'New Kind of Antisemitism': Jewish Students Slam Trump's Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi
The Columbia student, a green card holder, was detained by ICE at his citizenship interview on Monday.
“It’s infuriating. I think it's the new kind of antisemitism. It's just using Jews in a very cynical way.”
This is what Israeli Columbia PhD student Sahar Bostock told Zeteo regarding the Trump administration’s arrest of Palestinian Columbia undergraduate Mohsen Mahdawi on Monday. And she’s not alone in feeling this way. Students and professors spoke fondly of Mahdawi, a green card holder who was detained at his scheduled citizenship interview.
Mahdawi was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, in the occupied West Bank. As a child, he watched an Israeli soldier shoot and kill his best friend. After arriving in the US 10 years ago, he went to Lehigh University to study computer science, before transferring to Columbia to study philosophy. While there, he organized with Palestinian and Jewish students towards peace, served as Columbia’s Buddhist Association president, and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union, alongside now-fellow-detained classmate Mahmoud Khalil.
This week, Mahdawi was set to possibly turn his green card into full citizenship.
Instead, an hour after his appointment time at an immigration office in Vermont, ICE arrived to detain him.
“A Slap in the Face”
Mahdawi, like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly wrote to the university asking for help finding a safe location to live, away from ICE. As with Khalil, the university appears to have ignored the repeated pleas. Mahdawi’s requests came after months of anti-free speech groups like Betar USA and Canary Mission targeting him, amid his involvement in the Columbia anti-war and pro-Palestine protests over the last 18 months.
The groups pointed to things like his appearance on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ – where he discussed not viewing Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in a vacuum – as proof of his villainy. In that same appearance, Mahdawi condemned antisemitism, recounting an instance during a student walkout when he told off a campus non-affiliate saying antisemitic phrases.
“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi said during the segment. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand-in-hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
And so Mahdawi becomes the latest in a string of students the Trump administration has targeted nationwide in the name of “student safety” and “combating antisemitism” – while Jewish peers of these students express feeling safe and heard around them.
That includes Aharon Dardik, an Israeli whose family lived in a West Bank settlement, and who spent four months in prison after objecting to serve in the Israeli military. Dardik, who co-founded Columbia’s Jews for Ceasefire chapter, met Mahdawi at Columbia through peace activism circles.
Monday’s harsh arrest contrasts starkly with Mahdawi’s spirit of “love” that Dardik described in how he navigated not just academia, but “the way that we in the modern world treat each other.”
“That is something that he has had to grapple with more intensely than anyone else I've known and dealt with,” he said, describing admiration at Mahdawi’s response that he would hold not only his own grief and suffering, but that of his enemies as well. “I will make them into my friends,” Mahdawi told Dardik.
“He's probably the most profound person I've ever met,” Dardik said of Mahdawi.
Dardik described meetings the pair would have with Zionists. Sometimes, they would be kind, but sometimes “really nasty and cruel” to Mahdawi. But he wouldn’t be fazed, Dardik said, “because for him, this was the work; it was showing that when approached with sincerity, love can win.”
While jostling to find ways to heal campus, Dardik recounted with a laugh, Mahdawi even expressed sympathy for administrators’ well-being (some of the same administrators who did not help him find a safe location from ICE).
Not long after meeting, Mahdawi insisted Dardik join a class he was taking, on peacemaking and negotiation. So much so that he successfully pressed Dardik to drop another class and helped him convince the professor to let him in.
That professor, Jean Krasno, has known Mahdawi for three years – through classes and outside seminars on international law, conflict resolution, and Gaza. She told Zeteo she was concerned about the prospect of him joining fellow detained students in being shipped off to ICE facilities in Louisiana, being “treated as prisoners with very few rights.”
“He knows that what he's trying to achieve – a peaceful solution to the Palestine question – is very complicated and it’s challenging, but he tries very hard to take the long-term look and work on staying calm and peaceful,” she told Zeteo. “What the government is doing is really unjust, illegal, and cruel, in my view. I think that he was entrapped today.”
For now, Mahdawi is being held in a Vermont ICE facility. His lawyers secured a temporary restraining order preventing immigration authorities from moving him to another state. According to his legal team, Mahdawi has not been charged with a crime, and the government has not yet provided documentation for why he was arrested. The State Department declined to comment due to "privacy and other considerations."
“New Kind of Antisemitism”
In the month since the Trump administration detained Khalil, it’s only escalated its sweeping attacks on students – revoking visa statuses without student or university knowledge, attempting to deport students who committed minor traffic violations or were victims of domestic violence. While the case of Khalil could’ve been a fissure point, the Trump administration has instead widened its blitz.
Students told Zeteo they viewed the attacks as a movement rife with antisemitic figures cynically using Jewish people to justify attacking academic freedom, free speech, and students like Mahdawi.
Bostock, who met Mahdawi in joint anti-occupation organizing circles, described it as “the new kind of antisemitism,” saying that “antisemitism is just a pretext, and that he's been targeted because he's Palestinian, just like other activists, and for being political, and for being willing to stand out there with his face uncovered, and to say things that are important, but difficult for some other people to hear.”
She described how Mahdawi has always pursued a large, inclusive movement while understanding both “the intergenerational trauma of Jews and the ongoing trauma of Palestinians from violence they're experiencing and that he had experienced as a child and an adult under the occupation.”
One of the first things he told Bostock was that he wanted to ensure her children would be safe in this world and that they should never be afraid.
Another friend, former UCLA J Street chapter president Rachel Burnett, told Zeteo that “anyone who calls themselves a liberal should be screaming at the top of their lungs to condemn” Mohsen’s arrest.
“It remains true both that Mohsen is truly an outstanding guy, and Palestinians and foreign students shouldn't have to be the ‘perfect victims’ to stand up and support their rights,” Burnett said. “And right now, as I observe the holiday of Passover, I am highly conscious of the fact that we cannot celebrate and call ourselves a free and liberated people while our oppression is being directly weaponized to deny others their freedom.”
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“That is something that he has had to grapple with more intensely than anyone else I've known and dealt with,” he said, describing admiration at Mahdawi’s response that he would hold not only his own grief and suffering, but that of his enemies as well. “I will make them into my friends,” Mahdawi told Dardik.”
Mahdawi isn’t being deported because he’s is a Hamas or terrorist sympathizer; to the contrary, he’s being deported because he’s not!
People like Mahdawi are the greatest threat to the crimes Israel is committing and about to commit.
Mahdawi represents the prospect for peace and unity, and that’s something Trump and Netanyahu can never allow to be achieved. IMHO!….:)
The word anti-Semite is understood strictly as anti-Jewish, but in fact refers to people who speak Semitic languages, which includes Arabic and Hebrew. In other words, all the hatred directed against those who defend Palestine's right to exist, defend itself, have sovereignty and equal rights, is also anti-Semitism.
The similarity with how the United States treated Native Americans is vivid. Natives were also viewed as violent savages/vermin to be exterminated, and little by little were pushed out of their lands and "allowed" to live in reservations, which were later to inform the "rounding up the undesirables" idea behind Hitler's concentration camps. The federal government routinely lied to and cheated Native Americans out of countless treaties that favored the US. The difference between Manifest Destiny and Zionism is geographic and populations.