With Mahmoud Khalil’s Arrest, US Violence Abroad Is Coming Home

Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat responds to the arrest of Columbia University student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and situates it in the long, bipartisan history of anti-Palestine suppression of free speech. “It was the Biden administration, it was the Democratic establishment, that has created the conditions that we are now seeing taken advantage of,” she says of Khalil’s targeting by the Trump administration for deportation. Erakat calls for continued resistance and study of U.S. imperialism and Zionism in the face of racist repression. “This is the precise moment we should be studying Palestine in order to understand ourselves and what’s coming and our responsibility in the world as an imperial power.”

TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: For more on the criminalization of dissent and repression of pro-Palestinian activism, we’re joined now from Philadelphia by Palestinian human rights lawyer, Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Her most recent article for the Boston Review is called “The Boomerang Comes Back: How the U.S.-backed war on Palestine is expanding authoritarianism at home.”

If you can respond, Professor Erakat, to these latest developments with Mahmoud and talk about what you mean by the boomerang effect?

NOURA ERAKAT: Thank you, Amy.

By the boomerang effect, I am invoking Aimé Césaire, Martiniquan essayist, author, poet, who in 1950 wrote a searing polemic on the discourse on colonialism, where he pointed a finger at European and Western leaders who were condemning Hitler for the execution of genocide within Europe’s shores, and telling them very blatantly that they are not different from Hitler, but have little Hitlers inside of them that they have failed to condemn because their violence has been meted out against Brown and Black and Indigenous peoples in their colonial periphery. And in that critique, he was emphasizing that the Holocaust that — the Jewish Holocaust that happens at the hands of the Nazis was rehearsed on other Indigenous, Black, Brown, colonized peoples and emphasizing that there is no violence in a colonial periphery that does not boomerang back home into the domestic sphere. And my emphasis here by invoking that was to show that there is no way to defeat fascism at home without combating empire abroad. In order to defeat U.S. state violence at home, it has to be confronted on both fronts of its domestic and its foreign image.

In this instance, we have seen that boomerang come home especially quickly as the United States, under the Biden administration, continued, fomented, supplied, made possible a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza for 16 months straight; in order to do that, repressed speech at home, fomented the attack on students, expanded presidential authority, refused to apply U.S. law, denigrated international law, and basically created, spread a red carpet for the Trump administration to come now and expand that repression to all other vulnerable communities. And I want to emphasize that this was possible because of the thorough dehumanization of Palestinians, because of the desensitization to their suffering, because of the racialization as violent and dangerous. There was not a blink amongst the Democratic establishment that children were being slaughtered and asking for Americans not to slaughter them. Somehow, “do not kill children” became an exception when it came to Palestinians.

There was actually supporting the repression of universities of their students because they were described as violent and dangerous, rather than celebrated as antiwar protesters in the tradition of university protest in this country. I have quotes from the Biden administration — from Biden himself, excuse me, where he says, “Let me be clear: Violent protests will not be tolerated, but peaceful protest is,” suggesting that the student protests were violent, when 98% of them were nonviolent, and the violent ones were violent specifically because of mob violence and because of police violence, because of drones, because of law enforcement that was sent out to the universities. It was Biden who said, “This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous. It has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere in our country.”

It was the Biden administration, it was the Democratic establishment, that has created the conditions that we are now seeing taken advantage of. The Trump administration before has tried to gut women and gender studies, DEI, critical race theory, but could not do it, but in this moment has been able to do it because all of the guards have been let down as the supposed liberal establishment allowed for these repressive regimes to be mobilized against Palestinians once again, understanding us as the lowest hanging fruit to sacrifice rather than as the canary in the coal mine that has been telling you danger is here. Those Palestinians and their allies here on university campuses, heroically at points, struggled to save some sort of core humanitarian principles in the United States, and instead were expelled , were suspended, were doxxed, were denied graduation. And now there can be no surprise that the Trump administration is mobilizing with ease as they continue to use Palestinians as their Trojan horse in order to gut the welfare state, in order to defund universities, in order to go after minority communities.

And so, this message is not to point fingers, but this message is to mobilize us and to stand in line that in order to defeat this fascist rollout, Palestinians have to be centered. Palestinian humanity has to be recognized. Palestine has to be central to an agenda, not because it is exceptional, but specifically because it is not exceptional and it is central to this agenda that is being rolled out, and it can stand at the gate against further repression.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Noura Erakat, I wanted to ask you — the warnings to more than 60 universities now that they’re under investigation, even though most of those universities did exactly what they were told last year in terms of repressing the pro-Palestinian protests. The issue of how many of these universities over the last decades have increasingly relied on federal funds, on donor, private donor, money to keep themselves afloat. Now they are having to buckle even further under, even though they did what they were told.

NOURA ERAKAT: Look, the universities have been suffering from a crisis and a neoliberal crisis in their funding and in their structure for a long time, as public funding for them and subsidy has been declining and they become increasingly reliant on private capital, including from weapons manufacturers, who are more subsidized by the federal government than, in fact, the DOE is subsidized by them. They have become beholden to this holding pattern.

But what we get in this lesson is that this kind of anticipatory obedience to do what the administration does will not make you safe, not at the university level and not at the individual level. The only way to protect yourself is to protest in this moment. Your silence will be a target, not a shield. There is no way to put your head down and to survive this moment.

And again, I want to emphasize that paying attention to Palestinians will allow you to understand what is coming. They have long been the canary in the coal mine, the Trojan horse for conservative agendas. They have been the experiment, the guinea pig for state repression. Steven Salaita was the first professor whose tenure was not denied, but revoked. Rasmea Odeh had her citizenship revoked — not her green card, her citizenship revoked. The Holy Land Foundation were subject to trials where they had secret evidence marshaled against them, a blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment. All of them, Palestinians. The Los Angeles Eight, Amy, you reported on this. I love your reporting on this. And people seem to forget, from 1987 to 2007, a 20-year witch hunt against seven Palestinians and one Kenyan for pamphleting, for passing out pamphlets for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, first prosecuted under the McCarran-Walter Act, and when that was deemed unconstitutional for its anti-communist provisions, then prosecuted under material support until it, too, was dropped.

People need to understand that what happens to Palestinians is not because we are a national security threat, but because we have been so thoroughly dehumanized, you cannot recognize our suffering, and think that it’s somehow justified. And that is a Zionist narrative that has fomented anti-Palestinian racism. And organizations that deem themselves to be civil rights organizations, like the ADL, rather than condemn the trampling — if they were civil rights organizations — rather than condemn the trampling of civil rights violations in this moment, came out and expressed appreciation for the Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, as have several other Zionist organizations.

And so, this is the moment to develop a critical analysis of Zionism and understand where you stand on it. It is certainly a responsibility of Americans to study this, because it is part of our politics. At Hunter College, the search for Palestine studies professors was canceled. This is the precise moment we should be studying Palestine, in order to understand ourselves and what’s coming and our responsibility in the world as an imperial power. And instead, it is being shut down under these precepts because of our failure to grapple with Zionism, our failure to grapple with American empire, our failure to understand Palestine, and, frankly, our failure to listen to Palestinians.

AMY GOODMAN: Noura Erakat, we want to thank you so much for being with us, Palestinian American human rights attorney, professor at Rutgers University, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Her most recent article for the Boston Review is “The Boomerang Comes Back.”

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