Jewish groups turn on Sydney University

A rare coalition of Australia’s peak Jewish groups says it has ‘lost confidence’ in the University of Sydney to provide for the safety of Jewish people.

A Jewish Sydney University student in the Quadrangle who is afraid to reveal his identity and is considering transferring to another university. Picture: John Feder

A rare coalition of Australia’s peak Jewish groups says it has “lost confidence” in the University of Sydney to provide for the safety of Jewish people, and that the organisations “stand ready to provide support to Jewish students and staff … who now wish to leave the university”.

The move follows the university’s controversial agreement with the Muslim students society, which defied university orders to pack up its pro-Palestine encampment protest and has been implicated with extremist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir.

In a significant escalation of pressure on Australia’s oldest university, six Jewish organisations, including some of the most powerful in the country – the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, the Zionist Federation of Australia, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Anti-Semitism, and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council – said they were “appalled and deeply concerned” by the university’s agreement.

“Many of the protesters were from outside the university, yet they were allowed to menace the university community and disturb campus life without challenge,” their joint statement reads.

“They have now been ­rewarded for doing so.”

The groups said they had rejected the University of Sydney’s offer to participate in a working group to review defence and security related investments and called on others not to partake in the “sham” and “fundamentally flawed process”.

The university has pledged to grant a seat on that working group to the Sydney University Muslim Students Association under last week’s agreement. It has also promised a suite of other measures in return for an end to the encampment protest after almost two months.

Those measures include a pledge to disclose defence and security related investments and research ties and to double its expenditure to support academics under its scholars-at-risk program with a particular focus on Palestinians.

The agreement came a week after the university ordered the campers off the lawns, threatening that failure to comply with directions to leave would constitute an offence. Everyone but the Sydney University Muslim Students Association left following that order. That group defied orders and camped out another week until the agreement was struck.

They said in a statement last week that this defiance “worked in our favour across many fronts, most particularly being the catalyst for negotiations with the uni”.

The Jewish groups said the agreement would “only act as an incentive for further and more extreme disruption at the university in the future”.

“Based on our interactions to date, we have lost confidence in the capacity of the university to provide for the physical, cultural and psychosocial safety of Jewish students and staff members.

“This is not just our view. We have been made aware that several academic staff, some of them leaders in their fields and employees of long standing, have already notified the university of their decision to leave the institution. We have also been informed that a number of Jewish students are now considering shifting to other universities.

“We have also rejected the university’s offer, extended to us after an agreement had been reached behind our backs, to participate in the proposed process to review the university’s investment and research activities. “The process is in our view a sham and we will have nothing to do with it. We encourage individuals and groups of standing likewise not to engage with or lend credibility to such a fundamentally flawed process.

“We continue to explore all options to ensure the safety and wellbeing of students and staff at the University of Sydney and stand ready to provide support and assistance to Jewish students and staff at the university, as well as those who now wish to leave the university.”

The University of Sydney has repeatedly said the working group will not review the university’s research activity.

When contacted for a response to the letter, a university spokeswoman said: “These are deeply challenging times and we recognise the significant distress relating to this conflict and also the way the university has managed the encampment.

“We deliberately took time to listen and understand our community’s concerns with the intention of coming to a peaceful resolution.

“We are pleased the encampment was resolved without violence. The ending of the encampment is the first step, and we know we need to work hard to rebuild our relationships with some members of our university community.”

One Jewish student at the University of Sydney, Zac, told The Australian that he was considering transferring following the last few months of tensions on campus. He did not want his face photographed or his surname published for fear of reprisal.

“I’ve been harassed,” he said. “They had a protest. I was filming the protest just in case anything happened. I got told I wasn’t welcome here and that I had to leave – I said, I’m a student at the university and they didn’t care. And I got pictured and posted on Instagram and they called me a ‘Zio’.”

Zac said the university’s deal with protesters announced last Friday confirmed to him that the university “didn’t care about me personally”.

“I guess the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If they complain loudly enough, it doesn’t necessarily mean their opinion’s right or anything they do is right. They’re just the loudest.

“I’ve looked into it a lot, into transferring to UNSW, or UTS, or Macquarie. When you don’t feel comfortable walking around campus, and your classes are on campus, and there are people who you thought were friends who now you don’t talk to or they don’t talk to you, it sort of makes it hard to want to keep coming to uni.”

The Sydney University Muslim Students Association did not respond to a request for comment.