. I interviewed one young woman who had faced discrimination when she complained that her lecturer had taught in his class, which happened soon after the George Floyd murder, that Israelis had taught American cops how to kill black and brown people.
Jewish students at Bristol University waged a difficult two-year fight against crackpot professor David Miller, who believed that members of a synagogue and mosque making chicken soup together was a Zionist plot, and taught that Zionism was one of the key pillars of Islamophobia. Although it led to death threats for Jewish students, it took government intervention and the threat of legal action for the university to take any action.
When he finally lost his job, his many voluble defenders included thousands of lecturers, and many branches of the University and College Union (UCU), whose own history of heinous antisemitism includes marking Holocaust Memorial Day by mentioning every group affected by the Nazis, apart from Jews. They insisted, as hard lefties always do, that Miller was simply being penalised for his pro-Palestinian views. Miller is no ordinary pro-Palestinian though, he’s also a shill for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad – a tyrant who has killed thousands of Palestinians as well as his fellow Syrians.
When people ask me what I was afraid of with Jeremy Corbyn I would point to what happened with Miller; Jews accused of having dual loyalty and being in the pay of a foreign government, told they are making up allegations of racism and are racist themselves. And all the grown-ups applauded it.
But the problem goes beyond universities. It is there in the teaching unions too. In April last year the National Education Union voted to boycott Israel – not just the disputed territories but the whole country – it also mobilised members to attend anti-Israel rallies which called for ‘resistance by any means necessary’. This led to a walkout by Jewish members.
And this isn’t just about education. The trade union movement as a whole has allowed legitimate concerns about the occupation to morph into out and out hatred of the world’s only Jewish state. By way of example, Jewish people say they don’t feel safe in the actors union Equity, the Social Workers Union (SWU) (which in June refused to endorse the IHRA definition of antisemitism), and Unite to name just a few organisations.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is a perfectly valid topic for discussion, of course. But it’s hard to see what it has to do with the bread-and-butter concerns of most union members. Nor is it clear how virtue-signalling about a conflict many don’t seem to really understand, other than through the prism of age-old antisemitic prejudices about power and dual loyalty, does anything to help the Palestinians. What putting anti-Israel politics above all else does do is hurts British Jews – who have a historical and cultural association with Israel – and it all too frequently tips into antisemitism.
And if you won’t take it from me, read the words of a Palestinian student who attended the 2022 NUS conference:
‘Antisemitism plagues every part of the NUS…. As a Palestinian, I find it deeply offensive that support for Palestinian human rights is being used to mask blatant antisemitism. The conflation between the conflict in Israel-Palestine and British Jews must stop. Our Jewish students cannot be made to feel responsible for a conflict that is being waged thousands of miles away. They cannot be made to feel unsafe, as they are hounded and targeted at our university. Instead, we must listen to them and act on their concerns.’
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