Alarming show of student bigotry

The bigoted conduct of University of Sydney students who turned their backs on their Jewish peers on Wednesday night is a wake-up call as to how deeply anti-Semitism has penetrated our society, including among educated young people. The incident, at a general meeting of the university’s student representative council, underlined the necessity of the work of the Dor (Hebrew for generation) Foundation, launched by Josh Frydenberg and non-executive company director Elana Rubin with a board of prominent, successful Jewish and non-Jewish leaders. Its goal is to build tolerance, understanding and social cohesion – qualities that were badly missing at the Sydney University meeting of more than 200 young people. The Jewish students bravely exercised their right to free speech, pleading for support to stamp out anti-Semitism on campus and defending Israel’s right to exist. “We need your help – you’re meant to stand for solidarity for minority groups on campus,” undergraduate Jack Mars said. The hostility of most students at the meeting for those objectives reveals a deep, dangerous fissure among some young Australians, and most likely abysmal ignorance of the history of the past 80 years, especially in Germany and across Europe in the 1930s and 40s.

Regrettably, the meeting voted almost unanimously to reject the university’s definition of anti-Semitism, claiming it was “not anti-Semitic to call for the elimination of the apartheid state of Israel”. One anti-Israel speaker said: “We will force our government to end their support for this genocide. From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free.” It was only the sixth student general meeting in the university’s 175-year history but the second meeting in the past 10 months calling for the elimination of Israel. Last year, Students Against War distributed pamphlets bearing the Hamas symbol. “There is no such thing as a two-state solution,” the group claimed. “The only ­solution is a one-state solution” and there was “no such thing as Jewish self-determination in ­Israel”.

Such clarion calls fly in the face of the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by Universities Australia’s 39 members in February. They agreed that criticism of Israel “can be anti-Semitic when … it calls for the elimination of the state of Israel or all Jews or when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions”. Jewish students, like all students, need to feel and be safe everywhere on campus, not just in “safe rooms” such as at Macquarie University that can highlight their vulnerability and breed further intolerance. As Western Sydney University chancellor and Dors board member Jennifer Westacott wrote last year, academic freedom and freedom of speech, while critically important, come with responsibilities: “Civility, respect and tolerance are the greatest freedoms of all; they are the bedrock of our democracy and the bedrock of our cohesive society. We must never take them for granted and we must act now to stop their erosion.”