This wasn’t a debate but a shakedown at the Oxford Union

Much to its pride, the Oxford Union, which calls itself the foremost debating society in the world, passed a motion last week naming Israel a genocidal apartheid state.

The Union is not part of the university, and I always avoided it when I was at Oxford in the 1990s. It was for teenage braggarts – that is, the vulnerable and the perennially insecure – pretending they were cabinet ministers. Antisemitism at Oxford was mere fumes then, though you might meet a professor who was also a Kindertransport child. (I did, and I knew without knowing I knew.) We were something different: slightly vulgar, slightly odd. Nothing worse than that, though I remain annoyed that the Jewish role in the foundation of the university – money, obviously, before we were expelled in 1290 – is somewhat opaque. If I had known I would have minded less about the constant anxiety that, in Oxford, a cathedral is always about to fall on your head.

The debate was a disgrace, and beleaguered Jewish students, bullied since October 7, avoided it. They don’t need the pain, and that is why the motion passed with such a large majority: 278 to 59. Many of those who attended – including the pro-Israel speakers – called themselves shocked by the tone of the debate, the heckling, the laughter, the strategic coughing. It was compared to the Dreyfus trial, and in that is my hope.

It isn’t that the Oxford Union is often wrong. Most famously it passed a pacifist motion in 1933. Six years later, we were at war. It’s this: it wasn’t a debate but a shakedown, and you only do that if you are stupid – not impossible in Oxford – and afraid.

First, the premise: this House believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide. That’s a debate where you need to prove your innocence. Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, the president of the Union, a position which seems to manifest with its own dinner jacket and political imperatives (always absurd in the young) did not just chair the debate. He spoke for the proposition.

The organisation was chaotic. The proposition initially had two Jews: Norman Finkelstein, who dropped out, and Miko Peled, who said that night, “October 7 was not terrorism” but “heroism”. It is lucky for Finkelstein that he did drop out. Susan Abulhawa, his fellow speaker for the proposition (“Israel is the devil”) said in a Twitter/X post: “He [Finkelstein] didn’t want to be overshadowed by actual Palestinians who can speak more cogently and eloquently than him on the matters pertaining to our own lives, on which he claims expertise, almost exclusively.” The president took Finkelstein’s place.

In fact, there was a Palestinian on the pro-Israel side: Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a founder of Hamas who became an informant after seeing Hamas members torture and murder Palestinians. He says he asked himself: “What if Hamas succeeded in destroying Israel and building a state? Will they destroy our people in this way?” I am told the Union admitted Yousef only reluctantly, after the rest of the pro-Israel side – the broadcaster Jonathan Sacerdoti and the lawyer Natasha Hausdorff – refused to appear without him.

Of course, they did not want to listen to Yousef. His testimony is too powerful. On X/Twitter, Abulhawa called him, “a collaborator on Zionist payrolls” and “a dancing monkey”. At the debate, the crowd called him “a traitor” and “a prostitute”. Yousef asked the audience to indicate by a show of hands if they would have reported prior knowledge of the October 7 attacks. Few raised their hands. This is not debate. It is the passion, and I wonder if they would have had more fun if Jews and their supporters were not there. They could have danced around a stone and torched a wicker Zionist.

There was also an Arab Israeli on the pro-Israel side, Yoseph Haddad. He was similarly treated, and I thought of the line delivered to an Arab Israeli by a terrorist on October 7, before he was murdered: “You’re worse than a Jew.” Haddad was ejected from the chamber, after loudly remonstrating with an audience member who took his photograph of Arab Israeli hostages and trampled on it. Before he left, he put on a T-shirt reminding the chamber that Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah: “Your terrorist hero is dead. We [Israel] did that.” They were shocked because this, on the night, crossed the line. When all is lost in the world, you still have Hassan Nasrallah.

The president also tried to eject Yousef for calling Palestinians “pathetic”, but changed his mind and this, not the tally, is the salient fact. Two Arabs spoke for Israel in Oxford, and the president tried to remove them both. That isn’t strength but uncertainty, the expulsion of dissidents. If people ever mistook the anti-democratic nature of the anti-Israel movement, they can’t now. They all wore dinner jackets. It’s there, if you will, in black and white.