“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984, p.162
“Where exactly are we in the poem that begins, ‘When they came for the Communists, I did not speak out’?” Alluding to the poem by Martin Niemöller, the question echoed across the stone steps of a New York City courthouse on March 12, as Professor Joseph Howley of Columbia University addressed a crowd gathered in defense of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, facing federal charges. “They’ve already come for the asylum seekers, they’ve come for the migrant families,” he continued. “And now they’ve come for Mahmoud Khalil. It’s not a very long poem. How far down that list do you think you are?”
The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil was not an isolated legal event but a target of a manufactured narrative, one year in the making, designed to criminalize dissent under the guise of protecting Jewish students from campus antisemitism. Khalil’s charges were a product of the false narrative advanced by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s earlier report, which sought to frame American universities as sites of rampant antisemitic violence, where student activism is suspect and Palestinian solidarity is indistinguishable from hate.
Led by Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, the Committee spent over a year pursuing this narrative, culminating in a sprawling 325-page report titled Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed. The document released in the fall of 2024 did more than present findings—it published redacted but identifiable student records, without consent from either students or institutions, blurring the line between oversight and political persecution.
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified Khalil’s arrest, he did so by resurrecting protest-related charges that Columbia University had not only dismissed but publicly apologized for, as The Intercept reported: “The suspension lasted only one day before Columbia — with an apology from the university president’s office, Khalil later said — rescinded the suspension and dropped the disciplinary charges against him.”
Now, those discarded charges have been reanimated by federal power, cast as evidence in a sweeping campaign to chill student protest and redefine it as extremism. As Khalil himself wrote from a detention center in Louisiana, calling himself a political prisoner:
“If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.”
Khalil’s arrest is not an exception. It is a strategy. One that stretches across administrations, across generations, and across bipartisan lines—a strategy designed to silence, surveil, and suppress.
This is not the first time the United States has turned its gaze inward to target pro-Palestinian voices. The chilling resemblance to Operation Boulder—the Nixon-era campaign of surveillance, intimidation, and deportation aimed at Arab and Palestinian activists—is impossible to ignore. Then, as now, the U.S. government framed criticism of Israel as a national security threat, justifying the erosion of civil liberties under the pretext of counterterrorism.
The blueprint is familiar. Its modern incarnation began with the 1972 Munich massacre, when Palestinian militants killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics. That tragedy became a pretext for sweeping internal policy shifts. Acting on the advice of Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon launched a strategy prioritizing Israeli security interests—even at the cost of domestic rights. The result: a broad campaign of surveillance, visa denials, and arrests targeting Arabs, Muslims, and critics of Israel. That campaign was called Operation Boulder.
Today, the same tactics resurface. The March 8 arrest of Mahmoud Khalil—despite his lawful residency—signals a renewed willingness to weaponize immigration law and federal power against student protest and Palestinian advocacy. Khalil had stood at the forefront of Columbia’s 2024 encampment movement, calling for divestment from companies complicit in Israeli apartheid and occupation. Just as in the 1970s, when American campuses became laboratories of state surveillance, today’s crackdowns reveal a chilling continuity: the conflation of Palestinian identity with threat, the suppression of anti-Zionist speech, and the prioritization of foreign policy optics over civil rights at home.
Harrisburg Echo
The case of Mahmoud Khalil—now linked to the names of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio—summons the ghosts of another era: the Harrisburg Seven case, a moment that laid bare the Nixon administration’s broader war on dissent. The Harrisburg Seven—a group of radical Catholic clergy, including Father Philip Berrigan, and Pakistani American scholar-activist Eqbal Ahmad—were charged with conspiring to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in an effort to end the Vietnam War. The case was built on a foundation of government-manufactured hysteria, bolstered by an informant embedded within the activist circle. The state’s narrative was sensational: pacifists turned kidnappers, priests and nuns recast as dangerous radicals. But the jury deadlocked on the major charges, refusing to convict on the government’s flimsy evidence.
It was a sensational case, one that revealed the state’s growing reliance on conspiracy charges to silence radical activism. Both cases, decades apart, expose the same underlying tension—the American state’s attempt to silence those who dare to challenge the machinery of empire.
The trial was built on flimsy evidence, much of it derived from an informant embedded within Berrigan’s activist circle. The prosecution’s narrative was dramatic—Catholic pacifists turned kidnappers—but ultimately, the jury’s decision was crucial. They deadlocked on the significant charges, acquitting the group of the most serious allegations. Yet the impact of the trial lingered far beyond the courtroom. It signalled a new era of state repression, where activism was no longer merely surveilled but actively criminalized under the pretence of national security.
A chilling effect settled over campus activism in the wake of the Harrisburg Seven. The case reinforced a lesson already learned through COINTELPRO and Operation Boulder—that the government was willing to use intimidation, surveillance, and the weight of the legal system to break movements from within. Many activists became increasingly wary of government infiltration, a fear that was not unfounded as informants continued to infiltrate campus organizations throughout the 1970s and beyond.
By the time the Vietnam War ended, universities had already begun shifting toward a more repressive climate, one in which radical dissent was treated as a security threat rather than political expression. The Harrisburg 7 case thus stands not as an anomaly but as a turning point—a moment when the machinery of the state, fine-tuned for war abroad, was turned decisively against those who dared to resist at home.
Just as Ahmad and his colleagues were branded seditious for opposing the Vietnam War, Khalil is not prosecuted for any crime, but for the perceived threat his voice poses. His arrest, looming deportation, and the invocation of a foreign-policy clause to justify his removal mirror Cold War-era paranoia that sought to criminalize dissent. The government’s strategy remains unchanged: brand radical intellectuals as dangerous operatives, frame Palestinian activism as subversive and deploy the spectre of foreign influence to justify repression.
Yet, as with Ahmad, Khalil’s persecution will not erase the movement he represents. His struggle is part of a lineage of activists surveilled and punished for demanding justice. In time, just as Ahmad was vindicated, history will recognize that Khalil’s case was never about law—it was about power. Their enduring legacy serves as a beacon of hope, inspiring us to continue the fight for justice.
1967: The Schism Unfolds
The great struggles for justice are rarely separate; their tides rise and fall together, colliding, merging, pulling apart. The arc of the American Civil Rights Movement, at its most audacious and insurgent, stretched beyond the soil of the United States, seeing in the struggles of colonized people abroad the same brutal logic of subjugation that governed Black life at home. And yet, there was a moment—fleeting but decisive—when the path of this movement was wrenched away from its natural course when the moral clarity that linked Black liberation to global anti-colonial struggles was muddied, redirected, and fractured. That moment was the creation of Israel in 1948 and, even more decisively, the Six-Day War, of 1967, an event that reordered the political and moral landscape, forcing the Civil Rights Movement into an impossible crossroads.
Before the Six-Day War, the Jewish-American and African-American communities had maintained a significant, albeit sometimes uneasy, alliance in the struggle for civil rights. Many Jews, particularly those aligned with leftist politics, saw in the Black freedom movement an extension of their historical battles against antisemitism and systemic discrimination. Jewish lawyers played instrumental roles in the NAACP’s legal challenges against segregation; Jewish activists marched in Selma, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. There existed, at least on the surface, a belief in a shared destiny—one in which oppressed peoples, bound by common suffering, could work together toward a new dawn of justice.
The 1955 Bandung Conference’s Afro-Asian solidarity directly challenged Cold War imperialism and spotlighted colonial occupations—including Palestine. But in the U.S., Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain (1956) recast that moment through an Orientalist lens, softening its radical edge. As Alex Rubin argues, this distorted frame shaped Black political thought on Palestine, reducing it to domestic Black–Jewish dynamics and obscuring deeper ties to anti-colonial struggle. In the process, it erased Black internationalist connections to the Arab-Islamic world and buried Palestine’s pre-1948 history.
However, even in this period of collaboration, tensions lurked beneath the surface. While many Jews championed the cause of Black liberation, others were more hesitant, significantly, as civil rights demands grew more radical. As economic competition between Black and Jewish communities in urban centres intensified, so too did resentment, mainly as Jews disproportionately occupied positions of relative financial stability. At the same time, many African Americans remained trapped in cycles of poverty. Yet, these tensions had not ruptured the broader coalition. The Six-Day War, however, would change everything.
The pivotal shift, the very heart of how Palestinian liberation became a central issue within the American left, lies in the seismic aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. Before this watershed moment, Arab American activism in the United States was a scattered affair, mainly devoted to localized, community-centric concerns. However, the war’s consequences—Israel’s rapid expansion and the ensuing occupation of Palestinian territories, all underwritten by unwavering U.S. support—radically altered the landscape. This expansion revealed a profound truth to Arab American activists: their struggle was not isolated but intrinsically linked to the broader architecture of American imperialism.
The shifting sands of 1968 witnessed Martin Luther King Jr. begin a gradual recalibration of his stance on Israel under the subtle, yet insistent, pressures of influential allies. The sharp edges of his earlier anti-colonial critiques were smoothed, replaced by affirmations of Israel’s right to exist, though a lingering unease with Zionism remained. His untimely assassination, a cruel caesura, fractured the movement he led, leaving it vulnerable to the subtle currents of co-option. Figures once beacons of radicalism, like Bayard Rustin, underwent a metamorphosis, becoming staunch proponents of an indivisible Black-Jewish alliance, even as the disenfranchisement of Arab voices—many of whom had stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the struggle against American racism—grew starker.
The derailment of the Civil Rights Movement was not merely ideological; it had material consequences. The funding structures that sustained Black political organizing were increasingly tied to a pro-Israel consensus. This ideological schism cleaved the movement, separating the radical from the respectable, the global from the narrowly parochial. SNCC’s bold pronouncements in support of Palestine and their denunciation of Zionism exacted a heavy toll: funding evaporated, mainstream Black leaders distanced themselves, and the media, ever wielding its power, branded them as anti-Semitic. This tactic, perfected over decades, weaponized accusations of bigotry to silence any critique of Israel, regardless of its anti-colonial roots, effectively severing the threads connecting the oppression of Black Americans to that of the Palestinian people.
The 1970s saw a redirection of Black political energies, narrowing their internationalist vision. The burgeoning Black political class, integrating into the Democratic Party, was gently steered towards an embrace of Israel, a concession to Cold War exigencies and the bureaucratic domestication of civil rights. Figures like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Andrew Young, once champions of Third World solidarity, found their voices muted, their internationalism tempered by the demands of electoral pragmatism. And so, by the 1980s, what had once been a movement with a global consciousness became increasingly domesticated, forced to fight for inclusion within the American empire rather than against it. No surprise, then, to see the baton passed seamlessly from Clinton to Biden to Harris, each one walking the same well-worn path of managed dissent. The Black politics with its radical edge blunted, its gaze turned inward and thus the politics of Diversity and Inclusion began, co-opting it within the Democratic Party’s fold.
However with the 2014 Ferguson Uprising and the Rise of Black Lives Matter, and amidst rising precarity and a cost-of-living crisis, a renewed anti-war movement is emerging from the ground up—refusing to separate breadlines from bomb craters. At its forefront, Kshama Sawant’s campaign calls out the bipartisan machinery of empire, urging voters to see foreign policy not as distant geopolitics but as domestic injustice in disguise. In her view, complicit candidates aren’t anomalies—they’re products of a system that trades ethics for profit, justice for militarism. Her message is sharp: the wars waged abroad are inseparable from the austerity imposed at home.
“Zionism- is- racism” Debate
The Arab American activism was not a marginal note to a central current in the complex weave of 20th-century U.S. radical movements. Pamela Pennock’s meticulous work, “The Rise of the Arab American Left,” dismantles the conventional narrative by showcasing the vital alliances forged between Arab American activists and the Black Panthers, Puerto Rican nationalists, and the New Left. These were not mere symbolic gestures but concrete collaborations, with Arab American activists working alongside organizations like SNCC and the Workers World Party and engaging in critical dialogues with figures like Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.
The Arab American Left’s crucial role in the contentious Zionism-is-racism debate. The resolution was framed as “the Soviet-Arab strategy to expel Israel from the United Nations and replace it with Palestine led to the adoption UN resolution.” The 1975 UN Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism, thrust Arab American activists into a complex ideological battle. They faced opposition not only from pro-Israel forces but also from segments of the liberal civil rights movement.
Organizations like the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) and the Organization of Arab Students (OAS) underwent a profound political radicalization. No longer content with mere cultural advocacy, these groups embarked on a militant path, directly confronting Zionism and the very foundations of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East. They understood that the plight of the Palestinians was not a distant concern but a mirror reflecting the systemic injustices they faced at home, a nexus where global power and local struggle intersected. This realization, forged in the crucible of war and occupation, catalyzed a movement, embedding Palestinian liberation firmly within the American left’s agenda.
Throughout the 1970s and into the Reagan era, Arab American activists found themselves increasingly isolated—not just by the state, but often by the very progressive coalitions they stood alongside. The politics of Palestine, wrapped in taboos and red lines, cast a long shadow over even the most committed anti-racist movements. Support for Palestinian liberation was not merely unpopular; it was radioactive. To speak out risked expulsion from coalitions that otherwise championed justice.
As the Cold War waned, when Secretary of State James Baker stood before AIPAC in May 1989, he flipped the script: peace depended not on Israeli concessions, but on Arab states proving their goodwill. His call to end the boycott of Israel and to “repudiate the odious line that ‘Zionism is racism’” wasn’t just diplomatic—it was ideological. Baker effectively made entry into the peace process conditional on abandoning anti-colonial critique, placing the onus squarely on Arab states to conform, not negotiate.
This wasn’t accidental. As pro-Palestinian voices pushed back against U.S. complicity in Israeli occupation, they were met not with solidarity but with silence—and often suspicion. The state, for its part, was already laying the groundwork for what would become the post-9/11 security apparatus. By the Reagan era spilling into George H.W.Bush, anti-terrorism laws began to conflate Palestinian activism with terrorism itself, transforming political expression into criminal intent.
Media narratives and federal policy operated in tandem, constructing Palestinians not as freedom fighters or refugees, but as threats. This convergence of racialized suspicion and political repression normalized the surveillance and silencing of Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian communities—long before the war on terror gave it official sanction. Far from being marginal, these struggles were central to the era’s defining battles over empire, belonging, and dissent.
Palestine as a Slur
It is a peculiar alchemy, the way a word is transfigured into an accusation and how an identity can be weaponized not for what it is but for what it is made to signify. On March 12th, in one of his signature eruptions of crude, unfiltered instinct, Donald Trump declared that Senator Chuck Schumer was no longer Jewish but Palestinian. “Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned. He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.”
At that moment, the word Palestinian was not merely descriptive, not an ethnicity, not a heritage, not the name of a people who have lived, suffered, and resisted. It was a curse, a diminishment, a demotion from one form of humanity to another, from belonging to exile, power to dispossession. In his characteristic bludgeoning of language, Trump did not mean that Schumer had joined a nation or taken up a cause. He suggested that Schumer had fallen, that he had become something lesser, tainted, and weak.
The paradox is sharp enough to cut. In the lexicon of power, to be Palestinian is not merely to be from a place. It is to be made into an object, a category of undesirability, a condition rather than a people. Trump’s invocation was meant not just to insult Schumer but to define what is contemptible—to be Palestinian is to be stripped of legitimacy, to be cast outside the sphere of entire humanity, to be rendered into a cautionary tale. In this calculus, Jewishness is not merely an identity but a credential, a mark of belonging within a privileged political order. One can “lose” it, not by renouncing faith, but by failing to uphold the expectations of empire.
But the more profound irony is that Schumer, a staunch Zionist and a lifelong defender of Israeli policies, has never stood in true solidarity with the Palestinians. There is no sudden transformation, no ideological awakening that justifies Trump’s framing. What Schumer did—his great crime in Trump’s eyes—was to issue mild rebukes of Israeli policy, not from a place of radicalism but from within the safety of American political consensus. And yet, even this was enough to push him beyond the pale. Suppose one does not toe the line with sufficient zeal. In that case, if one so much as hesitates before the machinery of occupation, they risk being cast into Palestinian-ness—a state not of being but of exile from acceptable political discourse.
Here, Palestine is not a national identity but a rhetorical void, an accusation rather than a belonging. The term, in Trump’s usage, is an expulsion from worthiness, a warning that to stray from absolute allegiance is to be cast into the realm of the dispossessed. And therein lies the bitter truth: to be Palestinian in this framework is not to be a person of a people, a culture, or a history. It is to be made into an absence. A warning. A thing that has lost its place in the world.
This paradoxical journey from the “Zionism-is-racism” debate to Palestine as a slur is telling of how the US-Israel axis has succeeded in changing the narrative.
The Unbroken Chain of Resistance
In hindsight, the story of Operation Boulder is a stark reminder of how racial and political biases can shape government policies, particularly when foreign conflicts and domestic politics intersect. The repression faced by Arab Americans in the 1970s is emblematic of how ethnic and political scapegoating can become institutionalized, with devastating consequences for civil rights and community cohesion. Yet, the resistance that arose from this repression underscores the resilience of Arab Americans, who turned persecution into a rallying point for collective action and political transformation. The story of Arab American activism in the face of government harassment is ultimately one of resistance, unity, and a renewed commitment to defending their rights and community.
The arrests, the threats, the institutional silencing—none have succeeded in extinguishing the call for justice that reverberates through each new generation of Arab-American students. The current wave of pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses—spurred by Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and committing genocide—stands on the shoulders of this history. The long march of Arab-American student activism has never been about a single war, protest, or martyr. It has been about building an unbroken chain of resistance in a country that has spent decades trying to sever it.
This is the anatomy of the political arrest of Khalil.
Not just Mahmoud Khalil’s—but an entire apparatus of repression masquerading as protection, where state power is used not to defend students, but to discipline them into silence when the state decides that resistance looks too much like truth. And with every protest, every demand, every moment of defiance, the next generation takes up the fight, ensuring that Palestine remains a wound in the conscience of the American university.