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Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you
Mahmoud Khalil knows what you’ve heard about him. That he is an antisemite. That he supports Hamas.
That he fostered “a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a letter seeking to deport Khalil on national security grounds.
It’s not just that these claims offend Khalil — though they do.
Or that they jeopardize his ability to continue living in New York City with his wife and baby son — though they do that, too.
“This is what we should aspire for: to get a place where there’s no more conflict, no more killing in that place and it’s open to anyone who wants to call it their home.”
On what a ‘free Palestine’ should look like
The major reason that Khalil put on a baseball hat and sunglasses and traveled from Brooklyn to a conference room in Manhattan last week to meet with the Forward is that he believes misplaced Jewish fear remains a major obstacle to achieving what he and other protesters consider to be the liberation of Palestine.
Speaking extensively about Hamas, Oct. 7 and his preferred political solution to the conflict, Khalil sought to reassure American Jews that the protest movement he participated in and helped lead at Columbia University recognizes “absolutely a Jewish connection” to Israel and does not seek to drive Jews out of the region.
“The Jewish people are part of the land and they should remain that way,” Khalil told me. “I want to liberate everyone.”
Face of a movement
When federal agents arrested Khalil in the lobby of his Columbia student housing last March, he was transformed overnight into an emblem of the campus demonstrations against Israel. Even many of those who objected to his detention accepted the Trump administration’s premise that he was an antisemitic extremist.
“I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time, before suggesting that his arrest might violate the First Amendment.
But despite occasionally speaking to the media on behalf of protesters, and negotiating between students and the administration, Khalil was not the movement’s face until he was arrested — and it was unclear what exact opinions and policies Schumer and his other critics were actually referring to.
Khalil, who is now 31, did not have any public social media accounts before his arrest. Unlike others at Columbia, he had not posted a video of himself saying “Zionists don’t have a right to live,” or held a sign labeling pro-Israel counterprotesters as “Al-Qasam’s next targets” or been caught on camera yelling at anyone to “go back to Europe.”
The protest movement at Columbia was fractious and, while Khalil managed to retain the respect of most encampment participants, on key issues — including whether a student who had insisted he had the right to kill Zionists should apologize, whether protesters should occupy Hamilton Hall, and whether to embrace the slogan “globalize the intifada” — he aligned himself with those calling for the more conciliatory approach.
His media tour following a court order releasing him from immigration detention in rural Louisiana last June largely confirmed this. There were flashes of anger, especially when he spoke about missing the birth of his son Deen last April, and resolve. “Even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine,” he told reporters immediately after his release.
But in repeated interviews, Khalil condemned antisemitism and violence against Israeli civilians, and spoke with passion about the important role of Jewish students he had demonstrated alongside.
All this made Khalil, who graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in public administration shortly before his arrest, a poor poster child for the protest movement’s excesses.
And yet nobody has wanted to confront this reality because it requires acknowledging that the movement had both moderates and extremists. Khalil’s opponents rejected the premise that there were any moderates in the movement, while his supporters rejected the premise that there were any extremists.
A balancing act
Khalil, like the movement he came to represent, is adamant that Zionism is racist. He opposes any two-state solution that seeks to preserve a Jewish majority in Israel.
“Rejecting the self-determination of the Jewish people on the Palestinian land in itself is not antisemitism,” Khalil said during our interview. “You are denying other people’s rights in the land.”
Khalil goes beyond accusing Israel of genocide and has said that its goal is to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza — a claim Israeli officials have strenuously denied, insisting that civilian casualties are the inevitable result of dense urban warfare. In our interview, he questioned whether militants sought to kill, rather than kidnap, Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. He is sympathetic to support for Hamas among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And like most of the Palestinian liberation movement, he views liberal Zionist groups that support Israel while seeking to push its government to the left as an obstacle.
He is reluctant to criticize the movement’s excesses, and ready with explanations for even the tactics and rhetoric he finds unproductive. Khalil argues that Israel is to blame for anti-Zionism sometimes slipping into antisemitism because its government has intentionally held itself out as representative of Jews and Judaism while carrying out what more than 40% of Americans — and the vast majority of Democrats — considered to be a genocide in Gaza.
Khalil keeps a magnet on his fridge with a map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza overlaid with the pattern of a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf, that reads: “I will stay a traveler until I go back to my home country, Palestine.”
There is nothing moderate about any of this for Jews who believe that anti-Zionism is always an expression of antisemitism.
“I have a nuanced view of the Zionist project that goes beyond ‘Zionism is bad.’”
On what he learned from engaging with liberal Zionism
But Khalil’s views are ubiquitous among those who have protested against Israel over the past two years — and are coming into the mainstream as Americans turn against Israel at a rapid pace. Its support has cratered to a paltry 13% among Democrats, and an endorsement from the AIPAC has become a liability for liberal politicians at a time when the former leader of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter just became mayor of New York City while other Democrats who share his views on Israel are winning Democratic primaries, and liberal members of Congress are rejecting funding even for Israel’s defensive missile systems.
Pro-Israel groups have been able to convince Republicans to enforce prohibitions on anti-Zionism by force — epitomized by the White House’s unprecedented attempt to deport Khalil — but the conservative vanguard is turning on this approach, with some blaming Jews for the war in Iran and referring to politicians who prioritize countering antisemitism as “J-pilled.”
If anti-Zionism is here to stay, Khalil advocates a remarkably pragmatic direction for the movement. He is critical of Hamas — including its embrace of political Islam and violations of international law — and his vision for a free Palestine includes safety and security for its Jewish residents. He is attuned to concerns over antisemitism, rejects an oppositional stance toward Jews who disagree with his beliefs and cares about bringing more of them into his tent.
“For a lot of people, all Zionists are bad,” Khalil said. “To me, no — it’s not like that.”
From Khan Eshieh to Columbia
A good place to start Khalil’s political journey is at 16, when he boarded a bus from Khan Eshieh, the Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus where he was born, bound for the foothills of the Golan Heights.
The Syrian military normally restricted access to the border, but on May 15, 2011 — Nakba Day, marking the anniversary of the 1948 Palestinian expulsion during the establishment of the new state of Israel — soldiers allowed thousands of protesters to stream into the demilitarized zone and toward Israeli territory.
Khalil had been raised on stories of his grandparents’ expulsion from a village near Tiberias to Khan Eshieh, which Yasser Arafat nicknamed the “Camp of Return,” because of its distance just 20 miles from Israeli territory. And the Arab Spring had awoken something in him.
He marched toward the border. Khalil says it was peaceful. The Israeli military says demonstrators tried to breach the border fence and threw rocks. Gunfire broke out. An Israeli soldier shot Khalil in the leg, he said, and four protesters were killed.
The incident adds credibility to Khalil’s insistence more than a decade later that he would die for Palestine. “This is a tradition of the Palestinian resistance,” Khalil said. “Longing for home.”
But the march was not a neat morality play.
The Palestinian factions inside the Syrian refugee camps — Hamas, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — had tried to stop the march from taking place because they were afraid that Bashar al-Assad’s government was using it as a distraction from mounting protests against his authoritarian rule.
A few weeks later, a similar march took place with even deadlier results. Israeli soldiers killed 22 demonstrators, sparking a Palestinian uprising in the Syrian camps that targeted their own leadership for playing into Assad’s hands and ultimately spurred a crackdown that forced Khalil to flee to Lebanon.
It was there, around the time he graduated from the American University in Beirut, that Khalil began to wonder whether he had been indoctrinated into his political beliefs about Israel.
“Growing up I was baffled by why this was happening to us — like, it’s clear this is our home, we did not do anything wrong — why were we exiled from our home?” he said.
And so Khalil began spending time in pro-Israel chatrooms on Clubhouse, a short-lived audio-only social media platform, and scrolling through Zionist discussion boards on Reddit.
“I started going into these conversations and just understanding why Israelis felt so strongly about Israel — the same way we feel so strongly about Palestine,” he said. “One of the points that caught my attention was the miscommunication and misunderstanding about what we are, and who we are, and who they are.”
Khalil suggested this lack of knowledge fueled a fear of Palestinians and the movement he participated in.
“People think that we want to drive all Jews to the sea,” he said. “We don’t believe that.”
Conflicting messages
It wasn’t always clear to outsiders what the campus protests following Oct. 7, including those at Columbia, were actually about.
The first set of demands from Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters at Columbia were relatively narrow: That Columbia’s senior administrators apologize for official statements about Oct. 7 that did not mention Palestinians, “divest from companies profiting from Israeli apartheid” and end the school’s partnership with Tel Aviv University.
But these calls received far less attention than the statement the two groups released days after the Hamas attack lauding it as an “unprecedented historic moment for the Palestinians of Gaza” and a “counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor.”
The protests often ran along these two tracks: The formal demands directed at university leadership, and the rhetoric and posturing that accompanied those demands.
Some of the students recognized that the inflammatory slogans and tactics could work against the movement. Especially after the first tent encampment started in April, fissures began to develop. Some participants — including Khalil, who emerged as a mediator between demonstrators and the administration — called for a more measured approach, while others wanted to aggressively escalate. “One of the reasons I was chosen to negotiate on behalf of these students is because I’m more pragmatic,” Khalil told Hasan Piker during a July livestream. “I can meet you in the middle.”
“There were maybe some bad actors who believed only in the theory of resistance — and believed themselves to be part of it — while Palestinians were like, ‘No, it doesn’t work this way.””
On divisions within the protest movement at Columbia
These divisions were often invisible on the outside. Everyone at the encampments was facing pressure from university administrators, who repeatedly called police to sweep the areas and arrest students, and from outside organizations that sought to identify and blacklist them as antisemites.
Even when students thought some of their peers had gone too far, the impulse was to circle the wagons rather than be seen as giving ammunition to enemies of the protest movement.
For instance, Khalil maintained that the slogan “globalize the intifada” was unproductive. “I don’t use it just because — to me, my goal at Columbia is to get it to divest,” he told Piker. But even now, he is careful to explain that it’s not intended to invoke violence and that he would never discourage others from using it.
“Even if the students used a normal word like globalize the ‘uprising’ they would receive the same sort of backlash,” Khalil said in our interview. “The point is not about their slogan, the point is about silencing them.”
But cracks began to show the following school year. A few days after the first anniversary of Oct. 7, a group of Palestinian students broke away from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the coalition that had organized the encampments. “We refuse to have our liberation dictated for us,” the anonymous organizers wrote in the Columbia Spectator. “We refuse to allow anyone to speak over us.”
The article also included a veiled swipe at the increasingly cavalier attitude some participants in the movement had been taking toward violence against Israeli civilians. It said the new group supported armed resistance against Israel under two specific provisions of international law but that “equally and firmly, we wholeheartedly disavow any violence outside of this context.”
Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian-American undergraduate at Columbia who had been a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, unleashed on CUAD in an interview last month with The Blue and White, a student magazine on campus.
“They started making these crazy-ass posts,” Alwan said, referring to their Instagram account. She referred to Khymani James, the student who had said the school should be “grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” as an “opp,” slang for enemy.
Alwan said that she and the other Palestinian students at the encampment had opposed the occupation of Hamilton Hall, in which demonstrators smashed glass door panes and two janitors said they were assaulted before police swept the building and arrested 44 people, but that they’d been ignored before being asked to defend the occupation to reporters.
The leadership of CUAD became increasingly centralized and extreme in part because students that Columbia had suspended pending expulsion — already, in many cases, those willing to take the most radical actions — now had more time for activism as other members became turned off by the organization’s direction and went back to their studies. “Anyone who could’ve talked them down was gone,” said Alwan, who described herself as being close friends with Khalil.
Khalil’s role in CUAD has been hotly contested as part of his legal case. The government accused him of failing to disclose membership in CUAD on his green card application, but the group had no formal members and Khalil’s lawyers have argued that he served as a negotiator on behalf of student protesters rather than as a representative of the coalition itself.
Either way, he is more forgiving than Alwan and emphasized that many of the students involved were teenagers who suddenly found themselves at the center of an international news story. But he has also said the occupation of Hamilton Hall was not the right move and that he was barred from entering the building while it was occupied.
“There were maybe some bad actors who believed only in the theory of resistance — and believed themselves to be part of it — while Palestinians were like, ‘No, it doesn’t work this way,’” Khalil said. “A lot of them had only read the literature of the Palestinian struggle, rather than living within it.”
The Hamas question
Khalil made headlines for declining to condemn Hamas during interviews following his release, arguing that the question represented “selective outrage” and was unfairly directed toward Palestinian activists.
He has also said that, while he is opposed to any violence against civilians, he cannot dictate what Palestinians who experience Israeli human rights abuses should do. “To them, it’s not about supporting Hamas, it’s about resisting the occupation, resisting the status quo, resisting the injustices, resisting the killing,” he said during our interview. “All of that pushed people toward any resistance to Israel: ‘Whether it’s Hamas or anyone else, we want to resist Israel.’”
But in his most detailed public comments about Hamas itself, Khalil told me that the organization is “not up to the Palestinian aspiration for liberation.”
“Hamas came to power as a result of Israel’s concerted effort to delegitimize the PLO,” Khalil said, referring to the Palestinian Liberation Organization controlled by Fatah, which continues to rule Palestinian areas in the West Bank. “The Netanyahu government was allowing funding for Hamas because they see it as a way to maintain the division within the Palestinian political sphere.”
(Netanyahu’s working relationship with Hamas has been widely reported.)
Khalil, who is Muslim, added that his personal faith and politics did not align with Hamas. “I come from a family that doesn’t believe in political Islam,” he said. “You have to separate between these two.”
More broadly, Khalil argued that most of the grassroots support for Hamas that does exist among Palestinians came about because Israel had eliminated the organizations that could pose a serious threat to its power while failing to deliver on the promise of the Oslo Accords.
“When you have the PLO, who signed the Oslo agreement — agreeing to 22% of the land, yet you see Israel continuing its settlements, blocking any attempts for the realization of Palestinian statehood — that pushed people to think, ‘This is not working,” Khalil said. “So you’re left with Hamas.”
Khalil cautioned that the support some participants in the student movement expressed for Oct. 7 and occasionally for Hamas itself — embracing the inverted red triangle symbol used in Hamas propaganda videos, for example — did not mean they believed in the organization’s ideology.
“There should be a distinction between supporting legitimate armed resistance and supporting Hamas.”
On allegations that pro-Palestinian activists support Hamas
“A big part of this movement is LGBTQ, and of course they don’t support Hamas,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of PFLP affection in this country just because it’s the left-iest organization carrying out armed resistance.”
(The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a Marxist organization that has faded in relevance since the 1990s but operates a militia that participated in the Oct. 7 attacks alongside Hamas.)
“There should be a distinction between supporting legitimate armed resistance and supporting Hamas,” Khalil said.
The question of what armed resistance is “legitimate” is one that has divided pro-Palestinian activists.
Some of the most radical voices argue that Jewish civilians in Israel are acceptable targets because they can be called to serve in the Israeli military, or because as settlers on ostensibly stolen land they do not deserve any expectation of safety. Others simply state that Palestinians have a right to resist “by any means necessary.”
Khalil, like the Palestinian student breakaway group at Columbia, is adamant that targeting civilians is unacceptable. “I grew up in a community that valued human rights and valued principles beyond religion, beyond race,” he said. “I would never, in any context, justify the killing of a civilian for any reason.”
Those who support the right of Palestinian armed resistance, but oppose violence against civilians, generally point to provisions of international law that say national liberation movements may use force against countries that deny them independence while remaining subject to the laws of war. “In short: Right to resist, including armed resistance: Yes. Right to indiscriminately kill or target civilians: No. It’s as simple as that,” Ihsan Adel, the founder of Law for Palestine, wrote in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
Many pro-Palestinian activists see the events of Oct. 7 very differently than most American Jews do. Where pro-Israel groups condemned the attacks as an unprovoked act of brutality, most pro-Palestinian organizations portrayed them as a reaction to the tight Israeli control of travel and trade into Gaza since it withdrew from the territory in 2005 and its killing of more than 4,000 Palestinians during four major military operations over that time period. Many student demonstrators also expressed skepticism about the extent to which the violence targeted Israeli civilians.
“Hamas, yes, targeted civilians to take them hostage, which is another crime — that doesn’t absolve them of anything like, ‘I want to kidnap them rather than kill them.’ That’s the same, as it turned out later.”
On whether Hamas intended to kill Israeli civilians on Oct. 7
Khalil said there should be an independent and transparent international investigation into Oct. 7, something the Israeli government has generally sought to prevent.
“I wouldn’t say Hamas were saints or angels and did not commit any crimes,” Khalil said. “The fact that civilians were caught up in such violence and the killing means that there were crimes committed, and Hamas has a responsibility for that.”
He demurred when I pressed him on whether he believed the Israeli civilians killed had merely been “caught up” in a hostage-taking operation that also targeted military installations near the Gaza border. “I have no idea, to be honest,” he said.
Khalil referred to the Hannibal Directive, in which the Israeli military can be authorized to kill its own citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage. Haaretz has reported that the protocol was used in several instances on Oct. 7.
“Hamas, yes, targeted civilians to take them hostage, which is another crime — that doesn’t absolve them of anything like, ‘I want to kidnap them rather than kill them.’ That’s the same, as it turned out later,” he added.
But while it’s true that Israel has interfered with inquiries into Oct. 7, Khalil’s insistence that it is impossible to know whether Hamas targeted civilians overlooks that several independent investigations have found that it did.
Amnesty International concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups “were part of a systematic and widespread assault against the civilian population,” while Human Rights Watch determined that Hamas and its allies “bear responsibility for the worst abuses” committed during the attack.
“I wouldn’t rule out that Hamas targeted civilians, but I wouldn’t confirm it either,” Khalil said. “That’s my position on this.”
Seeking a ‘utopia’
The recent and dramatic shift in American attitudes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it hard to imagine that the U.S. government will be able to maintain its longstanding policy of ironclad support for Israel in the years ahead.
Influential Republicans like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene have described Israel as a major burden for the U.S. and suggested that the Trump administration should wash its hands of the conflict, withdrawing military and diplomatic support rather than conditioning it on a solution.
But on the left, the question is whether the U.S. should demand a two-state solution that would preserve a Jewish majority in Israel while creating a new Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and Gaza, or press for something more radical: a “free Palestine,” an aspiration that is often left undefined.
Khalil is firmly in the latter camp.
“It’s too late to tell people like, ‘Go back to Poland, go back to Russia’ or wherever.”
On Jewish concerns about the implications of anti-Zionism
He is adamant that preserving a Jewish majority in the 1948 borders of Israel is a nonstarter. “I don’t think this framework is realistic. We would still end up in the same vicious cycle of violence that we are in right now,” he said.
That rules out cooperation with organizations like J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy group that has called for limits on American military aid to Israel and pushed for policies that would compel the Israeli government to grant Palestinian statehood.
“J Street takes everything from a lens of Israel’s security, or a lens of Jewish security, not from a lens of human rights for everyone,” Khalil said. “They want a two-state solution because that’s better for Israel, not because that’s better for the Palestinians.”
He added: “We should fight against this.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president, said in a statement that Khalil’s “characterization was incorrect” and that his organization is “grounded in a commitment to the equal rights, dignity, and security of both Israelis and Palestinians.”
This is more than a simple policy debate. One of the main reasons that some Jews found the campus protest movement to be antisemitic was because they felt that demonstrators were hinting, if not outright stating, that Jews needed to be purged “from the river to the sea.”
Khalil recognized that for many Jews the vehement opposition to the encampments was rooted in this fear, and emphasized that he rejects any solution based on “driving anyone out of the place that they were born in,” including Israeli Jews.
“It’s too late to tell people like, ‘Go back to Poland, go back to Russia’ or wherever,” he said.
He said that a “free Palestine” means a democratic country — or multiple countries — with equal rights for all citizens, and the right for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to the land from which they fled or were expelled during Israel’s War of Independence.
“Anyone fearing persecution can live in that country without fear,” he said. “I know it might sound like a very ideal utopia, but this is what we should aspire for: to get a place where there’s no more conflict, no more killing in that place and it’s open to anyone who wants to call it their home or their Holy Land.”
Another concern among many Jews, including Jewish college students who did not participate in the demonstrations, was that protesters were quick to ostracize anyone who did not wholeheartedly support this vision of a liberated Palestine.
Khalil has described Zionism as “very, very racist,” and suggested a “Jewish and democratic” state is a logical fallacy because a democracy cannot elevate one group over its other citizens.
Yet he has also proven sympathetic to Jewish claims to the land and recommended My Promised Land, the liberal Zionist history of Israel by journalist Ari Shavit, during his appearance on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast. “A lot of Jewish people subscribe to the idea of Zionism because of the fear of persecution,” he told me. “I have a nuanced view of the Zionist project that goes beyond ‘Zionism is bad’ — no, there are different layers to that project that unfortunately aren’t being seen across the Arab world or among Palestinians.”
Khalil said that many of his Jewish friends began as Zionists but changed their views over time, something he believes will need to happen more in order to achieve the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and a system of equal rights across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. “Palestinians don’t have the power to make this happen,” Khalil said during an event with journalist Peter Beinart in November. “It’s the Jewish community — whether inside or outside of Israel — that can influence that.”
And despite blaming the Israeli government for conflating itself with Jews, Khalil said his movement had an obligation to root out bigotry. “Some anti-Zionist actions may touch on antisemitism that we absolutely oppose and don’t want and need to be educated about,” Khalil said, adding that he believes the protest movement did a good job of keeping this at bay.
Khalil said that, for the same reason, he is wary of growing far-right wing opposition to Israel among figures like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens who mix a generalized hostility for Jews with dovish positions on American foreign policy.
“A lot of it is coming out of antisemitism, not out of support for Palestinian rights,” he said. “As someone who is taking a rights-based approach — a principled approach — I have to be careful that I don’t ally with people who are not genuine about their support.”
A mistake — or a message?
The tentative reaction to Khalil’s arrest by some leading Democrats and major Jewish organizations suggested a belief that some evidence was going to emerge that showed he was part of the most radical vanguard at Columbia.
That never happened.
“When the administration started with the smears, they did not provide any evidence or any quotes from me,” he said. “But people believed them because I’m Palestinian and I’m an Arab man named Mahmoud so that alone means you’re guilty.”
Canary Mission, which compiles blacklists of activists it considers to be antisemitic, only managed to find a quote in which he said that armed resistance was legitimate under international law.
Khalil’s case continues to work its way through the legal system and he could still be deported. But once it became clear that Khalil was prepared to condemn antisemitism and avoid inflammatory rhetoric, the image that the White House sought to paint of him seems to have fallen flat.
David Lederer, a pro-Israel student activist at Columbia, lamented in a video he shared on social media that the media “fell in love” with Khalil, while Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lifetime, who holds more strident views and was the recent target of a foiled alleged assasination plot, referred to him as the “perfect victim”: “A green card holder, top student, with no criminal record or radical affiliations.”
A poll of Jewish voters taken the month following Khalil’s arrest found that only 20% believed that arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters would reduce antisemitism.
But there are other ways of understanding Khalil’s arrest.
One is that it was meant to send a message, as part of a larger Trump administration crackdown, that nobody who participated in the protests should feel safe.
After Khalil was arrested, immigration agents also detained Leqaa Kordia and Mohsen Mahdawi, two other international students who had participated in the Columbia protests, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University who had written an op-ed critical of Israel, and Badar Khan Suri, an Indian Georgetown researcher. The arrests were part of a sweeping crackdown that ultimately resulted in the State Department canceling more than 800 student visas, though not all were targeted for political reasons.
The government has struggled to keep those it arrested in detention and Kordia, Mahdawi, Öztürk and Khan Suri have since been released — Kordia just last week — though the Justice Department is still seeking to deport Kordia, Khalil and Mahdawi.
“It felt like we were being hunted,” Alwan, the Columbia undergraduate student leader, told The Blue and White. “Even as a U.S. citizen, I was scared because it felt like we had exited the realm of law and logic.”
Khalil thinks something else was at play.
He believes the government was incompetent and did not understand that some protesters were more radical — and easier to paint as threats to national security — than others, and may have erred in turning him into something of a poster child for the movement.
But he believes the pro-Israel groups that targeted him online, and encouraged the Department of Homeland Security to deport him, realized that it was the very nature of his moderate brand of anti-Zionism that made him a threat.
“It was very malicious and very targeted,” Khalil said. “They did not want someone who can actually present a viable solution where everyone can live in peace.”
The post Mahmoud Khalil wants to reassure you appeared first on The Forward.
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Hasan Piker favors Hamas, is pushing Dems to be anti-Israel — and wants Jews not to worry about him
(JTA) — “People are probably going to yell at me for having this conversation,” Hasan Piker said from his livestreaming chair, midway through a video call with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to discuss his views on Jews, Israel and Zionism.
By “people,” Piker meant his own: the 3 million followers he boasts on the streaming site Twitch, where the left-wing personality, from the same chair, opines about politics in between video game sessions for up to eight hours a day. That doesn’t include the many more who watch clips of his show on YouTube or follow him on X.
“People are going to say, ‘What are you doing? This is Jewish exceptionalism. Why do you care so much about making sure that Jews like you?’” he continued.
The 34-year-old New Jersey native, who has recently rocketed into the center of the Democratic Party’s identity crisis, then answered his own question.
“I still think that there’s value in reaching as many people as possible and helping them understand where I’m coming from,” he said, “so they’re not freaking out when they see their nieces or nephews watching me on Twitch, and then they think that their sons or daughters or nieces or nephews have turned into neo-Nazis.”
“That’s why I’m having this conversation with you,” he added. “So that more people can hear something in the Jewish newspapers that isn’t just, ‘This guy is a heinous antisemite.’”
Piker is an avowed anti-Zionist who has said that “Hamas is 1,000 times better” than Israel, has said that “I don’t have an issue” with Hezbollah, compared an Iranian-backed Houthi rebel to Anne Frank and likened liberal Zionists to “liberal Nazis.” And he reiterated to JTA, “I do still believe that Zionism is a racist ideology. Like, I genuinely believe that.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt recently called Piker “one of the most outspoken, virulent antisemitic influencers in the world.” The stalwart pro-Israel Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres wrote the heads of Twitch “to express alarm about the amplification of antisemitism on Twitch at the hands of Hasan Piker,” saying he “has emerged as the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism in America.”
Such criticism has escalated as Piker, a self-described Marxist and socialist, becomes an increasingly influential player in Democratic politics. He joined rallies for a Michigan Senate candidate earlier this month and has hosted several progressive members of Congress. Next month, the provocateur will appear in San Francisco with Saikat Chakrabarti, a congressional candidate who says Israel committed genocide in Gaza. His influence is beginning to extend beyond progressives, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a leading 2028 presidential candidate, has said he would appear on Piker’s stream.
Speaking to JTA in his first extensive interview with a Jewish news outlet, Piker acknowledged that anti-Israel activism can morph into anti-Jewish rhetoric — but also said he can’t be responsible for what everyone in his movement says. He explained that he wants to combat antisemitism — in part because it undercuts anti-Israel activism. He condemned “heinous” violence against Jews, such as the Temple Israel attack in Michigan — but maintained that American Jewish organizations are fanning the flames and creating an atmosphere of “hysteria.”
How does Piker reconcile the tensions and contradictions that radiate within his worldview? The answer is important not just because his influence is rising but because there are signs that a growing number of Americans already share some of his fundamental beliefs: that Israel is a malign presence in the world and for the United States in particular; that the United States should stop sending aid to Israel; and that Israel’s character and conduct explains the violence its people face from the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.
As American Jews adjust to a new reality in which old norms about antisemitism and the U.S.-Israel relationship are being shattered, Piker’s vision is one that, some warn, Jews will need to increasingly grapple with going forward.
Piker, though, says many Jews are on his side.
“There are a lot of young American Jews, at least in my community, who also feel this way,” he said. “They might be a little bit more shy about expressing their opinions in polite company.”
JTA spoke to Piker several days before the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump and several cabinet members at Sunday’s White House Correspondents Dinner, an event that has prompted renewed concern about escalating violent rhetoric on both sides of the aisle. Some, including the pro-Israel right-wing Jewish influencer Lizzy Savetsky, have attributed the shooting specifically to rhetoric promulgated by Piker.
Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Turkish parents but largely raised in Istanbul, Piker got his start on his uncle Cenk Uygur’s left-wing web network The Young Turks. In 2020 Piker left the company and launched a Twitch stream from his Los Angeles-area home in West Hollywood that has now outstripped Uygur’s influence.
Piker’s comments about Israel are nestled among hourslong streams that touch on a wide variety of topics he labels as anti-imperialist and anti-fascist. That includes criticizing America, which he has said “deserved 9/11.”
Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued in a recent piece that Piker exhibits a “soft spot for left-coded expansionist authoritarian regimes.” Rosenberg cited the influencer’s praise of Mao Zedong and lament of the fall of the Soviet Union, noting that “the tens of millions of victims of the Soviet Union went unmentioned.” Rosenberg is currently engaged in a back-and-forth with Piker after saying the streamer mischaracterized Albert Einstein’s views on Israel; a symptom, he said, of a fast-and-loose approach to facts.
Piker’s hold on younger left-leaning audiences has alternately alarmed many liberals and made them envious. Some in the party have likened him to the right-wing firebrand Tucker Carlson or even streamer Nick Fuentes, known for his praise of Hitler and attacks on “organized Jewry.”
He’s broken with at least one significant Jewish ally: Ethan Klein, a progressive YouTuber with his own history of incendiary comments, used to host a podcast about the left with Piker. That ended shortly after Oct. 7, when Klein, who is married to an Israeli, sharply diverged from Piker on Israel. Today, Piker posts memes comparing Klein to Sen. John Fetterman, the Democrat whose sharply pro-Israel views the left sees as traitorous.
But others see in him the potential to achieve an elusive goal: a “Joe Rogan of the left” who can draw young, largely male, disaffected voters to the Democrats through the force of his charisma and unfiltered opinions. Jewish New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently joined several other prominent liberal pundits in encouraging engagement with Piker and said the streamer was an anti-Zionist, not a “Jew hater.” (Last week, Piker appeared on a Times Opinion podcast as a political commentator to argue in favor of petty theft as a form of political protest.)
Yehuda Kurtzer, founder of the liberal Zionist think tank the Shalom Hartman Institute, disagrees with Klein: to welcome Piker, he argued, means “embracing the changing of the goalposts in the acceptability of Jew-hatred in liberal societies.”
Either way, Piker doesn’t just want outreach; he wants to convince people of his positions. Chief among them is that the Democratic Party should become explicitly anti-Israel.
“If there was real expression of democracy in this country, yes, the Democratic Party would be the anti-Israel party,” he told JTA.
When it comes to his position on the future of Israel itself, Piker described his ultimate goal as “a secular, solitary state where everyone has equal rights and representation, Jews, Muslims, Christians alike” — a state that would come with the Palestinian right of return, a truth and reconciliation committee, and “some form of reparations.” But he was open, he said, to “a binational solution” in the region “in the interim period, even if it’s not the most moral from my perspective.”
He dismissed concerns that his vision would put Jews at risk; once Palestinians were fully integrated into the Israeli security apparatus, he said, they would simply have no further need for Hamas.
He told JTA that he sees himself as committed to combatting antisemitism, on his terms. In the conversation, he condemned some behavior that others on the left have justified or even celebrated.
“Antisemitism still exists. Heinous hate crimes still exist in the country, right? Synagogues being attacked, painting swastikas on the side of Hillel buildings, all this stuff,” Piker said. “This is real antisemitism, and it’s horrifying for people to experience, because they’re like, ‘I want to go to my place of worship with my family, and now I’m worried that someone could just ram their car into it.’ No one should have to live like that.”
Yet he didn’t walk back any of his earlier statements. (He has previously apologized for referring to ultra-Orthodox Jews as “inbred.”)
Then there was the matter of antisemitism on the left. When first asked about it, he acknowledged its existence, in softer terms: “It is undeniable that there has been a shift, for sure, where people, I think, are not as careful in their expressions in the way that they communicate on these issues,” he said. But he also described it largely as a downstream effect of pro-Israel lobbying and American Jewish organizations that he said have created a “forced tying of Judaism and Israel.”
Was that also true for the self-proclaimed anti-Zionists who said that Temple Israel in Michigan, attacked last month, was a legitimate target for a man whose brother had been killed in an Israeli strike on Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon? Or the ones who were celebrating the murders of Israel Embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum last year?
“I don’t believe that, by the way. I don’t think it’s a legitimate target, for the record,” Piker responded. (On his stream the day of the Temple Israel attack, he declared, “There is no justification for f**king trying to go into a synagogue and murdering kids.”)
He chalked up left-wing antisemitism, in part, to it being “much easier to get Americans on board with just hating entire populations, than to actually be anti-imperialist, anti-genocide, anti-fascist, unfortunately.”
But then he again said the “biggest reason” is the downstream effect of pro-Israel lobbying — along with, as he puts it, “a lot of the Jewish advocacy organizations that claim to be Jewish advocacy organizations, but just simply are Israel advocacy organizations, like the ADL and numerous others.” Young people upset with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, he said, are being taught by such messaging that they must be antisemitic, and some of them wind up believing it.
“It creates an environment of panic and hysteria that serves the interest of Israel,” he said. “And I think it’s actually not beneficial to American Jews at all.”
He acknowledged that not everyone on the left seemed to think that fighting antisemitism was a moral imperative. “This will come across as, maybe, messed up,” he prefaced. “But the attitude from some is, antisemitism is a problem — however, it’s nowhere near as large a problem as Islamophobia is.” When it comes to his fans, he said, “some people say, ‘Why should we care about this?’”
He was not one of those people, he insisted — even if, in his estimation, antisemitism is no longer “a systematic form of discrimination” in America the way it had been in the prewar period.
Piker believes his stated interest in fighting antisemitism sets him apart from anti-Israel streamers on the far right — including Fuentes, the avowed white supremacist and Hitler fan, to whom a growing number of Jewish and political figures are comparing him.
“In Piker’s case, his record speaks for itself, the same with Nick Fuentes. I don’t need to go into details about who they are or what they represent,” Ted Deutch, head of the American Jewish Committee, told Jewish Insider last month. “Neither one of them belongs in the middle of the political process as a result of candidates choosing to put them there.”
Piker is insulted by the comparison to Fuentes. He thinks Jewish groups consider him a threat precisely because he’s not Fuentes. That means, he said, that they may see him as a more persuadable, rational influence on young Jews.
“Nick Fuentes, we both know, is a neo-Nazi. He’s a Holocaust denier, right? He’s horrible. His worldview is repulsive,” Piker said. “He’s not going to be able to get Jonathan Greenblatt’s nieces and nephews to really reconsider their relationship with Israel.”
An ADL official sharply disputed Piker’s characterization. The organization is warning about Piker, said Oren Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence, because his praise of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah is normalizing them for his audience.
“I don’t think Hasan Piker is offering a nuanced understanding. He’s celebrating them. I mean, his favorite flag is Hezbollah,” Segal said. “He is giving them voice and legitimacy that I think many in the Jewish community are concerned about. Is that unreasonable, for people to be concerned when they hear that type of language? I don’t think it is.”
Segal also rejected the claim that the ADL and other Jewish groups were contributing to antisemitism, as when Piker said, “They’re fomenting more antisemitic tendencies amongst the population by consistently refusing to separate American Jews from the State of Israel.”
Segal said that view “ignores the various ways in which we’re combatting antisemitism every day.” He added, “It’s like saying an oncologist causes cancer.”
The ADL monitors hate of all ideologies, tracks and responds to antisemitic incidents, and conducts research into antisemitism. But the group has also pulled back on some civil rights work following criticism from the right, and Greenblatt has defined anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism — a move that reportedly angered members of his own staff, some of whom quit the organization over what they said was its overt emphasis on pro-Israel advocacy.
But Piker believes he’s far from the fringe of sentiments among Democrats, and even Jewish Democrats, when it comes to his views on Israel. There is evidence of discontent on that front: A recent survey from the Jewish Federations of North America showed that about 7% of Jews overall identified as “anti-Zionist,” almost as many as tell pollsters they are Orthodox, and that figure was twice as high for Jews under 35.
To that end, he said, he wants to build coalitions with liberal Zionists — the same group he has disparaged as “liberal Nazis.” Both his political hero, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and an up-and-comer he’s intrigued by, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, are Jews who have voted to condition aid to Israel even as they are broadly supportive of a two-state solution.
That’s fine with Piker — despite the fact that he once said “you shouldn’t even let someone be the f**king local dog catcher” if “they’ve ever exhibited any sort of positive feelings about the state of Israel.”
He told JTA he likes the stances that politicians like Sanders and Ossoff have taken to move the dialogue on the issue. He insists that, despite his strong language, he doesn’t see litmus tests the same way many in his cohort do post-Oct. 7, as more and more on the left have taken to freezing out “Zionists” from coalitions, not to mention public society in general.
“I’m a pragmatic person,” he said. “The way I see Palestine as a litmus test is not to say, ‘Oh, if you’re not fully on board with this, you’re evil and repulsive. And therefore I can never align with you in any meaningful capacity.’” Instead of insisting on anti-Zionists, he said, he looks for “people who have sympathies that I think don’t stand in the way of conversation further into a more productive place.”
He pointed to the reaction of young Jews he knew in Georgia who were outraged after more than 50 Jewish groups, including several synagogues and the ADL, penned an open letter criticizing Ossoff’s vote in 2024 to stop certain arms sales to Israel.
“There are people who are like, ‘What is this? This doesn’t represent me at all. Why are you using my name? Why are you using my religion to take this stance that I find to be unconscionable?’” he said.
Piker is convinced that the Democratic Party wouldn’t lose its strong base of Jewish supporters even if it became a full-bore anti-Israel party. Liberal Jews, he thinks, would simply decide their other concerns outweigh Israel.
“American Jews are American. If they were Israeli, they would live in Israel,” Piker said. “At the end of the day, American Jews have American problems, right? And I don’t think Israel is as high of a priority.
“Perhaps I’m wrong,” he mused. “For many American Jews, they might even say, ‘Hasan, how dare you say this. You don’t know this. That’s not the case. It is very important for me.’ And then they’ll go and vote for American-related issues.” He pointed to the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he had hosted on his stream, as a case in point: an estimated one-third of the city’s Jews voted for him, according to exit polls.
Fundamentally, Piker believes antisemitism is a distraction for the left. “If you see what Israel is doing to be a problem, as I do, and you want to solve this problem, you have to dial in on the actual root of this problem,” he said. “And I find that antisemitism, oftentimes, is moving people to focus on Jewish people rather than the actual issue itself.”
Isn’t he being disingenuous? After all, he talks about movement-building and claiming to fight antisemitism while also saying things he knows most Jews will consider antisemitic.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, though he later added that he does “fully understand” why many Jews consider him antisemitic. “That’s why I’m having this conversation.”
He signed off soon after, popping up a few minutes later on his Twitch stream for the start of another session. His fans were tuned in already, waiting for him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hasan Piker favors Hamas, is pushing Dems to be anti-Israel — and wants Jews not to worry about him appeared first on The Forward.
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Russians Retreat as Al Qaeda-Linked Jihadists, Tuareg Separatists Kill Mali’s Defense Minister, Capture Key Town
A Malian soldier stands in position with his weapon during an attack on Mali’s main military base Kati outside the capital Bamako, Mali, April 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
The military junta in Mali came under attack this past weekend in multiple locations across the expansive desert nation, resulting in the death of Defense Minister Sadio Camara and the seizure of Kidal, a key town in the African country’s eastern region.
The strikes resulted from an alliance between Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM,) an Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group fighting to establish a state governed by strict Islamic Shariah law, and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg rebel separatist militia which seeks to form an independent nation in Mali’s northeast.
Local sources told France 24 that the groups had seized control of Kidal, a reported FLA stronghold, on Monday. This victory followed the retreat of Russia’s Africa Corps, the mercenary organization the Malian government had contracted at a monthly rate of $10 million to provide security.
Fox News Digital reported reviewing video of Russian mercenary casualties and Russian vehicles fleeing Kidal. An FLA spokesperson told the Associated Press that Russia’s Africa Corps had withdrawn and that a “white” agreement had been made.
Other locations hit by attacks included Kati, Gao, Sévaré, and Mopti.
JNIM took credit for bombings at Mali’s primary airport in Bamako.’
Meanwhile, JNIM is the suspect of a car bomb planted outside Camara’s home which exploded on Saturday, killing Mali’s top military leader and three other family members.
The attacks tell “every Malian, every regional capital, and every foreign partner that JNIM can operate at will inside the supposedly secure heart of the state,” Justyna Gudzowska, executive director of The Sentry, an investigative and policy group, told Reuters.
Mali’s military junta, which has ruled since August 2020, on Monday announced injuries sustained by two of its other leaders, Gen. Oumar Diarra, who serves as chief of the armed forces’ general staff, and Gen. Modibo Koné, director of the National Security Agency.
Yvan Guichaoua, a Sahel specialist at the German research center BICC, told Reuters that the attacks intended to “decapitate” the government.
A spokesperson for the US State Department said that the United States “strongly condemns” the terrorist attack in Mali.
“We extend our deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and all those affected,” the spokesperson added to Fox News Digital. “We stand with the Malian people and government in the face of this violence. The United States remains committed to supporting efforts to advance peace, stability, and security across Mali and the region.”
A statement from the office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he is “deeply concerned by reports of attacks in several locations across Mali. He strongly condemns these acts of violence, expresses solidarity with the Malian people, and stresses the need to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure.”
Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Germany, told Germany’s DW that the strikes were the biggest he had seen in the country in years.
“Remarkably, there has been a coordination between jihadists and Tuareg rebels, which have nothing in common, but they have a joint enemy,” Laessing said. “They staged together an attack in 2012 and took over northern Mali. Then later they fell out. The jihadists got rid of the Tuaregs. So, it’s remarkable that they made a comeback.”
According to a statement from Russia’s foreign ministry posted to Telegram, 250 militants struck the Bamako Senou International Airport and the military base nearby.
“The Malian Armed Forces repelled the attack and are currently taking further steps to eliminate the militia that may have been, reportedly, trained by Western security agencies,” the foreign ministry said. “Russia is deeply concerned about these developments. This terrorist activity poses a direct threat to the stability of friendly Mali and could have the most serious consequences for the entire region.”
Laessing also spoke to the Associated Press, calling the attack a major blow to Russia.
“The [Russian] mercenaries had no intelligence about the attacks and were unable to protect major cities,” he said. “They have unnecessarily worsened the conflict by not distinguishing between civilians and combatants.”
“The fact that the Malian military intelligence has not been able to detect that these attacks were about to take place is a major failure for them,” Nina Wilen, director for the Africa Program at Egmont Institute for International Relations, told DW, saying the attacks revealed how “strong JNIM has become over the past year.”
She noted that Camara had been a key figure in establishing relations with Russia, making him a symbolic figure to target and send a message opposing the presence of Russian troops.
Islamist activity in the Sahel of Western Africa has risen in recent years, causing analysts to label the region the most lethal place on the planet for terrorist deaths, with JNIM leading the body count.
The trend has caught the attention of Washington, DC.
“Across the Sahel in West Africa and in East Africa, terrorist groups are expanding, embedding, and operating with increasing capability,” US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said during a hearing last week on terrorism in Africa. “ISIS affiliates and al-Qaeda-linked groups are growing, controlling territory, and exploiting weak governance.”
“In region after region, terrorist groups are outpacing the ability of local governments to respond,” Cruz added. “The failures threaten our interest globally and endanger the American homeland. The threat is rapidly growing and demands attention.”
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US soldier charged for threatening to ‘kill every single Jew’ inside of a synagogue
(JTA) — A soldier stationed at Fort Polk in Louisiana was arrested last week after he told users on the popular messaging platform Discord that he planned to conduct a mass shooting at a synagogue.
Jakob Marcoulier, 22, was arrested last Thursday and charged with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce after the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center received a tip in February that he had made threats toward synagogues, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the western district of Louisiana.
According to court documents, the FBI obtained audio from Discord in which Marcoulier allegedly said, “After this deployment if the Jews still have reign over our government, I am going to walk into a synagogue with my AK, with a 75-round drum mag, and all of my extra mags, with my level four plates, and my haka helmet that’s three plus, and I am going to kill every single Jew I know inside of that synagogue. And that’s my goal in life.”
During the communications, Marcoulier told the other users, “You guys will never do anything about but I will. I just have to finish this, I have to go back overseas and do what I have to do. And then you’ll see me in the news. I promise you.”
He also allegedly said that he would “kill these motherf—kers in order to make sure the white youth is f—king secured.”
It was not immediately clear when Marcoulier made the comments, but the United States and Israel jointly attacked Iran on Feb. 28 following a buildup of U.S. troops in the Middle East.
The Iran war has put Jewish institutions across the country and the around the world on high alert, with attacks on synagogues including arsons in Europe and a synagogue ramming in suburban Detroit last month.
“Threats against synagogues and Jewish Americans are threats to the religious freedom promised to every single one of us, and this Office and our law enforcement partners are committed to protecting those freedoms,” United States Attorney Zachary A. Keller said in a statement.
The post US soldier charged for threatening to ‘kill every single Jew’ inside of a synagogue appeared first on The Forward.