When I told my grandmother that I planned to study in England at the University College of London, she told me I had better not let anyone there know that I'm Jewish. As a Jewish child living in hiding in Milan during the Second World War, she had once hidden under the skirt of a nun as the Gestapo came through. She knows just how vicious antisemitism can be when it is normalised everywhere.
That normalisation now appears to include UCL, which was founded in 1826 as the only major English institution of its time to accept Jewish students, even instructing Hebrew classes in its first academic year. The poet Isaac Rosenberg attended UCL’s Slade School. So did the artist Lucien Freud, son of Sigmund Freud. Rosalind Franklin, the Jewish co-discoverer of DNA, held a fellowship at UCL in the ‘50s. But 200 years later, UCL does not seem to be the tolerant, liberal, and pluralist institution that many Jewish students expect. Instead, it has allowed an antisemitic tumour to fester among its student and faculty populations, and what was once a safe place for Jews to study no longer is.
I soon began to understand why my grandmother told me what she did.
“From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada. There is only one solution. Intifada revolution.”
Those were the words chanted at a pro-Palestinian protest last month, which drew dozens of protesters – a mix of students and outsiders – to the Andrew Huxley Building in the centre of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus.
No matter how you cut it, the second intifada, which stretched from 2000 to 2004, was characterised by relentless violence that targeted Jews – and not just in Israel. In Tunisia in 2002, a truck bombing murdered 19 people at the El Ghriba Synagogue. In Turkey in 2003, two large trucks exploded outside the Bet Israel and Neve Shalom synagogues, 28 people died and more than 300 were injured. In France, there were 936 recorded incidents of antisemitic crimes in 2002, including the firebombing of four synagogues and a Jewish school bus.
This is what it means to “globalise the intifada.” It doesn’t give Palestinians statehood. It doesn’t right Israel’s political wrongs. And it doesn’t rebuild Gaza. All it does is normalise violence against Jews. In the last year, following the attacks on the Manchester Synagogue during Yom Kippur and the Bondi Beach massacre during Chanukah, authorities in the UK and Australia said that they would arrest those who chant the words “globalise the intifada.” After this event, the police arrested one protest organiser linked to the Revolutionary Communist Party for an alleged racially aggravated public order offence.
Anti-Zionist protesters claim – or pretend – that their advocacy is separate from antisemitism, that their case is against Israel, not Jews. The two cannot be seen as anything other than inextricably linked.
First, most Jews are, at a basic level, Zionist. Aliyah, meaning return to the Holy Land, is used 64 times in the Hebrew Bible. It would be difficult for any Jew to hold any sense of religious or cultural identity without, on some level, believing in Israel as a homeland. Yes, a minority of Jews claim to be antizionists. And yes, antizionists insist that Jews could still live in a future "Palestine." But a Jewish minority cannot represent the majority of Jews, and there is no practical future for Jews in the Promised Land without a state of Israel. If there's any doubt about this, ask yourself where, today, are the Jews of Yemen, Egypt, Libya, or Iraq, and everywhere else in the Middle East where they were forcibly and often violently displaced?
Second, the selective outrage against Israel demonstrates exactly why Jewish students feel so targeted. I have yet to hear anti-Zionist protesters call for the fall of the Islamic regime in Iran, where thousands have been murdered and hundreds of thousands beaten into submission. I have yet to hear students protest for the Kurds, whom the Turkish government continues to abuse and attack. And although UCL has thousands of Chinese students and countless agreements with the Chinese government, I don’t see those same protesters calling for UCL to divest from China for its internment and oppression of Uyghur Muslim communities in Xinjiang. It is a fact that the Jewish state is the only country that gets scrutinised and condemned in this way.
I arrived in London soon after New Year’s, already hesitant to disclose that I am Jewish due to an event at UCL in November titled "The Birth of Zionism." Hosted by UCL's Students for Justice in Palestine society, it featured a former UCL researcher who endorsed the notorious blood libel that led to the torture and death of Jews in Damascus in 1840. To the university’s credit, President and Provost Dr. Michael Spence called the comments "heinous" and banned the researcher from campus. The Students for Justice in Palestine group that hosted her was suspended pending investigation. But the damage was already done – and continues to be done, as evidenced by that "globalise the intifada" protest.
It's disheartening, but not at all surprising, to smell the stench of antisemitism on university campuses across the world. It's a stench my grandmother knows all too well – one whose consequences are usually written in blood. As UCL has just turned 200, the college would do well to ask whether it is still the same pluralist haven for Jews that it once was, and how it might better protect its Jewish students in the future.
Noah Stephens is a 20-year-old US college student spending this semester at UCL
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