It often happens that people who hate Israel take it out on Jews. Today, Nakba Day, the ultra-orthodox community in Stamford Hill, Hackney found anti-Israel graffiti on their synagogue, walls, shops, traffic lights.

This was an attack on Jews as proxies for Israel, and the Jews on the receiving end understand this. One said "Everyone feels scared" and another, "It makes us feel that we are in exile". The irony is that this it is precisely this sense of exile which strengthened the Jewish will for a state of their own in the years before the establishment of Israel.

This graffiti is another bit of evidence, if any were needed, that the University and College Union's pro-boycott motion assertions that "criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitic" or "is not as such antisemitic", is folly. The endurance of these clauses is an affront to anti-racism which promotes self-assurance in people who advance antisemitic ways of thinking.

I'm not saying that UCU pro-boycotters would dream of daubing hate graffiti about Israel onto Jewish property. But these attacks are nevertheless related to the virulently demonising boycott campaign in UCU, the anti-Israel hijacking of campus Nakba Day commemorations, and the ugly anti-Zionism shoe-horned into what should and can be positive Palestinian twinning projects. The common parent which relates these campus activities to these daubings is the wider movement, not to criticise Israel, but to make a pariah of Israel. It is this which, inevitably, nurtures antisemitism.