\n<\/p>\n
On Friday, 21 March \u2013 two weeks after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil<\/a>, a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Syria; a week after Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian graduate student, fled to Canada to avoid being detained by ICE; and just a few days after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, killing more than four hundred Palestinians in less than 24 hours \u2013 Columbia University capitulated to the Trump administration\u2019s menu of demands, including a ban on the wearing of non-medical masks on campus, adherence to a broad and highly tendentious definition of antisemitism that would forbid almost any criticism of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, and the imposition of a \u2018senior vice president\u2019 to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.<\/p>\n Columbia\u2019s surrender \u2013 a \u2018shameful day\u2019, in the words of Sheldon Pollock, who oversaw MESAAS \u2013 took place hardly a week after the Trump team presented its ultimatum. Four hundred million dollars in federal funds for scientific research were at stake, but it would be a mistake to view Columbia\u2019s decision as a painful concession under financial pressure. The university could have compensated for the loss by dipping into its $14.8 billion endowment; it could have taken the administration to court for its extortionate assault on academic freedom and the right to assemble; it could have sought to build a united front with other universities facing unconstitutional demands from the White House. Instead, the board of trustees \u2013 stacked with supporters of Israel \u2013 took advantage of Trump\u2019s ultimatum to accelerate a campaign against pro-Palestine dissent launched when Joe Biden was in office.<\/p>\n Pro-Israel faculty, as well as prominent deans and a representative of Jewish alumni, had met in February with the university\u2019s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, urging her to \u2018get ahead\u2019 of the Trump administration with new restrictions on protest. Esther Fuchs, a co-chair of the antisemitism task force at Columbia, said that \u2018a lot of these things are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we\u2019ve gotten done more quickly.\u2019<\/p>\n Paul Weiss, a liberal law firm, has followed suit, agreeing to work on $40 million in cases approved by Trump, and to donate tens of millions of dollars to a group combatting antisemitism. Up next is the University of Pennsylvania, under threat of losing $175 million in research grants for allowing a transgender woman to compete in the women\u2019s swimming team.<\/p>\n That Columbia was first on the list was predictable, not just because of the scale of the protests there but because of Trump\u2019s personal animus against the university. More than 25 years ago, Columbia\u2019s then president, Lee Bollinger, turned down a Trump development project, the price of which would have been \u2013 by coincidence \u2013 $400 million. \u2018Destroy Columbia University\u2019 was among the proposals advanced by Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute last December, in an article headlined \u2018A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education\u2019<\/a>. Eden advocated arresting Bollinger: \u2018Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.\u2019 Trump is also aligned with right-wing Zionists in the United States who loath Columbia for having been the home of Edward Said<\/a> (the \u2018professor of terror\u2019) and for its Middle East Studies programme, which they called \u2018Birzeit on the Hudson\u2019.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing surprising about Trump\u2019s attack on the universities, or on the liberal law firms that he also despises. What is<\/em> shocking is the ease with which his attack has so far succeeded. Like the academics and politicians in Michel Houellebecq\u2019s novel Submission<\/em>, American college administrators and lawyers are responding to Trump\u2019s bullying as if it were an opportunity to carry out \u2018reforms\u2019 \u2013 and as if they were secretly relieved that their hand has been forced by the Leader. This is a tale not so much of capitulation to an authoritarian leader as of collusion with him.<\/p>\n The groundwork for Trump\u2019s assault was laid by the universities themselves, and by the Biden administration, which supported the crackdown on the encampments. In the show trial Congressional hearings<\/a> that led to the firing of Claudine Gay and other university presidents, Gay and her colleagues never contested the claim that slogans such as \u2018Palestine will be free from the river to the sea\u2019 amounted to \u2018calls for genocide against Jews\u2019. In effect, the universities ceded the ground to Israel and its supporters, allowing them to paint the protesters as antisemites calling for the murder of Jews \u2013 and conveniently distract attention from the actual genocide unfolding in Gaza.<\/p>\n There were disturbing incidents of aggression against Jewish students on some campuses, including Columbia. But there were also cases of physical violence against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including a mob attack at UCLA, and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, one of whom was left permanently paralysed. Columbia and other universities could have punished individual incidents of anti-Jewish hatred, while defending the right of student protesters \u2013 many of them Jewish \u2013 to call for divestment from a state that, with American weapons, has carried out the destruction of an entire society.<\/p>\n Instead, Columbia embraced the narrative of its accusers, amplified by highly selective accounts of the protests by \u2018liberal\u2019 writers sympathetic to Israel. On this view, the protests were themselves antisemitic, or at the very least caused Jewish students to feel unsafe, and therefore could not be tolerated. The rights of Palestinian students, whose voices, unlike those of conservative Jewish students, are not echoed by members of the board of trustees, were ignored, as were their much more serious concerns over discrimination and safety.<\/p>\n In an email to the administration in January, Mahmoud Khalil warned that he and other student protesters faced \u2018severe and pervasive doxxing, discriminatory harassment, and very possibly deportation in retaliation for their lawful exercising of their rights to freedom of speech, expression and association\u2019. An organised campaign against Khalil and others was already underway, both within the university and in right-wing Jewish organisations such as Betar and the Anti-Defamation League (which celebrated his arrest). Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, denounced Khalil as a \u2018terror supporter\u2019 on X, and, in another post, suggested deporting him, tagging Marco Rubio. The night before his arrest by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, Khalil wrote to the university administration: \u2018I haven\u2019t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.\u2019<\/p>\n Armstrong not only failed to come to his aid; she has not been able even to mention his name in any official correspondence<\/a> since he was handcuffed in his apartment, where he had just returned from dinner with his pregnant wife. As the Trump administration hailed the detention of Khalil, a green card holder and legal resident (\u2018Shalom, Mahmoud,\u2019 the White House wrote on X), Armstrong claimed that her university was committed to making \u2018every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus\u2019.<\/p>\n Shortly after Khalil\u2019s detention, in a meeting with international students, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, urged them to remove posts about the Middle East. \u2018Nobody can protect you,\u2019 he said. \u2018These are dangerous times.\u2019 True enough. Nonetheless, it was extraordinary that the dean of the country\u2019s most prestigious journalism school was advising students to practice self-censorship \u2013 and expressing, in effect, the \u2018learned helplessness\u2019 that the American government has so often sought to instill in its critics. On 21 March, Armstrong and the board of trustees effectively buried the Columbia University of C. Wright Mills and Richard Hofstadter, of Edward Said, Barbara Fields and Eric Foner<\/a>.<\/p>\n The response of some liberal commentators to Trump\u2019s attack on Columbia has been to argue that \u2018antisemitism\u2019 is simply a pretext for his effort to impose his will on institutions of higher learning. There is some truth to this. But the choice is hardly accidental. Trump is surrounded by antisemites and himself prone to making antisemitic comments about sinister globalists. By styling himself as a warrior against antisemitism, he packages a highly repressive \u2013 and discriminatory \u2013 campaign as a crusade against bigotry. The charge of antisemitism is, more importantly, a way of delegitimising the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence, and strengthening Israel\u2019s efforts to inflict \u2018politicide\u2019 on Palestine. It is the logical corollary of Trump\u2019s support for Israel\u2019s resumption of the war on Gaza, and his call for the creation of a Palestinian-free \u2018riviera\u2019. Those who raise the mildest of objections \u2013 even the Zionist ultra Charles Schumer, the minority leader of the US Senate \u2013 can be derided as \u2018Palestinian\u2019. Protesters will find themselves at the mercy of the Justice Department\u2019s Joint Task Force October 7<\/a>, which seeks to \u2018investigate acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies and their affiliates, as well as acts of antisemitism by these groups.\u2019 In other words, students who protest against Israel\u2019s war on Gaza could be charged with material support for \u2018terrorism\u2019 and possibly jailed.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s approach to the policing of pro-Palestine dissent is ruthless, but not much more than that of universities like Columbia. Other universities are falling into line. Harvard recently endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance\u2019s definition<\/a> of antisemitism, a pillar of Israel\u2019s efforts to muzzle discussion of its oppressive practices. Susan Neiman<\/a> coined the term \u2018philosemitic McCarthyism\u2019 to describe the situation in Germany, where writers, artists, museums and cultural institutions that receive state subsidies have seen their funds cut for expressing support for Palestinian rights, and where many left-wing Jews have been assailed as antisemites. Philosemitic McCarthyism in Germany has underwritten a policy of unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu, while doing nothing to curb the rise of the neo-Nazi AfD party. The AfD, whose pro-Israel credentials are impeccable, is this week headed to Israel for a conference on \u2018combating antisemitism\u2019.<\/p>\n Mahmoud Khalil, who never wore a mask, had a strong premonition that he would be arrested. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Syria and fled the civil war, he\u2019d never had the luxury of safety, unlike his accusers. As a Palestinian, he knew his rights were conditional \u2013 even in a \u2018country of immigrants\u2019. After his unlawful detention, only thirteen members of the House signed a letter demanding his release. In his letter from prison<\/a> in Louisiana, he said:<\/p>\n Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn\u2019t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn\u2019t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Khalil\u2019s invocation of the \u2018right to have rights\u2019 is an allusion to Hannah Arendt. Arendt was thinking of Jewish refugees like herself, whom the Germans had stripped of their citizenship. Today it is refugees from the Global South, and above all Palestinians, whose right to have rights, whose very existence as a people, is under threat. (The law under which Trump seeks to deport Khalil is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which originally targeted suspected Communists among Jewish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust.)<\/p>\n Liberals in the West \u2013 on our campuses and in our politics \u2013 have contributed to an anti-Palestinian hysteria by carving a \u2018Palestine exception\u2019 into their liberalism. What they have chosen to overlook \u2013 the ethnocratic, racist character of the Israeli state; its brutal, authoritarian policies towards Palestinians \u2013 has now been embraced as a model for their own societies by Trump and the far right. The right to have rights was always asymmetrical, but its denial has now been radicalised by MAGA to include virtually anyone who incurs the disfavour of the Trump administration. <\/p>\n There is of course a difference between hypocritical liberalism and violent right-wing authoritarianism. But the one has helped pave the way for the other. Behind Armstrong\u2019s cowardice, and the cowardice of her accomplices in the university administration and faculty, lies the hope, or the calculation, that caving to Trump\u2019s ultimatum will allow Columbia to function \u2018normally\u2019 again. Research funds will return, along with donations from wealthy supporters of Israel, and the campus will be quiet. But the result is to make a mockery of the academic freedom the university claims to uphold, and to ensure the erosion \u2013 the destruction \u2013 of the university\u2019s values. The campaign of repression is already spreading to other targets. Submission is no way to stave off fascism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n