Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s firebrand national security minister, was in Washington on Monday to promote President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza — and, in particular, to try to garner support for moving Arabs out of the embattled enclave. But while Ben-Gvir has branded himself a loyal soldier for Trump’s message, the far-right politician has yet to receive an invitation to discuss the matter with anyone in the Trump administration.

“We did not meet with anybody from the Trump administration. That wasn’t the main goal,” Ben-Gvir told Jewish Insider in an interview on Monday on Capitol Hill. He spoke through his translator and advisor, Yishai Fleisher, the English-language spokesperson for the West Bank Jewish community of Hebron, where Ben-Gvir lives. 

The controversial minister feels confident that a meeting with the Trump administration will come in due time: “I’m young. I’m 49. [It was] only three years ago that I went into politics. We’ll meet with everybody along the way,” Ben-Gvir said. “I feel an embrace from the administration.” A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did he meet with his counterpart in Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was in Texas on Monday. 

The weeklong visit to the United States was Ben-Gvir’s first since becoming Israel’s national security minister in 2022, when his Jewish Power party helped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu form a governing coalition. 

Ben-Gvir has long faced criticism over his embrace of Israeli extremists, including a decades-long record of support for Meir Kahane, an Israeli ultranationalist political leader whose party, Kach, was deemed a foreign terrorist organization by the United States and banned in Israel. Ben-Gvir has been convicted in Israel of inciting racism and supporting a terror group, and he used to keep a framed photograph of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli who murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, in his home. Ben-Gvir’s attendance at a memorial event for Kahane in 2022 drew sharp condemnation from the Biden administration. 

“We’re not sure that the Biden administration would’ve given [me] a visa to come in,” said Ben-Gvir. “And I feel like the [Trump] administration is receptive.” 

While he did not succeed in reaching the White House, the minister had better luck in scoring meetings with congressional Republicans, including some in leadership positions. Ben-Gvir met Monday with Reps. Claudia Tenney (R-NY), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Lawler (R-NY), as well as Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ben-Gvir traveled to Mar-a-Lago last week to meet with House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), the third-most powerful House Republican, and Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA). 

“I am asking them to push from this side the Trump plan for Gaza. It’s moral, it’s logical, it’s the right thing to do,” said Ben-Gvir. “Our enemies in Gaza are not waiting. They did the 7th of October. And they want to strike us and kill us. The proper solution is voluntary immigration out of Gaza.” 

Ben-Gvir said he supports only “voluntary” migration from Gaza, which he has framed as a shift from his earlier support for removing all Arabs not just from Gaza, but from within Israel as well. While Ben-Gvir spent the trip saying he has softened or grown out of some of his past positions, like his support for Goldstein, he generally avoided specifying why or how he has changed his mind. 

Although Ben-Gvir casts himself as closely aligned with Trump, he has diverged from one major aspect of Trump’s approach to Gaza: Trump has said he does not want to see the rebuilding of Jewish settlements in Gaza, a policy that Ben-Gvir supports. When asked whether he agrees with this aspect of Trump’s plan, Ben-Gvir suggested the matter was not yet closed. “We’ll find an understanding. We love Trump,” he said. 

Before coming to Washington, Ben-Gvir visited Jewish communities and police departments in South Florida and New York, speaking mainly with Orthodox communities. He visited synagogues in South Florida and in the Five Towns, a heavily Jewish part of Long Island, where he spent Shabbat. 

Many of his meetings were met with protests, including during a visit to a Jewish society affiliated with Yale, where protesters hurled water bottles at him. When Ben-Gvir visited the global headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch in Brooklyn on Thursday, hundreds of protesters — those opposed to Ben-Gvir as well as Hasidic counterprotesters — gathered outside, in an incident that turned violent. A group of the pro-Israel demonstrators allegedly assaulted a woman.

Footage of the incident shows a large group of men surrounding the woman, who was escorted by a police officer, chanting “death to Arabs;” one protestor can be seen throwing an orange cone at her and another appeared to kick or shove her. 

Ben-Gvir declined to weigh in on the violence among the pro-Israel supporters. He said he was not familiar with the incident but was generally skeptical of claims of Jewish violence, noting instead that his greater concern is violence against Jews.

“The same violent folks of Yale, they have followed us throughout this tour. They tried to strike at Chabad Hasidim,” Ben-Gvir said. “They came to be violent. And I’m thankful that the Chabad community welcomed us in. There were thousands of supporters.”

It’s the “classic trope that Jews are violent, that the settlers are violent,” said Ben-Gvir.

“You saw on the 7th of October. It came from one side onto the other side,” Ben-Gvir said. “Those that murdered and did all that bad stuff, they don’t just want to murder me. And not just Israel. They were in the 9/11. They want to strike at America. They want to strike you. We cannot be naive.” 

He dismissed a question about whether it is possible for Jewish protesters to at times adopt violent tactics as well. 

“Right now it’s my children that I have to drive and defend in armored vehicles, and we’re the ones who receive the stones, and apartheid is against the Jews, and Jews cannot live in all of Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the biblical name of the West Bank. “Let’s keep it in proportion.” 

Ben-Gvir’s claim of “apartheid against Jews” has drawn fire in the past, with critics pointing out the restrictions faced by Palestinians living in the West Bank, and specifically in Hebron, where Ben-Gvir lives.

After concluding his meeting with Tenney on Monday, Ben-Gvir walked into the corridors of the Rayburn House Office Building, where he came face-to-face with activists who were on Capitol Hill for National Muslim Advocacy Day. They began shouting at him — and Ben-Gvir’s staff started filming, familiar with the kind of confrontational encounter the media-savvy minister has grown used to over the years. 

“You Zionist monster. You scum. You killed my family in Gaza for 70 years,” one man, wrapped in a keffiyeh, shouted at Ben-Gvir. He yelled back: “You’re a terrorist. You kill our children.”

More people gathered in the otherwise quiet hallway. “Free, free Palestine,” the demonstrators shouted. Ben-Gvir was ushered by his staff and his private security guards into an elevator, but he was not yet ready to end the confrontation.

“You’re jihadists,” he yelled from the doorway of the elevator, wagging his finger as the doors closed.

For a brief moment, it looked like 2024 all over again: Tents were erected at Yale University’s central plaza on Tuesday night, with anti-Israel activists hoping to loudly protest the visit of far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to campus. Videos of students in keffiyehs, shouting protest slogans, started to spread online on Tuesday night.

But then something unexpected happened. University administrators showed up, threatening disciplinary action, and the protesters were told to leave — or face consequences. So they left. The new encampment didn’t last a couple hours, let alone overnight. The next day, Yale announced that it had revoked its recognition of Yalies4Palestine, the student group that organized the protest. (On Wednesday night, a large protest occurred outside the off-campus building where Ben-Gvir was speaking.)

Meanwhile, at Cornell University, President Michael Kotlikoff announced on Wednesday that he had canceled an upcoming campus performance by R&B singer Kehlani because of her history of anti-Israel social media posts. He wrote in an email to Cornell affiliates that he had heard from many people who were “angry, hurt and confused” that the school’s annual spring music festival “would feature a performer who has espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos and on social media.” 

The quick decisions from administrators at Yale and Cornell to shut down anti-Israel activity reflect something of a vibe shift on American campuses. One year ago, anti-Israel encampments were, for a few weeks, de rigueur on campus quads across the nation. University leaders seemed paralyzed, unsure of how to handle protests that in many cases explicitly excluded Jewish or Zionist students and at times became violent. That’s a markedly different environment from what’s happening at those same schools so far this spring. 

“In general, protest activity is way down this year as compared to last year,” Hillel International CEO Adam Lehman told Jewish Insider. 

There is no single reason that protests have subsided. Jewish students, campus Jewish leaders and professionals at Jewish advocacy organizations attribute the change to a mix of factors: stricter consequences from university leaders, fear of running afoul of President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport pro-Hamas foreign students and the issue generally losing steam and cachet among easily distracted students. 

Last spring, an encampment at The George Washington University was only dismantled after the university faced threats from Congress. Now, no such protest is taking place — which Daniel Schwartz, a Jewish history professor, said was likely due in part to the “sense that the university was going to be responding much more fiercely to anything resembling what happened last year.” 

“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.

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.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has pressured top universities to crack down on antisemitic activity. The president’s threats to revoke federal funding if universities don’t get antisemitism under control has drawn pushback — Harvard is suing the Trump administration over its decision to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funds from the school — but it has also led universities to take action to address the problem. 

Sharon Nazarian, an adjunct professor at UCLA and the vice chair of the Anti-Defamation League’s board of directors, said there is “no question” that “the national atmosphere of fear among university administrators for castigation and targeting by the [Trump] administration is also present” at UCLA and other University of California campuses.

“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 for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

Rule-breaking student activists also face a heightened risk of law enforcement action. A dozen anti-Israel student protesters were charged with felonies this month for vandalizing the Stanford University president’s office last June. On Wednesday, local, state and federal law enforcement officials in Michigan raided the homes of three people connected to anti-Israel protests at the University of Michigan. Protesters’ extreme tactics  have scared off some would-be allies.

“I think some of the most activist students went too far at the end of last year with the takeover of the president’s office and a lot of pretty intense graffiti in important places on campus,” said Rabbi Jessica Kirschner, the executive director of Hillel at Stanford. “I think a lot of other students looked at that and said, ‘Oh, this is perhaps not where we want to be.’”

Students’ priorities shift each year, and other issues beyond Israel are also vying for their attention. Trump’s policies targeting foreign students are drawing ire from students at liberal universities, many of which have large populations of international students.

“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 for Jewish high school seniors. “On my campus, there are other hot topic issues. There might be more focus on what’s happening with U.S. domestic politics.” 

But the lack of protests does not mean that campus life has returned to normal for Jewish students, many of whom still fear — and face — opprobrium for their pro-Israel views.

“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 JI. “That is the most powerful way students are impacted by all of this.”

Ken Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which since Oct. 7 has represented dozens of Jewish students in Title VI civil rights cases against their universities, said that campus-related lawsuits are only faintly slowing down this semester. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.”

“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.”

Or Yahalom, a senior at Northwestern University who was born in Israel, recently attended a dinner with Northwestern President Michael Schill, who has faced criticism from Jewish Northwestern affiliates — including several members of its antisemitism advisory committee — for what they saw as the administration’s failure to adequately address antisemitism. 

“A lot of the staff and the administration think that, ‘OK, since there’s no protest outside, all the Jewish students must feel OK, and let’s put all this stuff that happened in the spring behind us.’ It’s really not the case,” said Yahalom. “That doesn’t mean that it’s all better for students. Jewish students are increasingly afraid to speak openly about their identity or connection to Israel, except in private, safe Jewish spaces.” 

Even without massive encampments, disruptive anti-Israel protests and campus actions have not gone away entirely, though they have been more infrequent this academic year. A Northwestern academic building housing the school’s Holocaust center was vandalized with “DEATH TO ISRAEL” graffiti last week. The office of Joseph Pelzman, an economist at The George Washington University who authored a plan calling for the U.S. to relocate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and redevelop the enclave, was vandalized in February. The Georgetown University Student Government Association is slated to hold a campus-wide referendum on university divestment from companies and academic institutions with ties to Israel at the end of the month. Smaller-scale protests continue at Columbia, with students chaining themselves to the Manhattan university’s main gate this week to protest the ICE detention of ​​Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, two foreign students who had led protests last year. 

Leaders of the University of Michigan’s anti-Israel coalition held a sham trial for the university president and Board of Regents members in the middle of the Diag, the main campus quad, this week. The event took place without issue, and the activists left when it ended. 

“I wouldn’t want to say that it’s perfect,” said Acker, the Board of Regents member. “But it’s certainly much better than a year ago.” 

The school year isn’t over. Some students at Columbia are planning to erect another encampment this month, NBC News reported on Wednesday. 

But they’ll be doing so at an institution with new leadership, weeks after Columbia reached an agreement with the Trump administration, where the Ivy League university pledged to take stronger action against antisemitism to avoid a massive funding cut. The pressure on Columbia to crack down on any encampment will be massive.