This week SABRINA MILLER visited four great seats of learning where pro-Palestinian camps have been set up. Her courageous account of being stalked by a masked man, publicly vilified and harangued will chill you to the bone
THERE is a Zionist reporter in the crowd. Do not answer her questions.’ These chilling words echoed out of a public address system at the protest camp at University College London on Monday.
Almost as one, a crowd of more than 100 flag-waving pro-Palestine demonstrators turned round and stared at me.
This turned out to be only the first incident in a sinister week-long campaign of intimidation as I visited a raft of the new American-style, anti-Israel encampments sweeping the country.
For the rest of that first afternoon in London, whenever I attempted to talk to anyone, a woman dressed in a forest-green abaya — a loose-fitting dress favoured by conservative Muslims — would run up behind me and whisper to my would-be interviewee: ‘She’s called Sabrina Miller. We’ve looked her up on Twitter. She’s a Zionist. You shouldn’t speak to her.’
With trembling fingers, I deleted the Star of David emoji from my X/Twitter bio the same day as well as the ‘Free the hostages’ slogan that I had uploaded on October 8, the day after Hamas terrorists conducted the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Earlier that afternoon, another University College London (UCL) activist had mentioned in passing that I had ‘Jewish-looking eyes’.
This week has proved a deeply disturbing insight into a new wave of anti-Semitism. And it is only just getting started.
So far, 15 anti-Israel camps have been established at some of Britain’s most prestigious universities.
I visited four of them in a bid to understand the genesis, aims and ambitions of this extraordinary phenomenon.
It soon became clear to me that the outbreak of pro-Palestine campus activism has been ins pired by scenes in the U.S., where more than 1,000 students have been arrested at colleges from Columbia in New York to
UCLA in Los Angeles.
American protesters have been supporting their British counterparts over Zoom, advising them on how to manage their campaigns and organising ‘shift patterns’ for people sleeping in the tents to keep morale high.
But conversations with British Jewish students reveal that they feel ‘threatened’ and ‘terrified’ by the encampments, which they claim are pro-war and pro-violence.
Raphael Cohen, a 25-yearold Jewish-Israeli land economy student at Cambridge, tells me: ‘These protests and signs make me feel unsafe. They are not promoting a peaceful solution.
‘By chanting “From the river to the sea” [a reference to the land between the River Jordan, which borders eastern Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west], they are calling for the deaths of me and my family.
‘ My family have been directly impacted by the terror attacks that took place in our city Ra’anana where there was a recent car ramming and we know many people who have tragically been killed in this conflict.
‘But most of these protesters have an uninformed opinion on Jews and are speaking about the conflict from a place of ignorance.’
Hours after Cambridge students had erected their campsite on Monday, 19-yearold Ari Vladimir, a Jewish history student, was violently shoved and had an Israeli flag ripped out of his hands.
In Manchester, Newcastle, UCL, Leeds, Warwick, Oxford and Cambridge, Jewish students have said they are ‘frightened’ by the spread of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and pro-terror rhetoric, including chants in support of ‘intifada’ — the Arabic word for ‘uprising’.
Amid this maelstrom, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, in a meeting with university leaders this week, told them they have a ‘moral duty’ to protect
Jewish students from intimidation and harassment.
But, so far, the police and university authorities have allowed the camps to operate completely unchecked.
At Oxford, the students launched their protest at 4.30am on Bank Holiday Monday. Under the cover of darkness, more than 50 balaclava-wearing activists gathered on the muddy lawn in front of the Pitt Rivers Museum, armed with posters, flags and tents.
Despite relentless rain, protesters erected about 20 tents and draped them in Palestinian flags, an act made all the more provocative by the fact it was carried out on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
When I arrived in Oxford on Tuesday, I was stalked by a masked man as I walked around the encampment.
Activists seemed to anticipate my arrival. I soon found that my picture had been taken and disseminated on WhatsApp groups among the protesters.
From the moment I stepped inside the camp, I was cornered by self-appointed ‘security guards’, their faces wrapped in keffiyehs, balaclavas and medical masks, who blocked my way and insisted I speak to the appointed ‘media team’.
When I announced I was a journalist for the Daily Mail, a ‘ media spokesperson’ immediately took my picture. ‘This is so everyone knows who you are and not to speak to you,’ she said. ‘Now please go away.’
I asked if anyone would talk to me about their decision to forgo university tutorials in favour of camping in front of the museum.
I wanted to understand why the Palestinian cause was so important to them. The answer was still no.
I carried on into the camp despite this order to leave. I could see that journalists from Iran’s state-owned Press TV and the Qatari network Al Jazeera — both hostile to Israel — were inside conducting interviews.
As I trudged across the sodden grass, a man wearing a navy beanie and a blue facecovering followed closely behind me.
Like a member of the Soviet secret police, he proceeded to peer over my shoulder and read everything I was writing down. Whenever I approached someone, he would butt in and order them not to talk to me. Every single protester obeyed with North Koreanesque deference.
Like teenage bullies in a
‘Protesters are in a place of ignorance’
school playground, pairs of pro-testers would gather nearby and say loud enough for me to hear, ‘Is that the girl from the Daily Mail? Who would ever want to work there?’ But I saw enough to real-ise that the encampments are highly organised, with itineraries detailing the day’s plans and mealtimes scribbled on to a whiteboard and shared via Instagram.
Activities at Oxford included lessons in ‘dabke’ — Palestinian folk dancing — arts and crafts banner- making sessions, film screenings and talks.
Many of the newly purchased tents were stuffed full of student paraphernalia including text-books, laptops, chargers, teddy bears and brand-new Osprey camping rucksacks that can cost hundreds of pounds.
This is not a place where free thinking is encouraged, however. Everyone entering the Oxford camp is forced to sign a radical pro- Palestine online pledge stating that Jerusalem is the capital of ‘Palestine’ (rather than Israel) and that ‘colonised people’ have the ‘right’ to ‘resist against occupation’.
Jewish and Israeli students have seen this as an explicit endorse-ment of the October 7 attacks — and on Tuesday a Jewish man in his 30s was turned away from Oxford’s so- called ‘ liberated zone’ after refusing to sign the statement. ‘The message Israeli students are hearing from these protests is that your very exist-ence is the product of an unfortu-nate mistake at best, an unspeak-able crime at worst,’ said one Jewish-Israeli Oxford student, who asked not to be named.
It was much the same story at Cambridge, which launched its own encampment in tandem with its famous rival.
When I arrived there on Wednes-day, dozens of identical-looking orange and green tents had been erected on the front lawn of King’s College.
Students entering the encamp-ment are asked to make a verbal pledge to abide by a list of ‘com-munity guidelines’, which include undertakings not to engage with ‘Zionist counter-protesters’. Once inside, participants are shown a ‘ security cheat sheet’, which warns that police may ‘ seize’ people’s phones or ‘hack’ them and gives advice on how to hide ‘incriminating messages/photos’.
On one end of the camp was a large gazebo serving as a ‘head-quarters’ and on the other was a bookshelf piled high with volumes on topics such as colonialism and race. Other elements included a ‘revision and prayer space’, as well as an ‘emergency toilet’.
When they are not leafleting passers-by or chanting slogans for the benefit of the TV cameras, Cambridge protesters have been seen sunbathing in deckchairs, smoking roll-ups and listening to music by artists including the pro-Palestine rapper Lowkey — or helping themselves to food donated by locals.
Evidence of their radical agenda is ever-present. Makeshift card-board signs in front of the camp bear slogans such as ‘ From Cambridge to Gaza, long live the intifada’ — an explicit call to vio-lence — and ‘Resistance is justi-fied if a people are occupied’, an apparent endorsement of Hamas’s massacre.
Their smiling faces as they hand out flyers cannot conceal the hatred that defines their cause.
It turns out that the informa-tion leaflets being pressed on people were donated by ‘Friends Of Al- Aqsa’, a lobby group founded in 1997 by Ismail Patel, one of the key organisers of the ‘Palestine solidarity marches’ in London, who has previously been criticised for defending and praising Hamas.
In January 2009, during another
‘It’s not a safe place to live for Jewish people’
conflict in Gaza, Patel told a large rally: ‘Hamas is no terrorist organisation . . . we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel.’
He has also shared videos falsely claiming that no one had been massacred by Hamas gunmen at a music festival in Israel on October 7.
Signs and flags bearing the insignia of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Revolution-ary Communist Party are also scattered around the Cambridge camp. It is unclear to what extent these extremist groups are involved in co- ordinating and supporting the protesters but the SWP has a long record of organis-ing protests on campus via its student arm.
On fundraising website Chuffed, the Cambridge student body has attracted more than £10,000 to supply campers with ‘aid’.
Emergency donated supplies include different varieties of soya and oat milk, board games and vegan snacks.
A Jewish Israeli first-year stu-dent, who asked not to be named, told me: ‘This country is no longer a safe space for a Jewish person to live in.
‘Most of these protesters have no connection to Palestine. They put on keffiyehs that they ordered on Amazon so they can cosplay as the oppressed.’
Inside one tent in Cambridge, a can of Diet Coke had been left discarded on the floor — one