Even though I have criticized anti-Zionist campus activism for relentlessly obstructing the core mission of American institutions of higher education, the arrest and potential deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University, makes me uneasy. Khalil was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York City on Saturday and transported to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. The charges against him are, at this moment, vague.
The arrest and potential deportation of Mahmoud Khalil makes me uneasy.
Social media posts from President Donald Trump and comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggest Khalil is a national security threat. Though she didn’t provide proof of her claim, Leavitt said of Khalil, “This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own content, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas.” A social media post from the Department of Homeland Security says Khalil “led activities tied to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”My queasiness at the government’s response to Khalil’s activism and the vagueness of the accusations against him is shared by other liberal Jewish Americans. They constitute a large segment of the Jewish American population, one that President Trump has accused of hating Israel, hating themselves and being “disloyal.” Trump also said last year that if he lost the presidential election, liberal Jews would be partially to blame. And just Thursday, Trump became a gentile rabbinical court unto himself by proclaiming Sen. Chuck Schumer to not be a Jew.
Liberal Jews, I would note, have reacted to Khalil’s arrest in broadly similar ways. Many disagree with, and deplore, Khalil’s leadership role in a Columbia anti-Israel movement whose actions ranged from incendiary rhetoric to the forcible occupation of university grounds. Yet they generally see his arrest as an existential threat to the FirstAmendment, academicinstitutions and the general health of Americandemocracy.Liberal Jewish Americans, like all of their compatriots, have a right to know if the allegations against Khalil are valid. If, for example, the government can provide evidence that Khalil has aided or abetted a terrorist group, then the government’s actions are, in my opinion, likely justified. If they are not — and they presently appear not to be — then Khalil’s arrest would seem to represent a threat to the civil liberties of everybody in America.
Let me acknowledge that the more I read about the legal issues involved in Khalil’s arrest, the murkier the case becomes. Is the murkiness a coincidence? That the administration pursued this action against this particular person with this particular citizenship status points to the under-discussed ingenuity of Trump’s legal teams. They have consistently displayed an uncanny ability to find gray areas within the law and resurrect mothballed edicts. Remember the Trump administration’s invocation of the 1807 Insurrection Act? The 1798 Alien Enemies Act? The 1873 Comstock Act?
Liberal Jewish-Americans, like all of their compatriots, have a right to know if the allegations against Khalil are valid Khalil is not an American citizen. He possesses a green card and is married to an American citizen. Does his status as a legal permanent resident in any way diminish his free speech rights compared to a full citizen? According to some scholars, the law here is murky. In other words, the government’s interpretation of how free speech rights intersect with citizenship status may be unusual but legally permissible (and that is where the aforementioned murky ingenuity of Trump’s counselors enters this saga). Aside from the discussions regarding national security and immigration status, the arrest of Khalil raises significant free speech concerns. What kind of speech is in question? I’d be the first to insist that slogans, chants, flyers and other such effusions are not instances of protected academic free speech. That’s a form of specialized discourse which is generally monitored and regulated by institutions of higher education. Academic free speech is associated with complex credentialing mechanisms that are almost uniquely reserved for professors, which Khalil is not. But based on what we know, Khalil’s political speech is constitutionally protected. In America, we have a robust right to say offensive, mean things that infuriate others. One of the fears raised by the government’s actions is that sometime soon — like really soon — the administration will round up other people whose speech it abhors. Might the “disloyal” Jews who the president believed nearly cost him the election fall into that category? Liberal Jewish Americans are an evergreen target of the MAGA movement. They are also a target of Jews with markedly different politics than their own — like leftist anti-Zionists and right-wing supporters of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Still, there is something very American about their response to this crisis. Many are disregarding whatever personal feelings they may have about Khalil’s anti-Zionism in the name of broader national ideals. There are Palestinian Americans who seem inclined to establish similar degrees of critical distance and put America first, so to speak. They call for calm, pragmatism, dialogue and reasoned analysis. For all hyphenated Americans traumatized by this piteous endless conflict, this might be the sanest, most patriotic way forward.
Jacques Berlinerblau is a professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. 
