[The UK’s National Union of Students currently lends itself to an ongoing ‘architecture of repression,’ providing a series of measures that covet Zionist advocates, while disciplining those that resist Israel’s genocide. Central to this architecture is the ‘Independent Inquiry’ on antisemitism, now known as ‘The Tuck Report,’ and NUS Action Plan.]
A Motion: Architectures of Repression
In a context where Israel’s genocidal carnage has been globally livestreamed and meticulously documented, repressing Palestine solidarity has become a state imperative. Forming an epicentre of resistance, as students and academics have testified, this is especially the case in universities in North America and Western Europe. Enacted across campuses globally, from Australia, North America, Canada, Britain and Europe, university and research institutions are busy filtering speech critical of Israel through the gauge of Zionist discomfort. Editing out claims of genocide, rewriting public scripts, removing and investigating anti-Zionist voices, obstructing Palestine protest and encampments, commissioning ‘antisemitism inquiries’ partial to Zionist aspirations; all to maintain Palestine, (as it has been for some time), the exception in spaces otherwise proclaimed as liberal bastions of free speech.
It is noteworthy that in this context, even those progressive ‘liberal’ spaces historically encompassing the scope for Palestine solidarity have conceded most, if not all, ground to Zionist interest. This explains why, during a year that saw unprecedented student solidarity with Gaza on British university campuses, the National Union of Students (NUS UK), the largest student representative body in the United Kingdom, a confederation of 400 unions, only passed a single motion at its National Conference of 2024 with scant focus on Palestine.
Entitled “Solidarity with the people of Palestine and Preserving the Student Movement,” the original submission was critical of student/union censorship post-October 7th and deemed it “inappropriate for NUS National Conference to overlook this issue.” It urged the NUS to maintain “their proud traditions of advocating for global human rights,” and challenge the “ operationalization of Jewish identity from “being used to shield Israel...from criticism.”
However, the final accepted motion read rather differently.
Editing out criticism of the NUS, the first paragraph began with generic acknowledgements of the “the historical and current occupation” referring to the unfolding genocide [1] as an “ongoing crisis.”
The remainder was bluntly edited to focus, not on the Gaza genocide or stated title of ‘Solidarity with Palestinian People,’ but on the toxicity of discussion in the Palestinian movement and its claimed disposition towards antisemitism. These insertions reflect the slanted findings of the NUS commissioned Antisemitism inquiry report of January 2023, authored by Rebecca Tuck KC. This was referenced alongside NUS’s subsequent Antisemitism Action Plan no less than 5 times. “The motion,” it concluded, “was to strengthen that work.”
Bearing little resemblance to its’ more radical beginnings, this was the conference motion on Palestine six months into Israel’s apocalyptic ethnic cleansing drive. By this point, well over 33,000 Palestinians had been killed including 6,000 students and more than 260 educational staff.
Months later, NUS has maintained its' commitment to assuaging Zionist discomfort by blanketing what has become the most well-documented genocide in history. Like many of its interventions, despite its claims to “fully supporting student’ rights” on Palestinian liberation, Palestine activists are not received as party to a motion, but as unruly subjects to be managed. In the context of enduring student resistance against genocide complicity, the inquiry’s mandated action plan is coming into fruition.
Indeed, one can hardly ignore the irony of a motion on curbing censorship, transforming into the very problem being highlighted, where “preserving the student movement” euphemistically describes ‘safeguarding’ Israel’s advocates, the Union of Jewish Students, (UJS), a self-avowed Israel interest group, anchored to the founding institutions of the settler- colonial regime and their British Zionist affiliates.
Motion ‘amendments,’ however, are not an isolated act of temerity, but remain indicative of a broader concern that cannot be ignored. In a climate where Palestine activists, students and academics, are being bludgeoned with censorship, the ‘Tuck Report’ and appending NUS Plan, widely publicised and invoked as testimony of student antisemitism, is also being leveraged to quash Palestine activism and insulate Zionist collectives.
While there is much historical precedence for embedding Zionist aspirations into NUS/UJS ventures, the inquiry is perhaps the most far-reaching measure for safeguarding Israel advocates and their advocacy within campus spaces. Yet, while the spotlight on repression of Palestine activists has predominantly fallen on university crackdowns, there has been zero public articulation of the way the NUS provides another route through which a ‘softer’ repression is being institutionalised under the aegis of tackling antisemitism; that is, to diagnose, discipline and diffuse the rising tide of Palestine solidarity.
NUS is one of the largest student unions in the world- intended to represent college and university students across the U.K, through democratic process.
Made up of a confederation of 400 unions across British university campuses, it proposes to serve 7 million students, providing local union services and mobilising national outfacing campaigns. Policy is voted on at national conference by elected union officers, as is the national executive body, although this setup is undergoing reform.
While often deemed ineffectual in engaging students and addressing everyday ‘cost of living’ concerns, on the Palestine Question and for minority groups that do engage, it has played a decisive role in advancing the cause, only to find itself curbed by Zionist campaigns and subject to boycotts for this very reason. The topic of Israel/Palestine in the NUS has proved enduring, deeply affecting and structuring NUS’s internal dynamics. This was highlighted most obviously by ploys to oust Israel-critical voices such as Malia Bouattia, a case also uncritically recounted in the inquiry report [2], that NUS failed to hold anyone to account for.
UJS called for disaffiliation from NUS for its perceived inaction on Bouattia, NUS’s first Black, Muslim/pro-Palestine president. She was framed as antisemitic for describing the University of Birmingham as “a Zionist outpost.” Ironically, Bouattia’s controversial descriptor chimed with a UJS-commissioned report issued just five years later by the Jewish Policy Institute. In the author’s words, Birmingham is described as “fundamentally pro-Israel with a strong focus on creating Jewish exclusive spaces;” Jews who sit “ideologically outside this position" struggle or choose to “opt out altogether” [3]. The case to undermine Bouattia’s presidency was clearly not based on a difference of opinion on the political demographics of Birmingham University’s Zionist community, but a reaction to her settler-colonial allusions as a vocal Palestine advocate.
NUS has also merited the ire of Benzion Mileikowsky, wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. In response to NUS’s alignment with the BDS, supported by the Black Students Movement in 2015, Mileikowsky falsely smeared NUS as an ISIS supporter. The desperation to counter BDS on campuses led to the British Council Israel’s Office to write directly to UJS lending its support [4] in a bid to monitor and counter its popularity. Led by UJS, this took the shape of anti-BDS campaigns, in direct opposition to NUS mandated policy; a position unheard of for any associative member of the NUS.
Muslim student representatives, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), also called for disaffiliation and continue to remain disengaged from NUS for ousting its former president-elect and Israel-critic, Shaima Dallali, as explored elsewhere. But it was precisely Dallali’s case and the notoriously public (supposedly ‘confidential) investigation’ into her decade-old tweets during Israel’s 2012 operation in Gaza, that formed the pretext to the inquiry; a saga that unfolded amidst the British government's public disengagement from NUS on grounds of its failure to address “systemic antisemitism within the organisation.”
Prompted by UJS (alongside other pro-Israel contingents) and acceded to by NUS, it follows a predictable pattern of scrutiny and scandal that targets NUS Presidents critical of Israel. In the case of Dallali, it also invited legal recourse. Her subsequent tribunal against the NUS concluded that anti-Zionist beliefs “may” be protected and “as President of NUS she was, entitled to hold protected beliefs.” It signals one of a number of cases countering the repression of Palestine activists and unsettling the complacency with which Zionism is institutionalised in British universities.
Despite its ‘woke’ persona as a hub for multiple ‘liberation’ groups (‘racialised,’ Trans, LGBT, Women and Disabled) and proud 100 plus year history of being ‘radical since 1922,’ on Palestine, NUS reflects an establishment politics it is apparently poised against. Although little documented, this has remained an enduring feature in its historical commitment to refurbishing Zionist aspirations since UN Resolution 3379; Zionism is Racism, which saw a wave of motions seeking to defund Zionist student societies reversed by the NUS [5]. Contrary to its pivotal historic role in boycotting South Africa’s Apartheid regime and its once prior commitments to the BDS movement, on the Palestine Question today, the NUS increasingly functions as an “architecture of repression.”
This ‘architecture’ can be seen in NUS’s adoption of the contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, lobbied for and implemented by its associates, UJS; its revised policy on the ‘historic conduct’ of electoral candidates and in a ‘new’ Israel-normalising culture modelled by Zionist ‘educational’ agencies.
These features are not exhaustive, but nor are they unique to the internal meddling of a British student union. They can be traced across a global medley of (mostly former colonial/settler) states that seek to discipline, contain and expunge those who unsettle (aiming for decolonisation proper) Zionist normalisation. Against more brazen state interventions that rely on ‘war on terror’ methods to evict Palestine activists from national/political spaces, these censorious interventions function more insidiously within a settler-colonial logic of erasure. In the British student context, they undermine, as have so many other junctures, the defining principles of equality and democratic process NUS claims to stand for. Divorced from the intifada (forthcoming) that has gained momentum on British campuses, this repressive architecture illuminates not just how far NUS has strayed, but its role in erasing voices for Palestine liberation.
The Inquiry and IHRA Definition
From the outset, the inquiry invited justified scepticism. Mired in procedural irregularities, notably, the disproportionate involvement of the UJS and terms of reference clearly targeting Palestinian advocacy, there was little hope of impartiality in either process or findings; a methodological skew borne out in the report and the subject of much critical commentary.
The inquiry reports final recommendations, which NUS commit to in advance, have nonetheless been swept through as final, necessary and incontestable steps, setting the tone for all discussion, pronouncements and interventions on behalf of their ‘associative partners,’ UJS. Most significantly, the report surreptitiously endorses the IHRA definition.
Although the subject of global repudiation and widely contested for its conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, NUS is committed to the IHRA definition. Originally adopted at NUS conference in 2017, it has since been renewed and maintained as policy.
UJS activists have relentlessly pursued university Vice Chancellors to adopt the IHRA, include all its examples as part of the definition, (7 of which reference Israel), and rely on it “as a supporting document within their complaints processes.”
Yet, with such prescriptive requests, one might assume the IHRA definition, and examples of what antisemitism might look like, are a statutory requirement. It has certainly been championed in these terms, although to be clear its instrumentalisation exceeds its non-statutory status, has detracted from its original purpose and arguably as Israel-critical Jewish voices attest, those it should protect.
As academic experts have concluded, IHRA examples referencing Israel (rather than the core definition), are the subject of ‘political misuse’ by Israel’s advocates, regulating, with disciplinary effect, the activities and speech of those that ally with the Palestinian cause. The reports five-page annex and other subsequent research provide ample testimony.
The IHRA was also adopted as the inquiries’ guiding definition[6]. Despite this and given it's centrality in the lobbying activities of the student groups she interviews, Tuck’s conclusion that the IHRA is virtually inconsequential [7] to tackling antisemitism in the NUS is peculiar and incoherent. The IHRA is not referenced in any of her case-studies, yet evidence of its misuse to repress activists[8] is mushrooming locally, globally, and in sector-wide infringements, notably against vocal Muslim activists. [9]
Of course, the relevance of the IHRA is not about its deployment per se but as Professor Ayyash notes, its “ability to determine the contours of the conversation over Palestine and Israel.” These shifting contours can be traced across NUS interventions, in the micro-managed motion introduced above, in NUS guidance on the “Middle East Crisis,” and in public interventions that label offensive anti zionist slurs as antisemitic without distinction. UJS are meanwhile referencing intifada as antisemitic and delivering this ‘training’ to student societies and staff as stipulated in NUS guidance.
Union of Jewish Students IHRA Antisemitism Training, 2025 Photography, courtesy of attendee
Besides the implications of endorsing a discriminatory definition, NUS's adoption of the IHRA fails to cohere with its own customary practice of seeking a majority conference vote as a basis for policy. Nor does it, as the inquiry report explains, reflect NUS’s stated logic that once policy expires it would require active revocation,[10]for it to be rescinded, something never facilitated, prior to or following the inquiry. As relayed by delegates at last year’s annual conference, although the subject of much internal debate, the IHRA (and alternatives) were not tabled for discussion but dismissed as “out of scope.”
Ironically, despite this undemocratic style of policy-making, NUS management and the inquiry report appeal to notions of democratic parity and presumed equivalence between policies/groups, (notably Muslims) to justify the IHRA’s mainstreaming into NUS policy. In private correspondence, NUS management cite the adoption of the APPG definition of Islamophobia since dropped by government, as a pretext to support the IHRA. It is a rationale that flounders given the APPG was certainly not a definition supported by Muslim representative FOSIS.
Based on neither merit or periodic engagement, as one might expect of a liberal-progressive-democratic institution, the IHRA’s adoption is better explained by the lobbying activities of the UJS and establishment pressure.
The outcome, however, is they are now burdened with a definition potentially at odds with free speech laws, including Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)[11]. This legal oversight is not unique to NUS’s renewal of the definition, but integral to the inquiry itself which provides “scant reference to legal frameworks under which student rights are protected.”
Such oversights have huge implications in the sector. If universities are eventually obliged to retreat from embracing a definition that trumps their own statutory obligations relating to free speech, assembly and academic freedoms,[12] this doesn’t bode well for unions promoting a definition that may implicate them in a legal quagmire.
One would think, given the costly Dallali case, NUS would be more circumspect about the policies they uphold, but their public declarations to the UJS display no shift or retraction of the definition.
Evidently, pushback in the sector is already taking shape. The IHRA was stalled as a ‘training’ option at one university, where staff members argued anti-Zionism is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. It is also the subject of a legal battle which last year forced the Department for Education to pause on their plans to roll out IHRA training across the sector. Significantly, this legal challenge was put forward by a Jewish-led group. The legal tender has now resumed, but curiously without reference to the IHRA as reports in the sector speculate. Internationally, legal pronouncements have rendered the IHRA unconstitutional.
NUS can only feasibly continue to adopt the IHRA by positively ignoring a swathe of global academic opinion, including that of the oldest race relations body in Britain (IRR), whose previous warnings have gone unheeded.
However, the NUS does not just ignore this groundswell of expert opinion, it also overrides its own prior campaigns to protect students, especially Muslim membership from counterterrorist surveillance such as Prevent; something the IHRA does well to replicate. It is no coincidence that Israeli professor, Neve Gordon, describes the IHRA as a “counterinsurgency tool” utilised to shield Israel from resistance.
‘Historic Conduct’
Replicating the racialised surveillance of counterterrorist measures, the NUS Antisemitism Plan provides the means to sieve out prospective leadership candidates based on ‘historic conduct,’ namely relating to ‘digital footprints.’ Borne out of a preoccupation with the social media content of Palestine activists such as Dallali, this policy revision is inherently lop-sided.
Whilst certainly not unique to the sector, it means Pro-Palestine activists critical of the regime would potentially be rendered ineligible, particularly if they fall foul of the IHRA definition or considered unfavorable by NUS associates, UJS. In marked contrast, UJS remains exempt from political scrutiny, and given historical precedence, by extension so do its members and those they patronage.
Curiously, while the focus on the historical utterances of electoral candidates has become a matter of policy, other questionable conduct seems to have slipped NUS attention. Surely, questions of ‘historic conduct’ ought to apply equally if not solely to be tools against Palestinian advocates. For example, one might consider students touring occupied territories through ‘birthright’ or leadership delegations, to be ‘conduct’ worthy of scrutiny and very relevant to any future position, electoral or voluntary. Yet over the last decade and more, this has not been publicly registered by NUS, although has certainly emerged as contentious in the public eye.
The divergence between Israel’s British student advocates that appeal to the rule of law through a ‘zero tolerance approach’ to proscribed movement, Hamas, but have enjoyed tours to territories prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention [1949] is astonishing. It is especially pressing given ICJP’s recent ruling that Israel's presence in Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem is wholly illegal. Argued by specialists at UCL, legal duties of Third States oblige them to ensure nationals are prohibited[13] from engaging in cultural, touristic or educational visits.
It means university governing bodies or unions cannot solely pronounce the criminality of supporting Hamas or claim to adhere to the ‘law of the land,’ for purposes of ‘safeguarding Jewish students,’ but ignore the implications of Hague Regulations and Article 64 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as laid out by the ICJP.
Culturing Zionism
The inquiry stipulates a “facilitator led” and “nuanced approach to Middle Eastern Politics” [14] to establish “ a new culture around Israel and Palestine” [15]. We see this implemented at NUS Conference 2024, where NUS endorse Solutions Not Sides (SNS).
SNS is a one-sided ‘educational consultancy’ with dubious connections to Israel's occupying forces, and sponsors that fund settler-colonial projects. They brand themselves as neutral peacemakers, although craft their “critical thinking” to sanitise Israel's settler-colonial project as just one side of a ‘conflict.’
SNS handbooks are replete with references to Zionists ‘feelings’ threatened by terminology such as nakba and occupation, when both are central to understanding the Palestinian condition and figure as rudimentary within the Palestine movement.
As described by well-seasoned Palestine activists, the imposition of SNS at conference was considered ill-placed and “infantile” and further disrupted by activists, including Jewish students who filed a petition against their presence. Yet they continue to be advertised as the port of call in NUS crisis response guidance and by university governing body, UUK.
One would expect greater vigilance on 'experts’ imported into campus spaces, something NUS has been especially mindful of in guidance concerned with proscribed groups and external influences. Yet this concern has not extended itself to Israel-normalising institutions.
Evidently, the implementation of policy adjustments does not speak to uprooting antisemitism as the inquiry purports but further entrenches Zionist expression as a normalised political disposition and practice – making it less susceptible to rising contestation in a time of genocide.
In shifting the burden of insulating Israel into NUS policy and practices, (rather than relying solely on traditional lobbying), NUS provides a key route to ensuring Pro-Palestinian activism remains constrained by inquiry measures. The trickle-down impact of this can already be seen in the emergence of collectives squeezed outside of NUS, such as Muslim Students for Palestine.
Lending itself as a political home for hasbara advocacy, the NUS not only remains divorced from the ‘decolonising’ movement it claims to support but undermines its 'internationalist’ founding principles and objectives: "To support causes which, in the opinion of NUS’s democratic spaces, merits the support of students in general.” [16]
Of course, besides exposing its feigned stature as a ‘radical’ progressive institution, against unprecedented global condemnation and accountability at the highest levels, NUS’s protectionism of Israel's advocates, as with the assembly of genocide complicit institutions in the sector more broadly, will prove futile in an era in which Israel's legitimacy stands beyond repair. We are now beyond cliches of falling on the ‘right side of history;’ for the present moment, that call is already long overdue.
*Forthcoming articles can be found here.
Appreciation to the team at Jadaliyya and all my expert reviewers. Any errors are mine.
“Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,” (September 2024) para.69.
n2427119.pdf
[2] Tuck, R. “Independent investigation into allegations of antisemitism within NUS,” (January 2023) p.25-27
[3] Boyd, J. “Searching for community A portrait of undergraduate Jewish students in five UK cities,” (December 2016) p.25
[4] Aked, H. Friends of Israel; The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity (2023) p.166
[5] Smith, E No Platform; A History of Antifascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (2020), p.104-6/186
[6] Tuck, Independent Investigation, p.40
[7] ibid., 3
[8] European Legal Centre, “Suppressing Palestinian Rights Advocacy through the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism,” (June 2023) p.26-30
The-Practice-of-Suppressing-Palestinian-Rights-Advocacy-FINAL-PP.pdf
[9] Tamea, L. (2024). “The Rise and Decline of Muslim Representation in Student Unions: Motivations and Experiences of Muslim Sabbatical Officers in Student Unions,” In: Mahmud, A., Islam, M. (eds) Uncovering Islamophobia in Higher Education. Palgrave Studies in Race, Inequality and Social Justice in Education. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 65-6
[10] Tuck, 43
[11] European Legal Support Centre & British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, “Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom in UK Higher Education: The Adverse Impact of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” (September 2023) p.13-15
[12] Ibid., 13-15
[13] Wilde, R. “Illegality of Israel’s presence in the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in the light of the 2024 Occupied Palestinian Territory Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, and consequences for third States and the European Union,” (December 2024) p.4
ralph_wilde_icj_opt_ao_thirdstateseu_legal_opinion.pdf
[14] Tuck, 17, 31
[15] Ibid 111
[16] National Union of Students (United Kingdom) Articles of Association (2006) 2.1.9
NUS_UK_Articles.pdf