“Our approach is all about trying to bring those students into the conversation and really just having intelligent conversations with them and treating them as adults who can make their own minds up on issues if given the opportunity to engage with the material.”
The Pinsker Centre, named after Odessan Zionist Leon Pinsker, was founded in 2016, in part as a reaction to outright hostility experienced by some Israeli speakers at British universities.
The author of Auto-Emancipation, one of the foundational Zionist texts, who argued that – like other nations – Jews had a right to their own homeland, is especially relevant today.
According to Freedman: “We wanted to create a space where double standards were removed, and where the exchange of ideas and tolerant debate around a variety of contemporary issues – not least Israel – could thrive, and that's what we've done.”
The group brings expert guests who are able give authoritative and nuanced answers to questions from curious students.
Part of the Centre’s founding cause was, Freeman claims, that there was too much preaching to the converted in the pro-Israel campus circuit.
The founders “really wanted to create a group that was able to bring high profile speakers who could engage meaningfully around difficult conversations relating to Israel. And not have the classic ‘Israel is great because of cherry tomatoes’, or ‘Israel is great because of irrigation’,” he remarked.
"They really wanted to delve into the history and politics behind why Israel, like other nations, has the right to exist.”
Last year, the group toured campuses with John Baird, the former foreign minister of Canada.
“He was able to deal with really complicated questions in a way that isn't straightforward. Because these conversations shouldn't be straightforward,” Freeman said.
Baird was “able to say he was the foreign minister that decided to close the Canadian embassy in Iran because it wasn't safe. And he can then go on to say, ‘here's why Israel is an ally in the region fighting against the threat of Iran’. It's that kind of insight that can help connect the dots for students who want to dig deeper”.
Since Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, 2023 – and the rise in antisemitism on UK university campuses since – pro-Israel students have significant challenges, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t successes.
Ben Freeman with Israel's president Isaac Herzog (Image: Pinsker Centre).[Missing Credit]
Freeman explained:“As part of our work, we take delegations of Oxford and Cambridge students to Israel every summer, and what's been really reassuring is seeing how those students who have come to Israel and seen it for what it is – the good, the bad and the ugly; they’ve seen everything – those are the students that, post-October 7, have wanted to make sure that the conversation is being had positively on campus.”
No stranger to campus conflicts himself as a veteran of the Union of Jewish Students, Freeman still believes the warts-and-all portrayal of Israel is vital to win over the silent majority of students and drown out the more extreme elements of the pro-Palestine movement: “You've got to treat them as adults and as open-minded people who, if given all the information, will come to their own conclusion. And so that's why it's really important for us”, he says, noting that their student delegations also involve trips to the West Bank, where they met Palestinian officials.
Students on a Pinsker Centre delegation visiting the West Bank (Image: Pinsker Centre).[Missing Credit]
“We think that students should have the opportunity to see everything”, he added.
There is something personal about this for Freeman, who “went university with no real desire to get involved in the pro-Israel world” but seeing the toxic conversations about Israel on campus made him want to “know more about this”.
He continued: “The following summer, I went to Israel for the first time and really, loved my experience of seeing how diverse it was, seeing what Israel had to offer.
"And I guess beyond anything, seeing that it wasn't anything like what it was presented as, on campuses across the UK.”
After a chance meeting of one of the founders of the Pinsker Centre he “began to get more and more involved in that work and the general conversation around Israel.”
As a group run by passionate students and recent graduates like himself, Freeman believes the Pinsker Centre has a “real ability to reach students and engage with students in a way that a lot of other organisations don't necessarily have, just by virtue of our proximity to them” which he said means they’re able “to build these relationships and make sure that these kinds of conversations are being had in places where they otherwise wouldn't”.
