As Zionist Jews, we must condemn Trump’s campaign to deport students

Amanda Berman
April 3, 2025

Is Mahmoud Khalil — the Columbia graduate, Palestinian activist and green card holder arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a criminal? Or is he an innocent victim of Trump’s lawless and Islamophobic deportation policies?

The truth almost certainly lies between those two poles –– but nuanced takes are unpopular. Instead, too many insist with certainty either that Khalil is a violent agitator who has personally incited lawlessness and provided material support to terrorist organizations, or that he is a heroic activist arrested for exercising his protected right to free speech.

As the Trump administration has pushed for the detainment and deportation of university students and faculty accused of antisemitism for their participation in anti-Israel protests, Jews, and all people of conscience, are being forced into the false choice of prioritizing either the fight against antisemitism or the fight for due process and civil liberties — without seeing the urgent, simple truth that these fights are inextricably intertwined.

Those celebrating Khalil’s arrest have publicly offered almost no proof that supports their accusations; his oft-cited proud association with Columbia University Apartheid Divest is not itself a crime. And even if the worst allegations made against him are true, unless and until he has been charged, his arrest is, at minimum, legally suspect. If he hasn’t been prosecuted and convicted, calling him a “criminal” is nakedly defamatory.

Khalil’s defenders are equally guilty of uncompromising, binary perspectives. They refuse to reckon truthfully with his connection to CUAD, which calls to eradicate Western civilization; espouses rabidly hateful, terror-glorifying, anti-Jewish ideas as justification for violent and illegal actions; and celebrates Hamas’s rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping of innocent civilians on Oct. 7 as a “moral, military and political victory.” Treating a leader of this heinous group as a poster child of civil liberties is as stunningly ironic as it is delusional.

Determining whether Khalil committed crimes, whether his arrest was lawful and whether he can be deported is the responsibility of a court of law, not the court of public opinion. The same is true vis-a-vis students or university staff arrested on other campuses around the country.

Yet the communal infighting over those questions has obscured the much more important conversation about the absolute urgency of protecting due process. History has proven over and over that Jews are not safe in countries that don’t protect the rule of law, or the civil rights and liberties of minority and marginalized communities. It has shown us that once laws are weaponized against one minority community, every minority community is vulnerable.

It is grossly, diabolically unfair that American Jews must step up to defend the rights of those who have celebrated the gruesome crimes of Oct. 7, and other violence against Israelis. But we know that history. A government that arrests and detains people without charging them with crimes — or while accusing them of deeply offensive yet clearly protected activity that in no way amounts to crimes — is a government working to weaponize our fear and make the United States resemble authoritarian environments like those in Iran, China and Russia.

We can be enraged and repulsed by everything someone stands for, and still know that if their legal rights can be transgressed, so can ours.

Those people who exploit radicalism on the left to further radicalize the right — and vice versa — are pushing a hyper-polarization that makes it impossible to address imminent threats to our democracy. Those employing social media algorithms to distract, confuse and divide are driving us deeper and deeper into siloed echo chambers filled with dangerously flattened narratives.

This is the goal of those who want to politicize antisemitism as a partisan weapon, rather than fight it with integrity and moral clarity, no matter where it comes from.

So when someone on your social media feed urges you to believe that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are valiantly fighting very real campus antisemitism, and that Khalil’s arrest and the defunding of institutions like Columbia are actions driven by care for and commitment to American Jews, be skeptical. After all, Trump has also gutted the Department of Education and laid off half the staff of its Office for Civil Rights, while that office was in the process of investigating more than 150 cases of campus antisemitism. When Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman worked to introduce legislation to double OCR’s funding to allow it to take on these cases with necessary vigor, he could not find one Republican co-sponsor. And when Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer tried to attach the Antisemitism Awareness Act to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act — which would guarantee its passage — Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson blocked it.

Be skeptical, too, when you see other voices insisting that campus antisemitism is not a serious problem, or that the real problem is “Jewish donors” overreacting to protected speech and protest activity.

While these people argue that fears of leftwing antisemitism are just distractions from the “real” antisemitism on the political right, the truth is that campus antisemitism has been aggressively undermining institutions of academia — and many other liberal and progressive civic institutions — since long before Oct. 7. It is a problem not only among students, but among tenured professors and university administrators. Jews across the country report having been violently targeted, threatened, spat on, bullied, charged with murdering babies, barred from entering campus buildings, harassed by professors, flashed with swastikas, ignored and gaslit by administrators, and subjected to hateful, bigoted and sometimes physically violent behavior that should make any moral person’s skin crawl.

When those in the progressive movement who have long claimed to stand for justice, human dignity and civil liberties can’t find the words or the courage to call out the most virulent, heinous, anti-Jewish hatred, they empower and embolden those who are more than happy to exploit Jewish trauma nefariously. And the ability of anti-democratic actors to weaponize antisemitism as an excuse to erode our democracy depends on the silence and moral depravity of those of us who prize our democratic institutions.

We must fight as hard as we can to protect our rights and liberties, without losing sight of the importance of the battle against antisemitism. The two goals are not incompatible. Quite the opposite, they are one and the same. Open societies and liberal democracies offer the only systems that have ever protected Jews. And institutions or societies that normalize the dehumanization of Jews, or celebrate violence against Jews, are systemically corrupted.

Any Jew who fears the danger of antisemitism must call out the threats to due process, civil liberties and our democracy posed by arrests like that of Khalil — no matter how abhorrent they may find his personal ideology. And anyone who fears the threats to our democracy must call out the cataclysmic danger of antisemitism — including the corrosive and pervasive anti-Jewishness that has become ubiquitous at Columbia and other elite leftwing institutions.

Anything less than a full-throated fight for both Jewish safety and democracy is morally deficient — and a fight every single one of us will lose.

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