Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) expressed confidence ahead of Florida’s primary elections on Tuesday that voters will reject the Republican candidates who have embraced blatantly antisemitic messages as part of their campaigns. 

In an interview on Friday with Jewish Insider, the Florida senator specifically called out James Fishback, who is running against Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins (R-FL) in the gubernatorial primary to replace term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and Dan Bilzerian, who is challenging Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) for the GOP nomination for Florida’s 6th Congressional District. 

“I’m very optimistic that Byron will win the primary. He’s got to win,” Scott told JI. “We’ve got an antisemite in the race, James Fishback, and so unfortunately, we have to keep fighting this antisemitism around the country. But Byron’s running a good race. He’s worked hard.”

Scott said that he campaigned with Donalds on Thursday near Tallahassee and noted that the House lawmaker “had a big turnout and he did a great job, so we’ve just got to get people out to vote.”

Asked what he’s heard from Florida Republican voters in response to Fishback and Bilzerian’s antisemitic campaign messaging, Scott told JI, “Most people are focused on their job, their kids’ education, public safety, but when you ask about it [Fishback, Bilzerian or other fringe figures in the GOP], they’ll say it’s disgusting. They know it’s wrong.”

“Often in life, if it doesn’t impact you, you don’t think about it, so what we’ve got to say to that is: Hatred impacts all of us somehow,” the Florida senator said. “First, they’re going to attack Jews. I don’t know for what godforsaken reason people have decided it’s okay to attack Jews, but they’re not going to stop there.”

Fishback, who ran an investment firm before entering the gubernatorial race last year, has run a blatantly racist and antisemitic primary campaign. He has repeatedly taunted Donalds, who is Black, over his race, referring to him as “DEI Donalds,” nicknaming him “By’rone” and calling him a “slave” to corporations and the donor class. 

As a candidate, Fishback has also defended neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” movement. 

Bilzerian is a social media influencer with more than 28 million Instagram followers. He gained notoriety in the 2010s for his extravagant lifestyle and has emerged in recent years as a far-right commentator who openly supports Adolf Hitler and calls for “ending the existence” of Israel. He boasts about his record of engaging in Holocaust denial and continues to claim Jews were involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Bilzerian is among the most openly antisemitic candidates to run for federal office in recent memory, launching his campaign by describing Fine, one of the few Jewish Republicans in Congress, as a “fat Jew” and asserting that “Jewish supremacy is the biggest threat to the world today.” He also calls Judaism a “terrible” religion and has expressed a desire to murder “evil” Israelis. 

“Everyone wants to complain about the left: They’re antisemitic, they’re anti-Israel, all that,” Scott said. “But we have people in the Republican Party who are [antisemitic and anti-Israel] — people like James Fishback or the guy that’s running against Congressman Randy Fine — so we’ve got to call it out.”

“Antisemitism is not acceptable anywhere,” Scott continued. “If there’s antisemitism [in the GOP], I’ll be glad to call those people out, because it is despicable, it’s disgraceful, it’s un-American, and whether it’s the left that is doing it or people on the right who are doing it, it is wrong.”

Scott was one of several prominent Republicans to condemn Bilzeran over the weekend after the candidate posted an AI-generated video suggesting Hitler’s opinions should be “revisited” and calling Fine a “Jewish [supremacist]” and “Satan’s creepy little [minion]” over imagery of Fine hugging a bag of money. The narrator in the video also referred to Fine as a “satanic whore” as horns were shown growing out of the House lawmaker’s head, and suggested that Fine rapes children.

Bilzerian also faced criticism for posting another AI video accusing Fine of staging an incident last week in which an unknown individual spray-painted a swastika on a Fine campaign sign outside of an early voting site.

“This guy is an actual Republican on the ballot. It’s so disgusting. Every single Republican needs to condemn this evil, and every single news outlet needs to expose how bad and antisemitic he is,” Scott wrote on X on Friday of Bilzerian. 

While Scott maintained confidence that Donalds and Fine would beat their fringe primary rivals on Tuesday, he expressed concern that Fishback and Bilzerian’s ideas could become mainstreamed in American politics if he and other Republicans fail to push back on them.

“The more this happens, the more that people will think: Well, that’s okay. So with people like these, you have to say, ‘I don’t want those people in my party,’” Scott told JI. “The Republican Party is a broad coalition of people that care about this country, but we’re not going to allow antisemites into our party, period. They belong in the Democrat Party, which embraces them.”

“Our party is not run by antisemites and will never be run by antisemites as long as I have any power to stop it,” he continued. “We have to fight, fight, fight.”

Fine, who has been vocal about his Jewish identity, has come under intense scrutiny from the left in recent years for his aggressive approach to his advocacy for Israel and against antisemitism. 

In February, he faced a wave of condemnations and accusations of Islamophobia from his Democratic colleagues, including 22 Jewish lawmakers and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), for suggesting in a social media post that he would choose dogs over Muslims. 

Progressive lawmakers pushed to have Fine censured and urged House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to revoke his committee assignments in response, but were unsuccessful.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) argued on Thursday that, without regime change in Iran, the U.S. will likely need to continue to conduct periodic military operations against Iran’s nuclear program to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

“One of two things is going to happen: We are forever going to have to continue to make sure they don’t have a nuclear weapon, or they’re going to have a regime change,” Scott said during an event at the Hudson Institute. “One or the other. If there’s not a regime change, then maybe we don’t have to do this every day, but we’re going to have to do this every so often.”

He also argued that past U.S. administrations have been “stupid” by not recognizing that the Iranian regime has been engaging in an ongoing war against the United States since the rise of the Islamic Republic in 1979. President Donald Trump, he continued, is trying to end that 47-year war.

Scott described Trump as reluctant to go to war with Iran, but said the president views the conflict as necessary.

“If you’re the president of the United States, you have a responsibility to protect Americans. That’s your job. So whether he likes it or not — and he doesn’t like war, he ran on getting out of forever wars, he doesn’t want to put American troops in harm’s way … he wants to sit down and negotiate everything,” Scott said.

But, he continued, Trump also knows that Iran would use a nuclear weapon if it had one and that appeasement was not a viable strategy.

“He did the hard thing,” Scott said. “He knew he was going to get criticized, but he decided freedom was and safety to Americans is important enough that he was going to go defend us.”

With President Donald Trump reportedly mulling the resumption of military action against Iran, fault lines are opening up among Senate Republicans over the prospect of a renewed military effort.

Some prominent Senate Republicans publicly called for the U.S. to resume military operations this weekend, after Trump dismissed as a nonstarter Iran’s latest negotiating proposal. Other colleagues joined them on Monday.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) said he thinks military operations must resume. “It’s the only thing that’s going to work, unfortunately,” Scott told Jewish Insider. Asked whether the administration needs to seek congressional approval to resume fighting, he said, “I think the president should go forward.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, reiterated that he “hope[s]” Project Freedom, the administration’s effort to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, is resumed, after writing to Trump on X on Sunday that it’s time to “get back to business.” He said that he would not expect the administration to come to Congress for authorization if that effort were to continue.

Others are leaving the prospect of military action on the table without fully ruling out a diplomatic path, while offering varying degrees of skepticism about how realistic a deal actually would be.

Asked about resuming the war, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said, “We need to clear the Strait of Hormuz, and I support doing that by whatever means necessary.” Cornyn faces a competitive primary runoff in late May, and a hotly contested general election race in November should he be victorious in the primary.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said that the U.S. “has a problem” as long as the Iranian regime remains in place and has the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon, “and we’re going to have to address it one way or the other.”

“I’m hopeful for a diplomatic solution, but I don’t think these fanatics over there necessarily believe that a diplomatic solution is what they really want,” Rounds continued. “I think they’d rather martyr themselves, and I think they’d murder millions of their own people if they could.”

“I think we all want to get this resolved as quickly as possible,” Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) said. “I would say, let’s focus right now. Let’s see if China wants to play a role in this, and we should probably know more by this weekend. But I don’t think anyone wants to end this in a decisive way more than President Trump.”

He predicted that the war would be a major topic of conversation in Trump’s meetings with leaders in Beijing later this week.

“The whole world’s watching right now,” Budd continued. “But look, we need to resolve this permanently, and we want to resolve it as soon as possible. And I know that’s President Trump’s goal.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), among the most prominent advocates in the Senate for keeping the war brief, praised the administration for notifying Congress at the beginning of the month that it considered hostilities concluded, and urged the administration not to reengage.

“I welcome his statement that the president sent … saying that the original operation — he had terminated those hostilities. That’s a good thing. That’s a good outcome. I certainly hope that will hold,” Hawley said. “I think we’re in a posture now where he’s clearly trying to conclude a long-term peace, which I think is good. But I welcomed his statement that hostilities have terminated.”

He praised Trump for not following his colleagues’ calls to return to war.

“I want to applaud the termination of hostilities,” Hawley said. “He’s been urged to return to full scale bombing, to his original bombing campaign by many of my colleagues over the last two weeks. He’s very pointedly not done so. … I’m glad that so far the president’s not listened to my colleagues who want to do something very different.”

Hawley dismissed followup questions about whether he believed that the hostilities had indeed terminated as the administration claimed, with U.S. forces remaining in the region and continuing certain operations even during the ceasefire. 

The administration faced a 60-day statutory deadline to conclude operations against Iran without congressional approval under the War Powers Act at the end of April. Hawley said the administration appears to be following the same precedent set by the Obama administration during operations in Libya.

“The ‘war’ is a very broad term. The statute speaks particularly to ‘hostilities,’” he said.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) called for the federal government to “immediately” pull funding from Yale University over Yale Political Union’s decision to host Hasan Piker, an antisemitic streamer who previously suggested that the senator should be killed. Piker is scheduled to speak on campus Tuesday for a debate titled “Resolved: End the American Empire.”

Scott, who spoke last year at YPU, a storied debate society at the Ivy League university, wrote on X on Friday that “Yale receives billions from the federal government —  President Trump and Congress need to IMMEDIATELY revoke it.”

Piker, a far-left Twitch streamer, has recently been invited to speak at several high-profile events, despite a laundry list of antisemitic, anti-American and terror-supporting rhetoric, which includes justifying Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel. He has also called Orthodox Jews “inbred” and claimed America deserved 9/11. 

For Scott, Piker’s incendiary language is personal; the streamer was briefly suspended from Twitch last year after urging followers to “kill Rick Scott.” 

“An elite private university that hosts an antisemite who says a Senator should be killed, capitalists should be killed, and the U.S. deserved 9/11, shouldn’t get ONE CENT from taxpayers,” Scott wrote. 

Asked about YPU hosting Piker, a spokesperson for Yale told Jewish Insider last week ​​that “student organizations are responsible for issuing their own invitations to speakers.”

“At the same time, Yale is committed to maintaining a diverse, vibrant, and respectful community in which free expression is a fundamental value and a shared responsibility. The university is dedicated to providing a space where differing views can be expressed and heard respectfully,” the spokesperson said.

Unlike several Ivy League counterparts, including Harvard and Columbia, the Trump administration has not slashed Yale’s federal funding over antisemitism concerns. 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned on Monday against the mainstreaming of antisemitic figures within the conservative movement in response to Tucker Carlson’s platforming of neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes.

Hawley, an ally of the national conservative movement who has advocated for the Trump administration to take an aggressive approach to combating campus antisemitism, made the comments while speaking to Jewish Insider about the controversy surrounding Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s podcast late last week. 

“I just think on the substance of what he says, I mean, it’s antisemitic. Let’s just call it for what it is, let’s not sugarcoat it,” Hawley said of Fuentes. 

“That’s not who we are as Republicans, as conservatives. Listen, this is America. He can have whatever views he wants. But the question for us as conservatives is: Are those views going to define who we are? And I think we need to say, ‘No, they’re not. No. Just no, no, no,’” he continued. “We need to be really clear, and I say that not only as a conservative, but also as a Christian. There is no place for antisemitic hatred, tropes, any of that stuff. I just think we’ve gotta say that stuff.”

The Missouri senator drew a parallel between the antisemitism seen at universities across the country since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and Fuentes’ views. 

“Do we really want to be part of what we’ve seen happen on college campuses, for instance, in this country in the last two or three years? Conservatives have been decrying that,” Hawley said. “Are we now to believe that, oh, actually, we have no problem with that? And that all of the things they were saying about Jews and Jewish Americans, that was fine? That’s not my view. I wasn’t fine with it then, I’m not fine with it now.”

“I thought it was morally repulsive then, I think it’s morally repulsive now. I’m not going to change my opinion on that. I want to be really clear: that’s above all a moral issue,” he added. 

Hawley was not the only Republican senator to voice their objections to a GOP embrace of Fuentes or the avowed antisemite’s appearance on Carlson’s program.

The fallout now involves the Heritage Foundation, the result of its president, Kevin Roberts, coming to Carlson’s defense in a video last Thursday that called out the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and warned that “their attempt to cancel him will fail.” Roberts has since clarified that he and Heritage do not support Fuentes’ antisemitic views, though he refused to disavow him, and is facing growing calls to walk back his comments. 

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), the co-chair of the Senate antisemitism task force, told JI that he was “a little surprised that Heritage jumped out in support of [Carlson] and Nick Fuentes to say, ‘Hey, we want them in our camp’ after the statements that were made.”

“Heritage could have just sat back and not said anything, but instead, they chose to jump out on their side,” Lankford continued. “I don’t get that.”

He, like Hawley and other Republican lawmakers, warned that the right faces a similar crisis of antisemitism as is roiling the left if conservatives do not proactively confront and shun antisemites in their midst.

“The left has seen an implosion of their party based on antisemitism rising in their party. I don’t want to see the same thing on the right,” Lankford said. “To say the least, I want to make it very, very clear we are not the party of antisemitism. We’re not the party that believes Hitler was a good guy and that Winston Churchill was the bad guy. We’re not the party that blames media issues on the Jews and all these weird tropes that are out there. That’s not who we are, that’s not what we stand for, nor what we should stand for.”

He said that he does not understand the impulse to “allow it to be a big tent and allow antisemitism in our party. If there are [antisemites] that are there, we should call it out and say that’s wrong.”

“What I’ve tried to be very clear on is [that] the ‘New Right’ is now quoting an old wrong. It’s wrong,” Lankford continued.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) offered a similar message.

“The Democrat Party — we already have a party that’s for antisemitism [and] is against Israel,” Scott told JI. “The Republican Party [is going to] stand for Israel and we’re going to stand against antisemitism. I don’t think there’s any question.”

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told JI that Roberts’ message “was the most tone-deaf comment, in both its content and its timing, that I’ve ever heard from a major Washington organization on any political side.” 

Menken resigned from Heritage’s Project Esther, the group’s antisemitism initiative, last week in response to Roberts’ video message defending Carlson. Along with Menken and CJV, several other groups have also publicly disaffiliated from Heritage’s antisemitism task force, including the National Jewish Advocacy Center, the Zionist Organization of America and Young Jewish Conservatives.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) accused the search firm that oversaw the failed nomination of former University of Michigan President Santa Ono to lead the University of Florida of not properly vetting and disclosing the candidate’s record. 

“Clearly the search firm didn’t disclose everything to anybody,” Scott told Jewish Insider on Wednesday of SP&A Executive Search, the firm behind the search for UF’s new president. “It sure seems to me, just talking to people on the search committee, they didn’t know all this before their votes. That’s wrong. That’s on the search firm, they didn’t do their job. It appears to me that that’s what happened.”

The vote by Florida’s Board of Governors, which oversees the state’s public universities, to approve Ono’s nomination failed 10-6 on Tuesday, the first time that the Board of Governors has ever voted down a university trustee board’s leadership selection. 

SP&A Executive Search did not respond to a request for comment. The firm also picked former University of Florida President Ben Sasse. 

The Florida senator said he had been “shocked” that Ono was nominated given what Scott described as a failure to deal with “antisemitic and pro-Hamas” activity on Michigan’s campus during Ono’s tenure and his positions on a Supreme Court ruling relating to diversity on campus.

“It just didn’t fit to what I’ve tried my best to do, to make Florida a great example of where people have the opportunity to go get a great education, where it doesn’t matter the color of your skin, and also where people can go learn in a safe environment,” Scott said.

The University of Michigan experienced some of the most disruptive anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Ono faced criticism for allowing an anti-Israel encampment to remain in place for over a month last year and admitted he should have engaged with campus Jewish organizations earlier on during protests. 

During the 2024-2025 academic year, Ono took a harder stance against anti-Israel activity on campus and became more vocal in support of Israel — leading to pro-Palestinian vandals attacking his home on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks. Ono wrote in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed last month that the “gold standard” Sasse set in combating antisemitism at UF would “not change under my leadership.”

Scott praised the members of the board for digging into Ono’s background and ultimately rejecting him.

“I’m glad that the Board of Governors made the decision to not confirm him, and I hope, when they do the search they’re going to have to change,” Scott said. “But I’m really appreciative of everybody on the Board of Governors that took this seriously and did the research and voted against him.”

Scott said that he wants to see the next nominee to lead UF be someone more in line with Sasse, a former Senate colleague of Scott’s.

“I was appreciative of what Ben Sasse did and I want somebody like that,” Scott said. “We’ve got to get somebody that fits Florida.”

Sasse’s brief term as president was dogged by accusations of financial mismanagement and other issues and tensions with the Board of Trustees.

Kingsley Wilson, a deputy press secretary at the Department of Defense who has come under fire from Democratic and Republican lawmakers and Jewish communal organizations for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, has been promoted to serve as the department’s press secretary, the Pentagon announced on Friday. 

“Kingsley’s leadership has been integral to the DoD’s success & we look forward to her continued service to President [Donald] Trump,” Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman and a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, posted on X on Friday. 

When Wilson was named deputy press secretary in March, she faced widespread condemnation for dozens of tweets viewed as antisemitic and racist. On two different occasions, she attacked the Anti-Defamation League for sharing its origin story — the organization was founded after the lynching of Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew widely believed to have been wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a white child over a century ago. 

“Leo Frank raped and murdered a 13-year-old girl,” Wilson wrote in 2023 in response to a post from the ADL, and repeated the claim a year later. “He also tried to frame a black man for his crime. The ADL is despicable.” (The tweet has not been deleted.) 

Wilson has also called Confederate General Robert E. Lee “one of the greatest Americans to ever live” and regularly promoted the antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory.” 

Her appointment in March drew bipartisan criticism. “Obviously I don’t agree with her comments. I trust the Pentagon will address this,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Jewish Insider at the time. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called for her firing. 

Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. 

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) reintroduced legislation last week targeting universities that have failed to stem the surge of antisemitism taking place on college campuses.

Scott originally introduced the Preventing Antisemitic Harassment on Campus Act last October with then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), now the secretary of state, as anti-Israel encampments had begun reemerging on some campuses ahead of the presidential election. 

The legislation would expand Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which currently bans discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin — to include religious discrimination and implement “clear and escalating penalties for institutions of higher education (IHEs) that are repeat violators.” It would also direct the Department of Education to “oversee private lawsuits against colleges receiving federal financial aid related to antisemitism.”

“Following Iran-backed Hamas’s attack on Israel, we saw a drastic rise in antisemitic attacks in the United States with anti-Israel mobs taking over campuses, and we’ve seen an unacceptable failure from leadership at higher education institutions to take action to condemn these mobs and protect Jewish students. Jewish students were afraid to go to class, fearful of the violence these pro-terrorist mobs threatened. That can’t happen,” Scott said in a statement.

The legislation was reintroduced on Friday, the same day that the Trump administration announced it would cut $400 million from Columbia University’s federal funding due to the school’s handling of antisemitic demonstrations that have roiled the campus since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. 

Earlier last week, Trump posted on social media that “all Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.” 

“President Trump is completely right to withhold federal funding from higher education institutions that refuse to enforce the law on their campuses and enable antisemitic hate to flourish, and I’m proud to lead this bill to build on his efforts,” Scott said.

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.”

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.