Editorial from the latest issue of The Socialist
As we go to print, Mahmoud Khalil, a key organiser of the Palestine solidarity encampment in Columbia University in New York City, has been arrested and is being threatened with deportation from the United States. This is despite possessing a Green Card, giving him a legal entitlement to reside there. He is married to a US citizen, and the couple are expecting their first child in April. Mahmoud’s arrest and subsequent detention in Louisiana (1,000 miles from his home in New York), flows from one of Trump’s noxious executive orders to deport foreign-born Palestine solidarity activists – outrageously cloaking it in opposition to anti-Semitism.
Mahmoud is a Palestinian refugee born in Syria whose grandparents fled Palestine after the 1948 Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their historic homeland by Zionist militias. Trump has said that his arrest and deportation is the “first of many to come”. Along with his many other racist and draconian measures, he is now ratcheting up a vindictive witch-hunt against the Palestine solidarity movement. This is designed to create a chilling effect and silence voices against the Gaza genocide.
Opposition grows
However, attempts to deport Mahmoud have already been met with active opposition in the form of protests involving tens of thousands, two days after his arrest by ICE – the state agency tasked with enforcing the deportation of migrants. Within a day of its launch, over two million signed a petition demanding his release, and a federal court has temporarily blocked it, reflecting the pressure of this public outcry.
Attempts to silence anti-Zionist dissent in the US are not new. In 2007, author and activist Norman Finkelstein was effectively removed from his job in St. Paul University in Chicago and has remained blacklisted ever since. More recently, on Joe Biden’s watch, encampments such as those in Columbia and other campuses were brutally repressed by police last year. Thousands were arrested, and many student protestors were expelled or suspended from their courses. More broadly, numerous states across the US have introduced legislation that seeks to criminalise the advocacy of BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions) against the Israeli State.
This is part of a disturbing global trend, with many capitalist states that back Israeli apartheid and genocide dispensing with any pretences to uphold democratic rights in their crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists. Notably, in Germany, the second largest exporter of arms to Israel, the state has engaged in widespread arrests and intimidation. Shortly after the genocide commenced in October 2023, 600 were arrested on Palestine solidarity protests in a two-week period.
The genocide continues
The deportation of Mahmoud Khalil is taking place as the genocide in Gaza continues. On the surface, a fragile ceasefire remains in place. However, conditions for the two million deeply traumatised people in the Strip remain unbearable. Food and medicines are blocked from entering this open-air prison, and electricity has been cut off. Basic foodstuffs are becoming increasingly scarce and unaffordable, while only 10% of the population can access clean, safe water. The United Nations is once again warning of the real threat of famine.
Trump’s obscene pronouncements to ethnically cleanse Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” have emboldened Netanyahu’s government to turn the screws on the Palestinian people. In the occupied West Bank, an estimated 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes by the Israeli Occupying Forces, the largest such dispossession since the beginning of the occupation in 1967.
The “Gazafication” of the West Bank
Major restrictions have been placed on the freedom of movement of Palestinians; work permits for those working within the Green Line have been revoked, and farmers are denied access to their land. Mass arrests are taking place, while new torture centres in the form of detention camps are springing up. What is now being called the “Gazafication” of the West Bank is taking place as airstrikes are hitting civilian areas, including vital infrastructure such as sewage, road and electricity networks, while housing demolition continues apace. For the first time since 2002, tanks have entered the West Bank to beef up the military occupation.
Supporting genocide in Palestine and clamping down on democratic rights at home sums up the approach of Western capitalist leaders in the last 16 months of horror. The struggle to tear down the occupation and the Israeli apartheid state is bound up with the struggle to end the rule of their system of capitalism and imperialism globally. In the face of the unimaginable horrors we’re witnessing, we urge all our readers to join the struggle for revolutionary socialist change today.
