By Reuters
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.
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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.
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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.
