{T} he rampant and overt displays of antisemitism on college campuses (including my own alma mater) are appalling. After years of actions against so-called “microaggressions,” it was infuriating to watch the presidents of universities with rock-bottom free-speech ratings display moral obtuseness when it comes to calls for genocide against Jews. It sends the signal that Jewish students simply don’t matter. All of this having been said, I believe it would be a mistake were the backlash against the university presidents to lead to an environment in which speech on campuses is policed to adhere to an abstract principle of making students “feel safe.”

Any policy on bullying and harassment that involves restrictions on speech must focus on the actions themselves, rather than how the actions may be received by somebody else, which is more subjective. On the issue of antisemitism on campus, there should be broad agreement that physical violence, specific threats of physical violence, and destruction or vandalism of property should be out of bounds. But when it comes to words, rather than actions, there must be a finer distinction.

There’s no doubt that chants such as “globalize the intifada” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” are not merely strong criticisms of Israeli-government policies; they are, in a practical sense, genocidal. In the most recent intifada, about 1,000 Israeli civilians were killed in a sustained campaign of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. The most straightforward understanding of “globalize the intifada” is that it would mean killing Jews everywhere in the world. And as I explained previously, freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea” would mean eliminating Israel, which is home to nearly half of the world’s Jewish population.

Even with these phrases, however, I think there should be a distinction between chanting them in the midst of a general protest in some common area, and a mob of protesters demonstrating in front of explicitly Jewish spaces (such as Hillel). There’s a difference between protesting in a place where Jewish students might happen to pass by, or seeking out and surrounding identifiably Jewish students to shout at them. This is, I think, what the university presidents were clumsily trying to get at when they said that whether calls for genocide would be considered harassment depended on the context. Although, to be clear, they deserve zero credit, because we know they would never have stood before members of Congress in a televised hearing and parsed the permissibility of genocidal language so carefully were the phrases being shouted by mobs of students waving Confederate flags and wearing MAGA hats instead of waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs.

I understand why Jewish students would feel uncomfortable walking to classes past a mob of people changing “globalize the intifada,” but that discomfort alone should not be a basis on which to restrict speech if the mob has not personalized it by directing it at specific students or Jewish spaces on campus. I get that my threshold for feeling safe might be different from others’. As a Jewish writer who is unapologetically Zionist in a very public way, I have been subjected to very specific harassment for years, including calls for me to stick my head in the oven and die. So I get that it might be more jarring for Jewish college students to be seeing the ugly side of campus activism for the first time. But any policy based on the arbitrary concept of whether a given student “feels safe” — rather than setting clear standards — is one that can and will be applied arbitrarily and end up restricting all sorts of speech that should not be restricted. Under such a policy, the most sensitive voices on campus would have veto power over free expression. For instance, it isn’t hard to imagine Palestinian students complaining that Israeli flags make them feel “unsafe.”

There is another reason why I am wary of more aggressive policing of speech on campus in response to antisemitism. And the reason is that antisemitism is often sinister when it is kept underground. I have been warning for nearly 20 years about the rise of antisemitism on the left, especially on college campuses and specifically the way academia was using the boogeyman of Israel to launder antisemitism in a way that made it more acceptable to elites. Early in the Trump era, I gave a lecture about left-wing antisemitism to a mostly liberal audience, and I was looked at as if I had three heads. At the time, the only threat they could see was from the Right. The overt antisemitism now being exhibited by professors and students at elite universities has been an eye-opener to many, but the only way many people have learned about it is precisely that the speech has been allowed, and these Hamas-loving students have been exposed. During the most pernicious periods of antisemitism in the United States, it infamously operated as a “gentleman’s agreement” in which it was understood that Jews were to be restricted from certain places of employment, neighborhoods, clubs, hotels, and restaurants without any explicit policies.

It would be letting universities off easy if they simply get away with firing presidents and/or instituting more restrictive speech codes that ban students from chanting certain phrases. It would be much harder to actually institute real changes to address the intellectual rot at their institutions. What we’re seeing today is decades in the making, and it has metastasized in an environment that teaches that America is systemically racist, that all whites — no matter how noble their individual actions — are to be demonized as beneficiaries of an evil system. This framework sees Jews as perhaps the most evil of all white oppressors, a theory that erases Jews of color and ignores the history of Jews as a religious minority that has been historically oppressed by those who view them as non-white (and see them as leading the charge for white genocide). Under the philosophy that is prevalent in American universities, Jews who can trace their ancestry back thousands of years in Israel are merely colonizers of stolen land. Leftist ideology has dehumanized Jews to the point at which a Yale professor could excuse Hamas attacks that included slaughtering babies because “settlers are not civilians.” These problems will not go away if students are told they can now chant only “Free Palestine” but not “Free Palestine from the river to the sea.”