...How do I even get down onto paper my anxieties and fears? And what do I tell my family and friends back home about the realities Jewish students face on campus?

UCL Friends of Israel and Kings College Israel Society and Camera held a joint event for Israeli speaker Hen Mazzig to come share his work for COGAT, an intermediary unit in the IDF between the Palestinian Territories, Israel and other local and international NGOs.

Ten minutes before the event was to begin, I stood outside the main doors of the venue with a list of people’s names to check before they were allowed in. All of a sudden, a group of about 50 anti-Israel protesters appeared in front of us all. They held Palestinian flags, wore keffiyehs, and chanted aggressively in our faces.

All I could help think about was the hate in their eyes and the way they looked at me with such disgust. They did not know me at all and yet they were ready to act in such a way that made me scared for my well-being.

What happened next is hard for me to write about, but in doing so I hope to raise awareness for the true nature of these protesters that claim they are doing so in the name of “human rights”.

For the first time ever, I was assaulted. I was severely pushed against the main doors by the back of a protester. She held me there for up to two minutes. I screamed. I screamed for help. I screamed for her to move. I screamed that I could not breathe. Yet she stood there. She stood and revelled in the fact that she was able to cause me such distress. But for what? What was she aiming to achieve by doing so? Did my screams mean nothing to her?

Another girl came and spoke to her in Arabic, and finally she took the smallest step forward. But I was past the point of consolation. Liora Cadranel, co-president of the UCL Friends of Israel Society, saw me in the distance and helped get me out. I stood outside of the building, overcome with fear. I could not stop shaking and crying. I had a small panic attack. I tried getting it together, I really did, yet something in me told me not to. I could not hold it in, but maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it is time that after all the hate Jewish students have absorbed these past years, that we stop holding it in. That we show our emotions and stand up for justice when it deems fit.

The protesters saw my reaction, they saw my red eyes, and loved it. It was a sign for them that they were winning. People surrounded me, walked past me, and I could not take it anymore. What was the point of all of this? Hen Mazzig is a peace activist. His army service was aimed at lessening the conflict on the everyday life of Palestinians. With his work for StandWithUs, he helped share his story of hope and coexistence. Yet he, and students that hosted the event, attracted the worst sort of hate possible.

On the Middle East Monitor site, the freelance journalist and anti-Israel activist Ben White has written this piece about the recent disruption, by pro-Palestinian students, of an event hosted by the University College London Friends of Israel Society, at which the Israeli activist Hen Mazzig was the speaker. Some reports of what happened are available here, here (£), here, here, here and here. A cursory glance of White’s article will show that he puts a very different spin of events, essentially blaming pro-Israel activists for “smearing” pro-Palestinian students, rather than blaming the latter for the violent intimidation of the former.

Ben White, of course, has previous: he has (among many other things) claimed to “understand” why people may be anti-Semitic; he has seemingly decried police action against those planning to blow up a synagogue; he has called for a boycott of an Israeli theatre company on the basis of Howard Jacobson’s face; he has recently defended Malia “Zionist-led media” Bouattia. Yet even by his standards, his recent MEMO article is an absolutely shocking piece of “journalism”. Four comments will suffice:

(1) In his third paragraph, White cites UCL’s statement, dated 28 October, which described the protest as “non-violent”. However, he neglects to mention that UCL issued an update to their statement on 30 October, stating that they had indeed received allegations of violence and intimidation. Since White’s own piece is dated 2 November, it is difficult to see how he could have been unaware of the update – particularly as it is available at the same link as the original statement.

(2) Some of the very articles that White himself links to describe, among other things, how a female Jewish student was assaulted (i.e.: held against a door for two minutes); how the Friends of Israel group was forced to move from its original venue to a different room, and how its members were chased across the campus by pro-Palestinian students; how the speaker had to leave out of a rear entrance for his own safety; how pro-Israel students had to leave in threes, under the watchful gaze of the police, and then had the words “Shame shame” chanted at them. By any reasonable standards, these things constitute the violent intimidation of pro-Israeli students, not to mention the suppression of free speech on a university campus. Yet White simply airbrushes these details out of his account.

(3) White quotes a veteran pro-Israeli activist as saying that “I cannot in all honesty say I felt particularly threatened or anxious. It was pretty much water off the proverbial duck’s back.” Tellingly, however, he omits the same activist’s very next words: “However here is the rub. It was very real and intimidating for inexperienced Jewish students, especially the freshers, who had never experienced such visceral hate and nor of course should have to.”

(4) In summary, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Ben White has no objection to the violent intimidation of pro-Israeli students (and others) – most of whom will be Jews and which will include many if not most Jewish students – on a UK campus. He would rightly be appalled if pro-Palestinian students received similar treatment from pro-Israeli representatives. And yet he wonders why he himself is so frequently accused of being anti-Semitic.