The new campus normal: harass the Jews, protect the mob

At Queen Mary University in east London, some students decided to hold a silent vigil on 7 October 2024 to mark the anniversary of the Hamas massacre. The vigil, comprised of a small group of students, was soon surrounded by hundreds of fellow students with banners and megaphones, shouting “Globalise the student intifada” and other slogans.

There is, as you well know, nothing unusual about this. It is, appallingly, a scene routinely witnessed when Jewish students seek to remember the victims of October 7 (and, of course, it happens beyond campus, too). But this time the university’s security staff intervened. A rare but welcome event, you might think. Except their target was not the baying mob barracking the small gathering of Jews but rather the small gathering of Jews, who were removed to a safe room, as the students described in a StandWithUs report.

Nothing better sums up the state of antisemitism on campus. Not only is it allowed to run rampant, unchecked and unstopped; it is actually supported, either by a failure to act, sending the clear message that it is permissible, or – as in the incident above – by removing the peaceful Jews  rather than those harassing them.

Yesterday’s StandWithUs report is both shocking and at the same entirely unnewsworthy. There is nothing in it that is in any way surprising to anyone aware of what is happening on campus and how Jewish life is being made intolerable in some places. It is a series of reports of incidents, statistics and statements by Jewish students, not a single one of which will surprise anyone.

And yet it is also a devastating, shocking compilation of examples of the scale of Jew hate on campus. It shames our nation – and it shames the university authorities which permit it. Page after page of the report details clear and unambiguous support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two proscribed organisations – as if the university authorities think there some sort of exemption from the law if you break it on campus.

But in many ways it is the more banal, everyday consequences of unchecked campus Jew hate which is the most consequential. One Jewish student at University College London is cited in the report as saying they feel unable to attend lectures and seminars because of the intimidatory atmosphere. What have we come to when a Jewish student feels cowed by dint of their religion from leading the normal life of a student? And yet far from being shamed by this, the university authorities preside over it – and by their inaction are seen as tacitly siding with the anti-Jewish mob.

The CST latest report on campus antisemitism in December reported a 117 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents on campuses during the previous two academic years, from 2022 to 2024. The Union of Jewish Students recorded a 413 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents from the academic year 2022-23 to 2023-24, with 53 incidents in the first year and 272 in the second. In the 19 months since the UJS launched a support line it received nearly 2,000 phone calls.

No wonder the StandWithUs report calls universities “hubs of hate” for Jewish students: “We are witnessing the normalisation of the previously unthinkable – flagrant support for proscribed terror groups, and the intimidation and ostracisation of Jewish and Zionist students simply because of their identity,” it says.

Polling British students, StandWithUs found that 64 per cent of respondents would not describe the October attacks as terrorism, while 29 per cent called them an “understandable act of resistance” – which rose to 38 per cent among Russell Group students. More than half said those who support Israel on campus should “expect” abuse. This follows much the same pattern as in the US, where some of the worst problems faced by Jews are at Ivy League universities.

It's important not to focus only on students. One of the main issues behind the entrenchment of campus Jew hate is the refusal of authorities to act. It’s a similar dynamic to the anti-Israel marches, with the police’s refusal to act against overt displays of Jew hate on the very first march giving a de facto green light – the consequence of which has been that Jew hate is now normalised on the marches.

On campus there is a kind of Jew hate co-dependency. Not all the authorities who refuse to act are antisemites – it is mainly, I suggest, cowardice – but not all are not. They are, after all, drawn from the ranks of academia, and while few come from the more extreme anti-Israel and antisemitic end of the spectrum, many – most? – have spent their careers in a milieu in which Israel has long been regarded as an illegitimate entity.

Consider the support shown to David Miller, the former Bristol University professor. Academics at 74 separate higher education bodies signed a statement hailing Prof Miller as “an eminent scholar” claiming he was the victim of “well-orchestrated efforts… to misrepresent [his views] as evidence of antisemitism”. And, in a repeat of the above pattern, many of the signatories were at Russell Group universities, with 12 at Kings’ College London, 12 at Leeds and 10 at University College London. Eight were at Queen’s Belfast and seven at Queen Mary London, Warwick and Manchester, with six at Liverpool and five at Edinburgh.

There will always be those who dismiss the evidence of campus antisemitism – mainly, of course, those responsible for it. But for everyone else the main question, surely, is what to do about it? We could spend more years discussing the intellectual roots of what has taken hold, so that there are now a large number of students and academics whose support of the Palestinian cause leads them to think October 7 was understandable and the right thing to do. Or we could decide that, while it is important to grasp the intellectual mindset that we are dealing with, what is needed in the here and now is action to tackle the consequence of that poison.

President Trump is using the leverage of federal funding to seek to force US colleges and universities that violate the rights of Jewish students to act. It is worth observing that British taxpayers spend £24 billion a year funding universities, although the chances of the current government using that leverage are surely close to zero. In September 2024, Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech to the Holocaust Educational Trust in which he condemned campus antisemitism and promised to deal with it. So far, however, making that speech has been the sum total of his dealing with it. Indeed, in a speech that same month to the Universities UK conference intended to survey the entirety of university education, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, made no mention of antisemitism.

The push needs to be to require universities to use the existing legal framework to act. The Terrorism Act, the Protection from Harassment Act and the Public Order Act, the Malicious Communications Act, the Equality Act and the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act are more than sufficient to protect the rights of Jewish students on campus. In addition, the Office for Students should fine universities that tolerate this hatred and break the law. The problem is not that the means to tackle campus antisemitism do not exist or are insufficient. The problem is that they are unused. And that is damning.