The campus uprising is not just spreading geographically. It’s also a lightning rod for an accelerated learning process in the student movement. Ideas which were only a few months ago confined to the margins are not taking centre stage in the student movement. This is not just visible in the US but also in the UK.

Indeed, the lightning-speed sharing of knowledge, ideas, tactics, and slogans is plainly visible. Slogans like "Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest" are heard in LA and Edinburgh, from New York to London. 

There is a radicalisation taking place that is quickly outpacing the aging leadership of the solidarity movement. It is becoming commonplace to hear support for the right to resist up and down the country as in the chant: When People are occupied. Resistance is Justified. 

A key area which challenges the staid leadership of Stop the War and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is the use of the Z word. Zionism was the form of racism whose name they dared not speak. Now calls to “crush Zionism” are heard across the country, as are references to the “Zionist entity” and chants such as “Hey ho, hey ho, Zionism’s got to go” and “say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here”.

Anti-Zionism is now sweeping student politics. The Zionist press has even reported in pearl-clutching fashion that at a breakout meeting at the National Union of Students (NUS) conference, “a show of hands in favour” of an anti-Zionist motion was carried “overwhelmingly”. According to an anonymous Zionist present, the motion was “backed by a vast show of hands”.

The motion questioned the legitimacy of the Union of Jewish Students affiliation with the NUS because of its “pro-Israel stance”. Naturally, the craven careerists at the top of the NUS issued a snivelling apology to the UJS the next day.

At the NUS conference, anti-genocide students had reportedly argued correctly that the only way to bring peace was to “dismantle the Israeli state” founded on “ethnic cleansing”, and that Zionism was a “racist ideology” and a “colonial project”.

It is no longer acceptable to say that the Union of Jewish Students should have a right to decide by itself if it supports genocide or not. Genocide must be opposed, no ifs, no buts.

If the Union of Jewish Students will not move from its “criticism free” approach to the Zionist entity, if it will not resign from the Zionist movement and agree to represent all Jewish students, then it will have to be dismantled as an organisation and replaced with one that will provide representation for all Jews. The UJS needs to be De-Zionised.

The NUS has historically been a mechanism for blunting the edge of student democracy. But at times, this has been challenged. As a result, the political establishment has regarded the student movement as a threat.

Disclosures at the Spycops inquiry show that undercover police infiltrated the National Union of Students in the 1990s.  

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This was towards the end of a period starting in 1982 and ending in 2000 when the NUS was led by Labour Students - a vehicle for suppressing the left.

Among the careerists who were president in that period were Stephen Twigg, later chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Lorna Fitzsimons who went on to run Zionist lobby group BICOM, and Jim Murphy later chair of LFI.

Zionist asset Wes Streeting was elected in April 2008 from Labour Students, with the support of the Union of Jewish Students. Under his leadership, the NUS abandoned its long-standing commitment to free education.

The permanent bureaucracy of employees at NUS is a standing block to implementing the democratic will of students.  

This was deployed to good effect between 2014 and the present, when the union tried to introduce more progressive policies on Islamophobia, war, and Palestine. These were blocked at every turn by the Zionist lobby, government pressure and internal betrayals.

Malia Bouattia was the first black and Muslim woman to be elected president in 2016 as the candidate of the “Liberation Left”. She was effectively destroyed by external Zionist pressure.

The next candidate to be attacked in a major way by the Zio,nists was Shaima Dallali a Muslim hijabi woman elected president in 2021  - again on the Liberation Left platform.

She was attacked relentlessly with trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism relating to a Tweet she sent when she was a teenager.

An internal report commissioned by the NUS from Rebecca Tuck, a Zionist KC, was used to dismiss the properly elected president of the NUS for the first time. Throughout this period, Dallali was privately assured by the union that she would not be dismissed, and thus encouraged her not to contest the process.  

Dallali took the NUS to an industrial tribunal and in May this year announced a settlement which involved the union paying her a substantial sum. The NUS said  it now accepted that “pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist beliefs may be protected beliefs, as may pro-Zionist beliefs.”

Unfortunately, Dallali was intimidated into accepting that her tweet had been “antisemitic” though this was “not her intention”.  

The lesson for the future is that Zionists must be fought at every turn despite assurances that their campaigns will not be successful.