Thursday 16th February 2010 was the day when Jewish students at Manchester said ‘enough’. Enough to racism, enough to delegitimization, enough to xenophobia, vilification and intimidation. It was the day Jewish students held their heads high and said where some look for polarization and conflict, we seek desperately for peace.

In order to give some context to an event that saw over 150 Jewish students march into their unrepresentative union, and say with their heads held high that they proudly supported the only free state in the Middle East, we must explain why such an event was so desperately necessary.

Two weeks previous, Manchester’s Politics Society invited Israel’s Deputy Ambassador Mrs Talya Lador-Fresher to campus, in an event that had nothing to do with Manchester’s Jewish Society, and everything to do with offering Manchester’s students an alternative narrative to the hate they are regularly subjected to on campus.

It comes of no surprise that members of ‘Action Palestine’ who have little history in helping Palestinians, and much experience in hindering efforts to build peace, immediately got to work on preventing normal students hearing a point of view that diverged from their own extremist agenda. Their claim that a General Meeting motion passed last year (by a group of students equally unwilling to listen to calls for peace), which boycotted Israeli products, somehow equated to banning any representative of the State of Israel speaking on campus was gleefully lapped up by a Union Executive willing to overstep its authority and let its own political agenda shape decision making.

Of course, one small hurdle lay as an obstacle to their racist agenda - the law. One would think that being told that their plan to prevent Mrs Lador-Fresher speaking was racist by law would be enough to make one stop and think, but no, such a revelation merely spurred them on to prevent her speaking. It was, therefore, to their great disappointment that there would be no way around this, and it became clear that their privately ingrained racism would become not-so-private were they to push ahead with their ‘no-platform’ policy.

Sadly, by this point Action Palestine’s protests and threats had become so intimidating and dangerous, that the Deputy Ambassador was forced to cancel. This cancellation, which was of great disappointment to the majority of students whom with no strong views on the conflict wanted a chance to here from someone at the forefront of peace building, did not represent the first time Action Palestine have lost the moral argument and instead resorted to intimidation and threats.

But there was good to come of this affair. The institutional racism, xenophobia, hate, threats and lack of justice came as a wake-up call to Jewish students, and indeed all those students who believe in peace and democracy in Manchester and around the country. Enough was enough. This time we would not just voice our concerns lying down, this was the time to show everyone that we know no boundaries in our quest to fight for Israel’s rights and the rights of all those in the Middle East to live in peace.

150 Students, many Jewish, plenty not, marched together as one to their student’s union, and despite the best physical endeavors of Action Palestine to prevent students entering their own union, sat down together in the foyer and together called for peace, and an end to racism. Shouts of “Our Union Too” rang through the union, and it became clear that from now on those students in favour of peace and justice would not be on the back foot, but would openly and vocally represent themselves, and express their pride in Israel, and their desire for peace.

It was only in the aftermath of this event that is became clear just how extreme Action Palestine and like minded groups are, and how convincing and overwhelming our victory was. Immediately after the event the ‘Manchester Stop the War Coalition’, who despite their name are much more intent on building conflict than seeing its prevention, released a statement that was libelous and racist at best, and an unambiguous call to violence at worst, described how “40 Israeli Students, many with Israeli army experience” stormed the union building, and described how “Israeli lawyers threatened the union”. Whilst a first reading, this statement could be somewhat humorous (If the IDF were really to be comprised of a bunch of maths and computer science students, I’d be worried!), a second reading reaffirmed the horrible truth that many of us already know: Anti-Israel sentiment is so often simply a guise for anti-semitism. In reality all ‘Stop the War’ had done was swap the word ‘Jewish’ for Israeli’, in order to justify their ranting anti-semitism.

If this is worrying, we can take pride from the unprecedented actions that followed this statement. The Union Executive, upon realizing the incredible racism and downright lies of a group with which they were affiliated, were compelled to condemn ‘Stop the War’, and write an open letter expressing their dismay at the groups laissez-faire willingness to resort to libel when the truth did them no good. Likewise, the Union’s General Secretary was embarrassingly forced to backtrack and decide that the Union, in fact, did not have a ‘no-platform’ policy for Israeli officials. A victory for both justice and the law.

We can say with enormous pride that at the heart of UJS and all JSOC campaigning, has always been the desire for peace. Where we are met with open calls for the end of the Jewish State, we call for a future where Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and equality. Sadly when fighting against a group of students whom are to a far greater extent ‘anti-Israel’ than ‘pro-Palestine’, it is often difficult to get across our message of peace, yet we showed last Thursday that we were unwilling to take racism lying down. Whilst we were victorious in every sense, notably in getting the Union’s Executive to take unprecedented steps in condemning anti-semitism, there can be no doubt that our greatest success was in showing clearly, once and for all, that the delegitimization of Israel and dehumanization of the Israeli people would not take place in our name.