Senate GOP demands Democrats hold hearings on campus antisemitism
Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans penned a letter to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) on Thursday to request that he hold a hearing on how the uptick in antisemitism on college campuses is violating the civil rights of Jewish students.
The letter was led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the top Republican on the committee, and signed by every Republican who serves on the panel, including Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Josh Hawley (R-MO), John Kennedy (R-LA), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). They urged Durbin, who chairs the committee, to convene a hearing “on the civil rights violations of Jewish students” and “the proliferation of terrorist ideology — two issues that fall squarely within this Committee’s purview.”
“With this current state of inaction, it is incumbent upon this Committee to shed light on these civil rights violations,” the group wrote. “This Committee owes it to Jewish students, and all students who attend universities with modest hope of having a safe learning environment, to examine these civil rights violations.”
“Our committee should examine why more is not being done to protect the civil rights of innocent students across America,” they added. “We must also examine the threat to national security posed by the proliferation of radical Islamist ideology in the academy. These pressing issues demand our immediate attention.”
A spokesperson for Durbin did not immediately respond to JI’s request for comment on the letter, which came the same day as a missive from Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) requesting a similar hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, sent a letter to Sanders on Thursday urging him to convene a hearing in his capacity as committee chairman on the uptick in antisemitism on college campuses.
Cassidy’s letter, first obtained by Jewish Insider, marks the second time in six months that the Louisiana senator has written to Sanders requesting that he allow for a full committee hearing “on ensuring safe learning environments for Jewish students, as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Cassidy released a statement last week re-upping his call for a hearing, though he told JI that effort got no response.
“It is our duty to ensure federal officials are doing everything in their power to uphold the law and ensure students are not excluded from participation, denied the benefits of, or subject to discrimination at school based on race, color, or national origin,” Cassidy wrote to Sanders. “In the six months since my last letter requesting a hearing, the situation has only gotten worse.”
While Republicans have generally been more vocal about their concerns on the issue of antisemitism on college campuses, there have been bipartisan calls for action in the upper chamber.
Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK) have also asked Sanders to hold a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses in his capacity as HELP chairman. Similar to Cassidy, they have also not heard back from the Vermont senator.
Separately, Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) requested a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser’s response to protests at The George Washington University’s campus this week.
The duo penned a letter on Thursday to Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), who chairs the committee, requesting he bring in Bowser and D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith to testify on their respective responses to university requests to bring DCMP onto campus to clear out an anti-Israel encampment, requests Bowser denied.
On the House side, where Republicans are in the majority, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) launched a chamber-wide effort to address all elements of the campus unrest.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee, revealed that in addition to her ongoing probes, she will have the presidents of three other schools testify next month on their responses to protests and instances of antisemitism on their campuses. The presidents of the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Michigan; and Yale University will be brought in to testify before Foxx’s committee on May 23.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, noted that her panel “oversees agencies that dole out massive amounts of taxpayer funded research grants… We will be increasing our oversight of institutions that have received public funding and cracking down on those who are in violation of the Civil Rights Act.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) said that his panel was reaching out to the State Department and Homeland Security Department to find out “how many students on a visa have engaged in the radical activity we’ve seen now day after day on college campuses.”
Tlaib, Squad push resolution labeling Palestinian Arabs the ‘indigenous inhabitants’ of Israel
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and a handful of progressive Democrats introduced a resolution on Monday referring to Palestinian Arabs as the “indigenous inhabitants” of Israel and endorsing Palestinian right of return, one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The resolution seeks to set as U.S. policy recognition of the “Nakba” — the term, translating to “catastrophe,” that Palestinians use to refer to the mass Palestinian exodus that accompanied the foundation of Israel — and accept as a settled issue Palestinian refugees’ right of return to inside Israel’s borders. It also refers to Palestinians as the “indigenous population” of the region, but does not acknowledge Jewish history in the region.
The legislation accuses Israel of having “depopulated more than 400 Palestinian villages and cities” during its 1948 War of Independence and characterizes ongoing Israeli “expropriation of Palestinian land and… dispossession of the Palestinian people,” including Israeli settlements, as part of an ongoing Nakba. In a statement announcing the legislation, Tlaib accused Israel of “ongoing ethnic cleansing.”
Tlaib’s resolution has been cosponsored by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Marie Newman (D-IL), Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).
Neither Tlaib nor any of the cosponsors responded to a question from Jewish Insider about whether they viewed Jews as also being “indigenous” to the region.
Newman is currently facing a primary challenger, Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL), who is backed by various pro-Israel groups, including J Street, which had endorsed Newman in 2020. Bowman has faced criticism from the Democratic Socialists of America over his positions on Israel, including voting for supplemental Iron Dome funding and traveling to the Jewish state last year. He has since removed himself as a cosponsor of legislation supporting the Abraham Accords.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) blasted Tlaib’s resolution as “predicated on a demonstrably false historical narrative… predictably failing to mention the hundreds of attacks on Jewish communities in the British mandate of Palestine by Palestinian militias.”
Sherman noted that the resolution “omits” that Israel was attacked by eight Arab states in 1948, that the 1948 war began with attacks by Arab forces seeking “a war of annihilation” against Jewish militants and civilians, that “not a single Jew was left alive in the portion of the British mandate controlled by Arab armies, that no Jews lived in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem for two decades and that 800,000 Jews were expelled from neighboring Arab countries.”
“Thankfully, the vast majority of my colleagues in Congress and in the House Foreign Affairs Committee understand that the historical narrative in Congresswoman Tlaib’s resolution is an outrageous falsehood and thus this bill isn’t likely to be passed or even considered,” Sherman added.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) agreed that the resolution has no “hope of moving forward,” claiming the resolution seeks to “rewrite history and question Israel’s right to exist.”
“It’s unfortunate that this histrionic and invidious resolution was introduced now, particularly, as we see continued progress in efforts to normalize relations between Israel and its neighbors in the region,” Gottheimer added. “Divisive efforts like this only set back our fight against terror and the advancement of democracy in the region.”
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who advised multiple secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said that the legislation asks Congress to “wade into the intricacies and volatility of some of the most combustible issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and essentially recognize a narrative.”
“This legislation is packed with landmines and traps,” Miller continued. “The whole issue of right of return is an issue that for years in negotiations we realized was the most combustible, most complicated, and the one which we had the least chance of resolving…. That’s the third rail of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.”
Miller emphasized that the legislation has no prospect of seeing widespread support in “any Congress that I can imagine.”
He described the legislation as “designed basically to support what the framers regard as an unrecognized, underreported and unacknowledged narrative in the American political scene of the Palestinians.” He added that the “Palestinian narrative has never been adequately explored or acknowledged” in U.S. politics and argued that “there was a way perhaps to go about this which would have recognized both Israeli independence and the Nakba being intertwined.”
Some Republicans seized on the legislation.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) called it “the latest in a long line of antisemitic, anti-Israel statements, policies and actions by the most radical voiced in the Democratic Party.” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) called it “disgusting anti-Semitism.” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said “the continued anti-Semitism from radical socialists in the House is horrific.” The three Republicans also sought to tie House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the initiative, demanding that she condemn the move.
