Antisemitism on University Campuses

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I first spoke on this topic in this House in 2007. Even more sadly, we have just marked 80 years since the liberation of Belsen and there have re-emerged some of the same hatreds and moral inversions. By that I mean that the victims have been painted as killers and the tragedy of the Shoah is downplayed.

I give a university example: 18 student bodies have decided to support the legal action to decriminalise Hamas. St Antony’s College in Oxford chooses to host a Mr Mishra, whose theme is that the underlying problem of the West is its sanctification of the Holocaust at the expense of colonialism. The lecturers and their union, the UCU, which should be supporting affected students, are themselves the aggressors. The local branch in Oxford voted for a motion calling for a third intifada until victory. Israel is not the problem, it is the excuse to persecute Jewish students.

The situation is deteriorating, and no remedial action has been taken. I have little faith in inquiries. We know what the situation is; we know what the remedies might be, and we need implementation and enforcement. We need no more hand-wringing or robotic statements from vice-chancellors that

“there is no place for antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian discrimination, or hate directed towards any faith, race, nationality, or ethnic group”

at their universities.

Dehumanisation of Jewish students in many campuses has now become so deeply embedded that people feel no shame in excluding Jewish students from gatherings, mocking them by reverting to centuries-old slurs and turning the Holocaust against them. Students in London have seen swastikas carved in front of them. At UCL, Jewish students were told that Israel killed its own people: a widespread reference to the lie that the 7 October massacre was staged to provoke a war against Gaza—or just staged.

What is common is the universities’ failure to take action. They could rely on the Protection from Harassment Act, the Public Order Act, the Malicious Communications Act, the Terrorism Act and the Equality Act, remembering that freedom of speech ends where hate speech and incitement to violence start. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act would at least help Jewish student societies’ speakers be heard and would not open the door to Holocaust denial and so on, because other laws do that.

It is impossible to imagine that sanctions would not be imposed were the targets of these hateful actions black or other ethnic minorities. The Government and the Office for Students should not hesitate to fine universities that tolerate this hatred and break the law. Staff and students who behave like this should be expelled or suspended. Universities’ funding of student unions should be leveraged to ensure legal behaviour.

The root of the behaviour is religious teaching that Jews are inferior. It demonstrates the failure of Holocaust education, which focuses on dead Jews as a feature of the past and has nothing to say about the long history of antisemitism and the focus of antisemitism today; namely, the State of Israel. As the late and much-missed Lord Sacks pointed out, hatred of Israel is today’s variant of antisemitism. That is what the students have not realised. They need education from school up and they need to know national and government disapproval.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wolfson of Tredegar (Con)]

My Lords, if you were a student attending Bristol University on 20 March this year—I pick a date more or less at random—you would have had the usual cornucopia of choices as to how to spend your evening. These were just a few of your options. You could have attended the French society’s games night and pub crawl, meeting at the Steam pub at 7 pm. The Christian union was holding a prayer hour at the Bristol International Student Centre and then its annual general meeting at Alma church at 6 pm. The Jewish society was holding a film screening at 6.30 pm at the JSoc house. However, unless you knew where that is, you would not have known where to go. That is because addresses for the meetings of the Jewish society, unlike those of other societies and groups, are not publicised in advance. You will not find the address on the website of the student union or on Instagram, as you would all the other locations. Instead, to get the address of the Jewish society meeting, you would need be on a private, by invitation-only WhatsApp group. It is private so that the members of the Jewish society know who is coming. That is not because they are doing anything nefarious—they were watching a film—but simply because they want to be safe. Yes, this is life as a Jewish student at our universities in 2025—addresses for meetings passed around on a need-to-know basis.

I have seen that done before when I was at university, but not at the university I attended. I saw it when I travelled as a student to visit Jewish students and dissidents—they were called refuseniks—in the former Soviet Union. They too passed around the addresses of where they were going to meet on a need-to-know basis—Moscow University 1988, Bristol University 2025.

While I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, for initiating this debate with a very fine speech—we have heard many good speeches—I am afraid that we have made many of these points before. Here we are again, with the situation getting worse and not better. I know that we have heard these points before because my first speech in this House as a Minister was in Grand Committee replying to a debate on the same topic. While on one footing it is better that we are now doing it in the Chamber and not in Grand Committee, I would far rather that we did not need to have the debate at all.

As a number of noble Lords have pointed out, we do need this debate because, as today’s StandWithUs report makes clear, the position faced by Jewish students at UK universities is getting worse, not better. The University Jewish Chaplaincy provides excellent pastoral care, and the Union of Jewish Students does fantastic work, but they are literally on the front line, day in, day out.

When a Jewish student sees a banner, “No Zionists on campus”, she will read it as “No Jews on campus”, because the overwhelming majority of Jews in this country, and therefore the overwhelming majority of Jewish students, are Zionist: they believe, as I do, in the right of Jewish self-determination, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, reminded us, is the only thing that Zionism actually means. When Jewish students have to run the gauntlet of a protest camp, as they did at Cambridge, and they see the university authorities doing absolutely nothing for far too long, they will draw the obvious conclusion.

If noble Lords will allow me a very short digression, what really annoyed me about that protest camp at Cambridge was the sheer ignorance on display. They thought they were being clever by having a big sign in Hebrew and English with the famous words from Deuteronomy, chapter 16, verse 20:

“Justice, justice thou shalt pursue”.


They obviously did not read the second half of the same verse. It carries on:

“that you may live and possess the land”—

we all know what land is being referred to—

“which the Lord your God is giving you”.

Let me be clear: denying Jewish students the right publicly to identify as Zionists, when, for many, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity, is a form of religious and cultural discrimination. It is also probably illegal, but this should not be a question of legal compulsion or demanding special treatment. I would simply like to see a day when Jewish societies can publicise the addresses for their meetings in the same way that everyone else does. It boils down to this: a university where Jewish students are not welcome, or are made to feel that they are not, is an institution that has entirely forfeited its right to call itself a university.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, may I apologise for not having mentioned my interest as a member of the UJS advisory council? I am sorry; I should have done so.