Mahmoud Khalil’s Abduction Is a Fascist Move — and Universities Must Respond
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 by 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 Khalil’s detention, promising that his was the “first arrest of many to come.” On Monday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked any 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 in 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 even before he took office.
Under pressure from politicians, donors, trustees, and pro-Israel lobby 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, racist and militarized law enforcement, and draconian disciplinary processes. Outside normal procedures, they have passed ever-more-restrictive speech 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 and 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.
Columbia knew Khalil was under threat; just a day before his abduction, Khalil himself had told the 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 since October 2023, many from students facing censorship of events, and absurd accusations and sanctions for protests typical of student activism.
Among hundreds of examples, Pomona College’s president suspended our clients without evidence or due process for allegedly occupying a building. George Mason police and administrators subjected students to FBI-led raids of their home because of spray-painted graffiti. University of Chicago police evicted a student from campus housing after arresting them at a demonstration. New York University administrators suspended students simply for being in the library during a peaceful sit-in. Universities have similarly punished faculty through investigations, suspensions, and firings. The stories are endless and harrowing.
As Trump implements ever-harsher crackdowns on Palestine advocates and on higher education as 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 is universities’ denial and ignorance of what has been clear to majorities of their students and faculty — and the international community — for over a year: that Israel is committing, even with a fragile ceasefire in place, a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and throughout Palestine. Administrators should be more concerned with the mass slaughter of Palestinians than with policing protests and 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 and policies legislators 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 to 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.
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, queer studies, and Black studies.
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 in 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 that pro-Israel groups lobby for in legislation and university policies, 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 make a twin argument. 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 for the 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.
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.
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