Even the ADL regards Betar as an extremist hate group.
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Israel’s Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar has been playing an active role in Donald Trump’s retaliation against pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States. This often involves efforts to control what Trump’s MAGA followers consider to be runaway free speech on America’s leading university campuses.
Betar’s activities have prompted concern by some mainstream American Jews that, rather than helping an already volatile situation, the group’s support for Trump’s attacks on intellectual institutions risks both inflaming antisemitism and increasing the American Jewish community’s sense of insecurity.
Betar, which backs Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud Party, prides itself on “working with the Trump administration and ICE to locate Hamas activists on American campuses — people who marched with terrorist flags, called for the destruction of Israel, and led anti-Semitic demonstrations.” ICE is the acronym for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In Betar’s view, any expression of support for Palestine is virtually the same as backing Hamas.
Betar also advocates revoking the citizenship of naturalized Americans of Middle Eastern descent who speak out in favor of Palestine.
The group admits to using facial recognition and database technology to identify activists, and claims that it has been submitting thousands of protesters’ names to the administration.
Last month, Betar spokesman Daniel Levy said that some people on the group’s list were identified using Stellar Technologies’ NesherAI facial recognition technology. The software’s name comes from the Hebrew word for “eagle.”
Congratulating itself on instigating the arrest and slating for deportation of Columbia University student Mohsen Madawi, Betar insisted that if Madawi is deported to Israel, it would lobby for his arrest there. Madawi is a Palestinian who grew up in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
So far, the Trump administration has cut funding for seven universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Brown, and Princeton.
Unlike most of the targeted universities, Penn was singled out not just for antisemitism but also because it permitted a transgender athlete to compete in its swimming program.
Trump has been carrying through on last year’s campaign pledge to counter what he considers to be “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content” in education.
Last week, Harvard University sued the Trump administration, challenging its decision to cut more than $2 billion in federal grants, in what promises to be a groundbreaking judicial showdown between the government and one of the United States’ most prestigious private educational institutions.
If the Middle East Forum’s focus is any indication, Rutgers University may be next in line.
“If a university sought to bring together the largest, most diverse group of credentialed, (in)famous, BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions]-supporting, Israel-hating apologists for Palestinian terrorism, it would be difficult to top the CSRR [Rutgers’ Center for Security, Race, and Rights],” Campus Watch’s Investigative Program on Terrorism charged.
“The Rutgers CSRR has so thoroughly cornered the market in Israel-hating professors that if they were all together on a boat that sank, the anti-Israel academic ‘resistance’ would all but disappear,” said A.J. Caschetta, author of the Campus Watch attack on Rutgers.
Betar and the Trump administration’s targeting of activists and academia appear to be relying for some of their information on the Washington-based Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which ostensibly seeks to combat antisemitism.
The project was named after the biblical Queen Esther, who, although Jewish, was married to Xerxes, the king of Persia. When the king’s adviser, Haman, plotted to kill Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, and exterminate Persia’s Jews, Mordecai asked Esther to intercede with the king. She hesitated at first, but Mordecai told her that she had been chosen by God to save her people. In the end, Haman was executed, and Mordecai became the king’s chief adviser. The story is celebrated by the Jewish feast of Purim.
To tighten relations with Trump’s MAGA base, Betar has sought to build ties to the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group that participated in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.
Project Esther’s recommendations include a “purge” of curricula that might be considered pro-Palestinian and the “undermining” of faculty deemed to be too sympathetic to Palestinian concerns. It also recommended the expulsion of foreign students thought to be friendly to Palestine and who might be accused of violating visa regulations.
Critics charged that Project Esther was arbitrarily targeting liberals and leftists, including Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros and his son, Alex. Betar Worldwide has denounced Soros as a “bastard” and “kapo of the week” — a reference to the term Nazis used for Jewish concentration camp inmates whom they forced to act as collaborators in supervising forced labor.
To tighten relations with Trump’s MAGA base, Betar has sought to build ties to the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group that participated in the January 6 storming of the US Capitol.
“Will the Proud Boys … or other related American nationalist groups care to join us to counter Islamic jihadis? We don’t yet work with them but would very much like to,” Betar said on X, days after Trump’s inauguration for his second term in office.
The president has issued two executive orders that emboldened Betar’s operations in the US. The first, titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” demands “the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws.” The second, an anti-immigration order, called for increased vetting and barring of visa holders and other people trying to enter the US, based on their political and cultural views.
A just-released Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report reinforced Jewish fears of rising antisemitism because of the Gaza war and the administration’s use of the term to justify its crackdown on academic freedom. “All told, as the war in Gaza raged on and campus protests exploded across the country, 2024 saw the largest number of reported anti-Semitic incidents on record, with over 9,000 incidents of anti-Semitic assault, harassment, and vandalism across the US,” the report said.
The stark increase in 2023 and 2024 was partly the result of the ADL’s classification as antisemitic “expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists,” including, for instance, the spray painting of “Free Gaza” in public spaces.
Mainstream American Jews are not the only ones who fear a backlash if all protests against Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are considered antisemitic. A number of Israeli scholars and some Jewish Trump supporters, as well as non-Jewish conservatives, are also concerned. Jonathan Greenblatt, the current head of the ADL, added Betar to the League’s “Glossary of Extremism and Hate” database in February.
Betar is the only Jewish group in the database. ADL charged that Betar “openly embraces Islamophobia and harasses Muslims online and in person.”
Greenblatt, in a further indication that the ADL fears Trump’s crackdown on universities may endanger Jews rather than enhance their security, recently warned that protecting Jewish students “shouldn’t require us to shred the norms that we use to protect other people,” a reference to democratic and academic freedoms.
Greenblatt said intemperate attacks on universities under the banner of antisemitism “could kill the golden goose” of US higher education that “fuels innovation, … enables economic prowess, (and) is so important to our scientific leadership on the planet.”
He explained that it was the detention of Turkish Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk that had prompted his concern.
Öztürk was one of four students who last year wrote an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing the university’s response to the student senate’s passage of resolutions that demanded Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.
Department of Homeland Security agents abducted Öztürk off the street in Somerville, MA, in late March.
“You cannot arrest people or eject people from the country because they are bigoted or racist. That’s not a crime,” Greenblatt said.
Some scholars greeted Greenblatt’s remarks with mixed feelings. “The ground for Trump’s attacks … has been well prepared by all manner of Zionist Jewish entities — with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) at the front,” said Jeff Melnick and Jessie Lee Rubin.
Melnick is an American studies professor at the University of Massachusetts, which, like Rutgers, is one of the educational institutions targeted by Betar and others. Rubin is a Columbia University Ph.D. candidate.
Even some right-wing figures have called attention to the dangers of using the charge of antisemitism to restrict free speech on US campuses.
In an email last September to Linda Katehi, chancellor of the University of California, Davis, ADL called for security and “discipline” during an upcoming pro-Palestinian protest.
ADL advised Chancellor Katehi to “send a senior university official to potentially hostile events and, prior to the start of the event, have him or her remind those in attendance of university codes of conduct regarding free speech and civil discourse.”
ADL described the organizer of the event, American Muslims for Palestine, as “the leading organization providing anti-Zionist training and education to students and Muslim community organizations around the country … all in an effort to isolate and demonize Israel and Jewish communal organizations.”
Even some right-wing figures have called attention to the dangers of using the charge of antisemitism to restrict free speech on US campuses.
Charlie Kirk — a conservative activist who established Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that campaigns for conservative politics in American education — warned that President Trump’s crackdown on freedoms of expression, assembly, and academia threatened fundamental US freedoms.
Kirk suggested that such actions might fuel rather than reduce antisemitism.
“A government organized around jailing, impoverishing, or silencing people based on ‘racism’ is what our enemies wanted. We should not repeat their mistakes just because some keffiyeh-wearing communists are protesting on campuses,” Kirk cautioned.
He added:
Once antisemitism becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as antisemitic. … Not only that, but all of this won’t even work: A legal crackdown won’t make antisemitism go away. In the long run, it would make it worse!
