According to a recent report, Jewish students in Britain “are withdrawing from all aspects of university life, including lecture theatres, online learning spaces, seminar rooms, social activities and entire areas of campus” in the face of growing anti-Semitism amid the Hamas-Israel conflict.
The report, from the Intra-Communal Professorial Group (ICPG), found that more than half of Jewish students surveyed felt fearful on campus – and three-quarters were uncomfortable being open about their identity, with some feeling intimidated into not attending Jewish events or wearing anything recognisably Jewish.
The survey suggests that as many as 79 per cent of Jewish students were at ease about disclosing their faith prior to Hamas’s 7th October attacks. Since then the figure has fallen to 21.7 per cent, with the number witnessing anti-Semitic abuse up by 34 percentage points. This abuse includes physical attacks, threats of rape, violence, verbal assaults, harassment and the use of Nazi imagery.
The ICPG was formed in early May “in response to a significant rise of anti-Semitism across academia globally and in UK higher education”. It is made up of Jewish academics and chaired by Professor Anthony Julius, chairman of law and the arts at University College London (UCL). Its report – written on behalf of the ICPG by Professor Rosa Freedman (University of Reading) and Professor Laura Vaughan (UCL) – surveyed 500 Jewish students between 29th May and 3rd July, at the end of the last academic year.
The ICPG said that while the survey was “not a formal statistical sample” of the UK’s 9,000 Jewish students, it was “broadly representative” of their experiences.
Almost 63 per cent said they had witnessed fellow Jewish students being harassed “because they are Jewish”, including on social media and across campus. (The figure prior to 7th October was 28.4 per cent.) Forty-one per cent said they had been personally subjected to such behaviour – more than double the pre-7th October figure. Fears for safety on campus increased from 17.1 per cent to 53.9 per cent.
The report found that “small, but concerning numbers” of Jewish students said they had been physically attacked because of their religion, rising from 1.8 per cent to 5.2 per cent since 7th October.
The attacks included being spat at after leaving a Jewish religious event, being “chased by a man with a large glass bottle”, being pelted with eggs after hearing the Chief Rabbi speak on campus, having rubbish thrown at them and having their Star of David necklaces grabbed from around their necks.
Students also told of an increase in verbal threats. One was called “a Zionist Nazi” as they tried to move past a pro-Palestine protest in their building – and anti-Semitic slurs have been aimed at visibly Jewish students walking past encampments. The ICPG report speaks of “several occasions of complete strangers making anti-Semitic remarks (e.g. ‘you’re a fucking pig’ etc.) in passing”, and one of somebody saying “Heil Hitler” and giving a Nazi salute. A female master’s student said she was “spat at” for wearing “a JSoc [Jewish Society] jumper on campus”.
A second-year undergraduate stated that at her university:
The Jewish Society stall was shut down due to safety concerns of security personnel due to the threats we were getting [from] the students and the crowd that was gathering around the stall. Students were harassing, shouting and swearing at us.
Another second-year undergraduate said it was “made abundantly clear every single day that, as a Jewish person who supports Israel’s right to exist, I am not welcome on campus”:
Since Oct 7th, it has been exhausting to be Jewish on campus, to feel like I can only express my identity to other Jews, to have to keep silent in all my classes about my identity, and to feel like I have to hide.
According to the ICPG, the survey results were “unsurprising in that they confirm what many people in higher education have reported having witnessed or experienced as occurring within UK universities”:
The data demonstrates the scale of the problem, underscoring the pressing need to combat the surge in anti-Semitism over the past year across UK universities.
As a result, the ICPG has called on the government to launch a special task force focused on combating anti-Semitism on UK campuses, with “a systemic and holistic strategy and approach that can be adopted in a context-specific way for individual universities”.
The report comes in the wake of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s decision to sabotage the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, a vital piece of legislation designed to tackle cancel culture in English universities.
Ms Phillipson has since sought to justify this decision by recourse to the canard that the legislation risked enabling ‘hate speech’ and Holocaust denial on campus. But this simply isn’t true. The definition of “freedom of speech” in the Act is that set out in Article 10(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and the European Court of Human Rights has consistently ruled that Article 17 of the ECHR excludes Holocaust denial from the purview of Article 10.
Nor would the new Act open the floodgates to other unlawful speech, given that it only protects free speech “within the law” – and there are plenty of legal protections already in place against harassment and hate speech, namely:
- The Crime and Disorder Act 1998
- s.145-146 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003
- Parts 3 and 3A of the Public Order Act 1986
- s.1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1998
- s.127 of the Communications Act 2003
- s. 26 of the Equality Act 2010
And just in case that isn’t enough to preoccupy Ms. Phillipson and her special advisors, Article 10(2) of the ECHR – as clarified and enforced through various European Court of Human Rights rulings, e.g., Handyside v. the United Kingdom (1976), Sunday Times v. the United Kingdom(1991)– allows for “legitimate” and “proportionate” interference with lawful speech by individual states.
Rather than detracting from any of these requirements, the now-abandoned Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act contained provisions that would protect Jewish staff, students and university societies from attempts by student unions and radical activists to sabotage their efforts to arrange meetings and invite external speakers onto campus.
Indeed, a clause in the new Act made it far more difficult for universities to cite “security costs” as a reason to disinvite potentially controversial speakers – an excuse used by London’s City University in 2018 for insisting that a Jewish society rescind its invitation to Mark Regev, then Israel’s ambassador to the UK.
This is in part why the Free Speech Union (FSU) has formally commenced legal proceedings against the government following its decision to stop this vital piece of legislation coming into force.
Thanks to the generous support of our members and supporters, the FSU filed a claim against the Education Secretary on 5th September. Our lawyers have put a powerful legal argument before the High Court and you can read their Statement of Facts and Grounds here.
Make no mistake: these proceedings are extremely important. As Akua Reindorf KC, the UK’s leading equality barrister, put in an article earlier this year: “This is not about petty ‘culture wars’; it’s about people’s lives, livelihoods and fundamental human rights.”
