Top UK university to debate if Israel is ‘an apartheid state responsible for genocide’
The exclusive Oxford Union society, which has hosted US presidents, celebrities and neo-Nazis, again courts controversy this week; its track record on Israel isn’t friendly
Robert Philpot is a writer and journalist. He is the former editor of Progress magazine and the author of “Margaret Thatcher: The Honorary Jew.”
LONDON — From Mother Theresa and Albert Einstein to Muammar Gaddafi and O.J. Simpson, the Oxford Union — an esteemed student debating society at arguably the UK’s top university — has hosted the good, the bad and the ugly.
The Union’s commitment to free speech and its willingness to court controversy will be in evidence again on November 28 when it stages a debate entitled “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide.”
The debate, which is likely to attract a packed audience of Oxford University students, will see the US political scientist Norman Finkelstein, Israeli-American activist and author Miko Peled, Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa, and Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer, poet and activist, face off against British barrister Natasha Hausdorff and Jonathan Sacerdoti, a British journalist who covers the UK and Europe for i24 News.
The backdrop is inauspicious: This spring and summer, noisy anti-Israel protests against the war in Gaza led to the cancellation of some exams and saw Israeli and Jewish students the target of “venomous hostility and threatening behavior,” in the words of UK Lawyers for Israel.
Even when it was first suggested in the summer, this week’s debate attracted controversy, with Gerald Steinberg, founder of the pro-Israel lobby group NGO Monitor, publishing an open letter rejecting an invitation from the Union to speak. “Although your invitation refers only to Israel, I assume that the Oxford Union would not contribute once again to poisonous hatred by joining those who immorally single-out Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people, for demonization,” Steinberg wrote. Steinberg also challenged the Union to lay out what it was doing to counter the “ugly display of abusive power” directed against Jewish students and faculty at the university.
The Union has a track record when it comes to 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.”
The US conservative writer and talk show host Dennis Prager, who spoke at the Union in 2014 in defense of Israel, has written of his initial confusion at reading the title of the motion he had been asked to debate: “Hamas is a greater obstacle to peace than Israel.”
“Outside of the Muslim world and the far left,” he wrote after the debate, “who would even think to argue that Hamas is not the greater obstacle to peace?” Prager’s confusion wasn’t eased by the outcome of the debate — students voted by a comfortable margin against the motion, deciding that Israel, not Hamas, was the true stumbling block to peace.
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 previously, 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% support for Israel at a British university in this day and age is a triumph.”
A political finishing school
Founded over two centuries ago as a secret society which would debate topics banned for discussion by Oxford University, the Union is the political finishing school in which future prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and journalists hone their skills and cut their teeth. Past presidents of the Union include the former prime ministers Henry Herbert Asquith, Ted Heath, and Boris Johnson; opposition leaders Michael Foot and William Hague; and Times editor William Rees-Mogg and legendary BBC broadcaster Robin Day.
It is also renowned for its ability to attract top-shelf speakers to debate before its members. US presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have all spoken at the Union, with Richard Nixon receiving a famously warm welcome in 1978 when he issued his first public apology for Watergate four years after resigning from the presidency.
Away from the world of politics, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Stephen Hawking have spoken at the Union, as have Morgan Freeman, Natalie Portman, Michael Jackson and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
Inevitably, however, some hot-button topics and controversial speakers have provoked protests and accusations that the Union doesn’t know where to draw a line. These controversies range across topics far beyond Israel.
In 1933, for instance, Union members overwhelmingly passed an infamous motion declaring: “This House Will under no circumstances fight for its King and its Country.” Passage of the motion caused uproar in the press with future prime minister Winston Churchill declaring it an “abject, squalid, shameless avowal.”
In his denunciation of this week’s Israel debate, Steinberg pointedly noted that the 1933 debate took place in the wake of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler coming to power and the unleashing of antisemitic legislation targeting Germany’s Jews. However, a student who supported the motion, the conservative Jewish historian Max Beloff, recalled in the 1980s that, at the time, the debate was less about the threat of Nazi Germany than the horrors of the trenches and World War I.
Three decades later, in December 1964, Malcolm X delivered a speech defending extremism as the Union debated recently defeated US presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s declaration, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Malcolm X, a leader of the Nation of Islam, had gained notoriety the previous year when he responded to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy by remarking: “A case of chickens coming home to roost.” His speech at Oxford was no less eyebrow-raising. “A better world has to be built and the only way it’s going to be built is with extreme methods,” he told the students. But while his speech earned prolonged and loud applause, the motion itself was defeated.
Open doors for terrorists
The Union has also not shied away from opening its doors to those associated with terrorism. In 1987, Gerry Adams, the president of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, spoke in a debate about the use of violence for political ends, stoking a media storm and the withdrawal of other speakers. Adams was heavily defeated in the debate.
As the historian Dr. Evan Smith, who has written extensively about political extremism, has detailed, far-right figures have also frequently received invites from the Union to speak. In 1957, for instance, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the prewar British Union of Fascists, was invited to debate the Soviet Union’s presence in Eastern Europe. Three years later, he was back debating whether apartheid South Africa could remain a member of the Commonwealth (an association of former territories of the British Empire). A further invitation to debate on the topic was issued in 1961. Colin Jordan, leader of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, was invited to speak in 1966, although, fearing disruption by opponents, the invite was later rescinded.
As Smith notes, the Oxford Union wasn’t the only prestigious university debating society to open its doors to fascists in the name of free speech. In 1954, for instance, the Cambridge Union invited Mosley to speak, while Jordan spoke at Southampton University in 1965. “Mosley and Jordan… used these speaking events as opportunities to legitimize themselves and their ideologies,” Smith writes in an article about the topic.
More recently, the Oxford Union faced protests when it invited David Irving, the discredited Holocaust-denying historian, to speak in 2001. While that invite ended up being pulled due to pressure from academics and students, Irving did speak at the Union six years later alongside the then-leader of the far-right British National party, Nick Griffin, in a debate on free speech. The invites were opposed by the Union of Jewish Students and the debate was disrupted when protesters broke through a police cordon and staged a sit-down protest in the debating chamber.
More than 15 years later, the question of free speech on campuses in Britain remains a hot political topic. The new Labour government decided when it took office in July to pause legislation passed by the Conservatives which, its supporters argue, is designed to protect academics from “cancel culture.” But the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who says she is considering repealing the act, believes the act “could expose students to harm and appalling hate speech on campuses.” The decision was welcomed at the time by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which said it supported the Union of Jewish Students’ concerns about how the act could potentially prevent universities from clamping down on antisemitic extremists.
Oxford University itself is currently in the throes of an election for its new chancellor, with the former Labour cabinet minister Peter Mandelson and former Conservative foreign secretary William Hague the front-runners. Although now largely a symbolic role, the post stretches back at least 800 years and the person who fills it is picked by over 30,000 students, staff and alumni. Both Mandelson (whose father was Jewish) and Hague are strong opponents of antisemitism and supporters of Israel.
Speaking to Channel 4 News last week, Hague said that students at university should “debate the great issues of the time” and “listen to points of view that make you uncomfortable.” When questioned, however, he said that the use of the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine should be free” in a speech was not a legitimate expression and was antisemitic. “You have to allow, wherever you can, freedom of speech and expression,” Hague, now a member of the House of Lords, said. “Sometimes you have to be generous with those limits, but not practicing or advocating violence.”
The political temperature on British campuses concerning Israel is already high. This week’s Oxford Union debate on the Jewish state seems designed to spark the kind of furor in which, history suggests, the exclusive debating club revels.
