For the past six months, I have been haunted by images. Israeli soldiers rounding up stripped Palestinian men in courtyards; infants without faces, rows and rows of bodies bundled in white cloth. Chanukiahs towering over demolished buildings, and tanks gouging the contours of the Star of David into the remains of a family park. In my bedroom, the same star dangles untouched in my jewellery box. Many images flash in my mind, but I can’t envision myself ever wearing that necklace again.

I’m far from the only Jewish student to distance myself from public markers of our shared identity. On campuses across the UK, Jewish students have reported hiding their Stars of David or kippahs in the months following October 7. However, while I have chosen to abandon my necklace out of shame, many of my peers have felt forced into hiding. In the British media, we’ve seen story after story of Jewish students expressing deep anxiety due to a rise of antisemitic incidents on campus.

Just this week, the White House condemned the solidarity encampment at Columbia University as “blatantly antisemitic, unconscionable, and dangerous,” ignoring the many anti-Zionist Jewish students involved in the protest. To bring these voices to the fore, I interviewed anti-Zionist Jewish students across the UK, and quickly realised how our safety is deliberately violated by the institutions – both on campus and off – that claim to represent us.

The campus discourse comes in a wider context, one where last month the Israeli diaspora minister declared London the “most antisemitic city in the West” due to the capital’s biweekly marches for a ceasefire in Gaza. On campus too, charges of antisemitism largely concern Palestine solidarity protests. As Israel prepares for a ground invasion of Rafah and mass graves are uncovered at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, charges of antisemitism will continue to plague any of us who protest these unending horrors. Yet, my experience as a Jewish member of the University of Oxford’s Palestine Society has been one of love, hope, and fierce friendship. In moments of despair, my Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian friends have been the ones to remind me not to collapse my Jewishness into the acts of the Israeli state.

This is not to say that antisemitism does not exist, or that it hasn’t risen in the past six months. But the media narrative of antisemitism on campus largely operates to silence pro-Palestine protests, and eclipses the experiences of anti-Zionist Jewish students. Like me, these students believe in a world without ethno-nationalism, a future where Palestine is free from colonisation and apartheid, and Jews are safe to live wherever they call home. Anti-Zionist Jews support Palestinians in their struggle for freedom, recognising that a liberated Palestine will come from Palestinians themselves. By fighting the genocide in Gaza, we are participating in a long Jewish tradition of resistance, one that existed long before the Zionist project.

In moments of despair, my Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian friends have been the ones to remind me not to collapse my Jewishness into the acts of the Israeli state

In January of this year, the UK’s Union of Jewish Students (UJS) co-signed a letter from the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS), which denounced anti-Zionist Jews across the world for furthering “antisemitic ideologies”. Long before October 7, anti-Zionist Jews struggled to find community in mainstream Jewish organisations, but with the publication of the EUJS letter, our ostracisation from the campus Jewish community became official policy. This letter has provided cover for rampant harassment targeted at anti-Zionist Jewish students, and even more dangerously, it has legitimised the notion that we are not Jewish at all.

On February 13, 2024, I hosted a panel on antisemitism as a representative of the Oxford Palestine Society. Before the event took place, the JSOC president penned an email to the vice-chancellor of the university, requesting that the event be cancelled on the premise that it would “tokenise an unrepresentative group of Jewish students.” Included on my panel was Sara Pelham, a co-founder of Oxford’s Jewish Students for Justice (JSJ) – a society that the JSOC does not consider to be representative of the Jewish student community, despite its 44 members who say otherwise.

Pelham is a finalist at Oxford who grew up in Jerusalem before moving to North London. “At uni, the antisemitism that I’ve felt has mostly been from the Jewish community,” they explain. “The JSOC have been saying things like ‘all of you [JSJ members] are patrilineal Jews, you are fake Jews, you have only one Jewish grandparent’. Basically, we’re not Jewish in their eyes, which is fair enough, if you have a fascistic view of what it means to be Jewish.”

Pelham is not alone in this experience, nor is it limited to the Oxford campus. A conversation with members of the University of Cambridge’s Jews for Justice in Palestine reveals a concerning trend of antisemitic rhetoric being used to silence and harass anti-Zionist Jewish students. As one of its co-founders, Cora, states, “the group came out of the sense that we lacked a political, social, and religious home in the institution.”  Shortly after October 7, its members made their first public appearance at a Palestine solidarity protest.

“It was important to us to be identifiably Jewish, because the dominant narratives that were emerging at that time were very much that Jewish students felt threatened on campuses by the presence of support for Palestine. And we wanted to contest those narratives and say, ‘No, you’re not speaking for us and that’s not how we feel,” Silas*, a founding member of the group and Cambridge undergraduate, tells Dazed. The group was worried about being directly confronted by other Jewish students, who had been engaging in counter-protests to support Israel on campus, but this didn’t materialise.

Instead, after launching an Instagram page, the group experienced an online harassment campaign which one of the students describes as “overtly antisemitic”. By and large, the hostility was coming from other Jewish students on campus. “The implication was that anyone who held these anti-Zionist beliefs was not or could not be Jewish,” says Silias, explaining why he perceived these messages to be antisemitic. After reading a deluge of comments which accused the group of being equivalent to ‘Jews for Hitler’, Elena* struggled to get out of bed for a day. “The idea of another Jewish person weaponising the Holocaust against us was devastating,” she says.

“It was important to us to be identifiably Jewish, because the dominant narratives at that time were very much that Jewish students felt threatened on campuses by the presence of support for Palestine. We wanted to contest those narratives and say, ‘No, you’re not speaking for us and that’s not how we feel” – Silas

The hatred didn’t stop at the Instagram page. “Lots of us felt unsafe to varying degrees,” Cora says. Orlando, another undergraduate student, felt shocked at the source of the vitriol. “This level of antisemitism coming from other Jews is crazy, and it is the only hostility that we have openly had,” he says. The students attempted to contact the university for welfare support but were directed to speak to the campus’s Jewish institutions. Elena points out that, “where they wanted to direct us to for welfare support was entirely inadequate. We can’t go to JSOC and say, ‘You’re targeting me and it’s really affecting my life.’”

Elena contrasts the inadequacy of this response to the level of attention that other allegations of antisemitism have received in the past six months. “The only time that the university chooses to discuss antisemitism is when it can be weaponised in the interest of Zionism, and in the interest of American and British imperialism,” she says. “They’re not actually dealing with antisemitism or the problems of navigating life as a British Jew.”

Part of the difficulty in combating antisemitism comes from the reporting used to measure it. The heavily cited statistic that antisemitism has almost tripled since October 7 comes from the Community Security Trust, an organisation which includes anti-Zionism in its definition of antisemitism. In their report of antisemitism on campus from 2020 to 2022, many of the reported incidents involved anti-Zionist statements construed to be antisemitic, such as framing any critique of the well-documented Israel lobby as an antisemitic conspiracy. Since October, public officials have jumped on expressions of Palestinian liberation, further weaponising antisemitism to suppress popular dissent.

Of course, the report also includes extraordinarily concerning incidents, such as one where a Jewish student was assaulted by a rubber bat. However, the focus on anti-Zionism and any support for Palestine over real forms of antisemitism detracts attention from these serious attacks and obscures the culpability of the far-right in promoting racial hatred. “The danger to our community is the fact that we have no idea what the actual numbers of antisemitic hate crimes are. We’ve changed the definition in a way that makes it completely impossible to understand what's happening in the world,” says Benni Plafker, president of the Jewish Society at SOAS University of London.

Importantly, one of the most prominent risks to the safety of Jewish students at this moment in time comes from the universities themselves. This is especially true at SOAS, where a student was recently raided and arrested for speaking publicly in support of Palestine. Aria Adler*, a fellow member of the SOAS JSOC notes, “What this university has been doing to its students is absolutely disgusting. They’ve reported us to the police. They’ve suspended us. They are installing more security cameras on campus. They harass students, especially students of colour, every day. It’s a top-down disgrace.” (In a statement, SOAS denied harassing or reporting students to the police, but noted that “a small number of students who vandalised SOAS property, targeted members of our community, and disrupted teaching, creating an intolerant atmosphere on the campus, were suspended.”

SOAS has a particularly rife history with the ‘antisemitism on campus’ narrative. According to Plafker, the previous JSOC was disbanded in 2019, while the university was embroiled in controversy due to a “toxic antisemitic environment”. In 2023, Plafker registered a new SOAS Jewish Society, which, unlike its predecessor, is not affiliated with the UJS. Instead, the current JSOC describes itself as a place for “anti-Zionist Jews from other nearby universities that do not feel welcome in their Jewish Societies”. Considering SOAS’s notoriety for alleged antisemitism, it may come as a surprise to some that Plafker and Adler have had such a positive experience.

“There’s so much interest in keeping Jews afraid. A lot of the Jewish media, the mainstream media, and a lot of people on social media are very committed to this cause. But unfortunately, tactics of fear and anger and resentment are effective” – Jessie

In terms of antisemitic incidents on campus, Plafker has never experienced one at SOAS, nor have any been reported to them. That’s not to say that they rule out the idea of an incident occurring, but rather that they deny the notion that the university is a uniquely antisemitic environment. “I’ve only lived in the UK for a year and a half, and in that time, I’ve only been at SOAS,” they say. “But I’m much more comfortable being outwardly Jewish, visibly Jewish, or having people know that I’m Jewish around SOAS students than I am in pretty much any other context in this country.”

Adler, who feels the same, lays the blame at the door of the university administration, and not the students. Adam Habib, the director of the university, recently hosted a high-level meeting about antisemitism on campus, extending an invite to various Jewish academics on campus, but excluding any representation from the new JSOC. (SOAS does not deny this, but claims they met with “Jewish and Palestinian members of staff to provide reassurance”). On April 19, 2024, the university posted a job advert for a new Jewish Chaplain whose key responsibilities include supporting “the implementation of a Jewish Society within the Student Union,” showing a disregard for the current JSOC, its members and, by implication, its politics.

Institutions weaponise antisemitism for an express purpose: to continue the genocide of the Palestinian people. In order for this strategy to work, Jewish people around the world must feel as though their safety is under threat and bound together with the state of Israel. Jessie*, a member of Oxford’s JSJ, says, “There’s so much interest in keeping Jews afraid. A lot of the Jewish media, the mainstream media, and a lot of people on social media are very committed to this cause. But unfortunately, tactics of fear and anger and resentment are effective.”

However, these anti-Zionist Jewish students are breaking through this rhetoric to support the Palestinian people, even in the face of real risks to their safety. By talking to these students, I felt more Jewish than ever before, remembering the legacies of resistance and survival that have brought all of us to this point. The most antisemitic thing to me is the assumption that because I am Jewish, I must support Israel. On the contrary, because we are Jewish, we will fight every day until Palestine is free. 

*These names have been changed

The University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford’s Jewish Society have been approached for comment.

More on these topics:Life & CultureLongreadFeatureisraelPalestineactivismuniversitypoliticalOxfordCambridge