As demands grow at Washington to punish college students who openly support Hamas in its attacks on Israel, concerns are mounting that government censorship could pose not only a dire threat to free speech but also add fuel to the fire of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses. 

With the eruption of anti-Israel, pro-Arab student protests across the country, members of Congress and Republican presidential hopefuls are calling for the deportation of foreign students supporting Hamas. Deportations from America have been common over political issues going back to at least World War I.

Yet some free speech advocates, including some who support Israel, worry that silencing such views, no matter how offensive, will ultimately strengthen them within the corners of the Ivory Towers. This could ignite a significant debate in Congress as the problem of antisemitism becomes ever more apparent.

Senator Cotton, who is a Harvard alumnus, is seeking to deport the foreign students from his alma mater who signed a letter last week claiming Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence at Gaza. “While American citizens may have a First Amendment right to speak disgusting vitriol if they so choose,” he wrote in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security on Monday, “no foreign national has a right to advocate for terrorism in the United States.” 

Mr. Cotton suggested on Fox News yesterday that the FBI should identify and refer students to the DHS using video footage of anti-Israel student rallies on college campuses. According to a legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Joseph Cohn, the Supreme Court affirms that people lawfully in America have constitutional rights, so international students cannot be deported without due process.

Retaliation against students engaging in anti-Israel campus activity would also be counterproductive, Mr. Cohn says. Suppressing a viewpoint does not defeat it, his reasoning goes, but instead “pushes it underground, where it metastasizes.” While he deems the violence in Israel horrible, Mr. Cohn says that censoring students celebrating that violence “will predictably lead to viewpoint-based discrimination.” 

This view is being championed by some of the country’s staunchest supporters of Israel. “Deportation wouldn’t be appropriate” to censor speech, an emeritus professor of law at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, tells the Sun. Such a move by the U.S. government would need to be pursued in tandem with the deportation of “Nazis, Communists, and other bigots,” he says, noting that a “single standard is required.”

“Even as I loathe the horrible terror attack that Hamas inflicted on the people of Israel to start this war, I remain in favor of the free speech rights for people who disagree with me,” a professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine, Jay Bhattacharya, tells the Sun. “I think this should extend even to foreign students.” 

Dr. Bhattacharya has himself been the target of censorship campaigns, as Twitter blacklisted him for raising questions about Covid lockdowns during the pandemic. “This situation in Israel,” he says, “is an excellent opportunity for the U.S. to recommit to free speech principles.”

Senator Rubio, though, is urging the Biden administration to cancel and rescind visas for foreign nationals who endorse or espouse the beliefs of groups officially designated by the U.S. as terrorist organizations. “America is the most generous nation on earth,” he said in a statement on Saturday, “but we cannot allow foreign nationals who support terrorist groups like Hamas and march in our streets calling for ‘intifada’ to enter or stay in our country.”

Mr. Rubio is also readying legislation to cut federal funding to colleges and universities that do not punish students condoning terrorist activity, such as statements blaming Hamas’s violence on Israeli citizens. Ivy League universities, though private institutions, receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants each year to support their research projects. 

“It is perfectly reasonable that Congress should have some say in how colleges and universities represent the national interest,” the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, tells the Sun. He says that America should think carefully about granting visas to citizens of hostile nations, especially those enrolling at schools that operate on substantial taxpayer dollars from the American public.

“Those foreign nationals who support Hamas are taking advantage of American-supported institutions to advance positions that are actively damaging our national interest,” Mr. Wood says. He cautions against deporting students simply on the basis of their nationalities, but sees “wisdom” in punitive measures against supporters of Hamas, given that the attacks on Israel appear to be in collusion with Iran and other American adversaries.

President Trump and Governor DeSantis are also endorsing such ideological screening. At a campaign event on Monday, the 45th president said that as part of his plan to implement “strong ideological screening of all immigrants to the United States,” he would, if elected president again, revoke the visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners” enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities.

Restricting anti-Israel speech, though, could also jeopardize America’s international standing, Mr. Cohn says. “We don’t do a good job of demonstrating our commitment to free speech for the world to see if we selectively pick viewpoints where our international guests just cannot express themselves,” he explains. “In the U.S., we air out our issues. It is part of our strength. It is not our weakness.”

Would punishing certain speech move the needle in favor of Israel, or is free speech a more powerful agent for progress? Skeptics of punitive policies say the solution is dialogue, not deportation. “Let the activists have their loathsome rallies,” Thomas Chatterton Williams declares in the Atlantic today.

Mr. Williams expresses shock at the bans on protests against Israel and for the Palestinian Arabs in France and Germany last week. He recalls that even when neo-Nazis demonstrated in the 1970s, as in the march of Nazis at Skokie, Illinois, in 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union defended the rights of the brown-shirted punks to march. 

A law professor, Erica Goldberg, says that to protect the pro-Hamas protests, as a Jew, is “to believe in something more than yourself.” She wrote on X today that “the best way to learn the actual truth of an event is for speech to be largely unrestricted. Otherwise, you have to trust centralized, potentially incorrect people with deciding what we can and cannot know.” 

Depriving certain students of the right to speak their minds, Mr. Cohn warns, would backfire. “Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea for the government to decide what is true and what’s untrue should imagine that power in the politicians they trust the least,” he says. “Free speech either works for everyone or it works for no one.”