New York City police arrested dozens of Pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University in New York on May 7, 2025.
By the end of the second academic year
since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attack against southern Israeli
communities on Oct. 7, 2023, the unprecedented increase in antisemitism
on American college campuses appeared to have abated. Some of the steam
seemed to have gone out of the organized mobs of pro-Hamas demonstrators
who took part in encampments and building takeovers while chanting for
the destruction of Israel and Jewish genocide (“From the river to the
sea”) and for terrorism against Jews wherever they lived (“Globalize the
intifada”).
More importantly, the administrators who
tolerated and encouraged the abuse of Jews—something they never would
have stood for had the victims been any other minority group—had met a
force they feared just as much, if not more, than truculent leftist
faculty members and students. President Donald Trump came into the
picture with an aggressive and ambitious plan to make campuses safe for
Jewish students and roll back factors that had made the post-Oct. 7
surge of antisemitism possible.
By the time this past spring semester had
ended, the second-term president’s effective threats of defunding those
institutions that had tolerated and encouraged Jew-hatred had forced
many schools to shut down the wave of illegal activity. The high tide
that had flooded colleges under the Biden administration seemed to have
ebbed.
Two forces collide
Still, as students return to campus for
the fall semester, complacency about the problem would be a mistake. If
anything, the coming months could turn out to be even more problematic
for Jewish students as two equally powerful forces collide: the
anti-Israel and antisemitic fervor that is the result of the war in Gaza
eclipsing every other left-wing cause in importance, and the
determination of Trump to end the reign of woke leftism in academia.
In recent months, as the campuses quieted
down for the summer, the drumbeat of incitement against Israel, Zionism
and Jews has increased rather than died down. Hamas propaganda
about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza and deliberately starving
Palestinians in the Strip has been mainstreamed by corporate media
outlets, making headlines worldwide.
These blood libels have become part of the
conventional wisdom about the Middle East among liberal and left-wing
elites in journalism, academia, cultural establishments and unions, as
well as in the Democratic Party. That has caused even many Jews who fear
being out of sync with liberal fashion to engage in unfair criticism of
Israel, which essentially legitimizes anti-Zionist invective and the
cause of letting the Hamas monsters behind the unspeakable atrocities
survive the war they started on Oct. 7.
Most schools now understand that Trump
means business and that he fully intends to punish academic institutions
that let Jew-hatred flourish with defunding measures that will
devastate their budgets. While most of them are far from ready to comply
with the full range of demands, none want their campuses to become the
focus of administration or congressional inquiries, let alone wake up
and discover that Washington is pulling the money that represents the
lifeblood for even the richest of universities.
That means they will, as many were in the
spring, be ready to suspend and expel students who engage in campus
takeovers. Nevertheless, the forces behind the pro-Hamas mobs are just
as determined to exploit the successes in the information wage that the
terrorists, their funders and enablers in the media have won.
So, as American higher education reopens
for business, it’s far from clear which of these two immovable forces
will prevail. The one thing we do know is that the stakes in this battle
of wills between liberal educational bureaucrats and the Republican
administration are not merely a matter of political advantage for Trump
or his opponents.
Those at risk if the administration’s
defunding threats and justified demands for reforms to abolish the root
causes of campus antisemitism are ignored or fail to have the intended
effect will not be Trump’s appointees. It is Jewish students who will
suffer if administrators believe that they are better off appeasing
leftist antisemites instead of the president. Their ability to move
about their schools without fear of intimidation and even violence, as
well as to engage in academic life without having to disavow their
people, their faith and Israel, hinges on whether the administration
makes it clear that the consequences of another antisemitic surge will
prove serious.
A woke bureaucracy
The forces behind the pro-Hamas agitation
on campus have not been eliminated by Trump. The same factors that had
ignited the firestorm of Jew-hatred throughout many of the country’s
institutions of higher learning remain in place.
The administration’s campaign to deal with
campus antisemitism came down like a ton of bricks on elite
institutions like Columbia and Harvard. The president’s task force
dealing with the subject demanded that they not only take stringent
measures to curb the activities of the pro-Hamas mobs but also address
the inherent factors that had made them possible.
Trump’s ambitious goal was not only to
make schools safer for Jewish students but to roll back the hold of
leftist doctrines that made the post-Oct. 7 troubles inevitable. While a
turning point may have been reached in which these forces will now
start to decline, these institutions have not been converted from woke
strongholds to their previous position as defenders of the Western
canon, the neo-Marxists have warred against.
The reign of bureaucrats implementing the
woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that sought to
exacerbate racial divisions, as well as falsely labeling Jews as “white”
oppressors, is largely still there. So, too, are the overwhelmingly
leftist faculties and administrators who have been thoroughly
indoctrinated in the toxic myths of critical race theory,
intersectionality and settler-colonialism.
The progressive takeover of academia has
been slowly unfolding as the left has completed its long march through
American educational institutions for decades. It reached its high point
during the moral panic of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020,
following the killing that spring of George Floyd by a Minneapolis
police officer. But as interest in dividing all Americans along
immutable racial lines waned, the neo-Marxist ideas that animated this
movement are held up as a new orthodoxy throughout the humanities and
among educational bureaucrats.
Woke policies didn’t just predispose
people to dislike Israel. They influenced the curricula taught at
schools, as well as the hiring of professors and admissions, creating
left-wing bubbles where antisemitic denial of Jewish history and rights
became normative. And as “free Palestine,” the phrase that has come to
encapsulate a belief in destroying the State of Israel and demonizing
Jewish peoplehood, became the primary obsession of the American left,
the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks helped mobilize students, faculty, school
employees—aided and abetted by outside agitators and funders—to turn
campuses into hostile environments for Jews.
Foreign students and funding
So, while the people who run American
higher education understood that the election in 2024 of a president who
prioritized the fight against antisemitism endangered their businesses,
the inmates of these academic asylums remain just as interested in
turning the fall 2025 semester into another ordeal for Jews and
supporters of Israel.
Nor has the funding for these antisemitic
groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine and others, from both
foreign sources, such as the emirate of Qatar and left-wing foundations
like those controlled by the Soros family, dried up.
One factor that may alleviate the problem has been Trump’s focus on the role of foreign students in campus disturbances.
Trump hasn’t yet banned the entry of
students from abroad, especially Muslim-majority countries. Nor has he
succeeded, as he still hopes to do, in deporting some of the leaders of
the pro-Hamas and antisemitic illegal demonstrations and takeovers.
Syrian-born Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead the chaos
at Columbia, has (with the support of many liberal Democrats who have
wrongly depicted him as a martyr to free speech and some empathetic
judges) been able to remain in the country, despite the administration’s
best effort to deport him.
Many other foreign students, who make up
significant percentages of the student bodies of many leading schools
like New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Harvard and Columbia, have essentially self-deported since they, like
Khalil, have undoubtedly lied on their visa applications and are
vulnerable to legal action. Others who were similarly intent on coming
to the United States to benefit from the education system here while
undermining the values of the American republic and spreading Islamist
doctrines have taken Trump’s hint and decided not to come to the United
States this fall.
But there are likely enough still here,
along with a cadre of leftist activists, to create havoc at schools in
the name of the supposedly starving Palestinian people and against
Israel.
Trump must double down
Averting another situation such as the one that unfolded after Oct. 7 will require two things to happen.
One is that the Trump administration must
be prepared to double down on its threats against colleges and
universities that behave as they did two years ago and let antisemites
run amok.
Moreover, rather than work solely toward striking more deals
with schools, such as the one they struck with Columbia, Trump’s team
must escalate their efforts to pull funding and force them to give up
their DEI bureaucracies, as well as dismantle those departments, like
those in Middle East studies, that are engines of antisemitism.
At the same time, those whose job it is to
defend Jews, in general, like the Anti-Defamation League and American
Jewish Committee, and Jewish students, in particular, such as Hillel
International, need to understand that they must cease opposing Trump’s
efforts to reform academia and end DEI. Measures that are supposed to
aid Jewish students that do not attack the reasons why they are under
attack are useless and say more about the bankruptcy of many leading
mainstream Jewish groups than anything else.
The coming months may prove trying for
American Jews as they undergo another trial by fire, fueled by lies
about Israel. The same leftist-Islamist alliance that has done so much
damage in the last two years seeks to ignite another storm of
antisemitism on campuses.
Still, they need to remember that they are
not alone in this fight. Trump’s prioritization of the battle against
Jew-hatred has put colleges and universities that would otherwise be
inclined to abandon their Jewish students on notice that there will be a
cost to doing so. We can only hope that this will be enough to force
school administrations into actions that will finally rid academia of
this scourge.
Mahmoud Abbas eulogizes Yasser Arafat. 
