Dutch biased pro-Israel Minister of Justice and Security reacts ...
This influential pro-Israel group is legitimizing the Gaza genocide on British campuses | Mondoweiss |
The Union of Jewish Students claims to serve the interests of the UK's Jewish student community. It actually serves the interests of Israel by associating with its "quasi-governmental" Zionist institutions and whitewashing its coloniality.
The Union of Jewish Students, the self-proclaimed representative body for over 9,000 Jewish students in the United Kingdom and Ireland, is a key cog but often unscrutinized player in British Zionist hasbara politics. Its Israel advocacy is well-known. Like many of its parent bodies, it is preoccupied with the management of Israel's legitimacy by "explaining away" and deflecting from Israel's coloniality.
Settler-colonial networks
UJS's historical and contemporary ties to Israel's national institutions provide the central plank for its advocacy -- the World Zionist Organization (WZO), the Jewish Agency, and the Keren Hayesod. These are the founding institutions of Israel's settler colonial and apartheid regime.
From its earliest configuration, the UJS was a constituent member of the World Zionist Organization. UJS's parent body, B'nai B'rith, and the WUJS (World Union of Jewish Students), to which the UJS is party, both squarely fall within the WZO as direct members and Hasbara advocates.
Although a national institution of Zionist settler colonialism, the Jewish Agency has a strong diasporic presence. Historically it played a pivotal role in establishing Israel, notoriously through its "Population Transfer" Committee. Ever since, it has been integral to realizing the Zionist dream ofaliyah (immigration to Israel) and the establishment of a Jewish ethno-state. It offers Jews worldwide a stress-free relocation package and facilitates the maintenance of "Jewish domination" across Israel and the "Occupied Palestinian Territories."
Normalizing settler colonialism on campus
It is quite something, then, to learn that the Agency plays an active and integral role in the life of the UJS, so integral that the UJS is home for two, sometimes three, of the Agency's schlichim (emissaries), who are also IDF-trained campus fellows and sit directly within the UJS Executive body.
Agency schlichim, alongside JSoc sabbatical officers, engage Jewish students from the moment they step foot on campus, and are recipients of UJS annual `Israel Engagement' Awards.
Much like settler-chaplains working in British universities, these IDF-trained emissaries are very much Israel's "in-house" advocates who assume a student "support" function that some might consider far exceeds their "pastoral" role of cultivating a "living connection" to Israel. An analogous scenario involving any member of the Palestinian resistance sitting on the executive body of a Palestinian, Muslim, or solidarity student union would raise more than eyebrows.
This signals the way pro-Israeli institutions remain integrated and normalized within British higher education, with little of the scandal and surveillance associated with their pro-Palestinian, especially Muslim, counterparts.
The recent case of IDF reservist and Chaplain Zecharia Deutsche serving Leeds and other Northern Universities has spotlighted the embedded infrastructure of pro-Israel institutions, and their urgency to entrench their position, within British higher education.
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