The promotion of Israel’s national narrative remains exempt from Trump’s wholesale attack on DEI

On 7 March, the Trump administration announced that it had cancelled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, saying the school’s “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and antisemitic harassment on their campuses” and that “universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding”.

The “harassment” leveraged by the president and other pro-Israel ideologues was a reference to the paradigm-setting pro-Palestinian activism that energized the campus over the past year. Columbia’s students became national leaders in the anti-genocide movement, and the Gaza solidarity encampment they established garnered international attention – including from the US Congress, which held hearings on so-called “campus antisemitism”.