Donald Trump’s War on Anti-Semitism is the Last Thing We Jews Need

Not long ago, conservatives laughed at the idea that words are violence. Now, they're embracing the same concept. Is that a good idea, morally or politically?

Ben Kawaller was the host of the sociopolitical interview series Ben Meets America and the 2024 election series Swing State Debates for The Free Press. His writing and video reporting have also appeared in Los Angeles Magazine. You can learn more about his work here.

Have you heard the news? Donald Trump, a man known even among his supporters for being uncouth, amoral, transactional, and dishonest, has proclaimed himself “the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” This should be just terrific for us.

Yes, this modern-day Cyrus is “prohibiting anti-Semitism,” in the stilted verbiage of the Department of Homeland Security, which detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born grad student and permanent legal resident who’d organized protests against the Israeli government at Columbia University. Though no charges have been filed against Khalil, he was apprehended by federal agents on March 8th and shipped to an ICE facility in Louisiana to await deportation. Deportation proceedings are now on hold, and the case has been transferred to New Jersey.

Khali’s offense, according to DHS, is that he “led activities aligned to Hamas.”

I know what you’re thinking: “aligned to”? Setting aside the fact that the people in charge of national security can barely wield a preposition, it seems that Donald Trump’s plan for ridding the country of antisemitism is to trample on people’s constitutional rights in the name of protecting the Jews. What could go wrong?

Trump’s anti-antisemitism spree was evidently motivated by the eruption of anti-Zionist activity that cropped up on university campuses all over the country following Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. For all I know, some of these demonstrations may be advocating for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. What has broken through on the internet, though, is footage of keffiyeh-wrapped students agitating, whether they realize it or not, for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

Israel has so far withstood the objections of American college students; the primary effect of these protests seems to be that life is now intermittently unpleasant on campuses—for Jews in particular, but for everyone, really. And while the kids engaging in this revolutionary cosplay may feel they are changing hearts and minds, it’s also true that they’ve caused millions of Americans to associate the Palestinian cause with college students avoiding their homework by shrieking into loudspeakers while dressed as Levantine bank robbers.

Now, though, the government risks making them look like freedom fighters, as opposed to the procrastinating adolescents they are underneath their costumes.

Ironically, that’s not a description that would seem to apply to Mahmoud Khalil. For one, this grandson of a Palestinian refugee had the dignity to show his face while protesting, presumably because he has a sincere belief in the righteousness of his cause.

Perhaps that stab at basic empathy makes me a threat to national security as well. Cheerleaders of Khalil’s deportation see things in black-and-white, rights be damned: as Hannah E. Meyers puts it in City Journal: “Manhattan is home to one less terror-supporter.”

Meyers’s article, “Mahmoud Khalil Doesn’t Deserve to Be in the U.S.,” lays out as well as any other I’ve found the case for detaining Khalil, and yet fails to identify a single crime he has committed. Rather, it’s all guilt by association: he has “helped propel” episodes of “anonymous violence,” and has led a movement that “has involved everything from erecting encampments on school property to directing death wishes at Zionists[.]”

So this is where we are. The same camp that thirty seconds ago couldn’t spill enough ink bemoaning campus “safetyism” is calling for heads to roll because a bunch of kids camped out and…wished?

To be fair, Meyers also points out that Columbia saw a mob of crazed anti-Zionists overtake one of its halls, committing property damage and traumatizing a custodian in the process — and while criminal charges were initially dropped, the school has since punished the students involved, at the behest of the Trump administration. (Whether or not the disciplinary proceedings of a private university is the federal government’s business is a whole other topic; I’ll stick here to the obvious assault on the First Amendment.)

What is most vexing about all of this—aside from, you know, said constitutional rights abuses—is that the left has spent the past decade or more punishing wrongthinkers, often destroying people’s livelihoods by unfairly labeling them sexist, or racist, or transphobic. The election of Donald Trump offered a glimmer of hope that, for all the malignancy he represents, we might at least get a rest from the relentless censorship of politically incorrect views. But no: now we just have the right playing the same game, using the cudgel of antisemitism to intimidate anyone who dares to speak against the state of Israel on a college campus.

And for Christ’s sake, can we not admit that a person could be moved to express sympathy for Palestinians without being motivated by hatred of Jews? For many people, the Israel–Palestine conflict looks like a wealthy, powerful country subjugating a stateless and relatively powerless people, and that’s all they need to know. How we got to that place might complicate or even negate that overall impression, but most people just don’t care enough to learn the history of Israel, and so there you have it.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” sounds inspirational, not genocidal — that’s why kids chant it. Is it not possible that the administrators hauled before Congress to answer for whether or not “calling for the genocide of Jews” constituted “protected speech” were hemming and hawing not because they hate Jews, but because they recognize the absurdity of charging a twenty-year-old with genocidal intent for chanting something that sounds like a Woody Guthrie lyric?

Fair: not all the chanting on college campuses is so anodyne. Woody Guthrie certainly never called for a global intifada. The point is that opposition to Israel runs the gamut from people who oppose its current government’s expansionism, to Islamist lunatics who want the entire country along with the rest of Western civilization expunged from the map. Does anyone trust the Trump administration to attend to the nuances of these views?

I increasingly see talk of the “Woke Right,” of which this current moral crusade is an exemplar. Of course we have seen anti-Israel protesters spouting Islamist slogans. But the underlying assumption here—that vocal critics of Israel are closeted Hamas supporters—follows the same logic as charging critics of DEI with racism. Intent doesn’t matter: if the effect seems to harm the Jews, it must be antisemitism.

Finally: words are words. Conservatives have rightly spent the past decade or so scoffing at the idea that words are violence. Is their argument really that words aren’t violence when it comes to race, sex, or gender identity, but God forbid one Jew should hear a slogan?

Why do this? Why invite such obvious charges of hypocrisy when they could easily take the approach summed up by Ben Sasse, president of the University of Florida, in the wake of similar episodes of student unrest? Sasse made clear that the school would punish any episodes of violence, but that the right to express anti-Zionism would always be protected. His words are like a balm: “Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves.”

It’s a right you would think President Trump would hold sacred.