NUS and antisemitism on and off campus
Last Friday the BBC published a report by Hazel Shearing, its education correspondent (inexplicably filed under “Young Reporter” (a term normally used of student reporters, which she isn’t), about antisemitism in and around universities in light of the dismissal of the NUS’s president earlier this year. It starts with a story about a Jewish woman attacked in the street (called a racial slur and barbecue sauce thrown at her), who as a result has stopped wearing her star-of-David pendant in public around Leeds. The story then cuts to the opinion of the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), which it claims “has lost confidence in the UK’s top student activists to fight for the rights of its members like Amy - after a series of controversies at the National Union of Students (NUS)”. Amy Cregor, the victim of the attack, did not report it because “she didn’t think she had enough information to do so”.
The “NUS antisemitism crisis” relates, as the story notes, to “tensions rumbling on more than 2,000 miles away”, i.e. in Palestine. There’s no evidence offered that the people who attacked Amy Cregor were motivated by concern over Palestine; they could have been simply racists. A lot of racists hate Muslims, or Black and Asian people, or all three, as much as they hate Jews, and some westerners who profess concern for Palestine also take an anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim stance at home. The incident happened off campus, on a street in Leeds. So there is no evidence that it has anything to do with the NUS (although student unions are there to support students in difficulty, including those suffering racial abuse or discrimination) or that ‘antisemitic’ (read pro-Palestinian) student activists have any responsibility or that an appearance by the rapper Lowkey (above right) contributed to the situation at all.
Shearing also interviewed the UJS’s president, Joel Rosen, who claimed that Jews face “more subtle, more insidious cases of political antisemitism”, a doctrine that “sees all Jewish students as being agents of a government many of them have no connection to, and many certainly don’t support”, and a culture within the NUS that marginalises Jews and denies the prejudices they face. It’s true that many British Jews do not support any particular Israeli government; however, mainstream Jewish community groups including the UJS have acted as lobbying and PR fronts for Israel and Israeli interests. The UJS, for example, has hosted speeches by Israeli military officers at their fringe meetings at NUS conferences in the past and its website currently has a Digital Israel Portal, they name “Israel engagement” as one of their “work areas” and have a sabbatical officer (meaning one who takes a break from their studies to work for the union full-time) for that area.
As for student activists not recognising prejudices Jews face, everyone is aware that racism in this country has an antisemitic history and nobody wants to see Jews attacked in the street for being Jewish. What is disputed is specific things alleged to be antisemitic: Jewish groups dictate what can and can’t be said about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, with the result that it’s an occupational hazard for anyone advocating for Palestinian rights to be accused of it. I saw a blog article alleging that the film Farha’s depiction of a Palestinian family being murdered echoes the “blood libel”; it simply depicted something that happened, namely the killing of civilians. Sometimes they tell us not to call Israeli soldiers and settlers ‘bloodthirsty’, a word that has been used in many contexts to mean the enjoyment of violence and killing, not necessarily that the guilty parties literally drink blood. Nobody believes this, but what we see gives us the impression that Israeli soldiers and settlers have such contempt for Palestinian rights, including their right to life, that they will kill for no real reason.
It’s quite right and proper not to allow groups that support Israel to dictate what can and can’t be said about its abuses, let alone to allow antiracist provisions to be used to shut people down when they try to talk about them openly. And of course, people who are being oppressed or whose friends are being oppressed will speak ill of the oppressor, or speak intemperately. I sometimes hear Black people say that “White people are the Devil” and feminists claiming that “men as a class” oppress “women as a class” and both these groups in the UK right now are, in general, far less oppressed than Palestinians. Not every Jew here in the UK is directly responsible for the Palestinians’ oppression, but their organisations contribute by shutting down debate, with mainstream political parties’ help, and they use the tactic known as DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender), portraying racism as antiracism and vice versa. People have the right not to face racial harassment and violence, but not to be protected from angry words about very real oppression.
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