Dima Khalidi in The Nation: Mahmoud Khalil’s Abduction Is a Red Alert for Universities
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In an op-ed in The Nation titled Mahmoud Khalil’s Abduction Is a Red Alert for Universities, Palestine Legal Director Dima Khalidi argues that universities’ complete surrender to Trump’s threats and ever-harsher crackdowns on the student movement “will not release them from the administration’s crosshairs. (Columbia has learned that lesson 400 million times over).” Instead, their compliance has helped and will only continue to help turn students into prime targets for fascist government repression.
We saw a key instance of this with the illegal abduction and detention of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was on Trump’s radar and whom Columbia had already made an example of, putting him through ever-more draconian disciplinary processes long before he was abducted. Pro-Israel groups also publicly urged Trump officials to target him. 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.”
In her op-ed, Dima lays out four fundamental shifts that universities must make to fight for the rights and freedoms of the students and faculty who make their campuses vibrant, diverse places to imagine and build a just and viable future. To so, universities should:
1) Recognize how anti-Palestinian racism threatens all of us, and how repression of the movement for Palestinian freedom 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.
2) 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.
3) 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 not only oppose Israel’s policies but also US support for them.
4) 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. Universities have heeded the calls for divestment before and must do so now.