Righteous fury over Gaza must allow empathy for fearful Jewish students

  • 5/12/2024
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Moral logic that seems crystal clear on paper often becomes murkier on contact with reality. So it is with the question of how to pick a path through the right to protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the rise in antisemitism that has been seen across Europe since Hamas committed the terrorist atrocities of 7 October 2023. Last week, the focus was on university campuses, as Rishi Sunak convened a roundtable of vice-chancellors at Number 10. In theory, the guardrail is straightforward: people’s democratic rights to protest must be protected, but any spillover into antisemitism is to be loudly condemned. However, putting this into practice has proved more complex. There is a historic problem of antisemitism in British higher education that – reflecting the pattern of antisemitism across society more broadly – has spiked since the Hamas attack. Last year, 182 antisemitic incidents in higher education were reported to the Community Security Trust, an increase of more than 200% from 2022. The vast majority occurred after 7 October, and the sharp increase in societal antisemitism happened after Hamas had attacked Israel but before Israel launched its counteroffensive. At Downing Street, Edward Isaacs, the president of the Union of Jewish Students, described how some members have received death threats, been physically assaulted or have had their property damaged in recent months. UCL has felt the need to post security guards around its school of Hebrew and Jewish studies; at Leeds University, the Jewish chaplain has received threats and a Jewish building was vandalised with graffiti. I have Jewish friends who are not prone to hyperbole who say that evidence of campus antisemitism will be a factor in conversations with their teenagers about where they should apply to university. This growing problem has quite understandably framed the tortured conversations we have also been having about protest. Talk of shutting down legitimate protest that falls short of antisemitism because of the way it makes other people feel sets a dangerous democratic precedent and would be counter-productive. But I challenge anyone to read accounts from affected Jewish students and feel anything other than empathy, not just for the outright and thus clearly identifiable incidents of antisemitism which some of them have experienced, but because some of what they describe is social ostracism and being made to feel unwelcome in a community because they don’t share a particular worldview, a fact that for many is intimately related to their ethnicity and family histories. Framing this purely as an issue of free speech in our universities and society more widely – as important as that is – leaves us ill-equipped to understand this because the limits imposed on free speech and protest should be as minimal as possible. Not making someone feel welcome is not unlawful, or a matter for the police, or even – unless it constitutes bullying – regulations. It is a matter of culture, of tolerance for diverse perspectives that has to be built bottom up, not imposed through top-down rulebooks. That tolerance is by definition harder to find at the heart of a university encampment, because these are people taking action because they passionately share one worldview. Their cause may be righteous, but that is rarely the end of it; most of us have multifaceted motivations for taking part in protest, which might include the thrill of feeling like a good person; the warm glow of collective endeavour; the enjoyment of a day out with friends. Nothing wrong with that; partly selfish motivations do not make a protest badly intentioned and are very different from those of a small minority who might use it as a cover for antisemitism. But they do create a responsibility to keep an eye on whether our “in-group” energy is creating unnecessarily unpleasant externalities for others, and to consider if we can reduce them. For example, in the debate about gender and sex, I sometimes feel uncomfortable about the way people I agree with express things, not because they are saying anything wrong or prejudiced, but because saying something differently might reduce the levels of hurt in the conversation. Yet I can also see why this might be resisted after calls to “be kind” have been linked to attempts to bully people out of the democratic sphere by falsely accusing them of bigotry. The black-and-white projections some try to cast on to the Gaza campus protests – and it is important to note the encampments in the UK are on a much smaller scale than in the US – seem to be widely off the mark. These students are neither the moral arbiters of our age, nor engaged in an endeavour that is somehow inherently antisemitic, and it seems strange to expect them to model how to talk about conflict well for the rest of us. On antisemitism on campus, the Union of Jewish Students describes a perceived lack of allyship. I suspect the bystander effect contributes to this: is it OK to call out someone being unkind to a Jewish student who doesn’t share the majority campus view on Israel, or does it mean you don’t care about the children killed in Gaza? But this way dehumanisation lies: once it becomes acceptable to be mean to someone because your cause justifies it, it eats away at your empathy. One example of protest curdling into something deeply nasty is the treatment of Eden Golan, the Israeli contestant in this weekend’s Eurovision contest. Sure, people have a right to protest against Israel’s inclusion in the contest. But it was horrible to see the level of ire focused on a 20-year-old performer, to the extent that she was advised to stay in her hotel room outside her performances, and other contestants felt justified in being publicly unkind to her, including issuing clarifying statements that being caught on video interacting with her did not mean they endorsed the government of the country she is representing. (Why on earth would it?) Some would argue that it is navel-gazing even to think about what’s happening in London or Malmö in the context of a brutal conflict that has created so much terrible devastation and pain on both sides. But I think that what is being projected on to 20-year-olds – whether they are student protesters or Eurovision contestants – reveals something important about our own understanding about what it might mean to live in a society that is both empathetic and pluralistic, and how this isn’t as easy to achieve as we might like to think. Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

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