Students’ Reprehensible Council
"Any corporation that sides with Israel is no friend of students..." USYD Students' Representative Council
Jewish students who support Israel were heckled and silenced last Wednesday as the University of Sydney (USYD) Students’ Representative Council (SRC) passed a motion supporting the Sydney Festival boycott.
Calling the Israeli Embassy’s $20,000 donation “art-washing of apartheid, plain and simple”, the motion said the SRC stands “in solidarity with all artists, workers and Palestinians involved in the campaign to boycott the Sydney Festival”.
“Any corporation that sides with Israel is no friend of students,” it said.
Jewish student Michael Grenier, in his first meeting as an SRC member, told The AJN he attempted to speak out and stand up for Israel.
“There was quite a bit of yelling from other people trying to either push me to defend the position of Israel or individual acts of Israeli people,” he said.
“It kind of enforces the idea that every Jew is a spokesperson for Israel. To an extent there was bullying and it did get a bit out of hand.
“And then [they were] just being very aggressive. They were very outraged and they weren’t ready to listen.”
The AJN understands that it left other Jewish students feeling too intimidated to speak out, one even abstaining from the vote.
Former AUJS political affairs director Gabrielle Stricker-Phelps heard about the motion after it passed and joined the meeting via Zoom.
“I said I thought it was outrageous that a student council that reportedly represents all students would support such a divisive motion. Not only is this supportive of a movement, BDS, which is undeniably antisemitic, but above all, to me, it seems anti-Australian values and symptomatic of cancel culture,” said Stricker-Phelps, a NSW Jewish Board of Deputies director.
“It was interrupted by heckling. There were many remarks made as I tried to speak, many interruptions, one of which was along the lines of ‘go back to your rich eastern suburbs home’.
“I was then muted and the president notified me that I was not to speak out of turn, and I unmuted myself and said ‘does this council not value democracy?’
“Again I was muted and told that if I did not leave the meeting, I would be removed forcibly.”
According to Stricker-Phelps, one meeting attendee also said, “Do you want me to burn a flag?”
AUJS president Natalie Gunn said she was “disgusted” by the incident and plans to speak to the SRC in addition to raising the issue with USYD’s administrative body.
“The motion isolates and vilifies Jewish students, and we are concerned it sends a dangerous message to the broader student society that the exclusion of Jewish voices is acceptable,” Gunn and vice president Alissa Foster said.
“We were disturbed to see the way Jewish students were treated by the SRC when the motion was being discussed. Their silencing of Jewish voices is something that we stand against.”
They said any Jewish student who feels uncomfortable and unsafe on campus should reach out to AUJS.
In addition, The USYD AUJS executive said the wording “any corporation who sides with Israel is no friend of students”, “explicitly removes students with a connection to Israel from the SRC’s definition of the student body, which dangerously tows the idea that Jewish people and those connected to us are removed or different from broader society.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Peter Wertheim said despite the endless protestations by BDS supporters that they are not antisemitic, “their actions and their words betray them”.
“It was not enough for them to pass a toxic resolution aimed at demonising and ‘othering’ supporters of Israel, knowing full well that this would apply to the vast majority of Jews and Jewish students. They also could not restrain themselves from sinking to verbal abuse of anyone who had the temerity to put forward a contrary view, and intimidated Jewish and other pro-Israel voices into silence,” he said.
“Their disgusting slurs directed at two Jewish students constituted antisemitism by any definition, including the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism which, they seem to have forgotten, the USYD SRC endorsed in April 2018.”
The SRC did not respond to a request for comment.
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