Midway through my recent University College London (UCL) graduation ceremony, a fellow graduate walked across the stage holding up a sign. It read “UCL funds genocide”. It was met with cheers and sustained applause from what sounded like most of the room. And on the stage, clapping along with everyone else, was the vice-provost.
Of course, it goes without saying that the right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy. But it has never meant a right to commandeer every room you happen to be standing in. A graduation is not a rally; it is one afternoon, shared between thousands of people, many of whom have saved and sacrificed for years to be there. Many will be the first in their families to have attended and completed university. That afternoon belonged to all of them equally. Yet one student decided it belonged to them and to ruin that event for many students and families such as mine.
We as a society must decide whether a small number of people can simply hijack every shared occasion, every ceremony, lecture after lecture, and get away with it, knowing nobody will stop them. Sadly, at my graduation, the answer was that not only can they get away with it, but they will be applauded, and across my three years at university, I saw that same response far too often.
Then there is the sign itself. What has happened in Gaza is a catastrophe for the civilians caught in it. But it is not a genocide. The historian Sir Simon Schama put it better than I can at the Holocaust Educational Trust dinner: “We, the victims of the greatest genocide the world has ever seen, are being called perpetrators of genocide. This is the new blood libel. This is a profound lie.” He reminded the room what an actual genocide looks like: 18,000 Jews shot in a single morning at Majdanek in November 1943, 32,000 in a day and a half at Babi Yar, one and a half million murdered by shooting between July and November 1942 alone – a rate, he noted drily, of 434,000 Jews a month. The people who wave that word on placards know exactly what they’re doing. They are taking the worst crime ever committed against the Jews and pinning it on the Jews.
The two things I couldn’t stop thinking about were not the protesting student, as I sat in the graduation hall feeling ashamed of my university. They were the vice-provost, who stood on the stage applauding a student holding up a sign accusing Israel of genocide – an accusation that could readily be understood to extend, as such charges often do in activist rhetoric, to the Jewish students sitting in front of him – and the ordinary people in the room from across the country and the world, rising to cheer that twisted accusation.
I kept thinking about my great-grandmother. For most of history, a Jew walking across a graduation stage was not a given. My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, always wanted to go to university. The antisemitic numerus clausus laws in 1920s Hungary made sure she couldn’t, and then in the 1940s the Nazis arrived and made sure of everything else. In her last years I tried to get her an honorary degree as a birthday present. It, unfortunately, never came off.
So there I was, collecting my history degree from the university founded in 1826 as the first in England to admit Jews, in its bicentenary year, doing without a second thought the thing she was never allowed to do. That should have been the whole story. Instead, that moment on the stage was the sad but perfect ending to sum up my three years at university.
I started at UCL a few weeks before October 7, which gave me a control group of students: I saw who wanted to talk to me before, and who wouldn’t after. Within days, before any Israeli response, students were moving away from me in lectures. Because of my kippah I was a visible Jew. Simultaneously, a UCL student society was celebrating the “resistance” and how “justified” it was. Later, they suggested renaming our student centre after Refaat Alareer, a UCL alumnus who, when reports emerged that Hamas had burned a Jewish baby in an oven, tweeted asking whether it was “with or without baking powder”.
A few weeks after October 7, UCL’s lecturers’ union passed a motion calling for “intifada until victory”. Several professors on the list would go on to mark my essays and exams that year and were the people we as Jewish students were directed to speak to when we felt there was antisemitism from other students in our lectures.
Reports of antisemitism through UCL’s own reporting system rose by more than 800 per cent that year. Sadly, over three years I made only a handful of non-Jewish friends, not for lack of trying: for a great many people on campus, being openly Jewish, let alone openly pro-Israel, was disqualifying.
The old blood libel turned up too. Last November, at an event hosted by UCL’s Students for Justice in Palestine, a researcher who had worked at the university told a room of students that in 1840 the Jews of Damascus murdered a monk and used his blood to make bread. UCL banned her and suspended the society – but only after the video went viral. It should never have been allowed to happen at all. That sat alongside masked protesters blocking the doors of a Jewish history talk, others pelting eggs, and Jewish students who moved out of their halls because they no longer felt safe there.
Every Jewish event I attended had security on the door. At the university that was the first in England to let us in. And then, to put the cherry on the icing on the cake, at the beginning of the summer UCL announced it was scrapping its antisemitism adviser. That adviser, Anthony Orkin, was appointed in 2022 – well before October 7 – as the first dedicated antisemitism programme manager at any British university. He trained more than 2,400 staff and students on antisemitism, and he was the person Jewish students actually went to when something happened. This summer, a fortnight after the Provost had publicly apologised for failing Jewish students, UCL scrapped the role anyway. It calimed though that it was not stepping back from fighting antisemitism but “moving to a more integrated approach that will deliver more support for our staff and students.”
None of this is unique to UCL. Sadly, it is our reality. Our institutions have been captured by antisemitism and by Islamist extremism – by radicalisation, most likely backed and financed by the Muslim Brotherhood. And it has led a small, loud, well-organised group to discover that a university will bend over backwards to avoid unrest and to appease them. It has got to the point where the United Arab Emirates has cut scholarship funding for its own students to study in Britain.
I don’t regret going to university. I got a good degree, taught by some brilliant professors who were quietly, consistently supportive of Jewish students and told me, more than once, how distressed they were by what they saw. But they were individuals working against the grain of their institution.
My great-grandmother would have been proud to see me graduate. But I suspect she’d also have been furious: that the thing she believed in so deeply was being twisted into a vehicle for teaching hate to so many of our brightest young people. She’d seen, in her own lifetime, what education and propaganda in the wrong hands can do to a society. Had she been sitting in the Royal Festival Hall, watching a whole room rise to applaud that sign, I don’t think she’d have been shocked. I think she’d have been scared. Because she knew exactly where it leads.
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