‘The Palestinian exception’: Trump limits campus free speech with the complicity of Zionist Jews | Jeff Melnick and Jessie Lee Rubin

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On 7 March, the Trump administration announced that it had cancelled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, saying the school’s “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses” and that “universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding”.

The “harassment” leveraged by the president and other pro-Israel ideologues was a reference to the paradigm-setting pro-Palestine activism that energized the campus over the past year. Columbia’s students became national leaders in the anti-genocide movement, and the Gaza solidarity encampment they established garnered international attention – including from the US Congress, which held hearings on so-called “campus antisemitism”.

Trump’s cynical attempt to protect an allegedly vulnerable class of students came just after executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs – initiatives whose prime directive has historically been to ensure equal opportunity for marginalized groups – within institutions that receive federal funding. In the first few months of his presidency, Trump has augmented the “Palestine exception” – that amorphous but consequential social limitation of the first amendment that enables suppression of pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist speech – with an “Israel exception” from DEI prohibitions. In effect, the promotion of Israel’s national narrative not only remains exempt from the wholesale attack on DEI, but it also functions as a weapon used to attack people and communities previously protected.

The current blow to Columbia’s funding came after a culmination of administrative efforts to pander to Trump’s war on DEI, beginning with the removal of Columbia athletics’ transgender inclusion policy from its website in early February, followed soon after with the altering of DEI language on a number of Columbia websites, and a directive to department chairs to “temporarily” remove any “DEI language” from departmental websites.

Where did this cowardly compliance, this last-ditch effort at saving the university from federal funding cuts, get the school? Columbia’s leadership has transformed the institution into an international laughingstock, a rudderless ship, poorer in every way – from its balance sheet to its moral vision. And after more than a year of many powerful Zionists purposefully conflating the way that some Jewish students feel unsafe on campus with actual danger, we have now witnessed a Palestinian student, Mahmoud Khalil, literally being abducted from New York to a detention center across state borders notorious for its mistreatment of detainees.

The ground for Trump’s attacks on Columbia has been well prepared by all manner of Zionist Jewish entities – with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) at the front, as usual. The ADL has come under sustained criticism in recent years for the ways it has used the halo effect of its origins as a civil rights organization to support racist policing, surveil progressive groups and cozy up to actual antisemites who happen to also be supporters of Israel.

But the group has been joined by a range of swaggering actors: the newly emboldened Kahanist group Betar Worldwide; Columbia’s own professor Shai Davidai, who has terrorized numerous Arab and Arab American students, including Mahmoud Khalil just before his kidnapping; and Zionist Jewish alumni groups. All have conspired to gin up a topsy-turvy mythology of what they call a crisis of “campus antisemitism”, but which is really a reactionary crisis surrounding the increasing popularity of campus anti-Zionism.

As a father and daughter who represent two generations of anti-Zionist Jewish scholars and activists – one of us a professor at University of Massachusetts Boston, and the other a graduate student at Columbia University – it seems manifest that we are witnessing a purposeful and devastating bait and switch. Every articulation of anti-Israel speech (or even the simplest affirmation of Palestinian human rights) gets recoded as dangerous antisemitic action.

The “Israel exception” to DEI means that the university’s post-October 7 antisemitism taskforce, formed on the pretext of protecting Jews on campus, was never paired with an Islamophobia or anti-Arab taskforce, despite the fact that Arab and Muslim students have been continually subjected to doxing campaigns from far-right organizations such as Canary Mission and Accuracy in Media, and singled out in a WhatsApp group comprising faculty, administrators, students, alumni and parents seeking to persecute student activists and get them deported.

The “Israel exception” means that faculty member Gil Zussman remains on the taskforce even after it was exposed that he is part of the WhatsApp group actively putting student’s lives at risk. Meanwhile, longtime pro-Palestine Columbia law professor Katherine Franke was essentially forced out of her tenured position for what many saw as a relatively minor speech infraction.

The “Israel exception” means that the antisemitism taskforce only concerns itself with certain kinds of Jews; anti-Zionist Jews do not register in the furrowed-brow rhetoric of university administrators, politicians or self-appointed Jewish community leaders, except as a problem to be eradicated. Columbia University is now at the vanguard of our political and cultural moment, serving the Trumpist agenda of “free speech except Palestine” and “free of DEI except Zionism”.

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What is most significant in the focused dismantling of DEI protocols is how Jewishness and Zionism has been spared. The banned word list issued by the National Science Foundation includes terms from “disabled” to “transgender” to “racism”, but no censoring of anything having to do with Zionism, Israel or Jews. As civil rights gains having to do with race, gender, ability and sexuality are rolled back, it has become exceedingly clear that the animus is not against DEI protocols and protections per se: Zionist Jews will remain a specially protected class. This serves the Republican party in ways concerning foreign policy, the cultural wars and electoral politics, and stands as the culmination of over a year’s worth of moral panic over the “safety” of Jewish students on college campuses.

The writer Lucien Baskin outlined this moral panic in an article that argues the current hysteria has roots in both liberal and rightwing premises. Baskin explains that for liberals, the putative antisemitism crisis is one more articulation of their understanding of racism as rooted in bad individual acts, rather than systemic injustice. On the right, the antisemitism hysteria is a Trojan horse for well-organized and well-funded attacks on American education at all levels – targeting libraries, secondary school curricula, and university teaching and publishing.

The basic premise that influential Zionists have been promoting is that widespread pro-Palestine activity on campuses across the country proves that US universities are essentially anti-Zionist institutions and that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. This promotion has happened as pro-Palestine students have been doxed and had job offers rescinded, as three Palestinian students were shot in a hate crime in Vermont, and as pro-Palestine professors have been fired.

The US has a legible history of antisemitism, but American antisemitism has never been a sustained systemic force in our history – like the way that anti-Black racism has been, for instance. There have been plenty of isolated antisemitic acts (up to and including lynching) and plenty of anti-Jewish thought and expression in the US. But by and large Jews have been remarkably safe in the United States. When Jews have faced sustained antisemitism there has almost always been a powerful white Christian man at the wheel, from Henry Ford to radio preacher Charles Coughlin to Donald Trump.

We are in a moment when many Jewish Americans and their rightwing allies have strategically weaponized the history of European antisemitism, and the more episodic American version, to prosecute a case against free speech and academic freedom. It is a deft trick that has been staged by powerful figures from the campus of Columbia University to the Oval Office, and one that is familiar to anyone who has read Amy Kaplan’s work on the Americanization of Zionism. Depicting Israelis as “invincible victims”, at once always under attack yet also preternaturally powerful, this social project of having the most cake and eating it too is turning out to be one of the most consequential political formations of our era.

This is one of many reasons we have to pay attention to the current “campus antisemitism” crisis – because ultimately it is doing two major things at once: it is distracting us from the genocide and continued siege of Gaza, and it is obscuring the reality of relative safety for American Jews in favor of a hyped-up narrative of fraught vulnerability. This almost certainly will not – as the idiom puts it – be good for the Jews. As pawns in a larger game being run by Christian Zionists (who often happen to be white supremacists), the safety of American Jews, Zionist or not, is hardly the endgame.