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The Jewish Chronicle

We could have dealt with campus hate long ago

We are reaping the whirlwind of our past inability to counter anti-Jewish propaganda in universities

February 12, 2009 11:30

ByJan Shure, Jan Shure

2 min read

Around three decades ago, I was deputy editor at a small, now defunct, UK publication called the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review. In common with the JC, it devoted a great number of column inches to the issue of Palestinian propaganda on UK campuses.

Apart from news stories in both publications reporting the avalanche of Arab propaganda on campus, and a small, heroic number of individual voices calling for the Jewish community to do more to help students combat it, the Jewish establishment failed to step up — with human resources, educational support, PR or advertising campaigns or cash — to counter the Palestinian narrative being imparted to students across British universities.

The Israeli Embassy — which, one would have thought, would want to help Jewish students in their battle with their Palestinian counterparts for the hearts and minds of British undergraduates — took an even more casual view; one which could be neatly summarised as “are we bovvered?”

There was a great deal of chest-beating about how unpleasant it was for Jewish students to have to bear the full brunt of Arab activism — exacerbated in 1975 by the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism — but few people in the Jewish community, it seemed, recognised the more pernicious long-term implications of this wave of implacably anti-Israeli propaganda, and how it would impact on the way the conflict and Israel would be perceived by the wider world in future years.