One of the more unsettling reporting experiences I had this year was reading through the House Committee on Education and the Workforce report on antisemitism on college campuses, released in October. For the 325-page report on pro-Palestine protest activity, the Republican-led committee (the same group responsible for the show trials of U.S. college presidents over the past year) had managed to wrangle hundreds of pages of private documents from top universities like Harvard and Northwestern, in which administrators weighed how to craft speech policies and respond to student solidarity encampment protests.
As a journalist, I’m normally thrilled to see a trove of documents made public. But in this case, the House committee was using the information to accuse college leadership of widespread antisemitism whenever they didn’t endorse a pro-Israel political line. Administrators who discussed making statements condemning both Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza and Hamas’s October 7 attacks were accused of “equivocating” about “terrorism.” University leaders who agreed to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide — a claim advanced by many scholars of genocide and human rights — were accused of endorsing “specious” and “baseless” claims. The report concluded that the findings called for a “fundamental reassessment of federal support” — i.e. funding — for colleges criticized in the report. Indeed, the panic about campus antisemitism had given the Republicans a perfect excuse to advance their crusade of disciplining and defunding schools they have deemed “woke” bastions of the “liberal elite.” The novel twist is they now claim to do so in order to improve the treatment of a minority group. Reading the report, I couldn’t help but think that some version of this treatment could soon be applied to other civil society institutions — including the media.
Since October 7, facing an outpouring of criticism from pro-Israel organizations and readers, many news organizations have rushed to do their own policing before politicians even have to ask. Reporters and editors who have posted about Gaza have lost jobs and contracts at publications that don’t enforce similar social media rules on other subjects. Under the Trump administration and a federal Republican trifecta, the pressure is likely to increase. A preview of this future is offered in Project Esther, a “national strategy to counter antisemitism” released by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The plan accuses various progressive pro-Palestine organizations of belonging to a “Hamas Support Network.” It calls for the “dismantling” of such groups and purging of their members from American public life. While the details of how such a plan will be advanced remain hazy, the Project Esther document’s language — which, ironically, itself adopts the structure of classic antisemitic conspiracies by accusing a shadowy coordinated enemy of having infiltrated American institutions, including the media — is chilling.
In an example of the type of policymaking we can expect to see more of under such a strategy, the House recently passed HR 9495, the so-called “nonprofit killer” bill, which would allow the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be “supportive of terrorism,” without any documentation or due process. Those that stand to be first affected are Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab organizations, the original targets of the legislation. The U.S. government has gone after such groups before in the wake of 9/11, like when the Holy Land Foundation, at the time the country’s largest Muslim charity, was designated a terrorist organization due to disputed claims that it had funded aid groups run by Hamas. And if the approach previewed in the House education committee report and Project Esther is any indication, these charges could end up being aimed at a much wider list of targets. As critics have pointed out, Trump could use such a bill to target his political critics, including indispensable nonprofit publications.
In this environment, it is urgent that news organizations defend their editorial independence, rather than capitulate to these attacks in advance. We must cover these perils accurately. In the past year and change, many of those with ostensible commitments to liberal values have abetted the crusade of anti-Palestinian repression. This includes the college presidents who cowered in the face of the House members’ bad-faith questioning and the majority of Democratic representatives who supported an earlier version of the nonprofit killer bill in the spring, before Trump’s election. It also includes the Anti-Defamation League, which bills itself as a civil rights organization but has long prioritized Israel advocacy over other causes. The ADL endorsed the bill and has also pushed universities to classify student activist groups as terrorist supporters.
For journalists, any approach that validates such measures as legitimate anti-discrimination tactics — rather than naked attempts to strangle speech critical of U.S. foreign policy — may well come home to roost. I’ve written before about how mainstream publications have often stumbled in covering the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. For example, even after several highly publicized controversies over the ADL’s Zionism, the group’s activities, including its antisemitism statistics, are still frequently covered without reference to the group’s broader political orientation or recent changes to its methodology that expand the definition of antisemitism. It’s not surprising, given that the anti-Zionism/antisemitism conflation is endorsed by much of our political leadership, and that reporters want to be sensitive to the concerns of major Jewish groups. But the current threats of repression ought to illustrate the stakes of our coverage. Now is the time to be brave.
Mari Cohen is associate editor at Jewish Currents.
