Deporting Hamas Supporters Won’t End Antisemitism

Among the dizzying number of executive orders coming from the new Trump administration, one has stuck out for Jewish college students like myself. On January 29th, the President issued an order entitled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism“, which (among other things) encouraged the deportation of foreign students and faculty who have supported Hamas or other terrorist organizations.

After the past year of dealing with antisemitic protests, targeted harassment, and death threats, some Jews are relieved to see the President taking action. At the same time, others have questioned the morality of deporting people for exercising their free speech. But few have asked the obvious question: will this executive order work? 

Trump’s executive order encouraging deportations of Hamas supporters is not useful for fighting antisemitism on campus. It furthers the divisiveness that antisemitism as an issue has been saddled with since October 7th by tying it to Trump’s larger immigration project, and distracts from the real problem, which is Americans who harbor antisemitic views.

Since October 7th, the serious issue of campus antisemitism has unfortunately become a political football. Republicans use the most extreme incidents to paint liberal universities as ideological cults, and Democrats claim that Republicans are anti-free speech. Republicans call out Democrats in the House for using anti-Jewish stereotypes in their attacks on Israel, then Democrats call out Republicans for breaking bread with Nazi-sympathizers. And in all this blame-gaming, no practical solutions to stop Jew-hatred ever get offered. 

This political nonsense has made combatting discrimination against Jewish students, which should be a bipartisan issue, into something contentious. Many Democrats assume that people who want to “fight antisemitism” are white-washing everything Israel has ever done, while many Republicans use the charge of antisemitism to attack anyone they don’t like. 

Trump’s executive order is just the next escalation in this fight. The order focuses on foreign students and staff because it isn’t really about ending antisemitism on campus, it’s about Trump’s divisive immigration policy. The Administration is hoping to use the justification of fighting antisemitism—which should genuinely be a priority—to brunt the backlash against mass deportations, and to hopefully pick up some more Jewish support in the process. Antisemitism, and the Jews as a whole, are being used as a political weapon.

Given the abuse towards Jews on American campuses today, this may not be a dealbreaker. If it takes a sketchy political alliance to keep Jewish students from being bullied, harassed, and threatened because of their identity, I’m sure many are willing to accept it. 

However, the executive order won’t work to stop antisemitism on campus. In fact, the conversation around foreign students and visas is likely to distract from the much bigger problem: home-grown American antisemitism.

The idea that deporting some foreign students will end the tidal wave of campus antisemitism relies on the assumption that the wave was started and maintained by a small number of non-Americans. Anyone who has attended, watched, or even just heard about the campus protests can tell you this is not true.

I have watched many anti-Israel protests on my campus at Rutgers, and have spoken to a good number of protestors. They are not made up of outsiders from countries with no Jews who hate America and its values. Mostly, they are Americans who grew up in American towns, studied in American schools, and vote in American elections. The antisemitic culture that led them to fixate on the world’s only Jewish state as the source of all evil was not imposed upon them by foreigners, it came from right here in the U.S.A.

The students chanting “from the river to the sea,” or “settlers go back home,” or “no Zionists on campus” aren’t invaders trying to subvert the U.S. from within. They are products of the U.S., and their anti-Jewish attitudes were developed right here by the far-left and far-right. These students are the next generation of Americans, the people who will lead this country in just a few decades. 

To solve the antisemitism crisis gripping college campuses, America must first take responsibility for it. The country needs to deeply reflect on how and why it convinced its most educated citizens to hate a small, historically oppressed minority. The failures that led to the past year run deep, and fixing them will require Americans of all stripes to recognize their own anti-Jewish biases.

Healing from the past year and a half will not be easy. In addition to personal self-reflection, it will require acknowledging and addressing the anti-Jewish tropes that pervade American life across the political spectrum. It will require teaching about thousands of years of hatred and overcoming a year-and-a-half of nonstop antisemitic propaganda. Nothing short of that will ensure that the past year will never happen again.

If the United States wants to tackle this issue, which it should, we need to be honest about what it entails. Pretending that all anti-Jewish bigotry in this country comes from a few evil immigrants will lead us to ignore the festering antisemitism on the political extremes until it boils over. If this executive order is meant to be a first step, it was a bad one; it elicited significant backlash without achieving any progress.  Meanwhile, most of the people who made these past months so hellish for Jews on campus will walk away scot-free, feeling vindicated in their belief that they are the oppressed ones.

I appreciate the administration’s signaling that it cares about fighting antisemitism on college campuses. But that’s all it is: signaling. Unless the government acknowledges the causes of the problem and takes steps to prevent it from happening again, my fellow students and I will keep holding our breaths.