The Emile Boutmy amphitheater renamed “Gaza Amphitheater”: this Tuesday, students occupied an auditorium, in support of the Palestinians. On Twitter, the Union of Jewish Students of France assures that one of their members was taken to task. “Don’t let her in, she’s a Zionist,” pro-Palestinian students reportedly said against her.
“We essentialize and we totalitarianize”
Invited this Wednesday morning to Dimitri Pavlenko’s microphone, Yossef Murciano, national secretary of the UEJF, does not hide his concern about such comments. “We must understand that what happened when a student was refused entry to an amphitheater by saying ‘she’s a Zionist’, without even knowing her political opinions, without even knowing what she made last night where what she ate for breakfast (…) is an essentialization of a Jew, it’s anti-Semitism,” he protests at the microphone of Europe 1.
Yossef Murciano believes that Sciences Po is currently facing anti-Semitism, but also totalitarianism: “The unwillingness of the debate, the fact of not wanting to hear contradictions, means that these people leave this student at the door. So, we essentialize and we totalitarianize. This is what happened at Sciences Po yesterday,” he regrets.
Jewish students ostracized
On the side of the pro-Palestinian student group, they justify the refusal to let this student enter “for security reasons”. According to the latter, she would have intimidated pro-Palestinian students recently, before ensuring that other UEJF students had been able to attend the debates. But for the national secretary of the UEJF, these comments underline the complexity of being a Jewish student in France. “It turns out that in September, we released a survey just before October 7 (the day of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli territory, editor’s note). We released a survey which said that one in three Jewish students chose his university career based on fear of anti-Semitism.
Speaking to Dimitri Pavlenko, Yossef Murciano believes that “when we are held accountable for the reality of Israeli politics because we are Jewish, there is a form of anti-Semitism and we must stop there.” Before concluding: “What I would like is for there to be a pro-Palestinian mobilization which accepts to hear a dissonant word, another word and which moves forward. (…) I am not against the fact that the Boutmy amphitheater is a high point of mobilization for the Palestinian people. I think that’s very good. The problem is when we prohibit Jews from entering the amphitheaters, when we equate them with Benjamin Netanyahu because they are Jewish and we point the finger at them, or when we get up in the lecture hall so as not to sit next to a Jew,” he concludes.