There has been a dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents at European universities in the 22 months since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre and the outbreak of war in Gaza, a newly published B’nai B’rith report finds.
The report, “A climate of fear and exclusion: Antisemitism at European universities,” examines universities in eight European Union countries — Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden — as well as the United Kingdom.
The report finds that there are “clear and repeated patterns of antisemitic or otherwise harmful behaviors” at universities across the nine countries, B’nai B’rith says, adding that it used the IHRA definition of antisemitism throughout.
It says these behaviors include threats and physical violence toward Jewish students and staff; calls to violence as appropriate protest action; solidarity with Hamas; widespread Holocaust distortion; calls for Israel’s destruction; and widespread vandalism following protests, and targeted vandalism of Jewish premises.
The report also found that various student groups have worked with organizations that have ties to proscribed terror groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is classified as a terror group by the EU.
In Austria, Germany and Spain, B’nai B’rith says, protests have been supported by organizations with “ties to terrorist activity,” including Samidoun — the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Meanwhile, in Austria, it says, students are working with organizations such as Dar al Janub, which it says has “direct documented links to Hamas.”
In some instances, university students have engaged in Holocaust distortion and instrumentalization in order to draw a “false equivalence” with the war in Gaza, B’nai B’rith says, calling this behavior “particularly pernicious.”
These instances include protest chants such as “Zionists are all the same, Nazis by a different name,” which was heard at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a move by the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht to cancel a lecture series on the Holocaust and antisemitism.
Antisemitic vandalism featured at many of the universities covered in the report.
In particular, it notes 17 instances of antisemitic or hateful “damage and desecration” at UK universities in Nottingham, Birmingham, Leeds, Kent, Norwich, London, Sussex, Oxford, Sheffield, Brighton, and Canterbury in the 2023-2024 academic year, up from just four instances a year prior.
According to B’nai B’rith, Jewish students at these universities “report feelings of fear, isolation, and disenfranchisement within academic spaces that should otherwise serve as environments of mutual respect and open discussion.”
The report also offers suggestions as to how universities can address these issues, including by creating new codes of conduct as well as “broader, long-term, sustained trust-building measures.”
“This report makes clear that Europe’s universities are failing their Jewish students,” say B’nai B’rith International president Robert Spitzer and CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin. “Just as we have seen on campuses across the United States, antisemitism here is too often excused as ‘activism’—but in reality, it is a threat to safety, inclusion and the very integrity of higher education.”
