In a damning report, a UK think tank found up to a quarter of Britain's leading universities released statements that veered into antisemitism at the height of the recent violence between Hamas and Israel.
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The Pinsker Center said student unions or faculty bodies at 12 of the country's top 40 schools - including Oxford and Cambridge Universities - published "highly partisan" anti-Israel statements that may have breached the widely agreed working definition of anti-Semitism, according to The Daily Telegraph.
According to the center, two main tropes were leveled against the Jewish state; namely that it was both an apartheid state and a "settler colonialist" entity.
The center offered two main recommendations in its report; the Charity Commission should update its guidance to student unions to give wider and better protection to Jewish students on campus, and universities should adopt disciplinary frameworks to enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition with sanctions. The government should cut funds to universities that fail to do this, the center said.
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The IHRA's working definition of antisemitism, adopted by the UK government, lists calling Israel a "racist endeavor" and applying double standards as examples of what could be antisemitic, depending on the context.
All but three of the 12 universities criticized in the report have adopted the IHRA definition.
The Pinsker Center drew a direct causal link between incendiary statements about the Gaza Strip-Israel situation and the massive spike in anti-Jewish attacks on campuses across the UK.
Antisemitic incidents during the 11-day conflict between Islamists in the Gaza Strip and Israel increased fivefold during and in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, according to the UK's Community Security Trust.
This article was first published by i24NEWS
