How has Britain come to a place where one in five students say they wouldn’t share a house with a Jewish student? Why do a quarter say they don’t care if Jewish students can’t be open about their identity on campus?
The headline statistics contained within the Union of Jewish Students’ report on campus antisemitism are truly shocking. Sadly, these figures, together with the appalling testimonies provided to UJS by young Jewish students, were entirely predictable.
Ever since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the tragic ensuing conflict, a small minority of extremists have peddled an obsessive and utterly distorted narrative about Israel and Zionism. We’ve seen it most graphically in the near-weekly demonstrations in our cities and on our campuses, which have echoed the calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state and “intifada” against Jews across the globe.
As we witnessed at the Heaton Park Synagogue, Bondi Beach, and in the 3,700 antisemitic incidents recorded last year by the Community Security Trust, words have consequences.
Jewish students have been at the sharp end of many of these incidents. I heard their stories for myself when I joined the Jewish Society at Leeds University at my first official event as Honorary Chair of Labour Friends of Israel. I heard it again when I joined them for their Friday night dinner, 14 years after my last dinner there as a student at Leeds.
The community is as vibrant, dynamic and resilient as I remembered it but the challenges facing its members are bleaker. Students told me of being abused on their way to Shabbat dinners, of a lecturer boasting of how “proud” he was of his son who had been arrested for supporting Palestine Action, and of how they had been subjected to chants of “Free Palestine” for the “crime” of being Jewish.
I welcome the action announced last week by the government to crackdown on extremism in higher education. But we must all do more if we are to root out antisemitism on our campuses.
First, we have to be clear: we will never succeed in tackling anti-Jewish racism unless we recognise that contemporary antisemitism is driven by the effort to demonise and delegitimise the State of Israel and Zionism. How can it be otherwise when the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community in Britain, and in other diaspora communities, hold the simple belief in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination?
Second, to bring clarity, the government should require all public bodies, including universities, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. It belies the oft-repeated falsehood that supporters of Israel want to shut down legitimate criticism and debate of the policies and actions of the Israeli government. We do not. Instead, it draws some very basic red lines: Israel, for instance, should not be compared to those who attempted to annihilate European Jewry in the 1940s and classic antisemitic symbols and images, such as the blood libel, shouldn’t be deployed against Israel and Israelis.
Third, as UJS has argued, university leaders need to act much more firmly and decisively against hate crimes on campuses. The Department for Education and the Office for Students should establish a statutory framework for the investigation and disciplinary handling of these incidents, while ensuring that universities are held accountable for upholding equality legislation. More transparency and consistency are required. No institution, including student unions, should be allowed to repeatedly fail to protect its students without being subject to investigation and, if necessary, sanctions.
Fourth, government has a crucial but not exclusive role to play. This is a question of leadership across society. Elements of the media, some politicians and celebrities, and high-profile pressure groups and charities have used their public platform to peddle hatred, disinformation and conspiracy theories which rest on centuries-old antisemitic tropes. They must be challenged and called out. So, too, must the many more who, while rightly willing to speak out against every and any other form of prejudice, are strangely mute when it comes to the oldest hatred.
Finally, as its victims, Jews must never be left to fight antisemitism alone; and young Jews should not be isolated and abandoned as they stand up to the racism directed against them on campuses. As chair of my university Labour club, I was proud to work closely with our Jewish society. In these darker times, student leaders, both locally and nationally, should publicly stand with Jewish students to defeat antisemitism.
“The victim cannot cure the crime,” the late Rabbi Sacks rightly argued. “The hated cannot cure the hate.” This, above all others, is the principle that should drive our response to UJS’s deeply disturbing findings.
Mark Sewards MP is honorary parliamentary chair of Labour Friends of Israel
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