I grew up under a terrifying authoritarian regime. Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is right out of their playbook

There’s a nip in the air, and it’s not from the early March wind. It’s the chill of fear and despair that is all too familiar to me. The recent Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday has brought back my most tormenting childhood nightmares as a child of Holocaust survivors in Communist Romania in the 1950s.

A knock at the door could make for moments of terror. For my parents, it recalled wartime experiences of hiding, trying to evade deportation, and hearing neighbors being taken away. And, for me, it always came with the fear that the Securitate — the dreaded secret police known for brutal arrests and interrogations — was coming for my parents.

There was no schoolmate, teacher or neighbor who could be trusted not to denounce us. There was never a lack of a pretext to arrest “enemies of the state,” a term often used as a code word for Jews. But during all that frightening time, there was a word that offered hope of living in freedom from such nightmares. That word was “America,” or as my mother pronounced it with enthusiasm, drawing out the “e,” “Amérika.” We came here believing in that possibility, and much of me still does.

I’ve spent much of my career teaching and writing about the memory of the Holocaust and other painful histories transmitted across generations. One of the core beliefs that fueled my work: The constant fear of repression, deportation or disappearance that I grew up with is not one that anyone should experience, ever again.

And today, I cannot help but think about Mahmoud Khalil’s history and the traumas that his unborn child — his wife is eight months pregnant — could inherit.

Khalil was born to Palestinian parents in a Syrian refugee camp, had to flee Syria for Lebanon, and was able to come to the U.S. to study at Columbia, eventually earning his green card. He should have been protected by the First Amendment to speak and act in support of Palestinian freedom, rather than be punished for his political speech with detention and threatened with deportation.

After the brutal Hamas attack of Oct.7, 2023, campuses became a focal point of protests over Israel’s violent retaliatory war on Gaza. Watching as those protests were quickly characterized as antisemitic and suppressed raised concern, for me, about what might follow. When university presidents, including Columbia’s, were summoned to appear before Congress and asked about campus protest and antisemitism, it became clear that right-leaning parts of the government were ready to use student anti-war activism as an excuse to implement strict control over speech, protest and higher education at large — moves that would take us much closer to an environment defined by fear like that with which I grew up.

I was particularly worried, alongside many of my Jewish faculty colleagues, that the false characterization of Columbia University — where I have taught since 2004 — as a hotbed of antisemitism would be used to facilitate that crackdown.

A growing group of progressive Jewish faculty of conscience came together to dispel this rampant portrayal after Congress launched pointed attacks on campuses last spring. We have argued vociferously for a clear distinction between an understanding of antisemitism as anti-Jewish hatred, which certainly exists alongside anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism, and the erroneous narrative that any criticism of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza — a war that many experts agree is genocidal — can be equated with anti-Jewish sentiment.

Student activism in support of justice and freedom for Palestinians is not inherently equivalent to expressing support of terrorism or of Hamas’s violent attacks on Oct. 7. The allegation that it is, which has been broadly advanced by President Donald Trump’s administration, is a shameful and deeply dangerous mischaracterization.

With the withdrawal of 400 million dollars of Columbia’s federal research funding announced within a day of Khalil’s arrest, it should be obvious to everyone that what is happening on this campus, or to this campus, is not about protecting Jews. It is about trying to trample basic freedoms — freedom of expression, freedom to protest, and freedom to speak out and to act against injustice.

Stifling speech and attacking universities are well-known authoritarian tactics, deployed through history by fascist governments including Nazi Germany and Latin American dictatorships, and, today, by the regimes in countries like Russia, Hungary and Turkey. The Trump administration is using antisemitism as a smokescreen for this purpose and, as Jews, we need to reject this blatantly misleading instrumentalization.

Columbia University is being made a test case for the detention of activists and — with announced funding cuts — for the decimation of higher education in the U.S. It is distressing and dangerous that university administrations are capitulating to disingenuous narratives. We need them to commit to keeping our community safe from illegal show detentions such as Khalil’s. If a green card holder can be threatened with deportation, we are all unsafe: undocumented students and international students, faculty and staff on visas, and permanent residents alike. I am a naturalized citizen, and even I am nervous about what this could mean for me.

During my 50 years of teaching, I have benefited from the university as a sanctuary of learning, deep thinking and discovery in an environment of trust, protected by academic freedom and faculty governance. I worry that, in the present atmosphere, those qualities that I, like so many, deeply value, will be eroded to the point where it will take generations to rebuild the mission of American higher education.

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