Members of the Oxford Union, the world’s best-known debating society, last week voted in favor of a motion that called Israel a greater destabilizer than Iran, prompting criticism from Jewish community leaders.
The Oxford Union on Thursday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a motion declaring Israel a greater “threat to regional stability” than Iran following a debate between Hillel Neuer, the director of UN Watch, and Mohammad Shtayyeh, a former Palestinian Authority prime minister, The Jewish Chronicle reported.
Neuer, whose organization monitors expressions of bias against Israel at the United Nations, argued that “Regional stability is measured by who starts wars, not by who stops them,” adding that: “Israel does not arm terror proxies in five Arab countries—the regime in Iran does that. The entire Middle East knows this, and that is why Arab states quietly depend on Israel for their own survival.”
Shtayyeh said that Israel was guilty of engaging in a “brutal occupation, crimes and genocide” and is “dragging the region into repeated conflicts” as well as “causing misery, genocide” with its “expansionist, colonial mentality.”
Neuer wrote on X after the debate that the proposition that Israel was a greater threat to world stability than Iran struck him initially as “deep satire, but then I recalled that 501 of their members voted to back the student chair who cheered the killing of Charlie Kirk.”
Last month, George Abaraonye, the president-elect of the Oxford Union, was ousted following outrage over his apparent celebration of Kirk’s shooting. The Oxford Union voted last year that “Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide” by a majority of 278 to 59.
The fact that the 202-year-old debating society voted in favor of Thursday’s motion is “tragic,” Gary Mond, chairman of the United Kingdom’s National Jewish Assembly, a communal advocacy group, told JNS. “Oxford students are unable to accept these simple truths, which go to the heart of the motion in question,” he said.
This is lamentable “not only because of Oxford’s historic reputation as an academic center of excellence, but also because the debate audience are young and likely to play major roles” in the U.K.’s future,” Mond added. “If their minds are poisoned in such a way to think that Israel is a problem, this impacts heavily on our hopes for the future.”
He disputed the resolution passed, saying it failed to look at Israel’s actions. “Iran is funding and otherwise supporting terror proxies all over the Middle East, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others,” Mond said, including Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela. “Israel, on the other hand, does not behave in this way. All of Israel’s actions are in self-defense,” he added.
Rabbi Shmuli Boteach, a well-known debater and advocate of Israel, told JNS that the vote showed that the “IQ level of the students has cratered” at Oxford, where he had lived for 11 years until 1999 as the Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to the famous town and campus.
“In the 20 years since I left Oxford University, its international reputation has been shredded, not just by rampant Israel-hatred and antisemitism, but by deep anti-intellectualism, as evidenced by the utter stupidity of this resolution,” said Boteach.
Oxford, he added, “has returned, in all its ignominy, to its 1933 vote at the Union that they would refuse to fight Hitler for their king, which at that time disgraced the university.” That vote would be outdone “only by this sickening vote that a democracy in the Middle East is more dangerous than the world’s foremost sponsor of terror.”
Anyone seeking a “serious education” should study in America, Boteach said, though he added that there, too, higher education was suffering from “a meltdown of stupidity and amorality.”
But “if you want to do arts and crafts and learn finger painting or how to create papier-mache, Oxford would be a good choice,” said Boteach.
On Sunday, anti-Israel activists disrupted a speech by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the Oxford Union. Olmert, who was released from prison in 2017 after serving 16 months for accepting bribes, has repeated anti-Israel messaging in recent months, calling Israel’s actions against Hamas in Gaza war crimes and equating plans to set up a humanitarian zone in Rafah with creating a “concentration camp.”