All during 2024, when Jewish students on campuses across the country were being roughed up, spat upon, even beaten by Hamas-supporting activists, the Biden administration threw up its hands, saying there was little it could do.
Flash forward to 2025, and it's a much different story. "Yalies4Palestine" tried to set up the kind of tent encampment we became familiar with last year, but within hours, it was taken down, the students dispersed, and most surprisingly, the Yalies4Palestinine, a chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine, had been "unrecognized" by the university.
The wind has been taken out of the sails of the pro-Hamas demonstrations. It's just not cool anymore to be pro-terrorist.
“My sense is that being anti-Israel is not as much of the popular thing anymore,” Evan Cohen, a senior at the University of Michigan, said at a Wednesday webinar hosted by Hillel International.
There are several reasons for pro-Hamas protests fizzling to nothing, but the primary cause of the huge drop-off in Palestinian activism is the wind blowing from Washington. Republicans in Congress started the ball rolling last spring by dragging several Ivy League university presidents before congressional committees to explain why they allowed so much hate on their campuses. Their answers were appallingly unsatisfactory.
When Donald Trump took office, he immediately put the fear of Yahweh into schools. Lip service to protect Jewish students was no longer enough. Only concrete action would prevent the federal government from severely punishing schools that refused to crack down on antisemitism.
Michael Simon, the executive director at Northwestern Hillel, came into the school year with a “big question mark” of how the school’s new policies, which provide strict guidance for student protests and the type of behavior allowed at them, would be applied. “I’m going to say it with a real hedging: at least up until now, I would say we’ve seen the lower end of what I would have expected,” he said of campus anti-Israel protests.
Many major universities like Northwestern spent last summer honing their campus codes of conduct and their regulations for student protests, making clear at the start of the school year that similar actions would not be tolerated again. In February, for instance, Barnard College expelled two students who loudly disrupted an Israeli history class at Columbia,.
“For the most part, the enforcement of rules, the understanding of what the rules are, what you can do, what you can’t do, requiring people to get permits for protests, has really calmed things down [from] the sort of violence that we saw last year,” said Jordan Acker, a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan, who has faced antisemitic vandalism and targeted, personal protests from Michigan students.
The jawboning by Trump wasn't enough. Threats to end the multi-billion-dollar gravy train of federal subsidies, grants, contracts, and tuition assistance proved to be far more effective than any actions taken by Joe Biden to address hate on campus.
While the outward manifestations of hate may have been submerged on many campuses, that doesn't mean that the disease of antisemitism has been cured by any means.
“It’s easy to avoid the protests, but if you are an Israeli student or a Jewish student perceived to be a Zionist, you should expect to be discriminated against in social spaces at the university,” Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, told Jewish Insider. “That is the most powerful way students are impacted by all of this.”
“Some campuses have been less intense than during last year’s historically awful period, but others have been bad enough,” Marcus told JI. “I believe that the federal crackdown, coupled with the impact of lawsuits and Title VI cases, has had a favorable impact at many campuses, but the problems have hardly gone away.”
It never should have come to this. Using the stick is only necessary because of cowardly leadership at colleges and universities that took weak stances on the hate when it first broke out, fearing a backlash from students. So they tried to straddle the issue, congratulating themselves on how clever they were.
Naturally, the Palestinian students walked through the open door and upped the ante by occupying buildings, carrying out intimidation tactics against Jewish students, and setting up protest encampments. By then, it was too late. The school administrators were no longer in charge.
How long this relative quiet continues is up to the schools. Trump has put the administrators back in charge. What they do with that authority will be watched closely by Congress and the White House, looking for any sign of backsliding.
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