Netanyahu’s allies turn Jews into potential scapegoats

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Betar, the far-right youth movement of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, is happy to help US President Donald J. Trump curtail pro-Palestinian speech and academic freedoms.

That has mainstream American Jews fear that the Trump administration’s crackdown on democratic freedoms of speech, assembly, and academia will fuel anti-Semitism rather than enhance their security.

Betar prides itself on "working with the Trump administration and ICE to locate Hamas activists on American campuses — people who marched with terrorist flags, called for the destruction of Israel, and led anti-Semitic demonstrations.” ICE stands for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Betar defines all expressions of support for Palestine as backing Hamas.

Betar has also advocated revoking the citizenship of naturalised Americans of Middle Eastern descent over pro-Palestine speech.

The group said it uses facial and database technology to identify activists and submitted thousands of protestors' names to the administration.

Mohsen Madawi

Last month, Betar spokesman Daniel Levy said that some people on the group’s list were identified using Stellar Technologies’ NesherAI facial recognition technology.  The software’s name comes from the Hebrew word for “eagle.”

Congratulating itself on instigating the arrest and slating for deportation of Columbia University student Mohsen Madawi, Betar insisted it would lobby for his arrest in Israel. Mr. Madawi is a Palestinian who grew up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

A Department of Homeland Security official confirmed that the administration uses information provided by Betar and like-minded US groups such as Canary Mission, and the Middle East Forum’s Campus Watch to “potentially detain and deport individuals.”

The administration also relies on these groups to identify universities whose federal government funding should be cut if they don’t counter alleged on-campus anti-Semitism as reflected in last year’s pro-Palestinian student protests and the staffing of Middle East studies departments and other social science centres.

So far, the Trump administration has cut funding for seven universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Brown, and Princeton.

Unlike most of the targeted universities, Pennsylvania was singled out for anti-Semitism but because of a transgender athlete who competed in the university’s swimming program.

Mr. Trump promised on last year’s campaign trail to counter “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content” in education.

This week, Harvard University sued the Trump administration, challenging its decision to cut more than US$2 billion in grants in what promises to be a ground-breaking judicial showdown between the government and one of the United States’ most prestigious private educational institutions.

If the Middle East Forum’s focus is any indication, Rutgers University may be next in line.

“If a university sought to bring together the largest, most diverse group of credentialed, (in)famous, BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions-supporting, Israel-hating apologists for Palestinian terrorism, it would be difficult to top the Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR),” Campus Watch’s investigative programme on terrorism charged.

Campus Watch targeted the Center’s associates from top left to bottom right): psychology professor Lara Sheehi, clinical law professor Susan M. Akram, already targeted Arab world scholar Joseph Massad, legal scholar and human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, CSSR director Sahar Azaz, former South African ambassador to the United States Ebrahim Rasool, social scientist Emmaia Gelman, and long-standing Israeli bete noirs Joseph Esposito and Nader Hashemi.

“This brief list only scratches the surface. The Rutgers CSRR has so thoroughly cornered the market in Israel-hating professors that if they were all together on a boat that sank, the anti-Israel academic ‘resistance’ would all but disappear,” said A.J. Caschetta, author of the Campus Watch assault on Rutgers.

Betar and the Trump administration’s targeting of activists and academia appears to be informed by the conservative Washington-based Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which seeks to combat anti-Semitism.

The project was named after the queen said to have saved Jews from genocide in ancient Persia.

The project recommends the equivalent of a scavenger hunt, including a “purge” of curricula and the “undermining” of targeted faculty followed the expulsion of foreign students accused of violating visa regulations.

Critics charged the project involved the targeting of liberals and leftists, including Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros and his son, Alex, whom Beitar denounces as kapos, Nazi concentration camp inmates who supervised forced labour and fulfilled administrative tasks.

To tighten relations with Mr. Trump’s militant base, Betar has sought to build ties to the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group whose members, allegedly encouraged by the president, participated in the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Congress in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from confirming Joe Biden’s winning of the 2020 presidential election.

“Will the Proud Boys…or other related American nationalist groups care to join us to counter Islamic jihadis? We don’t yet work with them but would very much like to,” Betar said on X days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration for his second term in office.

Mr. Trump emboldened Betar’s vigilantism with two of his executive orders: “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” issued in the first days of his second term that demands “the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws,” and an anti-immigration order that called for increased vetting and barring of visa holders and people trying to enter the US based on their political and cultural views.

A just-released Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report reinforced Jewish fears of rising anti-Semitism because of the Gaza war and the administration’s use of anti-Semitism to justify its crackdown on academic freedom.

The report registered 25 anti-Jewish incidents per day in the United States in 2024, more than one per hour.

“All told, as the war in Gaza raged on and campus protests exploded across the country, 2024 saw the largest number of reported anti-Semitic incidents on record, with over 9,000 incidents of anti-Semitic assault, harassment, and vandalism across the US,” the report said.

The stark increase in 2023 and 2024 was partly the result of the ADL’s classification as anti-Semitic “expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists,” including, for instance, the spray painting of “Free Gaza” in public spaces.

Mainstream American Jews are not the only ones who fear a backlash.

So do Israeli scholars, some Jewish Trump supporters, and non-Jewish conservatives.

Jason Greenblatt expresses concern

Jason Greenblatt, a Trump international negotiator in the president’s first administration and current head of the Anti-Defamation League, added Betar to the League’s “Glossary of Extremism and Hate” database in February.

Betar is the only Jewish group in the database. ADL charged that Betar “openly embraces Islamophobia and harasses Muslims online and in person.”

Mr. Greenblatt, in a further indication that the League fears that the crackdown on universities may endanger Jews rather than enhance their security, recently warned that protecting Jewish students “shouldn't require us to shred the norms that we use to protect other people,” a reference to democratic and academic freedoms.

“We were glad to see the administration taking action. But the pattern of behaviour since then has raised concerns that would be easy to address by being transparent about the charges, by creating a means by which the act of due process is clear,” Mr. Greenblatt added.

Mr. Greenblatt said he worried “about the overreach that could kill the golden goose” of US higher education that “fuels innovation…enables economic prowess (and) is so important to our scientific leadership on the planet.”

Mr. Greenblatt indicated that the detention of Turkish Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk prompted his concern.

Ms. Ozturk was one of four students who last year wrote an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing the university’s response to its community union Senate passing resolutions that demanded Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.

Department of Homeland Security agents nabbed Ms. Ozturk off the street in Sommerville, Massachusetts, in late March.

“You cannot arrest people or eject people from the country because they are bigoted or racist. That’s not a crime. That has never been an offense,” Mr. Greenblatt said.

ADL’s blacklisting of Betar and Mr. Greenblatt’s remarks were noteworthy given that the League, despite its history as a civil rights organization, has long supported racist policing, surveillance of progressive groups, and cozying up to alleged anti-Semites provided they support Israel.

“The ground for Trump’s attacks…has been well prepared by all manner of Zionist Jewish entities – with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) at the front,” said scholars Jeff Melnick and Jessie Lee Rubin.

Mr. Melnick is an American studies professor at the University of Massachusetts, which, like Rutgers, is one of the latest educational institutions targeted by Betar and others. Ms. Rubin is a Columbia University PhD candidate.

In an email last September to University of California, Davis, Chancellor Linda Katehi, ADL called for security and “discipline” during an upcoming pro-Palestinian protest.

ADL advised Ms. Katehi to “send a senior university official to potentially hostile events and, prior to the start of the event, have him or her remind those in attendance of university codes of conduct regarding free speech and civil discourse.”

ADL described the organiser of the event, American Muslims for Palestine, as “the leading organization providing anti-Zionist training and education to students and Muslim community organizations around the country…all in an effort to isolate and demonise Israel and Jewish communal organizations.”

Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist who established Turning Point USA, a non-profit that campaigns for conservative politics in American education, warned that Mr. Trump’s crackdown on freedoms of expression, assembly, and academia threatened fundamental US freedoms.

Mr. Kirk warned that the crackdown would fuel rather than reduce anti-Semitism.

“A government organsed around jailing, impoverishing, or silencing people based on ‘racism’ is what our enemies wanted. We should not repeat their mistakes just because some keffiyeh-wearing communists are protesting on campuses,” Mr. Kirk cautioned.

“Once anti-Semitism becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as anti-Semitic… Not only that, but all of this won't even work: A legal crackdown won't make anti-Semitism go away. In the long run, it would make it worse!” Mr. Kirk added.

This week, more than 200 Israeli academics accused Mr. Trump in an open letter of "fostering anti-Jewish sentiment" and cynically exploiting the fight against anti-Semitism to clamp down on academia.

The academics warned that the president was exploiting the fight against anti-Semitism in a way that “easily lend(s) itself to chauvinistic, exclusivist, and racist tropes.”

Prominent Yale University medical researcher Naftali Kaminski recalled the Jewish person sitting next to him at a recent physician-scientist meeting as saying, "And now they will blame us for this mess” when a participant noted that his grant had been cancelled because of the administration’s funding cuts.

“The more I thought about it, the clearer it became. The Trump administration is not weaponising anti-Semitism to suppress pro-Palestinians on campus…They are weaponising the discomfort experienced by some Jewish students amid mostly peaceful pro-Palestinian protests to suppress academic freedom, freedom of speech, and independent research at America's most prestigious institutions. And when they succeed, they will indeed blame us, the Jews. And the horrific truth is, they will have a smoking gun,” Mr. Kaminski said.

The problem for Jewish Americans like Mr. Kaminski is that the lines between the Jewish far right and mainstream Jewry are at times blurred.

Jewish Currents reported this month that Robert Fromer, a board member of the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy, had donated US$20,000 to Canary Mission through his Ann and Robert Fromer Charitable Foundation in 2023, alongside multiple other American Jewish entities.

The donation was routed through the Central Fund of Israel, a non-profit that enables tax-exempt contributions to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Last month, Canary Mission asserted that its doxxing of Ms. Ozturk led to her detention.

The blurring of the lines exploded last November on the streets after Amsterdam when Maccabi Tel Aviv FC and Dutch club Ajax fans clashed on the streets of Amsterdam after a UEFA Europa League match. A Dutch Whatsapp group called in advance for a “Jew hunt.”

One of the Israelis’ detractors shouted, “Cancer Jews, run! Cancer Jews! Dirty cancer Jews! Dirty cancer Jews!” as he recorded how Maccabi fans ran down a street, apparently trying to flee the angry crowd.

The incident occurred a day after a video caught the Israelis pulling Palestinian flags from houses, chanting racist anti-Arab slogans, assaulting people, and vandalising local property.

Even so, the incident fit a long-standing pattern in Israeli soccer stadiums, spearheaded by Betar Jerusalem, Betar’s most prominent club, notorious for its racist fan base and policies, in which Palestinian players, Arabs, and Muslims are regularly denounced in prejudiced and insulting chants.

In 2015, Betar Jerusalem fans threw flares and fireworks onto the pitch. They unfurled a banner of an outlawed racist Israeli political party, whose followers are currently represented in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, during a match in Belgium against Belgian team Sporting Charleroi.

In response, Belgian fans performed a Nazi salute.

Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, has supercharged racial attitudes on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide and emboldened West Bank settler vigilante violence against Palestinians.

Betar first floated a list of people it wanted to see detained and deported shortly after the US presidential election in November, which returned Mr. Trump to office.

The frequently updated list included Mr. Madawi, Ms. Ozturk, Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil, the first to be detained, and Momodou Taal, a Cornell University graduate student who was suspended twice last year for his role in pro-Palestinian protests.

Mr. Taal left the United States voluntarily in March to avoid arrest and deportation.

Months before leaving, Mr. Taal was subjected to what Betar calls an edgy joke, but he and others on the recipient say it is a death threat.

At the time, a stranger handed Mr. Taal an electronic page at a protest in New York, a reminder that Israel last year used booby-trapped pagers to kill or maim scores of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon.

Betar has called on its members to make handing out pagers a standard practice.

Hitting back at Betar, Peter Beinart, an outspoken Jewish critic of Israel, said on X, “Oppose my ideas all you want. But when you urge people in my neighbourhood to give me a pager--in the wake of Israel's pager attack in Lebanon--that sounds like a death threat.

Mr. Beinart, designated a ‘terrorist’ by Betar, is on a list of Jewish critics the group wants to be barred from Israel.

In 2018, Mr. Beinart was detained for questioning at Tel Aviv airport and later released.

Mr. Netanyahu described Mr. Beinart’s detention as an “administrative mistake” and insisted that Israel was “an open society which welcomes all--critics and supporters alike.”

Mr. Netanyahu neglected to mention that Mr. Beinart was not an isolated incident.

Others detained for questioning at about the same time included activist, documentary maker, and former Bernie Sanders advisor Simone Zimmerman, who is also on the Betar list, philanthropist and Brandeis University chairman Meyer G. Koplow, and Israeli activists Tanya Rubinstein and Yehudit Ilani.

This week, Beitar claimed, “There are names of younger JVP (Jewish Voices for Peace activists we’ve been asked to name to our lists as Israeli intelligence is interested in questioning them regarding terror links.”

Jewish Voices for Peace campaigns for Palestinian human rights, and played a prominent role in last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.