This influential pro-Israel group is legitimizing the Gaza genocide on British campuses

We are no longer able to ignore institutions operating across British university campuses that seek to insulate Israel from critique. Like the many “charitable” British institutions that have been flagged as complicit in Israel’s colonial project, hasbara hubs operating across British universities are also implicated in rationalizing Israel’s Zionist project. Furthering the de-legitimization of Palestinian narratives and deflecting from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, they provide the necessary rationale and distraction for “unfinished Zionist business.”[1]  

British campuses now form an epicenter of resistance to the genocide, but for some time, they have also figured as key sites for the management of Israel’s legitimacy. Pro-Israel advocates have long inferred that the boycott movement comprises “pro-Palestinian troublemakers” who are “importing divisions” onto British campuses. Yet this conveniently sidesteps the spectrum of invested communities seeking to uphold Israel’s expansionist endeavor whose commitments are a priori inscribed into campus life. One such community, often overlooked for various reasons, is the Union of Jewish Students (UJS).

The Union of Jewish Students, the self-proclaimed representative body for over 9,000 Jewish students in the United Kingdom and Ireland, is a key cog but often unscrutinized player in British Zionist hasbara politics. Its Israel advocacy is well-known. Like many of its parent bodies, it is preoccupied with the management of Israel’s legitimacy by “explaining away” and deflecting from Israel’s coloniality. Their settler-colonial links often escape scrutiny, are dwarfed by bigger friends of Israel, or remain buried under unfounded charges of antisemitism, as in the case of Professor David Miller.

The very tangible links between the UJS and its Israeli sponsors have been dismissed as a vague association or a “four times removed connection between a JSoc [Jewish Students Society] in Bristol and the World Zionist Organization.” One might consider such assertions evasive, representing something of an inversion of the antisemitic conspiracies of which Miller has been deemed guilty.

Likewise, the Community Security Trust (CST) insists the UJS is a “Union for Jewish students” rather than an “agent for Israel,” an accusation also listed as an example of antisemitism. 

But of course, few people would maintain the latter. The UJS is not an “agent” of Israel, but it is committed to Israel. Certainly, in its capacity as a union, the UJS provides core services for its membership, which has diversified over the years — but this pastoral element is arguably surpassed by its Zionist leanings, an outcome of the intimate and reciprocal relation with the Zionist movement through Israel’s “quasi-governmental” institutions[2], which function to uphold Israel’s settler colonial occupation. 

Looking past customary deflections, it is clear that the UJS is both a beneficiary of and embedded within a Zionist settler colonial movement through which Israel’s prerogatives are invariably, albeit not always successfully, upheld. 

Revisiting these external links, I trace how they manifest in their institutional commitments and remain normalized within the fabric of campus life. For some, involvement in such organizations can mean the beginning of lifelong careerist trajectories in sync with Israel’s colonial endeavor.

‘Enduring commitments’

Like any other student collective, the UJS is neither homogeneous nor monolithic in membership. However, despite the odd anti-Zionist candidate and signs of dissent, its prescribed organizational remit means there is a uniformly pro-Israel outlook reflected in its institutional links, campaigns, conference motions, and electoral outcomes. While its membership rotates, its institutional commitments do not waver against its (pro)Israeli sponsors and a highly partisan executive structure, currently led by Arieh Miller, who was formerly employed by the Zionist Federation and the Israeli Embassy.

This pro-Israel skew is evidenced by UJS’s largest funders. The United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA), the UK branch of the Keren Hayesod, is the backbone of Israel’s economy. It is also possibly the main source of the UJS’s funding. The Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) and Community Security Trust (CST), and allegedly the Israeli Embassy, also fund the UJS, as do other “charitable” trusts/trustees believed to have highly dubious investments in “right-wing” think tanks.

Enshrined in its constitution, the UJS professes an “enduring commitment” to Israel and maintains this in its four core principles. Its efforts on this front are well recognized and rewarded within global and national student circles. 

This explains why the tenor of accepted union policy may, at times, read remotely sympathetic, at least to (newer forms of) Palestinian dispossession, it does not translate into a defining institutional position. 

Settler-colonial networks

UJS’s historical and contemporary ties to Israel’s national institutions provide the central plank for its advocacy — the World Zionist Organization (WZO), the Jewish Agency, and the Keren Hayesod. These are the founding institutions of Israel’s settler colonial and apartheid regime.

From its earliest configuration, the UJS was a constituent member of the World Zionist Organization. UJS’s parent body, B’nai B’rith, and the WUJS (World Union of Jewish Students), to which the UJS is party, both squarely fall within the WZO as direct members and Hasbara advocates.

Although a national institution of Zionist settler colonialism, the Jewish Agency has a strong diasporic presence. Historically it played a pivotal role in establishing Israel, notoriously through its  “Population Transfer” Committee[3]. Ever since, it has been integral to realizing the Zionist dream of aliyah (immigration to Israel) and the establishment of a Jewish ethno-state. It offers Jews worldwide a stress-free relocation package and facilitates the maintenance of  “Jewish domination”[4] across Israel and the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Normalizing settler colonialism on campus

It is quite something, then, to learn that the Agency plays an active and integral role in the life of the UJS, so integral that the UJS is home for two, sometimes three, of the Agency’s schlichim (emissaries), who are also IDF-trained campus fellows and sit directly within the UJS Executive body.

Agency schlichim, alongside JSoc sabbatical officers, engage Jewish students from the moment they step foot on campus, and are recipients of UJS annual ‘Israel Engagement’ Awards. 

Much like settler-chaplains working in British universities, these IDF-trained emissaries are very much Israel’s “in-house” advocates who assume a student “support” function that some might consider far exceeds their “pastoral” role of cultivating a “living connection” to Israel. An analogous scenario involving any member of the Palestinian resistance sitting on the executive body of a Palestinian, Muslim, or solidarity student union would raise more than eyebrows.

This signals the way pro-Israeli institutions remain integrated and normalized within British higher education, with little of the scandal and surveillance associated with their pro-Palestinian, especially Muslim, counterparts. 

The recent case of IDF reservist and Chaplain Zecharia Deutsche serving Leeds and other Northern Universities has spotlighted the embedded infrastructure of pro-Israel institutions, and their urgency to entrench their position, within British higher education. 

In one way or another, these institutions sustain UJS’s commitment to Israel within Higher education. Campus security (CST) Chaplaincy services (UJC) and campus-based ‘educational thinktanks’  privilege a Zionist framework where advocating for Israel remains a prerequisite for inclusion in the Jewish Zionist student community. Non- Zionist Jewish students calling for a ceasefire in Gaza have been virtually ex-communicated, ostracised, and excluded from stated pastoral remits. This reflects political objectives, not the prioritization of welfare, often projected on behalf of Jewish students.

No less influential in exerting pressure, and (in)directly aiding JSOCs on campus, however, are the assembly of external bodies, agitating to quell anti-Zionist activity and delegitimize Palestinian voices, often by litigious means. 

Hasbara on campus

How these intimate ties to Israel translate into institutional commitments is indicated by the portfolio of “Israel Engagement,” “Incubator” programmes,” the role in anti-BDS initiatives, IHRA campaigns, and Birthright tours.

Perhaps the most egregious of commitments are the Birthright tours, a UJS fixture since 1999. Despite new Israeli settlements being prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, UJS’s itinerary has come to include new settlements, including controversial sites of settler land-grab. The unease (CA2) it has generated amongst some students has been ignored and leadership delegations have continued, even amidst the ongoing genocide. 

However, even campaigns that do not directly relate to “Israel engagement” are circumscribed by pro-Israel prerogatives. This is most obviously evidenced in UJS’s “relentless campaigning” across universities to adopt the highly contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, widely evidenced as instrumental to repressing anti-Zionist critiques.  

This Israel-heavy skew bears out in UJS’s scale of expenditure. In 2018-19, of UJS’s reported annual budget of 1 million GBP, 15% was allocated to ‘Israel Engagement’ and 25% to ‘Campaigns’ featuring a predominantly anti-BDS outlook. At this point, the overall budget pertaining directly to Israel was in excess of Jewish welfare (‘Life on campus’) and broader services, meriting 12% and 15% respectively. Whilst the focus on welfare appears to have since expanded, so too, if only marginally, has its budget on “Israel Engagement.” One might consider this a welfare issue.

Compared with other student unions, this scope of funding and support from (quasi)statist and British institutions are unparalleled. Yet, paradoxically, despite this degree of investment, it does not signal UJS’s efficacy as an advocacy group on campus. Rather, where they arguably find favor, lies in the status they occupy within university spaces, as students, and the attendant (affective) politics of “feeling safe,” routinely harnessed in campaigns to intimidate Israel’s critics. The impact of this strategy in shaping campus relations historically and constraining the scope for Palestinian activism is yet to be fully acknowledged. 

The East is a career

While it is clear that the UJS is anchored to Israel’s quasi-national institutions, it is also host to numerous beneficiaries of a pro-Zionist careerism. 

Through an active pro-Israel campus coterie, hasbara culture is rewarded and upgraded for life-long candidates. During and long after their departure from campus, Israel’s most ardent advocates provide a stream of labor into pro-Zionist institutions in Britain and Israel, including advocacy thinktanks, the Knesset, and the IDF, as UJS are proud to declare.

This is why allusions to the UJS as “Pawns of Israel,” or as “infiltrated by the Israeli lobby” remain at best partial, not only because they infer a lack of agency amongst activists and characterize the lobby as “Israel meddling in British politics,” but because they submerge the way Israel’s endeavor, reminiscent of Europe’s colonialism in the “East,” is in its widest sense something of a career.

The recently suspended mouthpiece for Israel’s genocide, British-Israeli settler Eylon Levy, is just one example of a UJS executive member “progressing,” or rather failing, in pro-Zionist institutions. There are many others whose trajectory from the UJS to pro-Israel establishment politics has not gone unnoticed. 

These obvious examples should not eclipse the diffuse nature of Zionist advocacy across a range of well-documented “civil society” networks and the even wider range of non-Jewish right-wing collectives that have extended their unequivocal allyship on campus. This represents a distinct political alignment that prevails in the establishment, although remains widely undisclosed.

If the dismantling of Israel’s punitive regime is to begin with arms embargoes and calls for divestment, it can only end by decolonizing Zionist institutions that sustain its settler-colonial logic.

It is worth learning from historical example. In the early seventies, expressions of support for Palestinian emancipation in the wider Zionist student movement (then deemed radical) were swiftly quashed by the World Zionist Organization, leaving them ostracized and under-funded to the point of dissolution.[5] At this juncture, Jewish students condemned “the attempt to create artificial student bodies” and the “imposition of the Israeli party structure on Jewish…student movements in particular.”[6] These were, it seems, unplanted seeds for a future that might have shed the role of upholding Israel’s colonial project. That decolonial future is still to be realized, but first, those ties must be dissolved.

For Nadine Abdel-Latif and the children of Gaza. 

Appreciation to my Reviewers. Any errors are mine.

Notes

[1] Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, p. 221

[2] David Miller at al, What Is Islamophobia? pp. 23-25.

[3] Jeff Halper, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine, p. 62.

[4] Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed, p.7.

[5] Julian Voloj, “Einstein’s Children: Chapters in the History of the European Union of Jewish Students,” p. 76.

[6] Ibid, p.87, fn.10