Mosley's Ghost Emerges in London

Last Friday something happened that made me ashamed to be British. The Association of University Teachers, which represents 49,000 academics, voted to boycott two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan. They are likely to boycott a third, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

This boycott is the culmination of years of pro-Palestinian agitation on campus, which has seen Jewish students and pro-Zionist academics subjected to frightening levels of vilification and intimidation. But not since the Third Reich have Jews been the targets of an official boycott in a civilized country. That this should have occurred in the profession which, above all others, should have been on its guard against intolerance, is disgraceful but not, alas, altogether surprising. Just as German universities were hotbeds of anti-Semitism even before the Nazis came to power, so in recent years British universities have become the bastions of the latest mutation of anti-Semitism: denial of Israel's right to exist.

The grounds given for these boycotts are so ludicrous that one wonders why the promoters bothered to cover their prejudices with this fig leaf. In the case of Bar-Ilan, the university has links with the College of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank - an institution that teaches Palestinian and Israeli Arab as well as Jewish students. Haifa was targeted for allegedly victimizing a lecturer, Ilan Pappe, who has made controversial claims that atrocities were committed by the pre-1948 Jewish militia, the Haganah. The fact that Haifa has not threatened or disciplined this individual seems to have played no part in the AUT's debate.

That may be because there was no debate: Opponents were given no opportunity to challenge the two militants from Birmingham who proposed the boycott. Moreover, the vote was held on erev Pesach, forcing Jewish delegates to choose between religious and civic duties.

One of the chief accusers was Shereen Benjamin, who makes much of being Jewish herself. She claims that the Hebrew University has evicted a Palestinian family and destroyed their home, conjuring up images of punishment demolitions. In reality, there was a legal dispute of title to a plot of land, the courts had found in favor of the university, and the matter was resolved by negotiation between the parties. The family in question still lives in the neighborhood.

The fact that a Jewish academic should wish to damage the Hebrew University illustrates the sheer ignorance of so many of the educators of our youth. For this is the proudest academy in the Middle East, and was for many years virtually the only one. It was founded in 1925 to be the "University of the Jewish People," with the support not only of international luminaries like Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, but also of the British Government, which then ruled Palestine on behalf of the League of Nations. The opening of the Hebrew University was attended by the author of the Balfour Declaration, Lord Balfour, and the governor of Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel.

Even more striking is the fact that the Hebrew University became a principal refuge for Jewish academics fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany and, later, occupied Europe. The great Kabbalah scholar, Gershom Scholem, who had been among the first professors to arrive in 1925, commented ironically in his letters on how German-Jewish academics who had pooh-poohed the threat of Nazism came to Jerusalem expecting posts and suddenly enthusiastic Zionists. More recently, the Hebrew University has been attacked by Palestinian terrorists - they blew up its cafeteria in 2002, killing nine and wounding 84 students.

This, then, is the university that Ms Benjamin wishes to isolate from the outside world. The agenda was set out by the founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, Omar Barghouti: "The taboo has been shattered at last. From now on, it will be acceptable to compare Israel's apartheid system to its South African predecessor." Nobody makes such comparisons with Arab universities, where academic freedom is still only a dream.

News of the academic boycott of Israel comes less than a fortnight before the first British general election in which anti-Semitism and militant Islam have played a significant part. One Labor poster depicted Michael Howard, the first Jewish leader of the Conservative Party since Disraeli, as a sinister hypnotist swinging a watch on a chain - an anti-Semitic stereotype strongly reminiscent of Fagin, the villain of Charles Dickens's "Oliver Twist." Mr. Howard's spokesman on finance, Oliver Letwin (who is also Jewish), was indeed compared to Fagin by the Labor Party chairman. Though these and other slurs were quickly withdrawn, Muslim community leaders have been pointedly asked whether they could expect anything from the likes of Messrs. Howard and Letwin.

The commonest anti-Semitic trope, however, is the Jewish world conspiracy, involving American neoconservatives (all supposedly Jews), the transatlantic "Jewish lobby," and, of course, the ubiquitous influence of Israel. Tony Blair, unlike several of his European counterparts, has refused to dabble either in anti-Americanism or anti-Zionism. But the British public has been bombarded by the BBC and the rest of the liberal press with hostile images of Israel and the suggestion, usually implicit but increasingly explicit, that Israel is to blame for Islamist terrorism against the West in general, and Britain in particular.

Worst of all has been the emergence of violent gangs of highly politicized young Islamists, who target candidates they suspect of supporting the Iraq war or Israel. At a memorial service for more than 100 victims of a Nazi V2 rocket that hit London's East End (then largely Jewish, now mainly Muslim), the pro-war Labor candidate Oona King, who is both black and Jewish, and many Jewish war veterans were pelted by missiles.

I wish I were confident that such incidents were not part of a pattern. But the ghost of Oswald Mosley, the prewar fascist leader who fomented anti-Semitic riots in the East End, is stalking the streets of London.