A Jew hunt at City University

British students are calling for an Israeli Jewish professor to be sacked because he completed mandatory military service in the 1980s. Read that again. Not for anything he said. Not for anything he did as an academic. But for being an Israeli who followed Israeli law – four decades ago.

This is the case of Michael Ben-Gad, professor of economics at City St George’s, University of London, who is now facing a hate campaign led by City Action for Palestine. Students staged a protest last week in which they held up signs featuring Ben-Gad’s face and claimed there was a ‘terrorist’ in the faculty. ‘Zionism off campus’ read one placard. This is a demand for the very idea of Jewish self-determination to be ousted from British universities.

The vast majority of Jews worldwide believe in Jewish self-determination. Banning Zionism from campus means banning most Jews – or at least forcing them to choose between their identity and their participation in higher education. Simply applying this test to any other group allows us to see how absurdly anti-Semitic it is. Would we tolerate demands for the belief in Kurdish self-determination to be banned from campus? Of course not. We would recognise it as ethnic targeting. But when it comes to Jews, we’re supposed to pretend this is sophisticated political analysis rather than racist groupthink.

What the students of City have adopted is a purely totalitarian doctrine. By these standards, the only ‘good’ Israeli Jew is one who doesn’t exist – or who ritually denounces his or her own people to satisfy the mob.

Israel has mandatory conscription. This means targeting Ben-Gad means targeting practically every Israeli Jew. Turkey and Russia also have conscription. Does that mean we should fire Turkish academics because of Turkey’s human-rights record? Should we sack Russian academics because of Putin’s wars? What about veterans more broadly? How about American academics who served in Iraq? Or British academics who served in Northern Ireland? Of course not. So why have Israeli Jews become fair game?

City Action for Palestine’s Instagram account has a post setting out its position on the Middle East. It holds the fervent and fantastical conviction that Zionism – that is, the continued existence of a tiny country of beleaguered Jews – amounts to ‘a system of oppression spanning continents’. Recently, the group shared protest footage of students calling for ‘intifada’. It also amplified a post by disgraced academic David Miller, in which he called the Union of Jewish Students, which has over 75 affiliated Jewish societies on UK campuses, ‘ineradicably racist’ and demanded it be closed down. This is bigotry dressed up as activism.

Perhaps the tide is slowly turning, though. More than a hundred academics have now signed a public letter condemning the anti-Semitic abuse Ben-Gad has been subjected to, noting that the university’s Jewish president has faced similar attacks. The letter stresses that these hateful campaigns are ‘intimidating, particularly to Jewish students, and set a precedent under which others could be targeted in future’. This should be the bare minimum response to such vile harassment, but sadly, in modern Britain, it is noteworthy enough to merit praise.

Still, at least there are still some in academia who clearly understand what’s at stake – that once you establish that Israeli Jews can be hounded from universities for their nationality, the principle is set.

But where are the students’ unions condemning this? The ‘diversity and inclusion’ officers? The academics who spent years telling us how important it is that everybody ‘feels safe’? Apparently, Jewish academics and students can be mobbed with impunity. The silence should tell us everything about how hollow the rhetoric of ‘anti-racism’ has become.

These City students have internalised totalitarian logic completely. They believe demanding Jewish professors be fired is opposing fascism. They think libelling someone as a war criminal without evidence is ‘speaking truth to power’. To their minds, their cause is so righteous that it justifies any amount of abhorrent behaviour.

British universities have spent years cultivating this mindset. They taught students that speech is violence, that disagreement is trauma, that some identities confer guilt and others victimhood. Now, the institutional higher-ups are seeing the poisonous fruits of their efforts. Can they really say they’re surprised?

Alex Hearn is director of Labour Against Anti-Semitism.