Free Mahmoud Khalil!

Right now, international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests last spring are being targeted by the Trump administration. From Mahmoud Khalil to Rümeysa Öztürk, students are being rounded up and sent to detention facilities under threat of deportation, student visa or even green card be damned. This is an outrageous attack on democratic rights and a backlash against students who spoke out against genocide in Gaza. Furthermore, the desperately desired ceasefire has been torn up as bombs are dropping yet again on Palestine, with the full support of the Trump government. Clearly, something different must be done.

These attacks are part of the push by Trump to tear down the universities as liberal bastions of yesteryear and rebuild them to better serve U.S. imperialism’s needs today. Columbia, like all the Ivy Leagues, is an imperialist institution, whether the Republicans or the Democrats sit in the White House. Setting the tone for other universities, Columbia has complied with every government diktat so far to crack down on protesters: suspending, expelling, or revoking the degrees of 22 students. Columbia also agreed to put in “receivership”—i.e., muzzle—the Middle Eastern studies department, including the Center for Palestine Studies, the first and only one of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

As Rashid Khalidi, author of the seminal work The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and professor emeritus at Columbia, noted about the crushing defeats these attacks represent: “Partisans of Israel, infuriated that scholarship on Palestine had found a place at Columbia, once named it ‘Bir Zeit on the Hudson.’ But if it any longer merits the name of a university, it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.”

Trump is trying to press forward his agenda and has no room for non-compliance. The ramping up of repression against pro-Palestinian students—after the Democratic Party smeared and crushed the campus encampments nearly a year ago—is intended to ice any dissent against Israel. While we are for pursuing all available legal avenues, we caution against any reliance on the courts as the means of defense. While court rulings might at least temporarily stay some deportations, Trump has made clear that he is ready to bypass them if they become too much of a hindrance.

In order to defend the students under attack and begin to rebuild an effective movement for Palestine, we must get some things straight. The student movement last spring was defeated; we must face this fact squarely in order to even begin to pave a road forward.

The reason the movement failed wasn’t for lack of determination. The problem was that the student movement directed its energies toward lobbying the government and universities fully committed to Israel to instead “do the right thing.” But a strategy based on moral suasion has been and always will be deadly to the struggle. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are unwavering in their support to Israel not because their hearts are in the wrong place, but because the Zionist state is strategic to their interests in and domination of the region.

The U.S. imperialists will not stop supporting Israel unless their position is seriously threatened. The only force capable of posing such a threat is the working class—for example, by stopping arms shipments to Israel. But so far, the pro-Palestine movement has been isolated from the working class, leaving it even more vulnerable to attack, such as those happening now. The pro-Palestine movement needs to be rebuilt, but on a completely different, anti-imperialist basis. It must be able to draw in workers by showing how their own oppression at the hands of the U.S. ruling class is connected to both the Palestinian struggle and the defense of student activists. Moral appeals to the working class to care about Palestinians, while their own lives get harder and harder, can only repel them.

As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a March 13 statement: “Defense of the protesters requires the mobilization of students, faculty, workers, and all of the oppressed, who share a vital interest in stopping these attacks…. The idea that setting up tents on the campus quad creates a ‘hostile environment’ for Jewish students is a big lie. But it also sets a chilling precedent they will use to go after striking workers who set up a solid picket line in defense of their livelihoods. A successful defense of the pro-Palestine movement will put us all in a better position to fight back.”

The fact that the pro-Palestine movement is not in a good place should be obvious to everyone. But not to groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Left Voice, which cheer on the largely moribund movement, cut off from broader layers of society, as doing great. According to Left Voice, even the repression of student activists “comes precisely because of the strength and the depth of the movement over the last year and a half.” We shudder to think what their version of victory looks like. Prettifying the dire situation and seeking to keep the struggle on the same liberal track, these leftists criminally lead those who still want to fight down a blind alley.

At this point, it should be self-evident that there has been a marked rightward shift in the working class. While most workers hold little sympathy for the Zionist blitzkrieg, they have not been drawn into the movement for Palestine. It is urgent for activists who still want to fight to have a sober view of reality and draw the lessons of last year’s student movement and apply them to today’s defensive struggles. A reorientation is urgently needed—there is no more time to waste.