Will the Capital Jewish Museum shooting lead Trump to crack down even more on pro-Palestinian activists?

JTA – In the weeks and months before Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were gunned down by a man who then shouted “Free Palestine!” United States President Donald Trump had already waged a battle on pro-Palestinian activism.

His administration sought to deport student activists. It froze billions of dollars in funding to universities, demanding reforms in how they addressed antisemitism. And on Thursday, 22 May, it withdrew Harvard University’s ability to enrol foreign students.

Will the murder of the two Israeli embassy employees, by a gunman who allegedly said he “did it for Gaza”, prompt the president to intensify his crackdown?

Some Republican officials and conservative pro-Israel activists hope so.

“The fact of the matter is, the Palestinian cause is an evil one,” Representative Randy Fine, a firebrand Jewish Republican from Florida, told Fox News.

Last Wednesday, 21 May, he tweeted, “It’s high time for us to acknowledge there’s nothing peaceful about this movement, and that these demons must be put down by any means necessary.”

He wasn’t alone.

“The ‘Free Palestine’ movement is fundamentally intertwined with support for barbaric terrorism,” said Representative Pat Fallon, a Texas Republican. “The movement is anti-Western and antisemitic at its core. The US shouldn’t tolerate these pro-Hamas agitators, whether on college campuses, on our streets, or in our government.”

Across an ocean, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted the same tenor, likening the attack, and the suspect’s slogan, to Hamas’s 7 October 2023, attack, as well as Nazism.

“The terrorist who cruelly gunned them down did so for one reason and one reason alone – he wanted to kill Jews. And as he was taken away, he chanted, ‘Free Palestine!’,” Netanyahu said. “This is exactly the same chant we heard on October 7th.

“For these neo-Nazis, ‘Free Palestine’ is just today’s version of ‘Heil Hitler’,” Netanyahu said.

The Zionist Organization of America, a conservative group whose views often align with Trump’s, said the attack in Washington should be a predicate for further crackdowns.

“We must now double down to quash the terrorism-promoting demonstrations on college campuses,” it stated. “This must stop! This only inspires hatred and violence against Jewish people and others. And we must support the deportation of illegal violent criminals.”

In the time since the shooting took place, a number of Jews have said the tragedy offered a grisly vindication to their warnings that chants such as “Free Palestine” and “Globalise the intifada”, common at campus encampments and other anti-Israel protests, could incite violence.

“There’s a direct line between demonising Israel, tolerating antisemitic hate speech in the public square, and violent action,” William Daroff, the chief executive of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said on social media. “We are now witnessing the deadly consequences of months of relentless antisemitic incitement.”

The Trump administration has already shown a willingness to target speech it views as dangerous. Federal authorities recently interviewed former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey after he posted “8647”, a phrase suggesting that Trump should be removed from office, and that Trump’s followers have depicted as a call for assassination. No charges were filed although Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, called for Comey’s jailing.

When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz compared immigration agents to the Gestapo, a top Trump aide, Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, said, “This vile anti-American language can only be construed as inciting insurrection and violence.”

And last Thursday, 22 May, the Federal Trade Commission launched a probe into Media Matters, a liberal media monitoring group, based on the allegation that its tracking of hate speech on X, which is owned by Trump’s billionaire senior aide Elon Musk, amounts to commercial interference.

In this environment, the killing of the Israeli embassy staffers will only harden positions on both sides, said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum whose doctorate was on political ideology.

“It’s only going to reinforce the divisions we’ve already seen,” Koplow said in an interview. “People who support the administration’s what I would describe as heavy handed approach to pro-Palestinian speech, to issues of protests on campus. This will provide plenty of fodder.”

Those who oppose the crackdown will say the suspect’s repetition of a commonplace phrase is less salient than his apparent support for extremist groups, a posture that, Koplow said, isn’t characteristic of the mainstream pro-Palestinian movement. A range of vocally pro-Palestinian politicians condemned the murders as antisemitic; a fringe of social media users have celebrated the attack.

“It seems that he has gone for years well beyond pro-Palestinian speech, and has advocated violence and openly supported Hamas and Hezbollah,” Koplow said, referring to social media accounts attributed to the alleged shooter.

There was no sign yet that the Trump administration was ready to cite the latest attack to further its crackdown, although in a social media post, Trump attacked “radicalism”.

“These horrible DC killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, now! Hatred and radicalism have no place in the USA,” Trump wrote.

Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Dan Bongino, deputy FBI director, were focused in their statements on prosecuting the alleged killer.

“We will follow the facts, we will follow the law, and this defendant, if charged, will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Bondi said in a press conference last Wednesday night.

“Targeted acts of antisemitic violence are typically carried out by spineless, gutless cowards,” Bongino said. “And the penalties will be harsh as we tighten up this investigation and run down any additional leads.”

A recent poll found that 77% of Jewish voters are concerned about antisemitism on college campuses, but 64% disapprove of the job Trump is doing on the issue. Liberal-leaning Jewish organisations who decry what they see as Trump’s heavy hand, have tussled in recent months with establishment organisations who have welcomed at least some of the measures.

Amy Spitalnick, the chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which has spearheaded criticism of the Trump administration’s overreach in its handling of antisemitism, said she didn’t think Jewish opinion would budge on the issue, even after the shooting.

“The Jewish community in general has been able to hold two truths, that antisemitism is real, that our fears are legitimate. They were proven legitimate last night yet again,” she said in an interview. “And that the solution isn’t to undermine our democracy and our academic institutions.”