Oxford Action for Palestine (acronym OA4P) has partially decamped to Ibiza for the summer, or, as they put it: “We have decided to redirect our momentum towards other forms of action, organising, political education, and the continued growth of our coalition.” I initially wrote the Ibiza line as a joke, but I discovered it is actually true.
One student leader – I recognise her because she filmed a reality show audition tape, which ended up on a news site – posted on Instagram that she is in Ibiza, because the Intifada is mobile. The announcement that the encampment in Radcliffe Square – they like martial imagery for the drama, the fetish – is ending to concentrate on other forms of protest was a masterpiece in self-deception. Of course, they would head to Ibiza when term ended and there are only tourists to show off to: you can’t demonstrate your moral superiority to people who don’t speak English. And it’s summer! They happily inconvenience others – parts of the exam schools had to close after one protest, and students couldn’t concentrate due to the noise, and some wept – but they must not be inconvenienced. War is coming – but Ibiza! I am fully with Karl Marx on this. “The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom.” Ibiza, then. Why not?
This is emblematic of a movement that has no real sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, but a lot for itself. There was much angst about the destruction of a “memorial garden” on property not their own – this made me laugh – cleared away, of course, by working-class people they imagine they want to save but functionally despise. They have fictionalised them, and Jews will identity with this: we have been an idea in Europe for two millennia. The Palestinians are a new idea, onto which they project their own feelings of inadequacy and rage, specific to the affluent late-capitalist young. Their heartfelt cry is: human rights for me, but not for thee. I was depressed to see no meaningful solidarity from faculty, but I studied at Oxford, so I am not surprised. When I arrived in the early 1990s, it looked like fairyland. JRR Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings in my college. The fairyland is a feint, a dream. Oxford cares about power and itself: that is why the only novelists it produces write about elves, talking lions who are Jesus, and class.
It is a cold place, and I always felt the gorgeous chapel in the quadrangle would fall on my head. I couldn’t blame Oxford for this, until I learnt how hard they worked, in their way – if the university were a water bird it would be a swan – to suppress the Jewish roots of the university.
I knew they built a botanic garden on the old Jewish cemetery, but the Jews were expelled in 1290, as you know, so why not? They should have called it Little Poland. Then, I felt my Judaism as an oddity to be tolerated and, if I were to have easy life, concealed.
There is, though, a more modern Jewish experience at Oxford. I read a gruesome letter of testimony from current students. Antisemitism, they were told, does not exist. Jews run all the banks in the world. They control the American government. There are too many Jews in the university (this is from a professor). Israelis should leave if they feel victimised (this is from a head of department). A mezuzah was ripped from a doorframe.
The slaughter on October 7 was “well-deserved”. Israel should be dissolved. And on and on.
This autumn, the Oxford Union plans to debate the motion “This House recognises Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”.
They had the entitlement to ask Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition in Israel, to speak, because that’s Oxford for you.
One remnant of the pretend encampment remained: enough to protest a graduation ceremony because “there is no pride in graduating from a university that bankrolls genocide”. Some of those graduating held Palestine flags: does that mean they allowed themselves to graduate, but with no pride? (An Oxford degree is still, as they would call it, a privilege. Perhaps it is acceptable to collect it with disdain: Clean hands.)
The Oxford Student reported that “the level of disruption was minimal”: the only light I can find is that it’s pleasing, at times like this, to remember that at Oxford there are stupid people too. Even so, they handed out pamphlets that decapitalised Israel: “We reject the normalisation of a state engaged in the decades-long genocide and occupation of Palestine.” And that’s the meat of it: no more Israel, shouted into the silence, near the swans, and it’s off to the airport.
