Damning Bibi Dangerously: When does criticism of his Gaza policies become antisemitism?

Even an ex-Israeli prime minister has overstepped Trump's speech codes targeting hate speech on campus.

Author’s Note: This article was completed just before the outbreak of the Israel–Iran-US conflagration. How the crisis unfolds will inevitably affect how Americans view the other players. But, as of this writing, there is no indication that the Trump crackdown on campus antisemitism in the US is abating -- or that student perceptions of the Gaza crisis have meaningfully shifted. So, for now, the central thrust of this essay remains intact.

On May 9, the venerable New York Times columnist Tom Friedman published a must-read column blasting Bibi Netanyahu’s decision to expel Palestinian civilians from much of Gaza, and eventually, from all of it, in the name of pacifying it.

Bibi’s endgame: to open the enclave up to Israeli resettlement.

Such an initiative -- effectively a reprise a hard-right Israeli policies in the West Bank -- would reduce Gazans to permanent homelessness or make them unwelcome wards of Egypt and Jordon, who already have more than enough political and social unrest to contend with.

There’s a lot to ponder in Friedman’s analysis. And I make a quick run at some of it below.

But that’s just a warm-up for my true mission here, which is to explore how commentary like Friedman’s could get the author or speaker arrested on many American campuses today -- and why that danger exists at all in the land of the free.

As someone who has battled for the First Amendment before the US Supreme Court, I am acutely aware of how fragile our first freedom is. And as a Columbia College grad—also, a product of the university’s school of international affairs—I’ve been watching with mounting alarm as Trump threatens to destroy the entire institution unless students and faculty clam up about Gaza, Netanyahu, and all the messy truths that come with both.

When I first read Friedman’s piece, it immediately occurred to me:

Here’s the perfect kick-start for a critique of Trump’s war on academia because here we have one of our most respected newsmen saying things that, if spoken by a Columbia student on the steps of Butler Library, wouldn’t be tolerated.

That prospect set me thinking about how we got here, about the ever-harsher constraints Trump has imposed on universities -- measures supposedly designed to protect Jewish students from hate speech and violence, but increasingly used to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and chill open debate.

The overarching objective – combatting antisemitism on campus and off -- is righteous and urgent. But the methods employed -- pure Orwell.

What follows is an inevitably incomplete look at how Trump has created an apparatus of repression masquerading as an antidote to bigotry.

Friedman’s case-in-the-main against Bibi

Let it be stipulated that Friedman, who proudly acknowledges his own Jewish heritage, is the unlikeliest sort of naysayer in this context.

He is, as I am, a fervent advocate for Israel as an inviolate homeland for the Jewish people.

But since the outset of the Gaza conflict, Friedman has become increasingly critical (as I have) of Bibi’s attempt to pressure Palestinian residents, through deprivation, isolation and selective punishment into pushing back against their Hamas overlords, the monstrous perpetrators of October 7.

Appalled by this strong-arm approach, Friedman has urged Israel to pursue, instead, a ceasefire with Hamas and to work toward normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia.

Such a partnership—essentially a sequel to the Abraham Accords brokered during Trump’s first term—would significantly bolster Israel’s security and help ease regional tensions (even now). The only requirement would be for Bibi to acknowledge a credible pathway toward a two-state solution for the Palestinians.

But the Israeli supremacists who keep him in power—and thereby shield him from prosecution on longstanding fraud charges—refuse to tolerate any such compromise on the “Palestinian” issue.

As a result, the prospect of an imminent Saudi-Israeli marriage of convenience has evaporated. In Friedman’s view, this only strengthens the incentive for Netanyahu and his hardline allies to push for the forcible annexation of Gaza.

But should they pursue this path, he warns, the political costs could be severe, likely including a devastating new wave of war crimes allegations.

The language he uses in his May 9 column is so unflinchingly critical of Bibi’s regime that I feel compelled, given my concern about its implications for campus protestors, to quote a large section of it.

Friedman:

Netanyahu is not our friend.…[T]his ultranationalist, messianic Israeli government is not America’s ally. Because this is the first government in Israel’s history whose priority is not peace with more of its Arab neighbors and the benefits that greater security and coexistence would bring...

[I]n pursuit of its extremist agenda this Netanyahu government is undermining our interests… Netanyahu’s plan to reinvade Gaza is not to stand up a moderate alternative to Hamas, led by the Palestinian Authority. It is for a permanent Israeli military occupation, whose unstated goal will be to pressure all Palestinians to leave. That is a prescription for a permanent insurgency — Vietnam on the Mediterranean….

[T]his strategy, if executed, may not only trigger more war crime accusations against Israel but will also inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt.

I will leave you with the words of the May 7 Haaretz editorial:

“On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14. …The Israeli military said that the target was a ‘Hamas command and control center’ and that ‘steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians.’… We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed — more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children…None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.”

I share Friedman’s concerns and applaud his candor. His column reflects a special kind of bravery – and a prudent sense of balance.

In composing it, he carefully distinguishes between the Netanyahu regime and Israel, the country. He rightfully includes references to the barbarities committed by Hamas on October 7. And he wisely relies on an Israeli newspaper, leftist though it may be, for the most gut-wrenching judgment on Bibi’s Gaza campaign.

Even given these caveats, however, the article ranks as one of the most withering critiques of Netanyahu’s Gaza policy that I have read in any reputable journal.

And I suspect that if a pro-Palestinian activist -- or Catholic priest or a Buddhist monk – showed up on Columbia’s campus or Harvard’s with a copy in hand and quoted from it, many Jewish students might feel diminished, threatened or intimidated and entitled to protest to university administrators.

I trust that any student friend of mine would be wise enough and caring enough not to foment any such confrontation. And I hope that all parties to the ongoing campus disturbances everywhere would be mindful enough of First Amendment values not to follow Trump officials in abusing them.

The sad truth is that the Gaza crisis and Trump’s weaponization of it have drawn us, as a society, into a place where the line between protected free speech and unlawful inciteful conduct is razor thin.

We have not been in this place before, at least not in recent years.

During the Vietnam era, the moral goons who represented a minority in the anti-war movement routinely spat on returning GIs or dubbed them “baby killers” (and God help you if you were a CIA officer who had served in Vietnam as I was).

But for the most part, based on my own experience, anti-war rage and its vocabulary were aimed at the state or those in charge who had devised the hated policies.

Not so, in the current environment.

Passionate, conscience-driven dissenters, appalled by the documented bloodshed in Gaza and the ghastly Palestinian displacement story often seem incapable of differentiating between Jewish classmates and Netanyahu-type extremists. They seem equally oblivious to the fact that university administrators are as handcuffed by Trumpian policy as they are and therefore worthy of being cut some slack.

At times nuanced facts seem to matter less to the objectors than the impulse to disrupt, flash-and-bang-style, and to jam truth, as they see it, down the throats of everybody else.

And all too often they forget that every child of the Holocaust and every grandchild and great-grandchild may carry first or second-hand “memories” or third-generation horror stories that make them abundantly sensitive to any intimation of threat or vulnerability.

That sense of exposure has doubtless grown ten-fold since the Hamas cross-border attacks. “October 7 is the “Israel’s biggest trauma yet,” remarked psychoanalyst Ofrit Shapira-Berman of Hebrew University, “not only because of its objective magnitude, but also because it echoes our past traumas, the Holocaust and the Yom Kippur [war].”

Israel’s own state controller estimates that some three million of his fellow citizens have experienced anxiety, depression and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as result of the Hamas-led massacre and subsequent war.

Nor is there any sure safe haven in the US. Just a few weeks ago, a man shouting “Free Palestine” shot and killed a young couple outside the Jewish Museum in Washington. Another hurled Molotov cocktails at a “free-the-hostages” rally in Boulder, Colorado. And on-going campus protests have reduced many Israeli students to a siege mentality.

I am not Jewish and have no experience with such things. But in interacting with those who do, I try to remain mindful of the history and emotions they carry with them.

I reserve the same kind of deference to soldiers who have just returned from combat – and to Palestinian civilians who have suffered under Israeli bombardment or Hamas terror.

Moreover, perhaps because of gaps in modern education, many of the “antis” in the current campus faceoffs seem unaware that the First Amendment does have its limits.

Famously, you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater and expect Constitutional protection. Nor can you expect as much free-speech latitude from a private university, as from a public one.

And though universities, public and private, try earnestly to provide for the free exchange of ideas, even the public ones, with all their special First Amendment obligations, have a right to declare some parts of their campuses off limits to demonstrators, as long as alternatives are available.

Thus, to cite a recent incident, it was not a concession to pro-Israeli or Trump interests for Columbia officials, who preside over a private institution, to expel demonstrators (with police help) from Low Library where other students were studying for final exams. It was simply constitutional law at work. And any demonstrator who blathers otherwise simply reinforces Trump’s outrageous claims that antisemitism and overwrought equity policies have warped modern education.

But lest I seem overly deferential to one side to this controversy, I would remind my Jewish and Israeli friends of the lesson taught by the Friedman article – namely, that not every apparent slur is created equal, not every verbal sling and arrow that causes pain can or should be sanctioned under the rubric of antisemitism. Otherwise, the First Amendment would no longer protect even the speech we hate and that would mean a fatal diminution of its value as protection for us all.

Overview

When Donald Trump signed his first executive order on antisemitism in December 2019, few could have anticipated the long-term fallout. Steeped in the language of civil rights, that measure seemed narrowly focused and keyed to the moment, an effort to protect Jewish students and ensure their inclusion on increasingly polarized university campuses. But tucked in the fine print was something explosive and insidious: a mandate that would allow federal agencies to define antisemitism in ways that expunged the difference between hate speech and legitimate political criticism.

Over the next six years, with the help of the conservative Heritage Foundation—through its sweeping governance plan, Project 2025, and its more targeted campaign, Project Esther—the original Trump scheme metastasized into a multi-front ideological assault. By the time he issued a second order on antisemitism at the start of his second administration, the machinery of enforcement had grown into a national inquisition: targeting not only anti-Jewish hatred but dissent itself.

How is it that a civil rights measure became such a political battering ram?

Understanding that process is essential to undoing it and undo it we must. For make no mistake: under the banner of protecting Jewish students – a vital and deeply moral objective in itself - a Maga-driven campaign to upend liberal institutions on campus and elsewhere is rapidly redefining civil rights enforcement as a mechanism of cultural control.

Context and mixed motives

One of the greatest ironies of the escalating ANTI-antisemitism blitz is that it comes to us courtesy of a man with dirty hands.

Lest we forget, long before affixing his Sharpie signature to his first executive order on Jewish-hate, Trump had —by word, deed, and studied indifference—validated some of the most toxic figures among us.

As a 2016 candidate, he had amplified antisemitic content, retweeting material from hate accounts and posting an image of Hillary Clinton atop a pile of cash and a six-pointed star—a graphic lifted directly from white nationalist message boards.

Early in his first presidency, he flirted with Proud Boys-style extremism, embraced ideologically adjacent figures, and repeatedly cast Jews as a monolithic bloc (“Jews love me,” he famously proclaimed).

And who can forget his now-infamous reaction to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where torch-wielding white nationalists marched to the chant of “Jews will not replace us!” Far from condemning them outright, Trump equivocated, claiming there were “very fine people on both sides.”

His failure to cap the bigotry around him wasn’t a lapse of nerve. It was a calculated move to harness antisemitism and other extremist sentiments for political gain.

Perhaps inevitably, antisemitic incidents surged during his first year as president —and by the end of 2018, they had spun off the charts. That December, a Jewish professor at Columbia’s Teachers College returned to find her office walls covered in swastikas and antisemitic slurs. The following year, the Anti-Defamation League logged yet another rise in harassment, vandalism, and violent assaults. The crescendo came on December 10, 2019, when two gunmen stormed the JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City and slaughtered three civilians in broad daylight.

The origin story

Not twenty-four hours later, Trump seized the moment. He signed Executive Order 13899—his debut performance on antisemitism policy.

The setting? A White House Hanukkah celebration, bathed in the glow of menorahs and opportunism.

The mood? Righteous indignation—or at least the version of it that plays well on Fox News and at Mar-a-Lago banquets.

On paper, the new directive aimed to stamp out antisemitic harassment on college campuses by invoking Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs.

There was one wrinkle: Title VI says nothing about religion.

No worry. With the wave of his rhetorical wand, Trump reimagined Judaism not just as a religion but as an ethnicity—an interpretive leap that allowed the Department of Education to swoop in with investigative powers.

Presto: antisemitism reclassified as ethnic discrimination.

That solved one problem.

But a second one quickly arose: What exactly counts as antisemitism?

For that, Trump leaned on a respected external source—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental body created in 1998 to promote Holocaust awareness worldwide. Eighteen years later, its thirty-two member countries and organizations adopted a definition of antisemitism for general reference.

Though non-binding and deliberately ambiguous, it offered just enough substance to justify action—and just enough elasticity to accommodate political taste.

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews,” the IHRA declared vaguely.

“Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are [potentially] directed towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Particularly challenging were the eleven illustrative “examples” attached to the definition like footnotes. These included several that focused not on anti-Jewish bigotry, but on speech critical of the state of Israel -- statements like describing Israel as a “racist endeavor” or comparing its policies to those of Nazi Germany.

These examples, though legally toothless, came with a whiff of expediency.

Trump’s order embraced them. It instructed federal investigators to treat such examples as guideposts in Title VI enforcement—effectively outsourcing the boundaries of campus free speech to a definition never definitively tested in US. courts. It wasn’t quite law, but it could certainly be used like one.

Civil liberties advocates cried foul. “Speech criticizing the Israeli government, or any government, is political speech protected under the First Amendment, and cannot be suppressed, the ACLU warned. “If the order were interpreted to do that, it would be unconstitutional.”

Even Kenneth Stern, the principal author of the IHRA definition, condemned its application. “It was never intended to limit speech on college campuses,” he wrote, cautioning that right-wing groups would weaponize it to silence dissent.

Trump was unfazed. If anything, he seemed to relish the power to recast even a chant or a tweet as a potential civil rights violation.

Meanwhile his willingness to countenance bigoted bottom feeders continued to vary directly with the potential for political gain. During his 2020 debate with Joe Biden, he infamously urged the neo-Nazi Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” -- a message many viewed as a wink and a nod to extremists.

Voters took note. They elected Joe Biden instead.

The darkness deepens – Project 2025

Once in office, Biden followed a characteristically measured—and some might say quaint—approach to antisemitism. In May 2023, he unveiled the first comprehensive government strategy to combat it. The plan emphasized protecting Jewish communities, raising public awareness, and fostering cross-cultural solidarity—without automatically branding campus protests as civil rights violations under Title VI.

Crucially, Biden acknowledged that multiple definitions of antisemitism exist, and he attempted the delicate feat of balancing enforcement with First Amendment protections. A tightrope walk, to be sure, but at least he brought a rope.

Meanwhile, as his administration charted its careful course through constitutional nuance, Trump and his ideological surrogates were backstage assembling a wrecking ball.

Most of the heavy lifting came from the Heritage Foundation.

In early 2023, this ultra-conservative think tank—never known for subtlety, and certainly not for fondness toward the Biden agenda—released its grand creation, a 500-page “transition guide” for the next Republican president.

Dubbed Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, it posed as a policy roadmap for national restoration. But behind its bureaucratic tone lay an all-encompassing vision to remake American institutions—governmental, societal, academic—in the image of the hard right.

Its aims were biblical. Dismantle the “administrative state.” Expand executive power. And dust off Trump’s old plan to let presidents fire career civil servants suspected of ideological disloyalty—because nothing says “constitutional republic” like purging bureaucrats for thinking the wrong thoughts.

Masterminding it all was Kevin Roberts, a modestly credentialed ex-college president and ideological entrepreneur with no prior Washington experience. In 2021 he became Heritage’s chief and over the next year and a half, shepherded Mandate towards the finish line with the zeal of a born-again culture warrior. Not only did he lend his imprimatur to the cause, but also his own rhetoric, penning the foreword to the sprawling document.

Re: the educational sector, a key battleground, he and his fellow travelers laid out an agenda to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, place university curricula under federal surveillance, and retool civil rights enforcement into a vehicle for conservative grievance.

This required a curious inversion of existing law: though the Supreme Court has consistently ruled against viewpoint discrimination by the state, Project 2025 encouraged the next Republican administration to do just that—boost right-wing messaging while policing progressive speech, all in the name of fighting “propaganda.” Free speech, but only for some.

Many of the proposals read like censorship in mufti. When professors risk losing federal research funding for studying race or gender, and civil servants are sacked for opposing politicized mandates, the First Amendment isn’t just under strain—it’s in a chokehold. Speech doesn’t have to be officially outlawed to become effectively suppressed. It just needs to be expensive, risky, or career-ending.

Although Project 2025 didn’t explicitly list antisemitism as an enforcement category, it mapped out the legal, bureaucratic, and ideological infrastructure to turbocharge the kind of crackdown Trump had initiated in 2019.

The heart of the plan was consolidation—executive power centralized in the White House, with agencies like Justice, Education, and Homeland Security brought to heel.

This meant that any future president aligned with the plan would have far-reaching power to reinterpret civil rights enforcement mechanisms in ways that match a narrow political agenda.

As The New York Times later observed, Project 2025 “laid the groundwork for Trump 2.0’s aggressive approach to combating antisemitism on university campuses.”

Campus eruptions, contentious Congressional hearings

In the days following Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 global sympathy for the embattled nation soared.

World leaders rallied to the Netanyahu government. President Biden’s response was full-throated: “We stand with Israel,” he declared as American warships moved into the Mediterranean and military aid flowed across the Atlantic.

But this moment of solidarity was short-lived. As Israel launched its lethal retaliatory campaign in Gaza—flattening neighborhoods, killing thousands of civilians, and displacing over a million Palestinians—the moral clarity of the October attacks began to erode. In capitals across Europe and in many American neighborhoods, sympathy gave way to scrutiny; support turned into outrage.

By early 2024, student protesters were mobilizing on campuses from Harvard to UCLA, demanding ceasefires and denouncing what they described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Chants like “From the river to the sea” and “Israel is an apartheid state” ignited intense controversy. Were these expressions protected speech or incitement to hatred? Were students exercising moral conscience—or stoking antisemitism?

As the debate quickened, so did tensions.

President Biden was hardly disengaged. His newly formalized National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism preached pluralism, education, and community resilience.

Yet antisemitic incidents kept rising. In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 9,000 cases across the United States—the highest annual total in the organization’s 46-year history of tracking. These included swastikas scrawled on synagogue walls, online threats against Jewish students, and acts of physical violence.

Jewish Americans and visiting Israelis—particularly on college campuses—reported feeling increasingly unsafe and abandoned.

Once again, into the breach, strode the Heritage Foundation.

According to a later report in The New York Times, a group of pro-Israel activists formed a Heritage-affiliated task force in mid-January 2024 to confront what they saw as a dangerous rise in anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric on campus.

Their founding statement—which would later evolve into the full-scale manifesto known as Project Esther—closely followed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. It cast delegitimization, boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel as inherently antisemitic and equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, calling them “different manifestations of the same hatred.”

Dominated by conservatives and Christian Zionists, the task force included few academics and no civil liberties advocates. It showed little interest in confronting right-wing antisemitism. Instead, its focus was squarely on framing liberal campus activism as a national security threat.

Meanwhile, a similar impulse was coalescing on Capitol Hill. In December 2023—barely two months after the Hamas attacks—Representative Elise Stefanik, a close ally of Donald Trump, helped orchestrate a combative hearing featuring the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Although ostensibly convened to address antisemitism, it quickly devolved into brutal political theater.

Stefanik repeatedly conflated criticism of Israel with support for terrorism, maneuvering the university presidents into rhetorical traps.

She pressed them to concede that generic calls for “intifada” or “liberation from the river to the sea” amounted to incitements to antisemitic violence.

She demanded they affirm that advocating genocide against Jews violated their campus policies.

Caught between constitutional free speech protections and internal conduct codes, the presidents hesitated or equivocated. The backlash was unforgiving: within weeks, two of the three had resigned.

Stefanik’s own performance, far from being impromptu, was the well-rehearsed opening act in a much larger drama.

By the time Columbia President Minouche Shafik appeared before the same committee on April 17, 2024, the rest of the script was being speed-written. Members of the Heritage task force were finalizing Project Esther, contriving ways to turn protected dissent into alleged hate speech.

Shafik’s testimony became a trial run for what they had in mind.

Like her predecessors, Shafik tried to thread the needle: condemning antisemitism while upholding the First Amendment. But Stefanik peppered her with questions

better suited for a corporate compliance seminar, demanding detailed justifications for faculty hires and disciplinary decisions.

Shafik stumbled a few times—offering her inquisitors Made-For-YouTube soundbites that they interpreted as concessions to bigotry.

But Shafik had done her homework. When pressed to characterize antisemitism, she dutifully deferred to the IHRA definition, affirming that it included both “traditional hatred of Jews and delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist.”

This rhetorical concession helped her deflect accusations of indifference. But it also played directly into the hands of those on the dais and at the Heritage Foundation who were hellbent on weaponizing antisemitism against American academia.

Shafik’s studied complicity was particularly disconcerting given her background. A Muslim of Egyptian origin and a distinguished academic adept at nuance, she could easily have given as good as she got. Instead, she wound up playing wingman to an agenda that erases Palestinian pain.

Not that she had much choice. At neither the December nor April hearing did Stefanik and her Republican colleagues even acknowledge the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza—let alone the deeper history of Palestinian displacement. By scrubbing the political context, they transformed a layered, painful debate into a simple binary: hate or safety.

In doing so, they bypassed First Amendment protections and flattened the diversity of Jewish perspectives into a single approved narrative.

In sum, the hearings didn’t just anticipate Trump’s now full-blown crackdown on campus speech -- they rehearsed it.

They identified the enemy (elite academia), selected the preferred weapons (public shaming and federal leverage), and buried the one counter-narrative still available (the reality of Palestinian grief).

Afterward, Stefanik, then angling to become Trump’s running mate, traveled to Israel to reap the political rewards. In a speech to the Knesset, she pledged to combat antisemitism worldwide by “eradicating antisemitism domestically and supplying Israel with its needs unconditionally and in a timely manner.”

According to one report, her campaign coffers were soon flush with new donations.

To longtime observers, the optics were troubling. Writing in Slate, Emily Tamkin, a senior editor at The New Statesman, criticized Stefanik for embracing a well-known antisemitic conspiracy theory even as she claimed to oppose such rhetoric.

The theory holds that “shadowy Jewish elites” —figures like philanthropist George Soros—are orchestrating mass immigration to dilute America’s white demographic.

By Tamkin’s account, Stefanik had tweeted during the congressional hearings: “Soros is trying to fund the downfall of America by buying elections for radical far left politicians and corrupting the next generation to support terror groups.”

Tamkin interpreted this not as a policy critique, but as coded conspiracy-mongering. “A cartoon depicting a Jewish person pulling puppet strings with dollar signs over the United States,” she wrote, “would have been just as subtle.”

Stefanik and her team strongly denied that she had trafficked in antisemitism.

Enter Project Esther

In October 2024, as Gaza lay in ruins after months of Israeli bombardment and student protests crested across U.S. campuses, the Heritage Foundation unveiled its long-gestating initiative: Project Esther.

Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the October 7 bloodletting, the initiative presented itself as a focused new “strategy” to quell campus unrest. In essence, it sought to criminalize solidarity with Palestinians by reclassifying it as a national security threat.

How did it evolve into such a powerful instrument?

Meet Esther’s spiritual architect: Victoria Coates.

Over the prior eight months, Coates—Heritage’s Vice President and a longtime champion of Christian Zionism—had wielded her institutional clout to bring the project to full muscularity. An NSC adviser in the first Trump administration, she reportedly views Christian-Jewish alliance not just as a policy priority, but as a biblical imperative. Her ideological compass is informed by the New Apostolic

Reformation, a movement committed to fusing Christian influence with political power and advancing support for Israel as both theological destiny and strategic necessity.

Thanks in large part to Coates’s vision, Project Esther marked a radical escalation in the right’s approach to antisemitism. Where earlier efforts—such as Trump’s 2019 executive order—had treated antisemitism as a civil rights concern, Esther embraced the language and tactics of counterterrorism.

Its central premise is pure Coates: that a “Hamas Support Network” has insinuated itself into the United States through campus groups, nonprofit organizations, and academic departments. Under Esther’s framework, criticism of Israeli policy or expressions of Palestinian solidarity—whether from faculty, DEI officers, students, or foreign scholars—may qualify as actionable support for terrorism.

The plan calls for the FBI to coordinate with the Departments of Education and Homeland Security, invoking a post-9/11 statute that allows prosecution for symbolic or indirect ties to designated terrorist groups. Protest chants, teach-ins, even course syllabi perceived as sympathetic to Palestinian resistance can trigger federal scrutiny or sanctions.

Universities face the threat of funding withdrawal based on subjective assessments of “campus climate.” Foreign students risk deportation. Professors may be investigated or dismissed. Entire academic departments—particularly in the humanities and social sciences—are vulnerable to ideological audits.

Project Esther doesn’t just muddy the line between dissent and sedition—it obliterates it. It repurposes the post-9/11 surveillance state and turns its machinery inward on American universities.

Much of its momentum stemmed from the high-profile hearings led by Rep. Stefanik. Her strategy of conflating progressive rhetoric with antisemitism, while pressuring institutions through donor leverage, paved the way for Esther’s broader reclassification of campus activism as a national security concern.

There was also a political calculus at play. By late 2024, support for Israel had plummeted among Americans under thirty-five, many of whom viewed the Gaza campaign with horror. Campuses had become ground zero for this generational rupture. Rather than contest it through dialogue, Project Esther aimed to criminalize it.

Civil liberties advocates hit the panic button. Jonathan Jacoby, director of the Nexus Project—which monitors antisemitism and defends open discourse—captured the danger in a later interview with The New York Times: “Project Esther changed the paradigm by associating anyone who opposes Israeli policies with a Hamas support network.”

One of the project’s most glaring omissions is its silence on white nationalist and Christian nationalist antisemitism—the forces behind synagogue shootings, digital hate campaigns, and domestic terror plots. By targeting only left-wing dissent, Esther functions less as a shield for Jewish communities than as an ideological filter.

The foreign policy implications are no less severe. Project Esther deepens the alignment of U.S. domestic policy with the priorities of Netanyahu’s far-right government—undermining America’s credibility as an impartial actor in the Middle East, alienating Muslim-majority allies, and exacerbating domestic divisions.

Even the project’s name is freighted with symbolism. Drawn from the biblical queen who saved the Jews of Persia, it was clearly chosen to imbue the initiative with moral gravitas. But in The Book of Esther, it was truth spoken to power that averted catastrophe. Project Esther, by contrast, insists that power define truth—and silence everything else.

Its true antecedent isn’t scripture. It’s the House Un-American Activities Committee—resurrected for the digital age and retooled for the politics of billionaire patronage and ideological purity.

Crackdown codified: EO 14188 and the politics of antisemitism

From the outset of the Gaza crisis, Columbia University had been the epicenter of student protest and political scrutiny. President Shafik’s initial responses had been measured: cancelling classes, restricting access, and quietly compiling names.

But pressure mounted. In the spring of 2024, after her vexing Congressional appearance, she authorized a dramatic shift—calling in the NYPD to dismantle a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” near her office and to eject twenty-two students who had seized Hamilton Hall. Between April 17 and April 30, more than 200 arrests were made on the Morningside Heights campus, and numerous students were suspended.

It wasn’t enough.

That fall, congressional Republicans escalated their onslaught. In late October, just after release of the Heritage’s Project Esther, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a 325-page report titled Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed. It singled out Columbia, Barnard, and nine other institutions for allegedly granting “concessions” to protest organizers and obstructing disciplinary procedures.

In December, a follow-up report from House Speaker Mike Johnson and six GOP-led committees condemned Columbia’s leadership for an “egregious failure to combat antisemitism.”

Ten-word translation: elite universities weren’t merely tolerating antisemitism—they were enabling it.

Then came Armageddon.

On January 29, 2025—just eight days into his second term—Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14188, officially titled “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism.”

This was no quasi-symbolic civil rights gesture, but a political bunker buster: a federally coordinated initiative to crush dissent on college campuses.

It keyed off Project Esther and echoed Trump’s 2019 executive order, with its reliance on the IHRA to shape antisemitism charges.

But unlike EO 13899, this one had real killing power.

It ordered every federal agency to audit its statutes and enforcement powers and to report back within 60 days on how existing civil and criminal laws might be used to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account” individuals or institutions accused of antisemitism.

The target list pointed in every direction at once: universities, students, faculty—all fair game.

Colleges were portrayed as breeding grounds for “an unprecedented wave of vile antisemitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence.”

The Departments of Justice and Education were instructed to reopen complaints and legal cases related to protests since October 7, 2023, and to consider additional enforcement actions. They were told to assist Homeland Security officials in identifying and monitoring foreign students and faculty suspected of supporting terrorism. They were to rely on a variety of immigration statutes, specifically 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3), and interpret them as allowing deportation of anyone who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity.”

A fact sheet released alongside the order left no doubt about the administration’s posture: “Come 2025, we will find you and deport you.”

Just days later, on February 3, the Department of Justice announced the formation of a new Interagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Its first priority: American schools and universities.

Reactions split sharply. AIPAC praised the executive order for reaffirming that antisemitism, “even when disguised as political protest,” would no longer be tolerated. The Heritage Foundation hailed it as a “model of civilizational defense.” The Zionist Organization of America applauded the targeting of “terror sympathizing students” using Title VI and immigration law.

But civil liberties advocates saw the order for what it was: a vast expansion of federal power to enforce ideological conformity.

In a legal bulletin, senior attorneys at Arnold & Porter warned that the directive “compels federal agencies to reassess their regulatory reach,” effectively encouraging them to deploy rarely used enforcement mechanisms in a politically volatile space.

Administrative law experts at Paul Hastings LLP described EO 14188 as “formalizing a new regulatory mandate” and crossing into “surveillance” under the guise of compliance. “The order turns oversight into punishment,” their analysis concluded.

The ACLU called it “an invitation to censorship and surveillance.” The Middle East Studies Association likened it to “a national loyalty test.” J Street and T’ruah, though normally on the other side of the fence, accused the administration of weaponizing antisemitism to suppress pro-Palestinian speech.

Then, there was the “Trump” of it all, the rank irony:

Just nine days before signing EO 14188, the President had issued blanket pardons for over 1,000 January 6 rioters—some of whom had stormed the Capitol in “Camp Auschwitz” hoodies and waved swastika flags. The dissonance was stunning.

“This is not about defending Jewish students,” one civil rights advocate said. “It’s about punishing ideological nonconformity.”

Arnold & Porter concluded, more diplomatically, that EO 14188 “reflects an enforcement model rooted less in the protection of vulnerable communities than in the projection of executive ideology.”

Academic repression by decree

By the end of the Spring 2025 semester, the foundations of American academia were visibly buckling under the weight of Trump’s new order. The aftershocks threatened to turn education into an exercise in blacklisting.

Within days of the order’s release, the Departments of Justice and Education launched parallel investigations into alleged civil rights violations at more than 60 universities. The newly minted DOJ Task Force to Combat Antisemitism dispatched investigators to ten high-profile campuses—Columbia, Harvard, NYU, and UCLA among them—to determine whether federal intervention was “warranted.”

Columbia took the first major hit. By mid-March, the DOJ had revoked more than $400 million in federal research contracts to the university, citing “continued inaction” over the harassment of Jewish students.

Trump made reinstatement conditional on total surrender: expel protestors, restructure Middle Eastern studies programs, and ban face coverings at demonstrations.

Columbia’s administrators, desperate to restore the money flow, quickly unveiled a raft of new policies. They adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, barred demonstrators from donning masks (except for medical or religious reasons) and appointed a senior provost to audit academic departments—starting with Middle East studies. They also pledged to reassess admissions practices in response to reported declines in Jewish and Black student enrollment.

The “reforms” came with internal costs. On March 28, interim president Dr. Katrina Armstrong—who had replaced Minouche Shafik the previous summer—resigned under pressure, following a faculty backlash over her behind-the scenes efforts to downplay the scope of the concessions. Trustee Claire Shipman stepped in to replace her, only to become a lightning rod herself when Rep. Stefanik unearthed a 2023 text in which Shipman had derided the congressional antisemitism hearings as “Capitol Hill nonsense.”

Notice to staff and faculty: stray from the new ideological line, and your job could be on the line.

Harvard, meanwhile, chose a different path.

When the Trump administration demanded the dismantling of DEI programs, federal oversight of hiring, and broad governance changes, President Alan Garber put his foot down. “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he declared.

In retaliation the government launched two-pronged offensive. First, it froze $2.2 billion in federal research funding. Then, it revoked Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), threatening the legal status of thousands of international students.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem followed with a letter demanding information on “illegal and violent activities” by foreign students, with a compliance deadline of April 30.

Harvard responded with not one, but two federal lawsuits—both unprecedented in scope and tone.

The first was filed on April 21, 2025. Harvard’s attorneys challenged the funding freeze as unconstitutional, citing violations of the First and Fifth Amendments.

The second suit came on May 23, targeting the SEVP decertification. In this complaint, Harvard alleged that the Department of Homeland Security had overstepped its authority by weaponizing visa policy against academic institutions in retaliation for their refusal to implement ideological litmus tests.

Together, these lawsuits marked Harvard’s most aggressive legal confrontation with the federal government in decades. The university thus cast itself as a national bulwark for academic freedom and constitutional governance.

The widening crackdown

Harvard and Columbia weren’t alone on the chopping block. Not long after Executive Order 14188 dropped, Northwestern, Brown, and Penn found themselves facing similar existential threats to their federal funding. Academic freedom, it seemed, had become a line-item negotiable at Washington’s whim.

The inquisition didn’t stop at institutions. It moved swiftly—almost efficiently—to students and faculty.

The Department of Homeland Security began screening the social media of all student visa applicants to root out supporters of “antisemitic terrorism.” The State Department followed suit, instructing US embassies to delay visa approvals and ramp up scrutiny for applicants from Muslim-majority countries.

At Brown, Palestinian-American scholar Rasha Alawieh was arrested and deported despite a federal court order temporarily blocking her removal. Hers became a leading case in what civil rights lawyers now refer to—without much hyperbole—as retaliatory academic exile.

Then, in early April, Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful U.S. green card holder and vocal Palestinian rights advocate, was quietly detained by ICE and effectively vanished. For days, there was no official word on his whereabouts. He eventually turned up in a remote detention facility. The unmistakable subtext: lawful status was no guarantee of safety.

By late spring, over 300 international students had lost their visas—many without hearings, explanations, or appeal.

On April 22, more than 150 university presidents signed an open letter denouncing “unprecedented government overreach.” The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed suit to block EO 14188 and its companion directive, EO 14161, which restricts political speech by non-citizens.

Ellen Schrecker, a scholar of McCarthyism, saw a familiar pattern. “This isn’t just a purge,” she warned. “It is [about] infrastructure.”

Even the legal establishment suffered a performance review. Through yet another executive order, Trump threatened litigation against prominent law firms—mostly those with liberal leanings—unless they donated millions in pro bono hours to the DOJ’s antisemitism task force.

Nine major firms, including Paul, Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis, negotiated settlements totaling nearly $940 million in pro bono commitments. Some agreed to dial back their DEI programs and accept government monitors. Whether this was cooperation or capitulation depended on your vantage point.

All the while, bottom lines buckled. Willkie Farr saw partner walkouts and client attrition. Paul, Weiss found itself under scrutiny for what sources described as a $40 million pledge extracted under duress.

Blessedly, there were some stalwarts. WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Jenner & Block rebuffed Trump’s bully boy tactics. They sued—and won. Federal courts granted injunctions, ruling that the President’s orders likely violated both the First Amendment and professional independence. These firms were hailed as defenders of legal integrity—proof that even in politically fevered times, not every institution folds.

Ivory towers sway

When Harvard filed its own countersuits in April and May, its purpose wasn’t just to safeguard its funding or protect international enrollments. President Geber and his trustees were also mounting a full-throated defense of academic autonomy.

Initially, much of academia rallied. More than 100 institutions—including Yale, Princeton, and MIT—signed a rousing amicus brief in support of Harvard’s April suit, warning that the administration’s efforts risked criminalizing dissent and chilling protected speech.

But two names were conspicuously absent from the filing – Columbia’s and Cornell’s.

In both cases, university lawyers had advised against joining Harvard’s suit, hoping discretion might avert further fallout.

The abstentions didn’t go unnoticed. Columbia alumni filed a separate brief in solidarity with Harvard, but the nonparticipation of two Ivy League giants weakened the image of a united front.

The legal impact may prove negligible. Harvard’s cases are backed by scores of institutions, civil liberties groups, and twenty-one state attorneys general.

But symbolically, the split speaks volumes. It reveals a sector under siege, caught between principle and self-preservation.

Harvard chose defiance.

Columbia and Cornell played it safe.

Their concessions – disciplinary reforms at Columbia, compliance gestures at Cornell – have not resulted in any meaningful restoration of their frozen federal funding.

Their caution may buy them time for further bargaining. But history will not look kindly at institutions that chose silence when courage was called for.

Harvard’s emotional bind

In April 2025, Harvard tried to change the conversation. After months of campus protest over Israel’s war in Gaza, the university’s leadership needed to show it was listening.

So, it released two long-awaited internal reports—one on antisemitism, the other on anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias.

The studies were conceived as acts of institutional soul-searching. But their actual framework —radically subjective, emotionally grounded, and unmoored from legal standards—may prove more consequential than Harvard bargained for.

Each report was compiled by a handpicked task force of students, faculty, and staff. Both teams drew on hundreds of interviews and fifty “community listening sessions” conducted through late summer of last year. And both declared, up front, that balance was immaterial. “We did not seek counterarguments or counterevidence,” the antisemitism task force explained. “Emotional responses—not intent or legal context—were the most reliable indicators of a hostile environment.”

In other words, the goal was to feel the truth of campus life, not to measure it by any formal threshold. What mattered was how students and faculty experienced their surroundings.

The results were raw.

Jewish students described fear, alienation, and shame. “Unless I explicitly condemned Israel,” one student recalled, “I was told I was complicit in genocide.” Others said they had stopped speaking in class or avoided wearing religious symbols like the kippah. Several Jewish faculty members reported self-censorship and administrative indifference. “It was clear that acknowledging our grief after October 7 would be perceived as siding with oppression,” one wrote.

The emotional weight of these testimonies was undeniable. But the report made no attempt to assess whether any of it constituted discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or whether the speech described was protected under the First Amendment. That wasn’t the point. Harvard was aiming for moral, not legal clarity.

“Our students didn’t just feel unheard,” the report stated. “They felt invisible.”

To avoid the appearance of one-sidedness, the university released a second report in tandem —this one on anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias. It painted an equally grim picture. Forty-seven percent of Muslim students said they felt physically unsafe on campus. Ninety-two percent feared academic consequences for expressing their political views. Some reported being labeled “terrorists” or told to “go back to Gaza.” One student wrote, “We were grieving and scared after October 7, but we were treated like threats.”

“Our students didn’t just feel unheard,” the report stated. “They felt invisible.”

The two reports shared assumptions. Emotional experience was the primary evidence of harm. No effort was made to separate discomfort from discrimination. No legal definitions of Islamophobia or antisemitism (like the IHRA’s formula) were applied. And no framework was offered to distinguish between interpersonal conflict, institutional failure, and the inevitable frictions of free speech in a pluralistic community.

None of this might have mattered beyond Harvard Yard – except for a sudden, simultaneous escalation of the legal stakes

That same spring, a noted in earlier in this essay, Harvard, its president and trustees filed two lawsuits against the government. The first, on April 21, challenged Trump’s decision to pause federal funding to the university. The second, dated May 23, objected to the revocation of Harvard's certified access to the student and exchange visitor program. (SEVP).

Both lawsuits cited violations of the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act, particularly its arbitration provisions.

At the heart of the university’s case was a defense of academic freedom. The government had no business dictating Harvard's curriculum or imposing a more “neutral” approach to teaching decisions, the plaintiffs declared. In their view this wasn’t just overreach, but a direct assault on the academic autonomy, a principle guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The briefs didn’t mince words. Time and again they chastised the government for pursuing “arbitrary and capricious” policies without any facts to support them.

One particularly stinging passage read:

“The Government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen… Defendants’ actions are unreasoned and unexplained.”

Another noted the Kafkaesque quality of the crackdown:

“DHS summarily revoked Harvard’s SEVP certification… but it did not explain why, let alone identify any actual noncompliance.”

After parsing all the government’s letters and filings, Harvard’s legal team found only a single line that even attempted to justify the federal blitz: vague “concerns of antisemitism and ideological capture.”

That’s it -- a wholly subjective rationale for overwrought federal sanctions.

Harvard was right in pushing back. Subjective concerns, untethered from evidence, are a flimsy basis for federal intervention. They invite political overreach, chill unpopular speech, and vaporize any distinction between dissent and discrimination. That's precisely why the First Amendment exists.

But Harvard has a problem – or series of problems -- stemming from its own emotionally charged reports about campus bias.

Legally speaking, the antisemitism study itself probably does more probative damage to the university than any of the government’s own filings. In court, federal attorneys could, quite legitimately, cite this report as an admission by Harvard that Jewish students face an implacably hostile environment.

And there is another deeper problem. By prioritizing emotional distress as a marker of harm warranting administrative attention, the Harvard studies indulge in the same kind of subjectivity alleged against the government.

Remember the researchers’ own acknowledgement: “We did not seek counterargument or counterevidence.”

What does that mean?

It means that Harvard now finds itself wedged between MAGA’s assault on the academy and its own overcorrection. What can be safely said in Harvard Yard is now as ambiguous as someone else’s unease.

Years ago, during my own legal battle with the U.S. government over censorship (United States v. Snepp, 1980), one of my attorneys taught me a lesson that still resonates. “When vague subjective standards become the basis for regulation,” he said, “the First Amendment goes out the window.” Free expression ceases to be a right and becomes a privilege— conditional and negotiable.

One Jewish educator critical of Israel says the Harvard antisemitism report threatens her own ability to speak out. Atalia Omer, a scholar once affiliated with Harvard, has warned that the task force’s findings could turn pro-Palestinian advocacy—even from Jews like herself—into punishable offense. “It sends a chilling message,” she says, “that if you are a Jew who questions Zionism, you are suspect.”

Such contradictions may not derail the university’s legal case. But they do expose a moral inconsistency. Can an institution defend free speech in court while smudging its edges on campus?

And if emotion is now the gold standard of harm, whose emotions count? Who decides when discomfort becomes discrimination?

One Jewish student helped frame the dilemma. “The campus became a space for the unfettered expression of pro-Palestinian rage—rage that many Jewish students felt was directed at them,” he told Harvard’s investigators.

Fair enough. Believe him.

But here’s the rub: Rage is not unlawful. And discomfort is not persecution.

Harvard’s challenge isn’t just to win in court. It must also decide what kind of institution it wants to be—one that leads with empathy, with law, or with both. Right now, it risks ending up with neither.

Read Tom Friedman on campus and prepare to be ICED

At the start of this essay, I floated a crazy-sounding idea: that if someone stood up at Columbia or Harvard and simply read aloud from Tom Friedman’s May 9 column in The New York Times, the speaker could be investigated—and possibly punished—for antisemitism under current Trump policy.

Farfetched, right?

But now that we’ve walked through the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Trump’s two directives on the subject, the Heritage Foundation’s poison-pen work, and Harvard’s Task Force report with its soft-focus emphasis on the emotional harm, the scenario I posed doesn’t seem so crazy anymore.

It feels all but inevitable.

Let’s recall exactly what Friedman wrote. In that May 9 column, he accused the Israeli government of occupying Gaza, pursuing the mass expulsion of Palestinians, destabilizing the region, and committing what could amount to war crimes. He quoted Haaretz: “We killed them… our hands did this.” He likened the conflict to “Vietnam on the Mediterranean.”

Now ask yourself: if that were uttered by a student activist instead of a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and delivered from the steps of Butler Library or the podium in Harvard Yard, what would happen?

For starters, under the IHRA standard, the speaker would be in deep trouble.

We’ve already seen what enforcement can look like.

In the U.K., filmmaker Ken Loach was dropped from an Oxford event because of his pro-Palestinian views. In Canada, legal scholar Valentina Azarova lost a University of Toronto appointment after concerns were raised about her critiques of Israeli occupation. And in the US, Trump’s Department of Education launched Title VI investigations into student groups that voiced support for Palestinian rights.

Compared to what Friedman published on May 9, these were minor-league offenses.

And Friedman didn’t stop there.

In a June 11 column, he warned that if Netanyahu pursues indefinite war in Gaza and his resettlement plan, Jews around the world had better brace for Israel becoming a “pariah state—a source of shame, not of pride.”

He also wrote: “This Israeli government is a danger to Jews everywhere.” And: “If my own tribe does not resist this government’s utter indifference to the number of civilians being killed in Gaza... Jews everywhere will pay dearly.”

If that’s not emotionally triggering to Israeli or Jewish students at Harvard and elsewhere, especially at Harvard where “emotional distress” itself can define antisemitism, I don’t know what is.

And then there’s a May 30 column by Friedman. Here he quoted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who wrote in Haaretz: “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination... Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”

Let that sink in: A former Israeli prime minister using the language of war crimes and extermination to describe his own country’s military operation.

Under Trump’s ever expanding antisemitism regime, quoting that on a US campus could land you on a watch list. You might lose your visa. Your federal funding. Your job. You could be accused of supporting terrorism or fostering a hostile environment.

Imagine that: Ehud Olmert, former head of the Israeli government, declared antisemitic under U.S. law… for criticizing Israel.

And that’s the punchline.

This is how far we’ve drifted. Students quoting Haaretz or Tom Friedman or a former Israeli prime minister can now be investigated for antisemitism -- not because they hate Jews, but because they’ve dared to question an ally’s government. And in this new environment, intent doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter. Only the emotional aftershocks do.

So, I wasn’t kidding.

If Tom Friedman were a student at Columbia or Harvard today, reading his own columns out loud… he’d probably be handcuffed, or at least booted off campus.

And if he isn’t safe, who is?