Israeli law professors warn partisan crackdown on pro-Palestinian students threatens ‘prelude to persecution’ of Jewish, other progressives

Editor’s (admin’s) note, April 15. The essay by Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona of Haifa University is detailed, and closely reasoned — difficult to paraphrase — and I’ve tried several times to work up a post. But events keep getting ahead of me as the Trump regime accelerates its slide toward Hungarian-style neofascism, and I keep putting it on the back burner. ) Oh, look! A squirrel! Today The Financial Times of London, hardly a left-wing scandal sheet, opined that Trump’s treatment of Central American migrants and pro-Palestinian students acccused of antisemitism signals the US has “ceased to have a law-abiding government.” And I decided I should go ahead and finish it now or else the outrages will keep piling up, more squirrels will come into plain view and I’ll never get around to finishing it.

I kinda thought something wasn’t adding up right last year when I saw local news coverage of Passover seder celebrations at pro-Palestinian student demonstrations in places like New York City, Ann Arbor and Philadelphia.

In spite of obvious evidence that the situation was more nuanced, headlines in the national news media, and some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, sounded the alarm about “rampant antisemitism” and violence on campus, and I was reminded of the coverage of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in my own student days 50 and 60 years ago.

In fact, I blogged about it HERE, HERE and HERE; and again, HERE, when newly reelected President Trump went after Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil this. month without due process of law. I couldn’t help but agree with the students, many of them Jewish, that cracking down on free speech — I called it “performative anti-antisemitism” for lack of a better word — looks more and more like a prelude to the real thing,

“When everything becomes anti-Semitic, nothing is anti-Semitic,” said Kenneth Stern, whom I quoted last year. “And that makes it harder to fight anti-Semitism.”

Stern should know. Now director of Bard Center for the Study of Hate in New York, Stern chaired the working group than developed a widely used definition of antisemitism for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance of Berllin.

Come now two Israeli law professors, Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona of Haifa University, who argue in the British press the congressional crackdown on perceived antisemitism is more about “consolidating authoritarian power under the veneer of minority protection.”

And US Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, a self-proclaimed “committed Zionist” whose district includes iconic Jewish neighborhoods on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has an even blunter assessment. He tells The Guardian that President Trump and his congressional allies use the genuine danger of antisemitism to justify his widely publicized attacks on Columbia, Harvard and other universities.

“Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism,” he said.

As far as the pro-Palestinian students at Columbia are concerned, Nadler “recently signed a letter excoriating the Trump administration for detaining and attempting to deport” Khalil. The students’ language did not rise to the level of “inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” he added, and was therefore protected speech under US case law.

“I disagreed with the encampment,” Nadler said, “but regardless Khalil is entitled to free speech and shouldn’t be deported for his opinions.”

For his part, Khalil seems to have been careful not violate the bounds of permissible speech. On March 11, shortly after he was detined by ICE agents, CNN searched its files from April 2024 and reported :

[…] long before he was arrested by federal agents Saturday night, Khalil told CNN he felt called to advocate for the liberation of both the Palestinian and Jewish people as a refugee.

“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.

“Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone,” he said. [Link in the original.]

Nadler has changed his stance on the IHRA’s working definition. A sponsor of 2018 legislation to require its use in federal investigations of antisemitism, he now says it is too open to interpretaion.

“The problem with the IHRA definition is that it leads to the conflation of anti-Israel expressions with antisemitism,” he told the Guardian. “You can be anti-Israel, and not antisemitic.”

(Nadler did not comment on Khalil’s statements to CNN, but they would seem to fall under the category of criticism of the Israeli government that refrained from language eliciting hatred of Jewish people.)

LATER (April 15). This is as far as I got. I started the post last month when The Guardian published the essay by Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona. Rather than let the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough, I will just quote a few of their most salient arguments in bulletpoints and call it a day.

• Progressive Jewish communities have already begun to challenge conservative policy agendas on religious freedom grounds – most notably around reproductive rights. In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade and the wave of state-level abortion bans that followed, Jewish women, congregations and community leaders have filed lawsuits asserting that such bans violate their religious freedom. In some cases, plaintiffs have argued that Jewish law not only permits but may even require abortion under certain circumstances. While many of these cases are still pending, in a landmark ruling in April 2024, the Indiana court of appeals recognized, for the first time, the legitimacy of such claims. […] One way conservatives can eliminate this risk to their project is by questioning liberal Jews’ Jewishness. “If liberal Jews can be erased – either pushed out of the public eye or denied as genuine or authentic specimens of Judaism – then the challenge of liberal Jews disappears with it,” as [Lewis & Clark law professor David] Schraub explains.
• Project Esther, a new initiative launched by the Christian nationalist Heritage Foundation known for Project 2025, offers a blueprint for combating antisemitism that targets not only pro-Palestinian groups but what it calls a broader “coalition of leftist, progressive organizations” – including Jewish groups – through tools such as anti-terrorism prosecutions, deportations, public firings, and efforts to “disrupt and degrade” dissenting movements. Despite its use of Jewish religious language, the plan has virtually no Jewish authors and is riddled with basic errors, including misrepresentations of Jewish texts. It chastises American Jews who don’t align with its worldview, calling them “complacent” and their positions “inexplicable”. […] This farcical performance of concern would merely be amusing were it not for the very real possibility that it serves as a prelude for persecution.
• The establishment clause of the US constitution, for instance, prohibits the state from intervening in religious disputes. By adopting the IHRA definition into law, the US government has in effect taken sides in an intra-Jewish debate, recruiting Zionist Jews to side in a war against its ideological opponents. The redefinition of antisemitism is therefore not only an attack on political dissent – it is an intrusion into Jewish religious life. By codifying support for Israel as a requirement for being Jewish, these laws function as a state intervention in an ongoing Jewish theological and ethical debate. […] Reclaiming religious freedom from the state, as part of this act of resistance, would not just protect Jewish dissenters – it would offer a broader framework for resisting state attempts to control religious identity. No government – not the Israeli government, and surely not the American government – should have the power to define what it means to be a Jew.

Citation: Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, “The new definition of antisemitism is transforming America – and serving a Christian nationalist plan,” The Guardian, March 23, 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/mar/23/antisemitism-redefinition-jewish-safety-christian-nationalism-democracy.

• Itamar Mann is an associate professor of law at the University of Haifa, and currently a Humboldt fellow at Humboldt University. He holds a doctorate from Yale Law School
• Lihi Yona is an associate professor of law and criminology at the University of Haifa. She holds a doctorate from Columbia Law School. Her research focuses on antidiscrimination law in the United States and Israel

See also: Edward Luce, “Trump is halfway to making America a police state,” The Financial Times [London], April 125, 2025 https://www.ft.com/content/4c4b0f14-3e85-4436-94de-204d3f518f3c.

[Revised and uplinked, April 15, 2025]