More than 1,600 academics, writers and public figures, including around 60 members of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, have signed an open letter defending an Israel-born economist whom anti-Israel activists heckled and allegedly threatened in London last week.
Separately, pro-Israel activists in the Netherlands headed to Rotterdam on Tuesday in support of an academic at Erasmus University in Rotterdam who is facing calls for dismissal over pro-Israel posts.
The attacks against the academic in the United Kingdom, professor Michael Ben-Gad, “are intimidating, particularly to Jewish students”, the open letter states.
The alleged intimidation happened last week at City St George’s, University of London, following a campaign of harassment.
Ben-Gad, an economics lecturer who served in the Israel Defense Forces from 1982 to 1985, told Sky News that masked activists burst into his classroom, calling him a “war criminal” and “Nazi.”
“They refused to leave. They were masked. One of them made a threat about having my head chopped off,” he said.
The demonstrators, identifying as members of City Action for Palestine, accused Ben-Gad of being part of the “genocide in Gaza” and chanted slogans including “Shame, this lecturer served in the IOF [Israel Occupation Forces]” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Ben-Gad has taught at the university since 2008 and previously chaired his department. He said he would not be intimidated. “These modern Brownshirts are not going to send me into hiding. I’m an unapologetic Israeli patriot, and no one is going to intimidate me,” he said.
The letter was coordinated by staff at the university and by the London Universities Council for Academic Freedom (LUCAF), the Council said. Ben-Gad recently went on GBNews and delivered a defiant message, which he said was instead of an apology that his detractors demanded as a condition to end their campaign against him.
On Monday, Ben-Gad went on GBNews and said he was being hounded for being “a Jew in the Middle East.” The “thugs” targeting him, he said, “are now offering me ‘terms’: I can have my life back if I apologize for my military service.”
Although as an Israeli citizen, military service was compulsory for him, “for most of us, conscription merely absolved us of the need to volunteer,” he said, reading from a text addressed to his detractors.
“I was born less than 20 years after nearly my entire family was gassed at Treblinka. And personally, I would have crawled over cut glass to get to that induction center, to put on the uniform and defend my people,” he added.
In the Netherlands, anti-Israel protesters said they would gather to stage a counter-demonstration to the support rally by pro-Israel demonstrators in defense of Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko. An Israeli professor of law, her expressions of support for Israel in recent months have prompted intimidation that’s preventing her from teaching or even entering the campus at Erasmus University, Ronny Naftaniel, a former leader of Dutch Jewry, told JNS.
“The same process as for Michael Ben-Gad is now also being directed towards Israeli Professor Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, led by six Islamic organizations,” U.K. professor Ian Pace tweeted last week.
