Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect

The new Trump administration promises to shift the landscape for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and anti-Israel politics.

A new Executive Order orders action to combat antisemitism, including deporting violent and terror-supporting non-citizens, and the administration’s efforts to remove the Federal DEI enterprise removes a key support for anti-Israel and antisemitic policies at universities receiving government funds.

The effectiveness of these and other measures remains unclear — but the new and supportive rhetoric must be contrasted with the new administration’s established pattern of pressuring Israel to make concessions.

Responding to increasing scrutiny, higher education professionals have rebranded DEI courses and offices, and more evidence has accumulated that university administrations are working to dilute or replace the focus on campus antisemitism. At Northwestern University, critics have noted that a required training program on discrimination and harassment omitted Israel and Zionism as targeted categories, but included “anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases.” The University of Toronto also launched a working group on Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian discrimination.

Universities and localities continue, however, to act against students who have violated regulations and laws:

• The University of Rochester expelled four students for putting up “wanted posters” targeting Jewish faculty and staff. The students also face criminal mischief charges;
• A University of Chicago student was arrested and charged with aggravated battery in connection with an October 2024 anti-Israel protest. Students later protested outside the president’s residence in support of the arrested individuals;
• Another four Case Western students were arrested and charged with felonious vandalism in connection with a November building takeover;
• Two Dartmouth College students were found guilty of misdemeanor trespass after refusing to leave an encampment in October 2023;
• A Northwestern University Ph.D. graduate pled guilty to a firebomb attack and lighting fires “in solidarity with Palestinians” at the University of California at Berkeley;
• At Princeton University, 14 students and others will stand trial in April on charges of defiant criminal trespassing in connection with an April 2024 takeover of a university building;
• New York University suspended 13 students who held a sit-in that disrupted the university library in December. One of the students accused the school of “targeting brown and Arab students;”
• Three University of Michigan students were charged with misdemeanors in connection with a fall 2024 “die-in.”

Divestment now appears nearly dead on American campuses. In January Johns Hopkins University rejected divesting from Israel as inappropriately political and impractical, as did the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Maine system. At the University of Georgia, however, students disrupted a board of regents meeting to demand divestment.

This follows a spate of protests by medical professionals, including a letter of support from the American Academy of Pediatrics to then Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in support of Hamas doctor Hussam Abu Safiya who was arrested in Gaza. “Call out sick for Gaza” protests occurred at Boston area hospitals including Harvard Medical School.

Physicians associated with Columbia University also complained administrators had engaged in “the erasure of Palestinian morbidity and mortality and “systematic repression and censorship of health-oriented discussions of the genocide.” The support for Hamas demonstrated by physicians at their medical school graduations is an ominous foreshadowing of future mistreatment of patients on the basis of religion or national identity that has already been documented in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Faculty

In the faculty sphere, one of the most notable developments in January was a resolution approved by the American Historical Association (AHA) members at its annual meeting to condemn “scholasticide” in Gaza. The resolution alleged that Israel had intentionally and systematically destroyed Gaza’s educational infrastructure using US weapons. Once approved the resolution moved to the executive committee before being sent to the full membership. The executive committee, however, vetoed the resolution, stating that “it lies outside the scope of the association’s mission and purpose.”

The AHA’s executive committee’s decision follows a similar one by the Modern Language Association to prevent a BDS resolution from being put to the full membership. The moves suggest that academic leaders — with the notable exception of the umbrella American Association of University Professors, which has endorsed “individual” Israel boycotts and whose leadership is strongly hostile to Israel — are perceiving BDS as a losing issue from the perspective of disciplinary reputation and perhaps legal and public relations liability. There is a schism between younger academics inculcated with the ideology of “scholar-activism” and an older generation.

Despite or perhaps as a result of small signs of resistance to BDS by leaders of academic organizations, faculty unions have emerged as centers of Israel hatred.

Resolutions demanding divestment area are also means to split the faculty and more importantly, leverage affiliated union support. In one example the City University of New York Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) union voted to divest from Israel. A Jewish faculty group then filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights.

The union vote was condemned by the university and New York State governor Kathy Hochul (D). The refusal of the Supreme Court to hear an earlier case regarding the union leaves in limbo the question of whether Jewish and other faculty can be fairly represented by a politicized union.

In an example of the mendacity and mediocrity that characterizes so many anti-Israel faculty members, Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke claimed that she had been forced to retire as a result of her “pro-Palestinian” activities. Her claim that the move was “termination dressed up in more palatable terms” was belied by report from an outside law firm which documented her persistent harassment and defamation of Israeli and Jewish students and “prohibited racial stereotyping.”

Franke has now filed a grievance against the school’s Office of Institutional Equity accusing it of “a pattern and anti-Palestinian racism.”

In a related development, the Islamist group CAIR declared that Columbia was a hostile campus for pro-Palestinian students.

Reports continue to accumulate regarding the routine incorporation of anti-Israel materials into coursework in disciplines as varied as English and music. At the University of Pittsburgh, faculty also offered extra credit for attending anti-Israel protests and berated students for their support of Israel and “Jewish privilege.” A video taken at the Barnard College English department shows that every faculty member’s door is decorated with anti-Israel flyers.

Other examples of campus propagandizing include a panel entitled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine” to be held at the University of California Berkeley in February. A description of the panel promises to “look at how Zionism has weaponized feminism, so as to serve Israel’s genocidal intent, by upholding debunked accusations of systematic Hamas mass assault.” After the event was publicized, the university removed the description from its website.

Students

With the semester underway campus protests against Israel have resumed but at lower level:

• At Cornell University protestors vandalized a statue in the center of campus with “Divest from death” and “occupation=death” and red paint. When interviewed, the anonymous protestors stated their goal was the elimination of Israel;
• At Columbia University “New York City Resists with Gaza” and “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” destroyed the sewage system at the International Affairs Building with cement and spray painted graffiti there and on the business school. In a social media posting the groups stated they had “attacked two targets” to note the death of Hind Rajab and to resist “One of Columbia’s most recent violent gentrification projects into Harlem, the construction of which was conditioned on the creation of Columbia’s Apartheid Global Center in ‘Tel Aviv’”;
• Columbia University protestors vandalized the campus with “Land back, nothing less than liberation.” Demonstrators also held several protests off campus;
• Also at Columbia masked protestors entered a modern Israel history class, reading manifestos and handing out leaflets saying “Curse Zionism.” The university president condemned the incident, warned that police presence on campus might be expanded, and later suspended one ‘”affiliate” for participating in the incident and barred two others from campus. A faculty group also condemned the incident;
• At Yale University, a speaking appearance by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett at the Hillel was protested by students and others who attempted to block entrance to the building and who then occupied the building’s lobby;
• Protestors at Oxford University occupied a campus library. They stated the building had been renamed the “Khalida Jarrar Library” after the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine;
• At Ohio State University, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter held a protest outside of the Chabad house during a Holocaust remembrance event, which included several former Israeli soldiers.

Pushback to university disciplinary efforts is also continuing. At the University of Chicago, a lawsuit has been filed by Palestine Legal, the lawfare arm of the BDS movement, on behalf of a student who had been disciplined and removed from student housing.

But in a sign that the anti-Israel movement and “Palestine” as an organizing principle continue to alienate fellow students, the black feminist group at George Washington University “Black Defiance” announced it had left the Student Coalition for Palestine “after repeatedly experiencing anti-Blackness and racism.”

Finally, in the new semester student governments quickly regained their place as centers for anti-Israel activity:

1. Several student governments at the University of California at San Diego have divested their holdings from Israeli companies;
2. The Concordia University Student Union passed a BDS resolution. Only 858 students out of 49,898 enrolled voted;
3. The Rutgers University student government rejected use of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
4. The student government at the University of Toronto held a fundraiser for Gaza during a meeting.

K-12

Evidence continues to accumulate regarding deep and pervasive bias against Israel and Jews at all levels of K-12 education. Efforts to coverup and downplay incidents also continue locally.

In a settlement reached with the Howard County Public Schools (MD), the US Department of Education noted that authorities had failed to report incidents where Jewish students were abused, including “posting of swastikas; mimicking Nazi salutes; threats to kill and stating preference for death of Jewish people; using the term “Jew” as a slur; calling a Jewish middle school student a “dirty Jew,” telling her to “go back to the gas chamber.”

Teachers and their unions continue to push “liberated ethnic studies” and “anti-Palestinian racism” in curriculums.

Arts/Culture

Social media and web platforms continue to be key battlegrounds regarding Israel and antisemitism. Wikipedia’s highest adjudicating body, the Arbitration Committee, has barred a number of editors who had systematically distorted the platform’s coverage of Israel, Palestine, and related topics.

The move came after months of revelations regarding the manner in which the group had conspired via back channel communications to edit pieces in order to blame Israel for the current conflict and accuse it among others things of “settler-colonialism” and “genocide.” Six pro-Hamas editors were barred in addition to two pro-Israel editors. A recent report also uncovered a group of pro-Hamas editors conspiring to manipulate French Wikipedia.

The move against pro-Hamas editors came after the Heritage Foundation announced a project to identify anonymous Wikipedia editors responsible for anti-Israel bias.

The author is a contributor to SPME, where a significantly different version of this article first appeared.