[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
In the U.K., pro-Hamas demonstrators have been harassing and threatening an Israeli Professor Michael Ben-Gad, who teaches economics at the University of London. They have barged into his classes to demand that he be fired by the University of London, all the while shouting their antisemitic slogans and threatened him personally with decapitation. His crime: he is an Israeli, and not just an Israeli, but one who forty years ago served in the IDF, like every other Israeli. In other words, these anti-Israel student stormtroopers are behaving just as the Nazis did in 1933, when they discharged all Jewish faculty from German universities. Juden raus! Oh, and by the way, let’s not forget that “diversity is our strength.”
More on the antisemitic madness can be found here: “Activists disrupt lecture at City, University of London, demand Israeli professor’s dismissal,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, October 23, 2025:
Masked anti-Israel activists barged into a City St George’s, University of London class on Wednesday to demand the firing of the Israeli lecturer, who told Sky News that one of the students had threatened to behead him.
The keffiyeh-clad activists disrupted the class by berating Prof. Michael Ben-Gad for his mandatory service in the IDF during the 1980s, urging students to leave his lecture. They decried Ben-Gad as a “terrorist” and “war criminal.”
“He’s killed innocent people, this is not someone to learn from, this is someone to be tried at The Hague,” said one activist, according to a video published by the Association of Student Activism for Palestine (ASAP). “You should all as conscious students walk out because this professor, his hands are stained off of genocide [sic].”
What do these pro-Hamas demonstrators know about Ben-Gad’s service in the IDF? What is their evidence that he “killed innocent people”? For them, it is enough that he was an IDF soldier, and thus he is automatically a “murderer” defending the “colonial-settler Zionist state.”
In an interview with Sky News, Ben-Gad said that one of the activists “made a threat about having my head chopped off.”…
Activists had launched a campaign against the economics professor since at least October 12, when City Action for Palestine published on Instagram a series of demands, including the termination of Ben-Gad’s contract, an apology by the university, and that the institution not hire former IDF soldiers in the future.
For these antisemitic protesters, Hebrew University of Jerusalem is built on “occupied territory.” Don’t talk to them about the 3,500-year history of Jews in Jerusalem, or about the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which in time was to become the Jewish state; its territory included all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And that means that no part of Jerusalem can be considered as “occupied territory.”
These campus stormtroopers ought to be arrested for disrupting campus life, for interfering with a faculty member’s attempts to teach his class, for threatening him with death (“I’ll cut off your head”), and for defending the terrorists who committed their pogrom on October 7, 2023. If they are students, they should be expelled from the university as well. Don’t bother trying to reason with them. Their minds are twisted by hate. Punish them. That the University of London has so far failed even to comment on the harassment and threats directed at Professor Ben-Gad is not a good sign. Pull up your socks, please, University of London. This is no time for pusillanimity.
