You cannot be a liberal democrat at home and a supporter of apartheid abroad.
On the night of March 8th, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student who served as one of the primary negotiators for the campus’s Palestine solidarity encampment, was taken into custody by immigration authorities. Khalil, a permanent resident, is being detained under the pretext that the government has the right to revoke a person’s permanent residency for commission of crimes including “supporting a terror group.” This action is part of a broader weaponization of immigration enforcement by the Trump Administration, which has additionally threatened to revoke the visas of international students expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
There is, of course, no evidence to suggest that Khalil (or the Columbia encampment writ large) was in fact providing support to terror groups. Furthermore, even if Khalil himself had made any morally objectionable statements (of which there is no evidence) that alone would not constitute a crime— let alone a crime warranting deportation.
Khalil’s detention represents the most alarming expression to date of the Palestine Exception, or systematic threats against the free expression of supporters of Palestinian rights. These threats, in the words of Palestine Legal, “burden Palestinian rights advocacy and chill speech even when dismissed by the courts.”
It is important to situate Khalil’s arrest within the cultural context of the Palestine Exception: this latest salvo in the Trump Administration’s escalating war on political dissent would not have been possible were it not for a broader culture of systematic anti-Palestinian racism.
Mahmoud Khalil would not have been arrested if we lived in an America where university presidents did not feel the need to apologize for simply hosting events spotlighting Palestinian writers. He would not have been arrested if we lived in an America where politicians received the slightest bit of backlash for using the word “Palestinian” as a slur. And he would not have been arrested if we lived in an America in which the Democratic Party did not consider the mere presence of a Palestinian-American speaker at the DNC to be too controversial to bear.
What Khalil’s arrest makes clear is that America's persistent, forceful condemnation and intimidation of Palestinian solidarity poses a threat to freedom of expression at large. The persistent efforts of American civil society— and, increasingly, the US government— to dehumanize Palestinians and silence voices critical of Israel has laid the groundwork for the Trump Administration’s assault on political dissent.
It should not be lost on anyone that the Trump administration chose to target a Palestinian activist as the first victim of a broader effort to weaponize immigration and naturalization law against political dissidents. In the same way that the growing normalization of anti-trans rhetoric has emboldened Republican officials to strip civil rights protections from transgender Americans, the persistent dehumanization of Palestinians has made activists like Khalil the first victims of the Trump Administration’s crackdown on free speech.
The fate of Mahmoud Khalil and activists like him is inseparable from the fate of political expression in the United States more broadly. If the Trump Administration does end up successfully deporting Khalil, it sets the precedent for authoritarian crackdowns against dissidents of all political stripes under the obfuscatory rhetoric of combating terrorism. In the end, the Palestine Exception may well be the harbinger of a broader suppression of political activism and dissent in this country.
The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil— simply the latest example of the Exception at work— demonstrates that a system which upholds liberal democracy for some and apartheid for others cannot last. Speaking out in support of targeted Palestinian activists requires that we truly acknowledge their humanity, an act that is inseparable from a genuine reflection on the conditions that Palestinians live under in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. One cannot reject the Palestine Exception without acknowledging the legitimacy of Palestinian grievances. In that sense, defending freedom of expression at home is inextricably linked with the struggle to defend human rights abroad— it is impossible to separate one from the other.
And yet, America’s unflinching moral, diplomatic, and military support for persistent Israeli human rights abuses in the Palestinian Territories, as well as our suppression of dissenting voices against those policies at home, demonstrates that our government simply does not view human rights as being truly universal. For how else can we explain our systematic denial of those rights to a group of people simply on the basis of their race?
And if we are not willing to engage in a defense of everyone’s human rights, then we are in no position to defend anyone’s human rights.
The singular event of Mahmoud Khalil’s detention and potential deportation crystallizes how America’s refusal to defend the civil liberties of Palestinians is directly linked to the erosion of those rights at home. If we take the concept of human rights to have any political merit, we cannot afford to place any conditions upon them. The act of placing such conditions immediately and unambiguously reveals that those rights are in fact not rights at all, but rather privileges bestowed by a hegemon that (currently) sees no reason to take them away.
In short, you cannot be a liberal except for Palestine. You cannot talk about democracy and avert your gaze from your government’s support for apartheid.
Either we are all free, or none of us are free.
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