He made it through five years in the Israeli army coordinating the construction of roads, hospitals and schools in the West Bank and helping Palestinians get medical aide.

But Hen Mazzig, an openly gay former Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) commander, never before experienced the kind of terror he felt and saw during a speaking engagement at prestigious University College in London, England, last October.

Invited by the university’s Friends of Israel society to speak about his humanitarian work in Ramallah, Hebron and Jerusalem, the 28-year-old found himself facing down 100 aggressive, angry and violent anti-Israel protesters.

As the Tel Aviv-based activist told a free speech event in Toronto this past week (I sat on a panel with Mazzig at the event organized by LGBTory, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and Hasbara Fellowships) he had to change rooms three times only to find himself barricaded in the third room with about two dozen Jewish students.

He said this was while 28 London police officers surrounded the room and the protesters stood at the window shouting “murderer, murderer, murderer” and “Israeli war criminal.”

Mazzig said he only managed to speak for about 10 minutes — screaming to be heard above the mob — before the police put a coat on him, instructed him to take off his glasses and escorted him running out of the university and into a dark London alley.

“So the university was not safe but a dark alley in London was safe,” he told about 75 people at the Toronto event. “It was a disturbing night.”

The violent melee, which made headlines in several British newspapers, resulted in an investigation by the university, which determined that Mazzig’s freedom of speech was “intentionally disrupted.”

Mazzig said he has been invited back to speak in mid-January but he has told the university provost he will only do so if the provost agrees to walk in with him and that faculty are invited to attend.

“It was terrifying, it was shocking ... but it’s a confirmation that what I’m doing is right,” said Mazzig, who speaks Arabic, Hebrew and English. “If it wasn’t right, they wouldn’t be afraid of me so much.”

He said since he left the army six years ago, he figures he’s shared his story on 300 campuses in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe and has been attacked or shut down at up to 90 of them.

He assumed, perhaps naively, that students would want to hear from an Israeli, Jewish, half-Iraqi, North African, gay, underprivileged guy who was seconds from losing his life during a terrorist attack at his favourite ice cream shop in 2001.

He thought, equally naively, that they’d be interested in someone who was accepted by the IDF as proudly gay in 2009-2010 when the U.S. military still had a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy and who worked with Palestinian civilians to ensure they weren’t hurt by the conflict.

The humanitarian unit (@Cogat_Israel), he says, gets no attention from the international media. “They’re seeing us as a terrible army and they don’t want any other narrative out there,” he said.

As for his own story, he said often his very existence is “provocation” for many students and many activists and social justice warriors (SJWs) can’t bear to hear it.

“Over and over again I’ve been attacked and called terrible names on social media and face to face,” he said.

He noted he has gained a close friend from social media — actress and comedian Roseanne Barr, who went to Israel this past January at his behest to speak to an anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) event.

Mazzig makes it clear that he’s not out to provoke anyone or anything but what happened at London’s University College last October shouldn’t happen at any university.

“I’m not going to bow down to these people,” he said. “Israel is a miracle ... I’m not going to allow this miracle to be tainted the way it is.”

SLevy@postmedia.com