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.