Pro-Israel Democrats are now pushing the president to respond more forcefully to antisemitic incidents at colleges and universities, echoing calls from Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, who have cast the increasingly combative demonstrations as a mark of incompetence inside the White House.

For months, Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the highest echelons of the party have approached the conflict in Gaza with relative caution, but as the protest encampments dig in, college officials weigh canceling commencement ceremonies and Republicans ratchet up their attacks, Biden’s work to hold together a united front are fraying.

The White House on Tuesday seemed to embrace a new, tougher tact when discussing the overnight occupation of an academic building by protesters at Columbia University.

“The president believes that forcibly taking over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach – that is not an example of peaceful protest,” White House national security communications adviser John Kirby told reporters. “A small percentage of students shouldn’t be able to disrupt the academic experience – the legitimate study – for the rest of the student body.”

That shift in tone, though, is unlikely to quiet the calls for Biden to take a heavier hand with the protesters. But a stronger approach would risk further chipping away at the president’s standing among younger voters, who, according to recent polls, are overwhelmingly disapproving of his handling of the war.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona doubled down later Tuesday during a Senate hearing on his department’s budget.

“I think what’s happening on our campuses is abhorrent,” Cardona said of the reported antisemitic incidents. “I’ve spoken to Jewish students who have feared going to class as a result of some of the harassment that they’re facing on campuses.”

The administration’s shift in tone, though, is unlikely to quiet the calls for Biden to take a heavier hand with the protesters. But it could further risk the president’s standing among younger voters, who, according to recent polls, overwhelmingly disapprove of his handling of the war.

At around the same time Cardona was speaking, the College Democrats of America – a mainstream, Biden-backing organization – put in its lot with the campus protesters, many of whom are Jewish themselves. It praised the “bravery” of students willing to endure arrest and suspension “to stand up for the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.”

While the group reiterated its support for Biden and other Democrats in the coming election, it also issued a warning to the president’s campaign.

“Each day that Democrats fail to stand united for a permanent ceasefire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party,” the College Democrats wrote.

Escalating tensions

On Monday, before protesters at Columbia took over the school building, nearly two-dozen House Democrats issued an ultimatum to members of the university board: Clear the protest encampments or step down.

The pro-Palestinian activists who occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia said they had “liberated” it in honor of a young Palestinian child, Hind Rajab, who was killed alongside her family in late January during the Israeli military offensive in Gaza City.

Outside on Tuesday, students chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Palestine will live forever,” video obtained by CNN shows. Protesters also displayed banners from a window reading “Intifada,” the Arabic word for an uprising, and “Hind’s Hall,” according to video.

Republicans have moved quickly to message around the latest developments, with House Speaker Mike Johnsonscheduling a Tuesday news conference to announce plans for a “House-wide crackdown on the virus of antisemitism spreading throughout college campuses.”

“We need moral clarity on the issue,” Johnson told reporters Monday. “We need everyone from the president on down to speak out about this and say that it is clearly wrong and Jewish students aren’t second-class citizens and they can attend class just like everyone else.”

Unlike the Democrats, GOP officials have been in lock step denouncing the protests and related efforts to curb Israel’s military campaign, which has killed more than 34,000 people in Gaza, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Trump, the party’s presumptive 2024 nominee, has gone so far as to claim that Jewish Democrats, who include critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, “hate their religion,” and he has sought to yoke Biden to the least savory characters in the college protest hubs.

The GOP also plans to put the spotlight on Democrats with a planned vote Wednesday on the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bill introduced by GOP Rep. Mike Lawler, a swing-district freshman from the New York suburbs. The legislation has Democratic co-sponsors but uses a definition for antisemitism – tying it to support for Israel – rejected by many party moderates, progressives, and Jewish advocates. It is expected to pass the chamber, though, and likely to become a political wedge come November.

The back-and-forth among Democrats heated up last week, when Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz responded to a statement from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders condemning Democratic leadership’s decision not to bring up for a vote his amendment “to end offensive military aid to Netanyahu’s war machine.” Moskowitz, in a social media post, suggested Sanders was evading a more important issue.

“Bernie, now do AntiSemitism,” Moskowitz wrote. “Why so quiet?”

The next day, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been bird-dogged by some left-wing activists for not taking a hard-enough line against Israel, came to Sanders’ defense.

“Sen. Sanders’ family was killed in the Holocaust,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on social media. “He dedicates his every moment to realizing tikkun olam. His commitment to protecting innocents in Gaza stems FROM his Jewish values. He and many other Jewish leaders deserve better than to be treated this way. This is shameful.”

Moskowitz responded by relaying his own family’s ordeal during the Holocaust and pointing to his votes for aid to Israel and Gaza.

“We see each other at work,” he then told Ocasio-Cortez, “we are both better than doing this here” on social media.

1968 redux?

In their letter Monday to Columbia University’s board of trustees, Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Dan Goldman of New York, along with nearly two dozen other Democratic co-signers, exhorted the school, whose president has already called in the New York Police Department to disperse demonstrators, to immediately “disband the encampment.” (The NYPD’s first effort failed, and the scenes from campus provided rocket fuel for further, nationwide protests.)

Parallels between the current, increasingly hostile stand-off between Democratic leaders and activists and the antiwar movement of the 1960s – or, more recently, Occupy Wall Street – are easy to find. Especially in the rhetoric used by Republicans to capitalize on the tumult, as Richard Nixon did in 1968 when he called for “law and order” over the forces of anarchy and what the right then called the “lunatic fringe.”