Letter from Mahmoud Khalil
“Israel recently committed the largest child massacre in its history. Two hundred children and 100 women were killed in one day. Altogether, about 400 civilians were killed, and the number of dead is not yet final.” Hanin Majadli began her March 21, 2025 column in Ha’aretz with that lede, after Israel broke the ceasefire and resumed its genocidal air and ground assault on Gaza this past week.
During the same week, tens of thousands of Israeli Jews filled the streets to protest Israel’s resumption of the war (which never really ended with the ceasefire), not because Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians brings the death total close to 50,000, but because the resumption of the war imperils the release of the remaining hostages whom Hamas seized on October 7. Why single out the threat to the Israeli hostages to the exclusion of the threat to Palestinians?
Except for a courageous minority of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel, the protest movement frames its effort as a struggle to save Israeli democracy which, apparently, has nothing to do with what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. “There is something warped in the narrative,” Majadli writes. “This struggle exists in the near total absence of reference to the war’s lethal consequences on Gaza and Gazans.”
How is it possible to square the defense of democratic values with a situation in which on the other side tens of thousands of lives are being cut short in a single blow? … How is it possible to insist on freedom and justice without any reference to the inconceivable human price of this war? How [is it] possible to devalue life in Gaza, which has become so cheap for Jews in Israel, while simultaneously calling for the preservation of Israeli democracy? Exactly what democracy are we talking about?
We should ask that question here. The Democratic Party, the Zionist leadership of the Jewish community, and the Israel lobby have spent the last 17 months cheering Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, attacking the Palestine solidarity movement as terrorists and antisemites, supporting MAGA attacks on campus free speech and academic freedom in the name of “fighting antisemitism,” and ignoring Trumps campaign promises to deport Palestinian activists. The Democrats spent the presidential campaign crying “Vote for us to save our democracy.”
Exactly what democracy are we talking about?
How is it possible to devalue Palestinian life (in Gaza, the West Bank, and our country), and to persecute and prosecute Palestinian leaders of the Palestine solidarity movement, while simultaneously calling for the preservation of U.S. democracy against the MAGA onslaught?
Exactly what democracy are we talking about?
Mahmoud Khalil is one of the latest victims of the bipartisan U.S. complicity in genocide and the Democratic Party’s acquiescence to MAGA’s authoritarian assault on education and free speech. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued statements that could not even be described as tepid. Said Schumer, after the obligatory “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports”:
If the administration cannot prove [Khalil] has violated any criminal law to justify taking this severe action and is doing it for the opinions he has expressed, then that is wrong, they are violating the First Amendment protections we all enjoy and should drop their wrongheaded action.
If? Wrongheaded? Trump broadcasted his intention to deport Palestinian activists because they were Palestinian and activists. No one in his administration could point to a law that Khalil had violated. As the Columbia Spectator pointed out,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, SIPA ’24, based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s assessment that Khalil’s continued presence in the United States would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Khalil dictated the following letter from an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.
Letter from Mahmoud Khalil
March 18, 2025
My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.
Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.
Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.
On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents [see video] who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.
My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.
I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.
While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.
Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration's latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students — some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation — and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.
If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.
The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.
Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.