I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Mahmoud Khalil Is One of the Most Upstanding People I Have Ever Met
We cannot allow fascists to use the pretext of Jewish safety to attack our communities.
As a Jewish student at Columbia University, I was disgusted by the White House’s cynical, smirking claim that it is acting in the interests of Jewish safety in detaining my Palestinian comrade, Mahmoud Khalil, last weekend. To announce Mahmoud’s abduction, the White House pushed social media posts reading “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” The Christian fascists are gleefully, wickedly invoking the Hebrew goodbye as they terrorize us.
Mahmoud is one of the most upstanding people I have ever met. Alongside other Jewish student activists, I only ever felt Mahmoud’s respect, solidarity, and strength. As Mahmoud told CNN last spring, “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.” Anyone who has met Mahmoud knows that the White House’s smear campaign is just a shallow pretext to unleash state violence against student activists and further divide already traumatized communities.
Who Will Be Left to Fight With Us?
Since Mahmoud's abduction, DHS agents have been on campus, terrifying students, with President Donald Trump promising more arrests to come. Let me be clear: the White House’s brazen attack on pro-Palestine speech and Columbia allowing, and perhaps even working with, ICE agents on my campus are the true threats to my safety as a Jewish Columbia student. As several Israeli Columbia students argued last month: “weaponizing accusations of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel not only undermines free speech but also fails to protect Jewish people.”
Indeed, stripping visas from student activists bears an ugly resemblance to the State Department’s systematic exclusion of Holocaust refugees – arguably the worst instance of antisemitism in US history. The recent campus crackdown relies on a 1952 law whose purpose was widely understood at the time to target Eastern European Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviets. This is not a system that promotes Jewish safety – which is why I continue to be appalled (if not surprised) by Jewish organizations’ support for the Trump deportation machine.
After years of doxing undergraduates, Zionist organizations are now distributing deportation target lists. Within the university, some Jewish faculty and students are working to try to get Columbia students and professors who hold different political views deported – not unlike the donor-influence campaign that precipitated violent policing last year. Perhaps these members of the tribe should reconsider collaborating with a regime that’s rounding up minorities in camps. Once all the other marginalized people have been deported, who will be left to fight with us? The malicious conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism undermines the multiracial organizing required to sustain Jewish life in a multicultural democracy.
ICE raids are terrorizing international students of all origins and faiths. Columbia students and workers are afraid to leave their homes because ICE agents have been spotted on and around campus. The university has made no effort to share basic “know your rights” information or establish protocols that would allow international students and workers to confidentially shelter in their homes. While the university failed to protect us last weekend, fellow members of my union, Student Workers of Columbia, worked to create informational resources and pushed to cancel or hybridize classes so that students would not need to risk coming into contact with ICE. The university’s response was to forbid faculty from moving classes online or cancelling them. One can only hope that Columbia is not offering up dissident students to the fascists in order to protect its finances.
Not in My Name
We cannot allow the fascists to use the pretext of Jewish safety to attack our communities. If you want to identify the Nazis who are endangering Jews, look no further than Trump and the Republican Party. In his second term, Trump is having a “mask-off” moment, packing federal agencies with alt-right losers and unabashed white supremacists.
Because Republicans believe “the universities are the enemy,” targeting a prominent Palestinian activist should be seen as a tactic to drive a wedge between liberals with differing views of the student protest movement. The Trump administration likely hoped to frustrate potential resistance to its brazen violation of democratic norms. Just look at the paltry statements Democrats Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer issued through gritted teeth! Schumer could only muster a pathetic reference to the First Amendment after two paragraphs slandering Mahmoud. He doubled down in a recent interview, saying that if Mahmoud committed a crime, "he should be deported" – a clear articulation of his apparent hatred for Palestinians and an absolute betrayal of his constituents who are being attacked by the Trump administration. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of defending Mahmoud with the full strength that we can muster. Beyond Mahmoud, we must defend all people subjected to ICE enforcement – even if some appear to be imperfect victims. Although Mahmoud is a legal permanent resident who committed no crime, our undocumented and criminalized neighbors deserve the same solidarity. If we do not act with the required urgency, we may soon discover that the freedoms many of us once enjoyed have become only distant memories.
We are now living through a neo-Nazi fever dream – far-right groups eagerly stirred the pot while the Zionist and pro-Palestine camps publicly struggled. It seems that the Zionists hitching their wagons to the Trump administration would rather join the fascists than fight them. For my part, I say: Not in my name.
Jonathan Ben-Menachem is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Columbia University.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
Catch up on Zeteo’s other coverage of Mahmoud Khalil’s case:
Mahmoud Khalil is a proud Palestinian, which does not automatically equate to him supporting hamas, anymore than my being a proud Jew means I automatically support the JDL. Nor do I support trump’s fellow criminal leader, netanyahu, and his cruel and inhumane treatment of innocent Palestinians. We are reliving a historic tragedy, and our lame democratic leaders are doing nothing to stop it.
This was a powerful, heartfelt piece by Ben-Menachem. Thank you, Zeteo, for publishing it. I hope that more platforms will do the same. Whether or not one agrees with Khalid’s pov, he has an absolute right to express it. I think that one of the most important points that Ben-Menachem makes is that it is false that deporting or silencing those that abhor what the Israeli government is doing to Gaza and the West Bank will somehow make people safer. It’s a lie thar being against the actions of Netanyahu means that one is anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism, and it is also a lie that trading our civil liberties for greater “safety” is a sound course of action. I hope that Ben-Menachem will try to get his piece published in more places and/or give permission to others to send it in to their local newspapers. I think it’s so important to get the work out.
As for me, Columbia’s actions are despicable and I will never again give them even one thing dime.