Mahmoud Khalil has been a public face of the pro-Palestine student movement at Columbia University and Barnard College since last spring. I have known him for over a year. During the encampment on campus he served as the lead negotiator with the Columbia administration: a mature, gentle human being and a sophisticated political thinker, he worked to deescalate the situation and bring about a peaceful resolution.
Last week Mahmoud joined a student sit-in at the college’s Milstein Center. Most of the participants wore masks to hide their identities out of caution, fearful of the Barnard administration and hoping to avoid the vicious campaigns perpetrated online by some of their fellow students and amplified by outside groups—among them the longstanding blacklisting enterprise Canary Mission and a more recently formed organization called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus. Mahmoud was not masked. Images of his presence were circulated on social media both by a Columbia undergraduate and by the business school professor and enfant terrible Shai Davidai, who tagged Marco Rubio and urged him to expel Mahmoud from the country: “Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no?” Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus echoed Davidai, explicitly calling on Rubio to revoke his visa. And now here we are.
A Palestinian refugee, Mahmoud was raised in a camp near Damascus. He fled to Beirut when it became too dangerous in Syria, and eventually he made his way to the US to enroll in an MA program at Columbia’s School of International and Foreign Affairs. Now, a week after ICE agents arrived at his university-owned apartment in Morningside Heights and took him away, he is incarcerated at an immigration detention center in Louisiana, his green card has been revoked, and he is at serious risk of deportation. He may well be displaced yet again.
Let us be clear: Mahmoud has been abducted and detained for his political speech. It is political speech that some of our colleagues and students—together with Zionist organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Canary Mission—do not like. This is political speech that makes them not just uncomfortable but enraged. Over and over again, they have harnessed that rage to paint pro-Palestinian politics as antisemitic, even as providing material support for terrorism, with no evidence to back up the claim.
We now know quite a bit about the campaign against Mahmoud and his peers. On January 29—the day Trump signed an executive order that laid the groundwork for deporting students with foreign citizenship for their pro-Palestine speech—the far-right Zionist youth group Betar posted that it had sent Mahmoud’s information to the government. “He’s on our deport list,” it boasted. Last month The Intercept reported that pro-Israel Columbia alumni and parents have maintained a WhatsApp group in which they discussed, among other things, reporting student protesters to law enforcement, including the NYPD, the FBI, and ICE. (It remains unclear whether Mahmoud was among their targets.) The Zionist activist Ross Glick told The Forward that on the day of the Milstein sit-in he “discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to ‘escalate’ the issue.” (Neither senator returned The Forward’s request for comment.) Glick also alleged, without elaborating, “that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.” The day after Mahmoud’s arrest, another recently formed group called the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association praised his detention on social media: “Reportedly, Khalil’s green card is being revoked. Good. A green card is a privilege that millions wait years for. So is studying at Columbia. Khalil threw them away…. No one should feel sorry for him.”
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This behavior—naming specific individuals, tagging them for arrest and deportation—amounts to a witch hunt the likes of which we have not seen in this country since the Red Scare and McCarthyism. How did we get here? How did we get to the point that a mild-mannered, thoughtful Palestinian political activist—a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime—can be picked up by ICE agents and shipped off to a detention center a thousand miles away?
The peril Mahmoud and others face today did not materialize out of thin air two months ago, when President Trump returned to the White House and the Republican Party secured all three branches of the federal government. The range of Democratic politicians and liberal citizens who, over the last year and a half, have vilified Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists merit their own share of the blame. From the minute protesters converged on college campuses and on the streets of American cities to oppose the slaughter in Gaza, they were portrayed as a danger to the wellbeing of Jewish Americans and as enemies of the country’s interests. Long before encampments were set up or a building occupied, Columbia’s administration and a number of its supporters were already cracking down on dissent and implementing draconian disciplinary measures: banning Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace barely a month into the genocide; establishing unreasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations. When a peaceful encampment emerged, rather than make any serious attempt at negotiating, the administration sent in the riot police on the second day—all in the name of student safety, particularly the safety of Jewish students.
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The university’s Task Force on Antisemitism, appointed in November 2023, has meanwhile issued a lengthy report depicting the university as a decidedly dangerous place for Jews—all Jews, any Jews—and effectively equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, thereby also dismissing the voices of anti-Zionist Jewish students. Last September dozens of Jewish faculty members sent the administration a ten-page letter enumerating a number of deep flaws in the document. It failed, they noted, to “recognize (save for a single fly-by phrase) Israel’s decimation of Gaza,” effectively effacing the fact that “protesters were reacting to a moral and material catastrophe” rather than denigrating Jewish identity as such; it neither corroborated many of the stories it was told by Jewish students who claimed to feel or to be unsafe, nor clarified when the alleged incidents occurred off campus; and it made “no effort to distinguish” between “incidents of genuine bias, discrimination, lack of safety or exclusion” and “discussions or chants that made some Jewish students feel uncomfortable or that they disagreed with.”
As I have argued in these pages, such appeals to “safety” regularly conflate actual, physical safety with students’ feelings of discomfort and rely on overbroad definitions of antisemitism that encompass almost all anti-Zionist and, for that matter, almost all Palestinian political speech. The Task Force’s report is no exception: the “working definition” of antisemitism it proposes “for pedagogy and training purposes only” includes “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among them “calls for divestment solely from Israel”—a definition that would encompass virtually the entire pro-Palestine student movement. In his newsletter this week for the Chronicle of American Higher Education, Len Gutkin wrote that, under the “current circumstances” of the right’s campaign against elite universities, the Task Force’s reports “read a bit like the accused slipping a confession to the prosecutor.”
All of my colleagues who promoted this rhetoric—each and every member of the Task Force, each and every colleague and student who tweeted unsubstantiated accusations against individual students and student groups: they, too, made Mahmoud’s arrest possible. Their speech has produced dire material consequences. Mahmoud is not safe. This is not a matter of how he feels. He is in real danger, and everyone who helped fashion a moral panic around students fighting to stop the outright annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza—and increasingly also in the West Bank—bears moral responsibility for that fact. They have helped produce and empower a narrative that has, in effect, made it a crime simply to be Palestinian in this country, and Mahmoud Khalil is paying an unconscionable price.
