It has become common for district and state attorneys to go easy on pro-Hamas demonstrators who have arguably crossed the line into lawlessness. These officials are usually progressives who are sympathetic to the protesters and therefore aren’t seeking to deter the acts of trespassing or vandalism (or worse) in the future. So going easy on campus Hamasniks isn’t likely to draw much shock anymore.
But the latest case of leniency is quite different from all the others, and it has the potential to reverberate against the Jewish community for a long time and in dangerous ways. It should be taken not only as a case of anti-Zionist activists being above the law, but also as an early warning sign of a new phase in the discrimination against Jews in public office.
In this case, the specific charges that were dropped are less important than the manner in which they were dropped and the process that led to this outcome.
The background is as follows. In April 2024, just over a year ago, pro-Hamas protesters established an encampment on the Diag, the University of Michigan’s main space on its central campus, that grew over the course of weeks. The school asked the fire marshal for an assessment, and he concluded that “the densely placed tents with no egress pathways and the highly combustible nature of the tent materials and other furnishings have made this encampment highly susceptible for a fire to occur and inescapable for any occupants to flee in the event of a fire. If a fire were to occur within this encampment, the human casualty rate would be catastrophic.”
The encampment included about 60 tents, a generator, multiple electric devices, and rope stretched all along the improvised chicken wire fence. The demonstrators appeared to have also damaged the nearby fire hydrant beyond use. The encampment refused to clear up the safety hazards, so it was cleared by police. Demonstrators threw furniture as the cops moved through the camp and a few got violent with police.
In addition to those charged with a trespassing misdemeanor, seven were charged with obstructing or resisting the police: a felony. They were charged by the state attorney general, Dana Nessel.
Michigan, you’ll remember, was the center of the fight for the Arab vote in the 2024 election. Elissa Slotnik, a congresswoman-turned-senator, yielded to the pressure from anti-Israel activists during her Senate election, so fearful was she of the electoral consequences in Michigan of fighting anti-Semitism.
The abandoned Jews of Michigan briefly, then, might have felt that Nessel had the steady nerves required to pick up the baton so carelessly flung aside by Slotnik.
Nessel has established a reputation as a loyal partisan Democrat unafraid to deploy her power against political opposition. But this time the call was coming from inside the house: The campus Hamasniks whose tent city might have burned down the center of the University of Michigan were a Democratic Party constituency. Moreover, Kamala Harris lost the state amid a vocal movement of Arab voters having decided to withhold their support as payback for the Biden-Harris administration’s refusal to end weapons transfers to Israel. Nessel was the AG, but as a loyal party soldier in the state of Michigan, it wasn’t at all clear that her side had the power in this case.
No doubt Nessel was expecting pushback, and it came fast and furious. Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib led the chorus of those accusing Nessel, who is Jewish, of acting out of bias and demanding her recusal. This was the same accusation Donald Trump infamously leveled in 2016 at Judge Gonzalo Curiel, arguing his Mexican heritage was itself a conflict of interest when dealing with Trump.
“We’ve [demonstrated] for climate, the immigrant-rights movement, for black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs,” Tlaib said. “But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”
On CNN, Nessel responded: “I don’t think you have to be Angela Lansbury to figure this out. Clearly, she’s referencing my religion.”
Indeed, Tlaib wasn’t unclear. It was a galling religion-based attack on a state Jewish official by a member of Congress from that state. The response to it would make clear just how far the Overton Window had shifted on the acceptability of rank anti-Semitism.
Initial returns were uninspiring. “I’m not going to get in the middle of this argument that they’re having,” Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said when asked by Jake Tapper to respond to the accusations against Nessel. “I can just say this. We do want to make sure that students are safe on our campuses and we recognize that every person has the right to make their statement about how they feel about an issue, a right to speak out.” It was an egregious dereliction of duty and the fallout was entirely predictable.
With the signal that it was open season on the state’s Jewish attorney general, the attorney for the protesters followed. “This was a case of selective prosecution and rooted in bias, not in public safety issues,” declared Amir Makled, who filed a motion to disqualify Nessel’s office. The attempts to describe the “bias” of which Nessel was supposedly guilty without explicitly mentioning her Judaism only reinforced the bigotry of the accusation. Nessel was declared a political ally of some regents of the university where the encampment was set up, and she was even accused of bias because other state attorneys general had supposedly not charged pro-Hamas protesters as often as Nessel had—one of the most ridiculous legal arguments you are likely to ever hear aired in a court case, but one that clearly set out the party line: The AGs who’d gone easy on Hamasniks have established precedent and therefore these demonstrators are to be treated as above the law.
Meanwhile, as the case dragged on, Nessel was left to fend for herself and the “Jewish disqualification” argument persisted. The judge was even considering granting a hearing on it. That same judge, from Nessel’s perspective, had slow-walked the case nearly to a stall while the AG took steady fire from the left.
It was too much for Nessel. This week, she threw in the towel, dropped all the charges, and, according to court observers, surprised even the defendants with her actions.
“Despite months and months of court hearings, the Court has yet to make a determination on whether probable cause was demonstrated that the defendants committed these crimes, and if so, to bind the case over to circuit court for trial, which is the primary obligation of the district court for any felony offense. During this time, the case has become a lightning rod of contention,” Nessel said in a statement. She lamented that the “distractions and ongoing delays have created a circus-like atmosphere to these proceedings. While I stand by my charging decisions, and believe, based on the evidence, a reasonable jury would find the defendants guilty of the crimes alleged, I no longer believe these cases to be a prudent use of my department’s resources.”
If that were all she had said, the statement would have been a run-of-the-mill copout from an official who was under a lot of pressure and who’d been abandoned by her party.
But it wasn’t. Nessel also mentioned a letter that the Jewish Community Relations Council, part of the local Jewish Federation, sent to the court. The JCRC letter criticized the call for Nessel’s recusal: “If it were successful, this would mark the first time a prosecutor would be disqualified from prosecuting a case based on perceived bias due to their religious faith. The notion that AG Nessel is biased against Muslims and Americans of Arab descent is unfounded and deeply offensive.”
The open letter was intended to be copied to the court’s public information office to make sure all parties at least knew the letter went out. But according to the JCRC, it might have accidentally been sent to an address for a court administrator instead. Such letters are turned into official court documents.
The difference is significant. Nessel blamed the letter’s “impropriety” at least in part for her decision to drop the charges: “now, we have learned that a public statement in support of my office from a local non-profit has been directly communicated to the Court. The impropriety of this action has led us to the difficult decision to drop these charges.”
This was an inexcusable attempt to throw the JCRC under the bus. The letter was in response to, not the impetus for, nearly a year of accusations of bias just because Nessel is Jewish. And even if the letter was sent to the wrong address and therefore became a court document, the mistake is easy to explain and would not strike any reasonable observer as disqualifying.
Finally, even if Nessel was right about the impropriety of the letter’s unintended destination, publicly denouncing and blaming the letter rather than taking responsibility for the decision is petty, harmful to the few people actually defending her from allegations of bias, and chilling to the many U.S. Jewish groups already inclined to sit on the sidelines of these battles.
Dropping the charges amid the looming prospect of a bias hearing will only reinforce the religious bigotry at the heart of the demonstrators’ cases. And it will incentivize members of Congress to continue to use Jewish officials’ religion against them in a public setting.
It’s one thing that Nessel couldn’t take the heat. But her larger sin was burning others in the Jewish community along the way.
