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MAHMOUD KHALIL’S ABDUCTION IS A FASCIST MOVE — AND UNIVERSITIES
MUST RESPOND  
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Dima Khalidi
March 11, 2025
972 Magazine
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_ Schools across the United States have a choice: defend their
students against Trump or be complicit in his crimes. _

Students from inside the gates of Columbia University wave
Palestinian flags through the bars, April 22, 2024. , SWinxy/Wikimedia
Commons

 

On Saturday, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian lawful permanent resident
of the United States who was active as a negotiator between Columbia
University and students protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine,
was abducted
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at his Columbia
housing and in front of his pregnant wife. He was quickly shipped to
an infamous detention facility in Louisiana. President
Trump celebrated
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detention, promising that his was the “first arrest of many to
come.” On Monday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked
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attempt to deport Khalil, but his legal fight is far from over.

Khalil’s abduction, in its cruelty and unlawfulness, has horrified
people around the country. Let us be clear: this is what fascism looks
like, and it is part of a much broader campaign.

Since his inauguration, in a whirlwind power grab designed to shock
and awe, Trump has signed dozens of executive orders, many attacking
fundamental constitutional rights and already marginalized
communities. Now his loyal attack dogs at ICE, the Department of
Justice (DOJ), and other agencies are implementing them — with a
particular emphasis on criminalizing the student movement that
accelerated on campuses across America after October 7, when thousands
of students and faculty rose up against Israel’s U.S.-backed
genocide in Palestine and wars against Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

In a Jan. 29 executive order, for instance, Trump directed government
agencies to target pro-Palestine students and staff for deportation
and prosecution, in part by enlisting universities as censors and
snitches. The administration then announced that it would cut $400
million
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federal grants and contracts to Columbia for supposedly failing to
protect against antisemitism, threatening other schools with the same.

These are straightforward attacks on students’ free speech rights to
criticize Israeli and American policy, and universities that opt to
meaningfully support their students would have a strong defense to
mount against these abuses. But to their eternal discredit, many
universities have so far been rolling out the red carpet for the
fascist tendencies and policies that Trump and his acolytes proudly
promote, obeying
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before he took office.

Under pressure from politicians, donors
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trustees, and pro-Israel
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groups, most universities have responded to the student movement
against Israel’s genocide with rampant anti-Palestinian racism,
abandoning principles of free speech, academic freedom, and shared
governance. They have sacrificed their own students and faculty to
political grandstanding in McCarthyist congressional hearings
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and militarized
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and draconian disciplinary processes. Outside normal procedures
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they have passed ever-more-restrictive
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codes and anti-protest policies.

Over 300 workers, students and community members rallied for Palestine
in a march ended at the UPenn encampment for Gaza in Philadelphia, May
8, 2024. (Joe Piette/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

These decisions have not ended the Palestine movement. Nor have they
mollified Trump and his followers in Congress. Instead, they have
helped turn students into prime targets for fascist government
repression. There is a reason, after all, that Mahmoud Khalil was on
Trump’s radar. Columbia had already made an example of him
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other Palestinian and allied students, hitting them with
ever-more-draconian disciplinary processes long before he was
abducted. Right-wing pro-Israel groups also publicly urged Trump
officials to target him, as did Columbia board members, according
to The Forward
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Columbia knew Khalil was under threat; just a day before his
abduction, Khalil himself had told
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university that he feared that “ICE or a dangerous individual might
come to my home.”

But it’s not just Columbia that is failing its students so
thoroughly. My organization, Palestine Legal, has received an
avalanche of over 3,500 requests for legal support
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from students facing censorship of events, and absurd accusations and
sanctions for protests typical of student activism.

Among hundreds of examples, Pomona College
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president suspended our clients without evidence or due process for
allegedly occupying a building. George Mason
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and administrators subjected students to FBI-led raids of their home
because of spray-painted graffiti. University of Chicago
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evicted a student from campus housing after arresting them at a
demonstration. New York University
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suspended students simply for being in the library during a peaceful
sit-in. Universities have similarly punished faculty
through investigations
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suspensions, and firings
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The stories are endless and harrowing.

As Trump implements
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Palestine advocates and on higher education
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we know it in the United States, universities must see that
capitulating to his threats will not release them from the
administration’s crosshairs. (Columbia has learned that lesson 400
million times over.) Rather, they are surrendering a primary arena for
critical inquiry, debate, and resistance to those whose primary agenda
is to crush it. The question is: will they reverse course and fight
for the rights and freedoms of the students and faculty who make them
vibrant, diverse places to imagine and build a just and viable future?

To do the latter, universities must make some fundamental shifts.

A protest encampment for Palestine at Columbia University, New York,
April 23, 2024. (Pamela Drew/CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)

THE THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE

First, universities must recognize how anti-Palestinian racism
threatens all of us. One manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism
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ignorance of what has been clear to majorities of their students and
faculty — and the international
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for over a year: that Israel is committing, even with a fragile
ceasefire in place, a genocide
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Palestinians in Gaza and throughout Palestine. Administrators should
be more concerned with the mass slaughter of Palestinians than with
policing protests
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slogans due to complaints from people who don’t believe that
Palestinians deserve freedom in their homeland.

The now widespread rhetoric that labels protesters of genocide like
Khalil as “Hamas supporters,” and villainizes advocates for
justice in Palestine as supporters of terrorism and antisemites, is
also an example of anti-Palestinian racism that helps give Trump a
pretext for his actions. So are the laws
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and institutions pass to suppress Palestinians and supporters of
Palestinian freedom. All of these bring us closer to an undemocratic,
fascist society where none of us have the power to address the issues
most important to our survival and wellbeing.

Moreover, universities’ censorship of all things Palestine is the
thin edge of the wedge, paving the way
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the dismantling of core constitutional and academic freedom principles
designed to stop government and special interests from dictating what
can and can’t be said and taught. Instituting policies that create
ideological and intellectual strangulation on Palestine — which get
more bipartisan support than any other issue — provides the
blueprint for doing the same to discourse, scholarship, and teaching
on race, gender, climate, and other critical issues that Trump and his
allies are already targeting
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Indeed, the attack on advocacy and academic activity on Palestine is
complimentary to right-wing crusades — from K-12 through higher
education — against ethnic studies
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queer studies, and Black studies
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Universities must value the lives and voices of their Palestinian and
associated students and faculty, engage them as critical members of
the community, and resist political pressures to dispose of and
silence them as they mourn and protest a live-streamed genocide. To do
this, they must abide by free speech and anti-discrimination
principles for all (as the Department of Education instructed George
Washington University
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a resolution of an anti-Palestinian discrimination complaint last
year). They must do so not only because the law requires it but also
to prevent a landslide of censorship that would destroy academia.

Second, universities must reject the idea that student demands for
Palestinian survival, freedom, and self-determination somehow
constitute support for terrorism. They must also reject the false
binary promoted by Israel-aligned groups, which posit that freedom and
safety for Jews is only possible in an apartheid State of Israel, at
the expense of freedom and safety for Palestinians. Relying on this
false binary is the widely rejected conflation of Judaism, a religious
and ethnic identity, with Zionism, a political ideology that has
required in practice the mass murder, dispossession, occupation, and
oppression of Palestinians to create Israel as a “Jewish state” in
historic Palestine.

Students protest at a pro-Palestine encampment at Wake Forest
University, North Carolina, United States, April 30, 2024. (Heather
Sharona Weiss/Activestills)

This conflation of support for Israel or Zionism with Judaism, and by
extension anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is central to the
discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism
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in legislation and university policies
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and that Trump just reaffirmed in his order. But the definition, which
categorizes calling Israel a “racist endeavor” as antisemitic,
does not protect pro-Israel students from anti-Jewish discrimination
or harassment. It protects them from ideological opposition, from any
disruption to an inculcated belief that Israel and its actions are
necessary for Jewish safety.

Universities must not legitimize the idea that ideological disruption
is akin to discrimination. Trump and the white supremacist promoters
of attacks on so-called critical race theory (CRT) instruction and
diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures
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a twin argument
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They claim that white students are harmed by the teaching of
“divisive concepts” like slavery because they will be made to feel
guilty for the actions of white ancestors, and that it is anti-white
to teach about systemic racism. Both IHRA and anti-CRT/anti-DEI
efforts not only aim to prevent educators and institutions from
acknowledging and teaching about the racist roots and impacts of
ideologies and states. They also perversely use anti-discrimination
principles to punish those that do.

REJECTING THE PALESTINE EXCEPTION

Third, universities must challenge the McCarthyist tactics of
right-wing and pro-Israel groups, which are using red-baiting and the
politicized label of antisemitism to justify purging people who oppose
not only Israel’s policies but also U.S. support for them. Such
red-baiting typifies the right’s attack on higher education in
general.

Like their McCarthyist precursors, the congressional hearings and
attacks led by Trump allies — and the Heritage Foundation’s
“Project Esther” manual
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new administration — demonize supporters of Palestinian freedom as
“un-American,” communist, and unpatriotic. To circumvent
pro-Palestine activists’ First Amendment-protected speech and
assembly rights, Project Esther proposes criminalizing activism using
laws related to counterterrorism, hate speech, organized crime, and
immigration, including by deporting non-citizen student activists.
Trump’s executive orders have empowered federal agencies to engage
in just such targeting.

To understand what’s at stake, one need only ask: if students and
academics are prohibited from questioning the patently criminal acts
of a foreign government, what about their ability to question the acts
of our own — just when that right most needs to be exercised and
protected?

Rather than doing the censors’ work for them, universities must be
firm in rejecting a racist “Palestine exception” to speech and
anti-discrimination laws, which are but a Trojan horse for rising
authoritarianism. Instead, universities must vigorously and without
bias protect free speech and academic freedom, including by ceasing
persecution of their own students for speech activities critical of
Israel. And they must refuse cooperation with ICE and other government
agencies and congressional investigations that are counting on cowing
universities into silent obedience.

Finally, universities must reckon with their historical and present
roles in oppressive and destructive systems, including those complicit
in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ongoing oppression of Palestinians.
Student uprisings over decades — including movements against
apartheid South Africa, for climate justice, Black Lives, and now
Palestine — have demanded that institutions to which they pay
increasingly obscene tuitions and rent disclose and divest their vast
holdings from military, fossil fuel, prison, police, and other
industries complicit in oppression, death, and destruction.
Universities have heeded these calls before and must do so now,
defying threats to punish divestment via inapplicable and
unconstitutional state laws.

Ultimately, we can only protect democracy by enacting it, not by
mirroring authoritarian tendencies. So to do all this and resist
Trump’s broader reactionary agenda requires rejecting the
encroaching corporatization and centralization that has made
universities politically and financially vulnerable to coercion.
Embracing the democratic practices of shared governance would position
them to withstand the unprecedented attacks and protect faculty and
student rights.

As in past eras of domestic and global upheaval, students are the
bellwether of undeniable political shifts. Universities should embrace
their role as facilitators of those shifts rather than being the
authors of their own ruin by serving as handmaidens of a Trumpian
agenda. If they don’t, we will only have them to blame for their
complicity in the political persecution of Mahmoud Khalil and the many
others being targeted for their political dissent.

_A version of this article first appeared in The Nation. Read it here
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_DIMA KHALIDI is the founder and director of Palestine Legal, an
organization dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional
rights of people in the United States who speak out for Palestinian
freedom._

_About 972 MAGAZINE: Our team has been devastated by the horrific
events of this latest war. The world is reeling from Israel’s
unprecedented onslaught on Gaza, inflicting mass devastation and death
upon besieged Palestinians, as well as the atrocious attack and
kidnappings by Hamas in Israel on October 7. Our hearts are with all
the people and communities facing this violence. _

_We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to
engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed
by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on
Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is
ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence
Palestinian citizens and left-wing Jews who object to its policies._

_This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
past 14 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and
militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized
siege on Gaza._

_We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need
your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity
of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians
and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the
fight of their lives._

_CAN WE COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT 
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