Arrests of Columbia pro-Palestine activists will not save Israel's image

Al Jazeera

12-03-2025

In April 2024, students across the United States were mobilising to demand an end to their universities' complicity in the genocide in Gaza,
I wrote an article explaining why I saw the emergence of these protests, and especially those at Columbia University's New York City campus, as a turning point in the global movement for Palestinian rights and liberation.
Now, almost a year later, the federal government is fiercely cracking down on these protests, and punishing the brave souls who played a leading role in them, to protect Israel from scrutiny and conceal its undeniable complicity in its genocide.
This month, Trump's government, guided by his newly formed multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, announced the cancellation of roughly $400m in federal grants to Columbia University over what it deemed a 'failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment'.
Further, Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a promise to revoke 'the visas and green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported' – 'Hamas supporter' in this context is of course just a code word for anyone who supports Palestinian rights and objects to Israel's repeated violations of international law.
Rubio's statement was not an empty threat. Earlier this week, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University who played a prominent role in last year's Gaza protests there, was arrested by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE) at his Manhattan flat, in front of his American wife, who is eight months pregnant. Despite holding a Green Card, he is now being threatened with deportation. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused the former student of 'leading activities aligned to Hamas'. It is unclear whether he is facing any actual charges or being accused of a crime that could warrant this treatment.
The information currently available to us about the case of Mahmoud Khalil points to a grim reality: Washington is willing to deport a legal permanent resident for playing a prominent role in protests that were critical of and upsetting to Tel Aviv.
It seems the current administration is so committed to pleasing Israel and crushing students' objections to genocide that it is willing and eager to stamp on core American rights, values and liberties.
But this unprecedented crackdown is also indicative of the success of these protests. Trump is willing to risk so much to silence the anti-genocide cry coming from American universities because these protests – once dismissed as meaningless 'noise' on campuses detached from wider society – have succeeded in toppling a critical pillar of Israel's well-established public relations strategy in the West.
Student protests put the Palestinian struggle at the top of the national agenda, and encouraged many Americans who are normally oblivious to the events in the Middle East and get their news and commentary strictly from pro-Israel sources, to pay attention to what's happening in Gaza.
As they started to pay attention, many realised Israel is not a democratic oasis in a region full of war-crazed barbarians as it has long pretended to be, but a colonial outpost, an apartheid state currently enacting genocide upon a captive population.
As people turned to on-the-ground sources to understand what students on American campuses are so passionately protesting against, the contrived image of Israel as a moral force 'merely defending itself from terrorists' has crumbled. This is not just sentiment. In a Gallup poll published this month, Americans' support for Israel polled at an all-time low, and sympathy for the Palestinian plight was at an all-time high. The American administration's ongoing clampdown on student protesters is a testament to its desperation to save this crumbling facade.
In its efforts to silence criticism of Israel on American campuses, the American administration is following a well-worn playbook. Taking its cues from Tel Aviv, it is conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and then claiming it must stamp out anti-Zionism just like it works to stamp out anti-Semitism, in the name of public safety and 'shared values'.
This script has gained increased traction in Congress since the beginning of the genocide in Gaza. In December 2023, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a measure (House Resolution 894) that rejects the 'drastic rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world' and then goes on to 'clearly and firmly' state that 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism'. In so doing, it classifies any criticism of the state of Israel and its actions as an attack on the Jewish people.
The efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism to silence pro-Palestinian activism and malign those supporting Palestinian rights as hateful are also gaining ground in universities amid the Trump administration's crackdown.
In January of this year, faced with two lawsuits that accused it of not doing enough to prevent anti-Semitic harassment on its campus, Harvard University agreed to adopt a broad definition of anti-Semitism to reach a settlement. This definition – a product of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) – considers certain cases of anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli criticism as anti-Semitism. Many universities facing similar lawsuits, or merely scared of attracting the ire of the Trump administration and losing federal funding, are expected to follow suit.
But none of these are proving enough to stop the people in the West from recognising the truth about Israel.
For many years, Israel managed to sell itself to the American public as a small but proud democracy, heroically fending off existential threats. But the carnage unfolding in Gaza has forced Americans – and the Western world – to reckon with the horrifying truth behind that tale. The Israeli military's indiscriminate shelling and ground invasions have laid waste to the entirety of Gaza, decimating families and turning schools and hospitals into rubble.
Far from a small outpost of 'civilisation' in a 'barbaric' region, Israel is a ruthless US-backed nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world, attacking Indigenous people to keep them imprisoned in a small corner of their own land. It uses a largely American arsenal to regularly ' mow the lawn ' in Gaza and the West Bank, steal more land by expanding its illegal settlements, and keeping Gaza under a land, air and sea blockade.
As a genocide in Gaza unfolded over the past year and a half, photographs of dismembered children filled timelines as protesters across the US, and especially in university campuses, put the tragic realities of life under US-supported Israeli occupation under the spotlight. What is left of Israel's carefully curated image began to crumble.
Politicians who support the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism claim they are doing so to combat hatred. Yet, we see, time and again, how these same forces remain silent when Jewish activists are expelled from protests or face police violence for standing with Palestinians. If their genuine concern was anti-Semitism, they would be equally committed to defending the rights and safety of Jewish people who align with the Palestinian cause. Instead, they use the mere whisper of 'antiSemitism' to smear entire protest movements, all while funnelling billions in aid to a foreign government that has systematically denied Palestinians their humanity and statehood for more than seven decades.
The truth is, the student activists at Columbia – like those at countless other universities – did not invite oppression or orchestrate some campaign of hate. They stood up for Palestinian human rights. They urged their institution to stop profiting from, or ignoring, the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. In return, the federal government is punishing them and their school with savage fury, ensuring no academic institution dares replicate their protest without risking financial devastation.