JERUSALEM — President-elect Donald Trump‘s victory could make it much more difficult for U.S. college students and academics to harass Jewish students and boycott Israeli academics and institutions.
“My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that, if you do not end antisemitic propaganda, they will lose their accreditation and federal taxpayer support. Next, I will inform every educational institution in our land that, if they permit violence, harassment or threats against Jewish students, the schools will be held accountable for the violation of civil rights law,” Trump announced during a Nov. 14 Washington, D.C., rally against antisemitism.
Trump’s Nov. 5 win and his incoming presidential administration come at a time of unprecedented attempts by Palestinians and their left-leaning allies to isolate not only Israel but individual Israelis and their Jewish and non-Jewish supporters, especially in academia and the arts.
The Hamas-Israel war breathed new life into the 20-year-old Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which had been largely ineffective until then. Within days of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, and even before Israel sent ground troops into Gaza, students and professors on dozens of U.S. college campuses called for Israel’s destruction and an end to ties with Israeli students, academics, and institutions.
Back in Israel, many academics began to detect a cold front from formerly warm and engaged overseas colleagues. First, it was small things, such as calls not being returned. Later, conference invitations failed to arrive or were discreetly canceled, international collaborations were suddenly severed, and research papers were rejected by professional journals that said, “This isn’t the right time” to publish articles emanating from Israel.
While snubbing Israelis isn’t usually an official or across-the-board policy, the only survey on the subject has found that academics in Israel have been “affected dramatically” by negative calls to exclude Israelis from college campuses, research collaborations, journals, conferences, and more. Early-career academics without tenure and those in the social sciences and humanities have been the most affected.
The looming second, nonconsecutive term of Trump, who already expressed his intolerance for on-campus antisemitism during his first term in office, bodes well for Jewish and Israeli students, said Professor Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based watchdog organization.
“The American election’s outcome was a huge repudiation of the woke campus culture, including the mob violence and mass intimidation of Jews and Israelis under the banner of the Palestinian cause,” said Steinberg.
Public funding for universities that tolerated anti-Israel boycotts and DEI programs “that were exploited to target Jewish students and faculty, unless they were vocally anti-Zionist, are slowly being phased out,” Steinberg said. “As these changes take place, the specific targeting of Israelis and Zionist Jews, including the BDS movement, will become more difficult to sustain.”
An executive order Trump signed in 2019 affirmed that antisemitic discrimination may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination based on an individual’s race, color, or national origin. The order “turned up the heat” on those who oppose Israel’s right to exist, the American Jewish Committee said at the time.
The fear of losing vital federal funding could spur college administrators to take a much harder line on anti-Israel protests and behaviors widely viewed as antisemitic. Dozens of college campuses are on the Anti-Defamation League’s watch list, where several elite schools received failing grades for not tackling antisemitism and calls to boycott and even annihilate Israel.
Soon after Trump won over Vice President Kamala Harris, the Stand Columbia Society, a group of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of Columbia University, which was accused of tolerating, and at times encouraging, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activism, warned that the school could lose up to $3.5 billion in annual federal funding. That’s possibly as much as 55% of the New York City-based university’s budget if Trump makes good on his pledge to hold academia accountable for the chaos sweeping Columbia and other campuses in the United States. Much of that funding (including research grants and federal student aid) could be pulled due to Title VI violations.
The society urged Columbia’s trustees, president, administration, and university senate to “act promptly with a toolkit of risk management strategies” to ensure the continuation of government funding.
Gilad Hirschberger, a professor of psychology at Israel’s Reichman University, knows what it is like to be boycotted for his nationality. Invited to keynote an international conference organized by RVTS, a Norwegian resource center for psychological trauma, the organization suddenly withdrew its invitation “to avoid collaboration with representatives of countries involved in ongoing warfare,” said the letter sent to Hirschberger.
A social psychologist with more than two decades of experience, Hirschberger is an Israeli academic, not a representative or a supporter of the Israeli government.
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Hirschberger’s papers continue to be accepted, and he doesn’t believe his funding has been affected by international boycott calls, “but on a personal social level, I feel ostracized for the mere fact that I’m an Israeli,” he said.
“In a way, the boycott has helped me know who my friends are and who are not. Many in my field have become activists instead of scientists. They evaluate science based on their social and political positions. That,” Hirschberger said, “is not science.”
Michele Chabin is an Israel-based journalist. Her work has appeared in, among other outlets, Cosmopolitan, the Forward, Religion News Service, SCIENCE, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post.