Last term, the University of Birmingham offered two free screenings of Watermelon Pictures’ short film, The Encampments. The documentary chronicles the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampments and student protests at Columbia University, where Jewish students were accosted and openly targeted. My Student Guild advertised the event as an ‘urgent’ and ‘intimate’ viewing which, to me and my Jewish peers, felt like a public endorsement of hate.
The Encampments perfectly encapsulates the radicalisation of anti-Israel hatred across UK universities. Despising Israel no longer represents some extreme political leaning; it has become the unofficial curriculum and institutional norm. Here at Birmingham, it is quite normal to publicly declare that Zionist students are unwelcome. It is perfectly acceptable for Jewish students to be treated as second-class.
My university twice provided the lecture theatre for the showing, transforming anti-Israel hatred into a cinematic experience. What’s next: The Intifada in 3D? Intrigued, I attended the screening in the hope of seeking perspective outside of my own.
The film follows the testimony of Ivy League students Sueda Polat and Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil has been accused of distributing pro-Hamas leaflets during these same 2024 encampments. Watching the screening felt inextricably linked to sympathising with Hamas, something Birmingham’s Palestine Liberation Society appeared to tolerate, if not embrace.
In one disturbing clip, Polat verbatim exclaimed: ‘For the first time since October 7 I felt so… happy.’ No gasp, not even a flinch, from the surrounding audience. Neither the student organisers nor the Guild representatives, responsible for initially approving the event, acknowledged this dangerous sentiment.
Throughout the film, Hamas is omitted entirely. The atrocities perpetrated on October 7, Polat’s Day of Reverence – the plight of the hostages, the indiscriminate murder of Israeli civilians – are all pointedly erased. Who cares that Jewish students at Columbia described these same protests, glorified throughout the film, as a ‘Museum of Terror’ and Judenrein?
Watching the screening, the chants of Columbia students calling for a ‘Zionist Free NYC’ evoked disturbing memories of Birmingham’s own ‘Zionists Not Welcome’ placards.
This sort of radicalised anti-Israel sentiment at Birmingham is alarming. In the same term as the screenings, the candidate elected as UoB’s Ethnic Minority Officer for 2026-7 filmed and reposted herself denouncing ‘racist’ Zionists, promising to ‘To fight against the rising racism… to advocate against genocide’.
I deserve to feel represented by my University; I’m certainly paying a hefty fee for it. If the Ethnic Minority Officer won’t speak up for marginalised Jewish and Zionist voices, when antisemitic incidents on campus have risen by 117%, who will?
When a Jewish student campaigned for the same role, never mentioning Israel, she was flooded with online abuse: Since when should racial supremacists be ethnic minority officers? After last year’s Guild President publicly accused Israel of ‘killing babies’, it becomes increasingly apparent that hating Israel is the precondition to holding student office.
Are you surprised? 27 UK universities held vigils for Ayatollah Khamenei. Jewish students at Birmingham have been chased, taunted Go back to Auschwitz, group chats renamed ‘No Jews Allowed’. A popular student-run Instagram account, boasting over 14,000 followers, compared the Muslim student experience at UoB to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. In comparison, The Encampments is reasonably mild, certainly nothing special in the scheme of Campus Jew Hating. Just another romanticisation of terror against Israel.
Nobody seems to care that Birmingham’s Palestine Liberation Society campaigned on behalf of a suspended KCL student Usama Ghanem, a prominent figure in a rally last year where Jewish students were forced to lock themselves inside a chaplaincy room to escape protestors. Nobody bats an eye that their Instagram openly advocates for the release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the Egyptian activist who boasted he would ‘kill all Zionists’.
It is wholly acceptable in the eyes of my Guild that a registered student society, the Friends of Palestine, promotes a WhatsApp group entitled ‘UoB Encampments: Warmongers off Campus’. Here at my Russell Group university, all Zionist students are targeted by the same radical narrative. Ironic, when the real warmongers are the Hamas terrorists they openly admire.
During the Nakba Day protests outside the main library, Jewish students avoided their normal study spots, while pro-Palestinian student and faculty speeches were proudly platformed on campus grounds. For Jewish students, the university experience comes at a cost. We must keep schtum, make ourselves invisible, in order to appease the anti-Zionist mob.
Professors decorate their office doors with watermelons and Palestine flags. Law lectures and undergraduate careers fairs are stormed by keffiyeh-clad hecklers shouting about the genocide in Gaza. At Birmingham, radicalism is not only legitimised, but publicly endorsed as support for Palestine. Only one thing remains clear: you Zionists are not welcome. And, if you must attend, please keep silent.
The Guild advertised their screenings as ‘urgent’. And they were right. The Encampments is a call to action, a warning: this is only the beginning.
Tiptoeing around campus will not solve this problem and silence offers a temporary solution at best. It falls on us to resist intimidation, flaunt our magen davids, organise events on campus, and refuse to be silenced.
I’m done hiding. Are you?
