Mahmoud Khalil’s False Martyrdom

No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention, by Mahmoud Khalil (Metropolitan Books, 208 pp., $27.99)

For the better part of two years, Mahmoud Khalil has held himself out as a martyr for free speech, persecuted by a dissent-crushing tyrant for advocating on behalf of Palestinians. Khalil’s new memoir, No Land to Stand On, reveals that he’s been preparing for this his whole life. Growing up in Syria, Khalil was shot in the leg trying to invade Israel; the incident earned him the nickname “the living martyr.” His sense of martyrdom only grew more profound throughout his time at Columbia University, and during two months in ICE detention.

If a martyr for the cause is meant to be its perfect avatar, Khalil is a good fit for the anti-Israel industrial complex. His legend began by skipping school, drunk on the notion that the Jewish state would implode if only pushed far enough by his and others crossing of the border. He describes the subsequent incursion as “the largest crossing over the border since 1973,” when Israel’s neighbors launched a surprise attack on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. “By the end of the day, they had killed four protestors.”

Needless to say, the term protest features prominently in Khalil’s con. And it is a con. Khalil is the perfect representative of his movement because he is a con artist. Unable to live with the consequences of his own actions, he prefers instead to cry victim, paper over inconveniences, and make vague insinuations of a conspiracy against him, all while advocating a viciously barbaric position.

Which is not to say that he didn’t suffer, much as Palestinians have suffered. Khalil missed the birth of his son. Untold numbers of children in Gaza have been killed and wounded, their homes and families demolished. That is heartbreaking. Before shaping one’s identity around avenging that suffering, though, it is advisable to spend some time considering who’s responsible for it.

The extent of Khalil’s consideration of that key question—and its application to the Palestinians and himself—is revealed by his total omission of the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7. In a book full of intimate recollections and granular thoughts from his time in Morningside Heights, Khalil does not tell us anything about how he felt, or what he did, as he learned of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

By contrast, we know a lot about what he did soon after. Khalil was already a board member of one anti-Israel campus group and a cofounder and leader of another. Both soon joined the umbrella coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) alongside dozens of other student organizations. Khalil’s deportation orders would be justified on the basis of his membership in CUAD.

“CUAD was an informal coalition of student clubs at Columbia with no membership, no card to carry, no roster to sign,” he writes. At least he doesn’t try to argue that he wasn’t a leader within CUAD. But the coalition has a website,  a “Who We Are” op-ed in the Columbia Spectator, a list of constituent organizations, a “mission,” a set of demands, and press conferences.

CUAD and its constituent groups kicked into high gear after October 7. They distributed Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)’s “toolkit,” which celebrated the massacres and claimed to be “PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement”—an explicit affiliation with Hamas. While establishing encampments in violation of campus rules (something Khalil does not deny), CUAD made it abundantly clear that it was pro-terrorist. It offered tributes to Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, as well as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, and celebrated Iran and the Houthis. CUAD students infamously described themselves as “Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” who would “continue to escalate until the empire crumbles.”

“We took Hamilton Hall because it belongs to us,” they announced after defacing, trespassing, and occupying the campus building in the spring of 2024. “We chose action, and you must too—again, again, until the weight of our collective action and refusal dismantles the prisons and all our prisoners flood the streets.”

Not only did Khalil fail to distance himself from such a group—or take the opportunity to start a pro-Palestinian but not pro-terrorist alternative—he became its face. He continues to dissemble on their behalf. Without acknowledging their substantive views or the fact that they repeatedly broke campus rules and the law (bragging about their “action”), he refers to his band of masked criminals only as “a group of protesters” and repeatedly asks, incredulously, how they could be punished for their “speech.”

Equally absurd to him is the idea that he could be called “pro-Hamas.” His rebuttal, though, suggests that his critics might have him pegged. “I have little patience for Palestinian factions: not Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or any of them,” he writes. “I have always criticized their failures, their corruption, their inability to unite the Palestinian people behind a liberatory national movement . . . their ideological rigidity, their factionalism, their willingness to sacrifice the national cause for organizational survival and personal gain.”

The surface-level takeaway here is that Khalil’s frustrations with Hamas have nothing to do with murder, rape, and kidnapping babies. Beneath the surface is his revelation that he actually does understand the concept of “criticism” and how it is distinct from calling for something’s elimination.

The obvious conclusion from all of this is that Khalil was accurately identified as a leader of a low-level criminal organization that does PR for terrorist organizations, intimidates Jews, and aims to erode support for the U.S. and Israel in their ongoing operations against the terrorists. Khalil is correct that the State Department did not charge or convict him of crimes to buttress his removal order. But State didn’t have to. Deportation is not a criminal proceeding, and there is ample basis for removing aliens (even lawful residents, who are not the same as citizens) who lead organizations like CUAD. Aliens have First Amendment rights, but not precisely the same ones as citizens. In any case, the First Amendment does not permit you to evade consequences for trespassing and destruction of property.

Instead of owning his behavior like a self-respecting civil disobedient, Khalil complains that the U.S. government has changed the rules around free speech, just as people worldwide bend the rules to victimize Palestinians. “Palestine is the exception to those rights the world claims as universal,” he writes. “We are the exception to every rule the supposed free world claims to hold sacred. Innocent until proven guilty—unless you are Palestinian. Due process—unless you are Palestinian. Free speech and academic freedom—unless you are Palestinian.”

The irony of this claim is staggering. Khalil writes from the throes of a prolonged legal process, in which his guilt need not be proven for him to be removed from the United States. An army of lawyers has rushed to his aid while completely ignoring the men Khalil befriends in detention, as he details without any self-awareness. Together, they are enjoying some success convincing the public that violence is sometimes “free speech”—if done in the name of the Palestinians.

It’s a perfect microcosm of the greatest “Palestine exception” of all. Khalil is a Syrian with Algerian citizenship who calls himself a Palestinian refugee. He grew up in a city that calls itself a refugee camp (“the Camp of Return,” no less), built by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which serves Palestinians for whom Khalil worked and whose ties to Hamas he wrongly calls “debunked.”

Alone among UN agencies, UNRWA considers refugee status heritable regardless of whether descendants of refugees settle in new countries. Children of refugees from every war in history are expected to pick up the pieces and build their lives somewhere new. Only one group is discouraged from integrating and encouraged instead to continue the war against Israel that began in 1948, transmuted into a joint guerilla-information campaign. “From the moment I was born Palestinian, my existence was political,” Khalil writes. That is exactly right.

Stacking irony upon irony, Khalil describes twice living under apartheid systems—the very accusation he levels against Israel. Syria did not want to integrate Palestinians into its society, so it made them second-class citizens. “There were three things we could not do,” he writes, without naming what he was describing. “Vote, stand for elected office, or own more than one residence.” (Arab-Israelis can do all three.) Palestinians were also routinely “tortured” in Damascus, he says.

“In Lebanon,” where Khalil spent his teenage years, “being Palestinian was a different kind of fact than it was in Syria . . . where Syria had folded Palestinians into the labor market, Lebanon had walled them out.” I did not know the depth of the anti-Palestinian apartheid in Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah has waged a relentless war against Israel at the expense of civilians in both nations. “Palestinians there were barred from dozens of professions,” Khalil explains. “They were forbidden to own property in most cases.”

Yet to this day, Khalil blames Israel alone for his suffering. It can be hard to understand the worldview of a person who would let his actual oppressors off so easily. The truth is that his ideology is ad hoc and malleable, best characterized as blaming Israel and figuring out the details later.

In one absurd example, he describes Columbia’s denunciation of “from the river to the sea,” a popular phrase among campus activists who often don’t know which bodies of water they’re referring to. The dean of the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) described it as a “call for Jews to be eliminated.” Khalil was enraged: “They take what we say about ourselves, replace it with what they claim we mean, and condemn us for the version they invented,” he writes. “These instincts are profoundly racist.”

Yet later, after his detention, Khalil and his wife went out for dinner, where a group at another table “began loudly singing ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’” which means “the people of Israel live.” Khalil believed that their “Hebrew anthem often chanted by racist Israeli mobs while harassing Palestinians” was a “threat.” Inferring threatening intent from another group’s chant is racist, according to Khalil—except when he does it, in which case it’s the chanters who are racist.

In this telling, the oppressors continue to victimize the oppressed for no reason, while the oppressed lack all agency, much less a share of the blame for their own suffering. The possibility that Arab eliminationism toward Israel—and multiple ongoing campaigns of violence against civilians—has some explanatory power in the Palestinians’ position does not seem to occur to him. To think that “from the river to the sea,” a phrase which appeared in Hamas’s charter, is “associated with terrorism is to presume Palestinians have not the vocabulary or aspiration for justice,” Khalil says. More accurately, it is to recognize that when Palestinians historically have spoken about justice, or about any lofty principle regarding their relation to Israel, it has stood for the proposition that the Jewish state should disappear—by any means necessary.

That would not fit well with Khalil’s persecution complex. Instead, he sees opportunities for victimization everywhere. “While Israel was blockading food from entering Gaza, Columbia was preventing food from entering its lawn,” he writes about the administration’s half-hearted attempts to quash the trespassing. (Another student leader infamously referred to the rioters’ desire for takeout as “humanitarian aid.”)

More horrifying still was the fact that Columbia tried to encourage the rulebreakers to leave using printed materials. “The flyers spread through the encampment like the leaflets dropped by the Israeli army over Gaza neighborhoods warning residents to evacuate before the bombs came,” Khalil writes. The real upshot of the parallel is that Israel and Columbia both take unnecessary steps to care for those who despise them.

That Khalil is a conspiracy theorist isn’t surprising, but the depth and quality of his conspiracy theories are. He laments that the “safety concerns” of pro-Israel students were taken seriously despite not being “by any reasonable measure of the word, actual issues of safety.” Normally, campus claims of being unsafe are overblown, but that might not be the case when a masked anti-Israel demonstrator shows up to a pro-Israel event with a sign reading “Al-Qassam’s Next Target.”

Regardless, what bothers Khalil was a perceived double standard in favor of the pro-Israel side: “To understand why Columbia behaved the way it did, we have to understand who was actually running the institution and what they were protecting.” Unsurprisingly, the culprit is Jewish money. The Columbia board of trustees “are drawn overwhelmingly from finance, real estate, corporate law, and weapons manufacturers . . . some are major donors to pro-Israel causes. Some sit on the boards of Zionist organizations.” They were “profiting from the killing of Palestinians,” he claims.

Khalil shows his depth as a conspiracy theorist in his last-ditch effort to avoid deportation. Between complaints about the slow and grinding “machinery” of the immigration courts—this is due to for-profit prisons, he concludes—he informs us that he “sought asylum” in the United States because he “faced targeting by Israel if deported.”  His first example of Israel having engaged in similar perfidy before is Ghassan Kanafani, spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who took credit for murdering 26 civilians weeks before his assassination. If Israel were still interested in assassinating spokesmen for terrorist groups, it’s not clear why it would wait until its targets were on Syrian or Algerian soil.

What Khalil imagines as a grand conspiracy is, in the end, his own actions coming back to bite him. To get this far in his con, though, he had to get extremely lucky. Any reasonable person would have expected to die invading Israel, to be expelled from Columbia for violating campus rules, or to be deported swiftly for running a terror PR campaign.

“The living martyr” has been treated with kid gloves at every step of his life, which only baffles him as he expects his enemies’ sympathy to translate into submission. His book is an attempt to curry a bit more favor and cross that threshold. He is free to keep doing so from Syria, Algeria, or the myriad lands where his ideological derangement will be more at home.