Speech under siege

Last week articles appeared in The Washington Post and The Guardian by Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate arrested without producing a warrant by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents intent on his deportation. He wrote from a detention facility in Louisiana far from his wife Noor Abdalla, a US citizen who is about to deliver their first child. For company he has dozens of others who have been held for weeks and months without legal hearings until they could be deported.

His nightmare began on March 8, when he was accosted, handcuffed, and forced into an unmarked car as he and his wife were returning home from dinner. When the couple protested, the arresting officers threatened to detain her as well. He was held in two facilities in New Jersey, where he and his wife dwell, before being sent to distant Louisiana.

In The Guardian, Khalil wrote, “My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and the end to the Genocide in Gaza.” This resumed when Israel broke the two-month ceasefire on March 18, 10 days after his detention.

While no criminal charges have been levelled against Khalil, his incarceration and potential deportation come under a 1952 act which gives the secretary of state the authority to remove people whose presence in the US could have, in incumbent Marco Rubio’s determination, “adverse foreign policy consequence.” On April 11, a Louisiana judge decided Khalil could be deported but a federal district court issued a stay of deportation while considering a separate case challenging the arrest and detention.

Khalil is an Algerian citizen as his mother’s family descended from Abdel Qadir, the Algerian freedom fighter exiled by France in 1855 along with his followers to Greater Syria. Today many Syrians claim descendance from them. Some even take the name Al-Jazayeri, like a friend of mine.

Khalil was born in Damascus in 1995 into a Palestinian family with roots in Tiberias before Israel’s 1948 war drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, towns, villages and homeland. In 2012, the Khalils fled to Lebanon after the eruption of the Syrian civil conflict. Khalil earned his BA degree from the Lebanese American University in Beirut before being employed by the British embassy as a translator and manager of a scholarship programme. Having completed in December work on his Master’s degree at Columbia, Khalil is slated to graduate next month. While a student he interned with UNRWA, the UN agency which cares for Palestinian refugees.

He became involved in Palestinian activism in October 2023 and served as a spokesman for students participating in anti-Gaza war Columbia University protests and encampments. In interviews with mainstream media, he has said the fate of Palestinians and Israelis is “intertwined” and that “antisemitism” has no place in the protests. He mentioned that Jewish students were involved in the protests. He was singled out and targeted by hardline pro-Israeli group Betar and was the victim of a concerted campaign to deport him. More than 1,500 students at 240 US universities have seen their visas cancelled, disrupting their education and their lives. Like Khalil, none of the students have been found guilty of a crime. Instead, the administration is defining dissent as a threat to national security, especially when dissent involves Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank and criticism of Washington’s total backing for Israel.

Soon after returning office on Jan.20, Trump signed an executive order calling for deportation of students who have visas for studies at institutions of higher learning and have allegedly broken the law during anti-Israeli protests due to the Gaza war. Khalil’s arrest followed Trump’s cancellation of $400 million in grants and research contracts for Columbia on the grounds that it failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

The Trump administration is now using antisemitism as a blanket accusation to deny free speech and punish students and others who criticise Israeli, the US or the US government. This is a very dangerous game. Trump is aligning the US with hardline elements in Israel.

Sixty-nine per cent of Israelis, of whom 54 per cent are ruling coalition voters, back ending the war on Gaza in exchange for the return of Israelis held by Hamas. Seventy per cent of Israelis does not trust the government, including 33 per cent of Coalition voters, while only 31 per cent trusts Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Furthermore. Trump has taken this stand despite the fact that at the end of March, 53 per cent of US citizens had an unfavourable opinion of Israel and confidence in Netanyahu was only 32 per cent.

On April 15, US Public Radio reported that the 10-member non-partisan Jewish Council for Public Affairs stated that the Trump administration is endangering US Jewish citizens by targeting foreign students for protesting the Gaza war and punishing the universities they attend. “Our safety as Jews has always been tied to the rule of law, to the safety of others, to the strength of civil society, and to the protection of rights and liberties for all,” the council said in a statement. Council head Amy Spitalnick said that “she and her group are concerned that fear of antisemitism is being exploited to ‘undermine our democracy.’”

Writing on April 17 in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, Yale University medical scientist Naftali Kaminski argued that Trump administration cuts of research funds for Columbia, Harvard, and Cornell are not due to non-violent pro-Palestinian protests on campus. “The Trump Administration is not weaponising antisemitism to suppress pro-Palestinians on campus.... They are weaponising the discomfort experienced by some Jewish students amid mostly peaceful pro-Palestinian protests to suppress academic freedom, freedom of speech and independent research at America’s most prestigious institutions. And when they succeed, they will indeed blame us, the Jews.”