When it comes to British Jews, our anti-racist elites have dropped the ‘anti’
What is it like to be a young Jew at a British university these days? that might seem like an odd question. Surely Jewish students have much the same experience as their peers.
Beginning essays the night before they’re due. arguing with flatmates about whose turn it is to do the dishes. Making their student loans stretch to cover essentials like beer as well as optional items like textbooks.
But university is very different for most Jewish students right now.
It is a lonely place, sometimes a frightening one, but most of all one where they do not feel welcome.
Edward Isaacs, President of the Union of Jewish Students, describes the situation in bracing terms.
he says Britain is witnessing ‘the worst anti-Semitism crisis on campus we have seen for a generation’. antiSemitism is far from uncommon on the modern university campus, where ideas are worn as fashions and few ideas are quite as fashionable as Jew-hatred.
Campus anti-Semitism, which is the most concentrated form of progressive anti-Semitism, wears a different guise to the anti-Jewish bigotry espoused by fascists and white nationalists, but many of the attitudes and instincts are similar. On campus, they don’t talk about Jews controlling high finance, or governments, or the media.
Malefactors
Instead, they talk about undue ‘Zionist’ influence over major institutions. Rather than accusing Jews of being the ultimate malefactors in human affairs, they cast Israel as the ultimate malefactor in world affairs.
Calls for the destruction of the Jewish people are replaced with calls for the destruction of the Jewish state.
however, the past seven months have surpassed all that went before, leading to what Isaacs calls ‘an unprecedented rise in campus anti-Semitism’.
the timeframe is not coincidental. It takes us back to October 7, 2023, when Palestinian forces from Gaza invaded Israel, murdered more than 1,100 people and took 250 hostages.
the assault, led by hamas but including other Palestinian terrorist groups, represented the worst single-day loss of Jewish life since the holocaust.
Young people were gunned down at a music festival, kibbutzes were drenched in blood, women were raped and threedozen children murdered. It was a modern-day pogrom. While the scenes of carnage horrified Western populations, among certain groups they seemed to sever the last remaining tethers of respectability when it came to Jews and the Jewish state.
One such group was the intellectuals, who revealed how much even their harshest critics had underestimated them.
For decades they had busied themselves slandering Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ and worse, soft-pedalling Palestinian terrorism when they weren’t openly justifying it, spreading conspiracy theories about an all-powerful ‘Israel lobby’ pulling the puppet strings of US politics, insinuating fanatic abstractions into humanities and social science teaching and scholarship, and legitimising crank theoretical frameworks that divided humanity into oppressors and victims and placed Jews firmly in the former camp.
It was easy to dismiss them as potty professors and faculty-lounge revolutionaries, their pronouncements too strangled by academic jargon to gain any traction beyond certain disciplines.
Besides, surely they didn’t really believe what they were saying? But they did believe it, and October 7 felt like theory bursting audaciously into reality. What they believed, had written, taught and advocated was now happening on every news channel around the world.
and it turned out that abstractions have real-world consequences. For while October 7 was met by revulsion among the masses, if you wanted to find someone to excuse it, your best bet was an educated person. Failing that, someone on a university campus would do.
after some limited throat-clearing about October 7 — in some cases, they didn’t even bother with that — the intellectuals seized on every civilian death in Israel’s subsequent military operation.
these weren’t deeply tragic casualties of war in a densely-populated enclave where hamas, the de facto government of Gaza, uses its civilians as human shields. It wasn’t even a matter, on occasion, of Israeli tactical error or strategic misjudgment. (Israel’s military response is by no means above reproach, nor is its prime minister’s shoddy wartime leadership.)
No, Palestinian casualties were always intentional and the intention was genocide. Israel was deliberately and callously trying to exterminate the Palestinians. It is a monstrous lie but lies make good propaganda.
Since October 7, we have seen largescale marches with routine calls for the elimination of the Jewish state. On US college campuses, and now at British universities, encampments have taken over public spaces, with administrators often too weak and cowardly to challenge these disruptions and the extremism promoted at many of them. Jewish students are bearing the brunt of all this.
Isaacs’ testimony is as powerful as it is disturbing. there has been, he notes, a sixfold increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7.
Jewish students have been sent death threats, assaulted or had their property damaged. In an era where good, educated progressives believe there is no higher calling than being an ‘ally’ to the vulnerable and oppressed, Isaacs reflects that there has been ‘a distinct lack of allyship post October 7’.
Other student leaders ‘have often felt unable to stand in allyship with Jewish students’, he says, which has been exacerbated by university administrators ‘failing to singularly condemn instances of anti-Semitism’, leaving young Jews feeling ‘alone, marginalised and vulnerable’. the Union of Jewish Students’ welfare hotline has taken ‘hundreds’ of calls from Jewish undergraduates in the past seven months.
Massacre
Isaacs warns of ‘a climate of fear on campus’. he tells of one Jewish student who said they now had to ‘hide my identity’ for their own safety, adding that: ‘the university did not act properly’.
another had the news of the October 7 massacre broken to them by a flatmate, who said: ‘700 Israelis dead. Yaaaay, let’s go.’ Others have been told to ‘go back to where they came from’.
Isaacs’ account echoes the findings of research by the Community Security trust, a British charity which monitors anti-Semitism. Its most recent report documented a 589 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents between the final quarter of 2022 and the final quarter of 2023, when October 7 happened.
that is not a typo. an almost 600 per cent spike. Last year saw a 96 per cent increase in assaults on Jews; a 146 per cent rise in destruction or desecration of Jewish property such as synagogues and cemeteries; and a 196 per cent surge in threats made against Jews.
two-thirds of these incidents occurred after October 7. that is what British Jews, on and off campus, are having to deal with. and they are, if we are honest, largely having to deal with it alone.
Yes, there are politicians speaking out here and there and some institutions belatedly recognising the problem, but there is a distinct lack of urgency — a distinct lack, frankly, of outrage.
If this was happening to any other minority group, it would be a national scandal. there would be marches and perhaps even riots. Night after night, the News at ten would lead on it.
the vice-chancellor of every academic institution would be hauled instantly before a parliamentary committee. Resignations would be demanded, legislation proposed, change insisted on.
Why are Jews treated differently? the answer is unpleasant but unavoidable: when it comes to Jews, our anti-racist elites drop the anti.