Hundreds of Professors Express Solidarity with Colleague Subjected to Antisemitic Harassment

How seldom do we read of professors coming out on the side of right, and denouncing the antisemitic and anti-Israel bullyboys who dominate the faculty on so many campuses. Now hundreds of professors in the UK have come out to defend a colleague who has been subjected to harassment and vilification because, some forty years ago, he served in the IDF. More on their rallying around their put-upon colleague can be found here: “‘We Stand Together’: UK Professors Call Out Harassment of Jewish Colleague Who Served in IDF,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, October 21, 2025:

Hundreds of professors on Tuesday signed a petition calling for the end of an antisemitic hate campaign aimed at driving a Jewish Israeli professor from his job at City St. George’s, University of London because he served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the 1980s.

The professor, Michael Ben-Gad, has been unrelentingly pursued by a pro-Hamas organization which calls itself City Action for Palestine, the petition says. It has subjected him to several forms of persecution, including social media agitprop, unlawful assembly at his place of work, and even a petition of their own.

“Regardless of diverse views on the recent Gaza war and the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we deplore any campaign that seeks to intimidate and drive out lecturers because they are Israeli, Jewish, or members of any other group,” the professors’s petition says. “Academics and students have a right to go about their work at any university without facing harassment.”

It continues, “Attacks of this kind are intimidating, particularly to Jewish students, and set a precedent under which others could be targeted in the future. We wish to make clear to what appears to be a small, if very vocal, group that their mobbing tactics will not succeed. We stand together in support of Professor Ben-Gad and his personal and intellectual freedom as an academic.”

City Action for Palestine is one of London’s most notorious anti-Zionist groups, convulsing higher education campuses across the city with pro-Hamas demonstrations which demonize pro-Israel Jews, attack policies enacted to combat antisemitism, and amplify the propaganda of jihadist terror organizations. Ben-Gad is not its only victim, as the group has targeted Members of Parliament, the Union of Jewish Students, and City University London president Anthony Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the child of a Holocaust survivor.

Jews employed in higher education in Europe and America face an escalating climate of hate and intimidation.

Around the globe, in Alameda County, California, a professor is suing the University of California, Berkeley, alleging that school officials denied her a job because she is Israeli — a claim the university’s own investigators corroborated in an internal investigation. According to court documents, a hiring official allegedly concluded that an Israeli professor working in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies would be unpalatable to students and faculty after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

“My dept [sic] cannot host you for a class next fall,” the official allegedly told Dr. Yael Nativ in a WhatsApp message. “Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”…

Dr. Nativ was not hired to teach at Berkeley, according to the university’s own investigation, simply because she was an Israeli. Her hiring, according to the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance would anger “many of the grad students.” In order to forestall an outburst of their hatred, Dr. Nativ was rejected for the job.

At George Washington University, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) issued an ominous warning to a professor who created a proposal to resettle residents of Gaza outside of the Palestinian enclave and remake it into a hub for tourism and economic dynamism.

“This notice is to inform you that you are hereby evicted from the premises of the George Washington University,” SJP wrote in a missive it taped to the office door of international affairs professor Joseph Pelzman, who first shared the resettlement plan with Trump’s presidential campaign in July 2024, according to an account of events he described to the podcast “America, Baby!” the following month.

“The reason for the eviction is: your active role in incepting the genocide and planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza,” SJP’s message continued. “Your disgusting plan for the complete destruction and foreign occupation of Gaza and the colonial ‘re-education’ of Palestinians.”

Denouncing Pelzman as an “architect of genocide,” SJP added, “Pelzman’s tenure is only one pernicious symptom of the bloodthirsty Zionism permeating our campus … The proprietors of this eviction notice demand your immediate removal.”

Is Pelzman an “architect of genocide”? All Professor Pelzman did was prepare a plan for a postwar Gaza, not for the “destruction” of the Strip, as the SJP charges, but to make it into a “hub for tourism and economic dynamism.” The antisemitic venom — Pelzman’s presence on campus being a “pernicious symptom of the bloodthirsty Zionism permeating our campus” — is worthy of Der Stürmer.

Despite this dispiriting news, there are those, like the hundreds of professors in London issuing their own expression of solidarity with Professor Ben-Gad, and deploring his tormentors, who are signaling that they won’t let the antisemites on their campuses — to be found among both faculty and administrators — prevail. And individual Israeli or Jewish professors who have endured everything from campus harassment to having job offers withdrawn in order to forestall angry reactions from antisemitic and anti-Israel students, are now fighting back by suing universities that have not done enough to suppress the antisemitism on campus. They are simply not going to take it anymore. That’s a good sign.