President Donald Trump announced a new policy seemingly targeting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) protests against continued support of the Israeli government, advocates for the BDS movement say. The move by Trump via executive order (EO) has raised alarm bells not just among activists who fear it will be used to silence them, but also among those worried about what Trump’s manipulation of the legal distinctions of Jewish identity could mean for the future.

As reported by the New York Times, administration officials said Trump believes his new executive order will target anti-Semitic activity on campuses by withholding federal funding from educational institutions that fail to combat discrimination. According to the Times, some Jewish students feeling threatened on some campuses by the BDS movement — a Palestinian-led campaign that says it draws inspiration from campaigns against South African apartheid in calling for cutting financial ties with Israel.

Significantly, the Times notes, Trump’s EO aligns with a bipartisan bill that has stalled in Congress, where concerns about both anti-Semitism and the BDS movement have been intermingled for some time.

Initially, concerns about the EO were raised outside of the BDS movement, as well, on the grounds that the Times wrote the EO would effectively treat or interpret Jewish identity as a race or nationality. In particular, the notion of interpreting Jewishness as a national identity unto itself evoked for some memories of Adolf Hitler’s move to strip Jews of citizenship in Nazi Germany and tying Jewish identity to nationality reminded others of the anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty. Notably, Jewish identity was used as a nationality in the Soviet Union, where Jews historically faced oppression.

However, a draft of the EO obtained by Jewish Insider (JI) doesn’t have much to say about Jewishness as nationality, though it does demand that anti-Semitic incidents be treated in the same way as forms of discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin” as outlined in the federal funding rules in Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual's race, color, or national origin,” the draft of the EO obtained by JI reads. “It shall be the policy of the executive branch to enforce Title VI against prohibited forms of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism as vigorously as against all other forms of discrimination prohibited by Title VI.”

Following the JI publication of the draft, the New York Times published an op-ed by Jared Kushner — a senior adviser and son-in-law to Trump — in which Kushner lauded Trump for protecting Jewish students and stated that the administration's public position has long been that there is no distinction between opposition to Israel and attacks on Jewish identity, writing, "Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism."

Effectively, the EO would let executive branch agencies like the Department of Education (DOE) crackdown on institutions that receive federal funding and have been found to have discriminated against Jewish people on the basis of a definition of anti-Semitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that reads, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The EO doesn’t reference the DOE by name but does make special mention of its jurisdiction, writing in the first section, “students, in particular, continue to face anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses.”