After debate, Oxford Union votes Israel is ‘apartheid’ state committing ‘genocide’
Controversial event at prestigious UK university results in 278 votes in favor, 59 votes against; Arab Israeli speaker removed after he calls audience ‘terrorist supporters’
A controversial debate held by the Oxford Union that discussed whether Israel is an “apartheid state responsible for genocide” devolved into a yelling match between speakers and attendees on Thursday. The event took place under tight security, as protesters demonstrated outside the building.
After the debate, the union voted on the proposition, “This House Believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide,” with 278 votes in favor and 59 votes against.
The Oxford Union is a student society located in Oxford, England, and is made up almost entirely of students at the prestigious Oxford University, widely regarded as one of the best institutes for higher education in the world.
Thursday’s debate featured several prominent speakers on both sides of the topic, including pro-Israel advocates Natasha Hausdorff, a British lawyer, Jonathan Sacerdoti, a British journalist who covers the UK and Europe for i24 News, as well as Arab Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad, and former Hamas member-turned Israeli spy Mosab Hassan Yousef.
Arguing against Israel were US political scientist and anti-Israel activist Norman Finkelstein, Israeli-American activist and author Miko Peled, Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa, and Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer and poet.
According to Oxford University’s student newspaper, Cherwell, the debate featured intense heckling and argument, with one audience member calling Sacerdoti a “sick motherfucker” and a “genocidal maniac” while the journalist was giving his position.
Absolutely packed tonight at the Oxford Union Society debate and hundreds outside. pic.twitter.com/aVQv239oq4
— James J. Marlow (@James_J_Marlow) November 28, 2024
Cherwell reported that Peled said during the debate, “What happened on October 7th was not terrorism — these were acts of heroism of a people who were oppressed,” and called for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”
The ongoing war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre, which saw some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians, many amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
For her part, Abulhawa told the crowd that she “came to speak directly to Zionists: we let you into our homes when your own countries turned you away. You killed and robbed and burned and looted our lives, you carved out our hearts.”
The Palestinian poet El-Kurd argued that Zionism is “irredeemable and indefensible,” and said that if the union voted in favor of calling Israel an apartheid state committing genocide, “it means that this body is catching up to the moral clarity of the global majority. It is about time and about 70 years too late.”
Speaking against the proposition, meanwhile, Haddad was kicked out of the chamber for lack of decorum after calling the audience “terrorist supporters” when they booed him during his argument. As he was escorted out, the Arab-Israeli activist put on a shirt with the face of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with the caption, “Your terrorist is dead.”
Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad was kicked out of an Oxford Union debate on Thursday as speakers debated a motion titled, “This House Believes Israel Is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.” pic.twitter.com/XnO5bJCW6I
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) November 29, 2024
Pro-Israel speaker Hausdorff called the debate a “dark moment in the Oxford Union’s history,” and said that the accusation of genocide against Israel is a “slur being alleged against the real victims of genocide in this case.”
Yousef, the disowned eldest son of the co-founder of Hamas who has become a pro-Israel activist, reportedly told the crowd, “Palestinians are the most pathetic people on planet Earth,” and insisted that Palestinians are “a false identity”
At the end of the debate, the union voted in favor of the resolution 278 to 59, officially labeling Israel as apartheid and genocidal.
The union has a track record of contentious debates on Israel. In 1962, for instance, it debated whether “The Creation of the State of Israel is One of the Mistakes of the Century.” Decades later, the students were still debating whether, as a 2008 motion put it, “This house believes that the State of Israel has a right to exist.”
Over the years, union members have also overwhelmingly backed motions accusing Israel’s supporters of “stifling Western debate.”
But anti-Israel activists haven’t had it their way on every occasion. In 2015, for instance, the US lawyer Alan Dershowitz won a debate on whether the BDS movement against Israel was wrong.
Two years before that, the union rejected a motion that argued Israel is “a force for good in the Middle East,” although pro-Israel students delighted in the narrowness of their defeat, suggesting that “to get nearly 40 percent support for Israel at a British university in this day and age is a triumph.”
