How Washington is responding to the campus Israel protests

The Scene

The first thing Rep. Ilhan Omar did on the University of Minnesota campus this week: Thank Gaza ceasefire protesters for their bravery. The next thing: Ask why people in her world were so obsessed with these protests.

“I have to tell you, it’s been incredibly painful, for the last five days,” Omar told students on Tuesday. “While there is a discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Palestinians in Khan Younis… our media, our elected politicians, our president, every single leader, is spending their time and energy talking about the protests.”

Elected Democrats, who embraced social justice and civil rights protests throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, are treading more cautiously around the student movement to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

The protests, and even the crackdowns ordered by university presidents and Republican governors, have divided their party, with two members of Congress coming to campus to support activists and far more speaking out to denounce individual antisemitic statements by some protesters. The demonstrations have unified Republicans, many of whom were calling for crackdowns, expulsions, and the shutting down of anti-Israel groups during the first, brief wave of protests six months ago.

“Omar’s pro-Hamas rhetoric solidifies the Democrat party as the pro-terrorist party,” said House GOP Whip Tom Emmer after the congresswoman’s first campus stop. She joined the encampment at Columbia on Thursday, shortly after Speaker Mike Johnson came to condemn it.

The View From Some Democrats

Two weeks in, the Biden campaign and Democratic leaders are treating the protests like short-term events that are being inflated by their enemies to hurt their party. One big point of agreement, between them and Omar: Every day they discuss this, it would be better to discuss something else.

“It’s in Putin’s interest for ‘What’s His Name’ to win, and therefore I see some encouragement on the part of the Russians of some of what’s going on,” House Speaker emeritus Nancy Pelosi told the Irish news station RTE, during a trip to the country this week. “I trust the sincerity of many of the demonstrators. It’s spontaneous, it’s organic, it’s real. But some of it, I think, has a Russian tinge to it.”

In the same interview, Pelosi called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. The White House has dodged that topic and other micro-questions about the protests, like whether the National Guard should disperse them and whether college presidents should resign. The president himself denounced “antisemitism” at protests, as well as anyone who didn’t get “what’s going on with the Palestinians,” while leaving other questions to his press shop.

“The President put out a statement, as you know — I’ve mentioned this a couple times this week, when he talked about Passover, as Jewish Americans were celebrating Passover,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in an Air Force One gaggle yesterday. “And he said that antisemitism basically is wrong and that we should call out.”

The View From Other Democrats

The clearest Democratic endorsements of the protests have come after police crackdowns — sweeps of student camps by city and campus police, and calls by Republicans for governors to mobilize the National Guard.

On Thursday, Texas Rep. Greg Casar became just the second Democrat to join protesters, spurred by the arrest of 57 students and supporters after Austin police cleared a camp at the University of Texas.

“No matter what Greg Abbott says, our movement is rooted in love,” Casar told protesters, celebrating that they lived in “the largest city in this country where your entire Democratic delegation voted ‘no’” on further aid to Israel this month.

“There are millions more lives at stake,” he added. “and your continued organizing is the only way we can stop being complicit in this killing and instead get to saving our shared humanity.”

Progressives, who opposed new Israel aid without conditions, are trying to elevate the protesters’ most popular demands over the antisemitic comments made by some people at or around the camps. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders did that on Thursday, after Netanyahu released an English-language video about the “antisemitic mobs” on campuses. This, said Sanders, was a diversion from a PR war that Netanyahu was losing.

“Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to many millions of people,” said Sanders. “But, please, do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government.”

The View From Republicans

The only real disagreement between Republicans this week is over who deserves blame for the protests — which they uniformly call antisemitic. Before the tents went up, they’d passed a resolution classifying anti-Zionism as antisemitism; Emmer was one of many Republicans classifying any anti-Israel protest as objectively pro-Hamas, and objectively pro-terrorism. Their new debate was whether the campus actions were an outgrowth of the academy’s postmodern slide, or whether foreign donors were exploiting them to divide America.

“Don’t be surprised, if you look really deep into who’s funding [this], that the CCP is involved — that the Chinese Communist Party is involved,” Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez told Fox News on Thursday.

As Gimenez gave that interview, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee were asking the IRS whether it was doing anything to probe organizations that “receive foreign funding from America’s adversaries.” At least one China-based philanthropist, Neville Roy Singham, had been donating to Code Pink and The People’s Forum; it was important know, they wrote, whether the IRS has “a definition of antisemitism in place within the agency that it considers when evaluating the claimed exempt purpose of a tax-exempt organization.”

Trump, who’s said little about the war since it started, has spoken on the protests only to blame President Joe Biden for letting antisemitism flourish. “Charlottesville was a little peanut,” he told reporters in New York on Thursday, arguing that the scenes on campuses were worse than the 2017 Unite the Right rally where a white supremacist killed a left-wing protester. “And the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here.”

David’s view

The White House’s studious non-response to developments on campus has been denounced on the left; the president could defend protesters’ free speech or decry the use of police to stop it, and he hasn’t. That’s a contrast with how Biden campaigned four years ago, when Trump’s support for crackdowns on protests led to weeks-long standoffs between activists and members of the National Guard.

“I promise you, as president, I’ll never put you in the middle of politics, or personal vendettas,” Biden told the National Guard Association in August 2020. “I’ll never use the military as a prop or as a private militia to violate rights of fellow citizens.”

Republicans know this. When they call for Biden to endorse police crackdowns on campus, they know he won’t, and they know that doing so would shatter his coalition — elected Democrats squabbling about Israel, and Democratic voters who increasingly want to stop aiding Israel. In CBS News/YouGov polling this month, just 32% of Democrats favored additional funding for the country’s war against Hamas, a 15-point drop since it started six months ago.

And Republicans have allies that they lacked in 2020. Long before Mike Johnson walked onto Columbia’s campus, Canary Mission, a pro-Israel group that identifies and profiles anti-Israel activists, had been building dossiers on Israel critics in the faculty. What usually happens in these situations – the intermingling of elected officials and protesters outside the electoral system – is that the electeds will be asked to answer for the most alienating comments and events in the protests. That’s well underway.

Notable

• In Jewish Insider, Marc Rod reports on legislation from New York Reps. Ritchie Torres and Mike Lawler that would “condition federal funding for universities as part of a push for more stringent federal oversight and monitoring of campus antisemitism.”

• In Forever Wars, Spencer Ackerman looks at how protesting students are getting labeled as “the handmaidens of terrorists, and treated as such.”