Could the Columbia Campus wars over Israel now tear British universities apart?

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations and overt antisemitism led to the national guard being called out to one American university. Think it couldn’t spiral out of control in this country? Think again, says Nicole Lampert

Officers arrest a protestor who participated in an demonstration at the Columbia University campus (AP)

It was just a few days after 7 October when Romilly Blitz experienced her first antisemitic incident on campus. “Brainwashed Zionist genocide supporter,” whispered one of her classmates after a lecture. Other students giggled. Romilly, who like most British Jews has family in Israel, and had friends at the Nova Festival where hundreds of partygoers were murdered, wasn’t to know that was just the start.

In the past six months, she has had people shouting “psychopathic” and “genocidal” as she’s walked across campus. People point and tell each other, “That’s her, that’s the Zionist”. Her photo has been taken and circulated among pro-Palestine WhatsApp groups who were concerned that she would try to infiltrate them.

She’s been made not to feel welcome in certain buildings as she was told by pro-Palestinian protesters they have become “apartheid-free zones”. Once, on a bus on the way home from a nightclub, talk turned to the war and a crowd aggressively started shouting at her, “We are anti-genocidal”. She has been told that people who compared Israel’s stance on gay rights to other countries in the Middle East were guilty of Islamophobia.