Baroness Deech (CB)

My Lords, I first spoke on this topic in this House in 2007. Even more sadly, we have just marked 80 years since the liberation of Belsen and there have re-emerged some of the same hatreds and moral inversions. By that I mean that the victims have been painted as killers and the tragedy of the Shoah is downplayed. I give a university example: 18 student bodies have decided to support the legal action to decriminalise Hamas. St Antony’s College in Oxford chooses to host a Mr Mishra, whose theme is that the underlying problem of the West is its sanctification of the Holocaust at the expense of colonialism. The lecturers and their union, the UCU, which should be supporting affected students, are themselves the aggressors. The local branch in Oxford voted for a motion calling for a third intifada until victory. Israel is not the problem, it is the excuse to persecute Jewish students. The situation is deteriorating, and no remedial action has been taken. I have little faith in inquiries. We know what the situation is; we know what the remedies might be, and we need implementation and enforcement. We need no more hand-wringing or robotic statements from vice-chancellors that “there is no place for antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian discrimination, or hate directed towards any faith, race, nationality, or ethnic group” at their universities. Dehumanisation of Jewish students in many campuses has now become so deeply embedded that people feel no shame in excluding Jewish students from gatherings, mocking them by reverting to centuries-old slurs and turning the Holocaust against them. Students in London have seen swastikas carved in front of them. At UCL, Jewish students were told that Israel killed its own people: a widespread reference to the lie that the 7 October massacre was staged to provoke a war against Gaza—or just staged. What is common is the universities’ failure to take action. They could rely on the Protection from Harassment Act, the Public Order Act, the Malicious Communications Act, the Terrorism Act and the Equality Act, remembering that freedom of speech ends where hate speech and incitement to violence start. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act would at least help Jewish student societies’ speakers be heard and would not open the door to Holocaust denial and so on, because other laws do that. It is impossible to imagine that sanctions would not be imposed were the targets of these hateful actions black or other ethnic minorities. The Government and the Office for Students should not hesitate to fine universities that tolerate this hatred and break the law. Staff and students who behave like this should be expelled or suspended. Universities’ funding of student unions should be leveraged to ensure legal behaviour. The root of the behaviour is religious teaching that Jews are inferior. It demonstrates the failure of Holocaust education, which focuses on dead Jews as a feature of the past and has nothing to say about the long history of antisemitism and the focus of antisemitism today; namely, the State of Israel. As the late and much-missed Lord Sacks pointed out, hatred of Israel is today’s variant of antisemitism. That is what the students have not realised. They need education from school up and they need to know national and government disapproval.