Trump’s War on the Palestine Movement Is Something Entirely New
Never before has a government repressed its citizens’ free speech and academic freedom so brutally in order to protect an entirely different country.
Pro-Palestinian activists rally for Mohsen Mahdawi and protest against deportations outside of ICE headquarters on April 15, 2025, in New York City.
(Adam Gray / Getty Images)As people across the nation look on, aghast, at the footage of vulnerable students of color being abducted in broad daylight by the masked gunmen of ICE, it’s important to acknowledge the unprecedented nature of what we’re living through.
This moment has been compared to McCarthyism. But the Red Scare was sold (however fraudulently) to the American people as a way to protect the country and its government from the threat of communist infiltration. The campaign of brute intimidation ravaging campuses across the country is not being framed as a way of safeguarding the American government or political system; it is, rather, intended to protect a distant foreign regime and to shield it from criticism in the country whose taxpayers are increasingly unwilling to finance its system of apartheid and its program of genocidal violence.
After all, not one of the students being pursued or detained today is accused of criticizing the United States or its system of government. Even now, in this gathering darkness, you can stand with a bullhorn in the middle of any American college campus, say what you want about Donald Trump or the American government, and not fear that you will be kidnapped by the state. Instead, what Trump’s targets are alleged to share is their criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and their advocacy of universally acknowledged Palestinian rights.
Similarly, Columbia’s Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies has—by the combination of unprecedented government fiat and craven administrative capitulation—been stripped of its institutional autonomy not because some members of that department have been critical of the United States but because they are viewed by certain people as too critical of Israel.
The surest evidence that this crusade is ideologically grounded in protecting Israel, not the US, isn’t just in the roster of those chased or abducted by ICE so far—every one of them supposedly in connection with the anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian protests at campuses last spring—but also in the ransom list presented by the Trump government to Columbia in order for the university’s $400 million in suspended federal funding to be restored.
Every single item on that list represents a long-standing demand not simply of the MAGA right but rather of the institutions or individuals who, for years, have lobbied and cajoled (and are now openly threatening and coercing) Columbia, like other universities across the country, to suppress criticism of Zionism and Israeli policy and stifle the advocacy of Palestinian rights on campus.
Chief among these demands is the forcible adoption of an illegitimate, abusive, and thoroughly discredited redefinition of the very concept of antisemitism. By mendaciously seeking to conflate Judaism and Zionism, this redefining of antisemitism aims to classify criticism of Zionism and of the Zionist state’s policies of apartheid and genocide as a form of anti-Jewish hate speech—and therefore to banish it from classes, readings, textbooks, assignments, lectures, debates, conferences, and forums on campuses across the United States. This campaign has been relentlessly promoted—for years—by groups like the ADL, AIPAC, and the American Jewish Congress. Only under the threat of government sanction is it finally being imposed on institutions like Columbia and Harvard. Others will surely follow; some (such as NYU and Yale) already have. What Zionist lobbying groups, donors, regents or trustees have been unable to achieve through conventional methods of enticement, complaint, or emotional blackmail, they are finally able to accomplish through their direct influence over the government of the United States, which has, in turn, willingly allowed itself to be co-opted not to protect the interests of the United States itself but rather to protect those of the Zionist project in Palestine.
What we are witnessing is thus not the return of McCarthyism but rather something entirely new. Plenty of governments have repressed free speech or academic freedom to protect themselves from criticism and dissent. But never before has a government repressed its citizens’ free speech and academic freedom in order to protect an entirely different country; never before have the rights of the citizens of a major metropolitan power been abrogated, or its leading institutions thrown into disorder, in order to safeguard the illegitimate and criminal policies of an insignificant client state thousands of miles away.
Trump and his circle may want to go after the critics of American power as well—and they may still—but they haven’t yet, and even if they decided to, there is no readily available blacklist of their campus critics for them to go after, because no group or institution compiles such lists in the first place.
Zionist organizations and individuals, on the other hand, have been assembling and maintaining digital blacklists since the very dawn of the internet (and the ADL was curating paper watch lists as far back as the 1980s, with Edward Said among its targets).
“Academic colleagues, get used to it,” warns the Zionist agitator Martin Kramer. “Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.” Kramer wrote those words not last week or last month but over two decades ago, in 2004. Until now, few people took these Zionist blacklists very seriously; today, however, the “harvest” Kramer warned of is finally being reaped.
The reason that Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, Leqaa Kordia, Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Rasha Alawieh, Mohsen Mahdawi, and others have been hunted down, rounded up, deported, forced into flight, or have gone into hiding, is because they are among the thousands of people whose names have appeared on one or another of the many blacklists assembled and maintained by the army of Zionist organizations—three dozen of which are gathered together in the Israel on Campus Coalition—that have been besieging our campuses since the 1990s with the sole intention of suppressing criticism of Zionism.
No other movement or political faction, to my knowledge, maintains similar blacklists. There is certainly no blacklist of the hundreds of Zionist faculty members at universities across the country who have abused their positions of power against their own students, intimidating them, silencing them, harassing them, doxing them—or, in the final dereliction of our professional obligation as professors, publicly calling on companies and law firms not to hire their own students because they had dared to protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as one UC Berkeley Law School professor did in The Wall Street Journal in 2023.
Not one pro-Palestinian organization I know of assembles lists of campus Zionists or calls for them to be fired, expelled, deported, or imprisoned. In fact, not one Zionist student that I know of has been suspended or expelled or had their career destroyed. Not one Zionist professor has been stripped of a position or lost a job (as the directors of Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies were just recently).
On the other hand, I just returned from a conference at Princeton at which two participants—both Jewish, one Israeli—had either been removed from a professorship or had a job offer rescinded because of their support for Palestinian rights. They join a long list of others who have suffered a similar fate, including Norman Finkelstein, Ariella Azoulay, Steven Thrasher, Katherine Franke, Mohamed Abdou, and Steven Salaita (and those are just some of the ones we know about—there’s no way to keep track of offers or invitations never extended in the first place).
Campus Watch was one of the pioneers of this effort in the 1990s, with watchlists focused not only on individual professors but on whole campuses. The lapsed Trotskyist turned right-wing crank David Horowitz has generated one blacklist after another, framing students as well as faculty as “terrorist sympathizers,” and sometimes doubling down with mock “wanted” posters naming particular students on various campuses (including my own). Canary Mission’s crude character assassinations of pro-Palestinian students and professors joined the party in the 2000s, explicitly intended, as that outfit expressed it, “to prevent today’s radicals from becoming tomorrow’s employees.” During the Palestine solidarity protests last year, Zionist organizations hired Horowitz-style vans to drive around campuses, emblazoned with the names and pictures of students protesting against the genocide in Gaza.
The latest addition is Betar US, the local manifestation of a Zionist faction founded by the unapologetically racist ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky in the 1920s. It’s so nakedly hateful that even the ADL feels obliged to distance itself from it. Betar has been boasting that Mahmoud Khalil was on a list it provided to Columbia University and the Trump government. It’s been vociferously advocating the same treatment to the thousands of other vulnerable students and untenured faculty members on its hitlist.
Other Zionist organizations have similar hit lists, curated just for this moment, proposing candidates for rounding up—including Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi—under Trump’s executive orders. One Zionist organization with a whole portfolio of different blacklists emerged from the University of California system and spends most of its time targeting faculty members in the same system, possibly in violation of the UC faculty code of conduct (though it’s never been held to account).
Long before the current crackdown on our campuses began, the ADL had been promoting an effort to charge students demonstrating for Palestinian rights on American college campuses with “material support” for terrorism, which would lead not simply to misdemeanor charges or administrative punishments (from suspension to expulsion) that our universities are already willingly dishing out but to actual criminal prosecution on far more serious terrorism or conspiracy charges. When we see the Trump government accusing students who have been protesting against genocide of sympathy for Hamas, or pledging to investigate the supposed “terrorist” roots of student protesters, we can recognize the payoff of years of diligent campaigning and lobbying.
Above all, however, we can see the years of campaigning to redefine the concept of antisemitism. Long before Trump’s weaponization of supposed “campus antisemitism,” administrators and some senior faculty members at campuses across the country, including my own, willingly went along with the narrative that last spring’s Palestine solidarity encampments represented manifestations of antisemitic hatred, despite the fact that sizable proportions of the students in those encampments were themselves Jewish (although the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is a cynical exercise in political manipulation irrespective of the extent of Jewish anti-Zionism).
We were told that Jewish students felt unsafe on our campuses. But Jewish students do not constitute one mindless mass, and more and more of them are resolutely committed to the advocacy of Palestinian rights. The Jewish students most directly targeted on our campuses are the ones protesting against the genocide in Gaza: they have been shot at with rubber bullets, attacked by off-campus mobs, arrested by campus police, subjected to legal and administrative prosecution and harassment, and they run the risk of suspension, expulsion or the retroactive loss of degrees they’d already received.
The rights, feelings, and interests of these Jewish students, however, do not register in the “campus antisemitism” narrative. This narrative was initially propagated not just by Trump (who couldn’t care less about antisemitism), or cynical right-wing politicians like Elise Stefanik (whose concern for genuine anti-Jewish prejudice is at best doubtful given that some have accused her of it herself), but also by plenty of liberals, including liberal Zionists.
Moreover, American academic institutions and their often feckless and venal leaders not only prepared the way for Trump’s crackdown but are openly collaborating with it now. Some people are expressing surprise that Columbia, for instance, didn’t try to do more to challenge Trump’s orders. Why would it, when so many of its donors, trustees, and upper administrators—including its lazy susan carousel of coming and going presidents—have long wanted exactly the same things that Trump’s “antisemitism” task force is demanding of it? As The Wall Street Journal reported, “the school believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trump’s demands.”
The chancellor of my own institution, UCLA, has accepted all of the terms and recommendations of a campus Task Force on “Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias” that is staffed not by a single one of the university’s global scholarly authorities on Jewish history and antisemitism but by a coalition of people who teach and write about such matters as real estate finance, business law, and pediatric medicine, clearly in pursuit of a political agenda. Meanwhile, the university has studiously ignored the recommendations produced by a parallel Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism at UCLA (on which I serve) that amply document a harrowing catalog of entrenched institutional racism and grotesque violations of the faculty code of conduct, and probably the law. Our recommendations carry no weight because they are not backed by the threat of punishment and state intervention—and also because the institution itself, at least judging by its actions to date, values some lives and some people more than others, and Palestinians least of all.
Surveying this grim scene of repression, censorship, and outright punishment gripping campuses across the country, it’s tempting to reflect on the enduring institutional power of Zionism in the United States. In reality, however, what we are witnessing reveals the extent of Zionism’s weakness.
Thirty or 40 years ago, Zionism was entrenched and hegemonic in American higher education. Its power was expressed precisely in the extent to which it could simply be taken for granted. As new academic histories laid bare one after another of the myths surrounding Israel’s creation and as Israel’s behavior became more nakedly racist and its violence increasingly abhorrent, Zionism started to lose its grip on our campuses and among young Americans, including young Jewish Americans. That disillusion has spread to the country at large; a recent Pew survey found a majority of Americans now hold a negative view of Israel.
The current repression is a belated attempt to restore the status of Zionism on our campuses by trying to eliminate the possibility of critique or even argument. But as the wreckage of Columbia shows, the cost of this restoration is the destruction of the university itself. Zionism can reclaim its hegemonic status, in other words, only by destroying the very institutions it wants to “save” for itself. This is not a sign of strength; it is yet one more indicator of Zionism’s terminal decline.
While all this is happening, the Israelis continue to starve an entire population of 2 million people, snipe at toddlers, bomb refugee tents, destroy hospitals, shoot ambulance crews in the head, and proudly proceed with a campaign of population transfer and outright ethnic cleansing. We Americans pay for this genocide with our tax dollars—but if we dare to protest against it, we will find ourselves on watch lists or worse.
“It is surreal,” Momodou Taal wrote recently, after fleeing the United States and abandoning his doctoral program at Cornell, “that we live in a world where you get into trouble for saying killing babies is wrong [and] where those advocating for, and celebrating, endless massacres against Palestinians are able to, time and again, present themselves as victims while presenting those fighting against genocide as the oppressors.” That is the world we are in, however. And it is the world we will remain in until and unless we do something to make it better.