Not gonna make friends with this one

In partnership with

“Writers!” cries the Authory ad below. “Stop wasting your time!” I couldn’t agree more: Please stop wasting time and click on their ad—for each of you who does, I will earn $2.

LAST NIGHT: Moments ago, I heard a flurry of gunshots outside my window. Normally, I would second-guess myself. In my neighborhood, people set off a lot of fireworks, especially when the weather warms, plus there are a lot of construction sites where things bang loudly around. But in this case, the bangs came at irregular intervals, and when I looked out one window at the corner, I saw a guy sprinting across the street—red hoodie, grey jeans, white sneakers—followed by two people loping slowly after him. One urged the other to hurry, I could hear, and she (it sounded like a woman’s voice) responded, “I got hit.” Now there are sirens and flashing lights out the other window: cop cars, an ambulance. This sucks. It’s annoying, it’s stupid. But it happens. There’s 8.5 million people in this city, so statistically this is going to happen. And year to date, shootings in North Brooklyn are down 12% from 2024, from 25 to 22, so as frustrating and tragic as this may be, it’s an outlier. I can write it off. I’m not angry.

What I am angry about is Mahmoud Khalil.

If you weren’t following the news all day yesterday, Mahmoud Khalil was until December a graduate student at Columbia University. Born in Syria to Palestinian parents, he’s a permanent resident of the U.S., married to a U.S. citizen who’s eight months pregnant. Last year, he helped organize the pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus; depending on your point of view, he was either “a mediator on behalf of pro-Palestinian activists and Muslim students“ or an antisemitic Hamas supporter. And on Sunday night, he was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents, who at first claimed they were revoking his student visa and then, when informed he had a green card, said they were revoking that, too. He was, it seems, first held in New Jersey, then transferred to a facility in Louisiana. Claiming that Khalil supported Hamas, which is designated a terrorist group, President Donald Trump said his arrest and planned deportation would be the “first arrest of many to come.”

This is bad. So bad.

More after the highly clickable ad…

First, let me address the most important issue, the one you’ve been dying to ask me ever since Trying! launched in November: Matt, where do you stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? 

I’m glad you asked!

It depends. On you.

Are you pro-Israel? Then I will gladly lecture you on the decades of injustices and outright violence that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, all the way up to October 7 and then afterwards, with actions that amount to war crimes. How can you expect a people to suffer at your hands for years and then not fight back with everything they have?

Wait, are you pro-Palestinian? Then I will acknowledge Israel’s awfulness over the past decades but then argue that the country must continue to exist—that if we are going to use ancient blood ties and irrational religious beliefs to justify land claims, then the Israelis, all 9.3 million of them, get to stay put² .

Oh, you’re a Jewish student on campus and feel threatened by the protests or by a professor’s rhetoric? Grow up. You’re Jewish—you’re never going to be safe. Everyone hates us. Get used to it.

Sorry, you’re a pro-Palestinian protestor? You need to watch your language, and make it very clear, all the damn time, that you’re attacking Israeli policies and actions, and not just out to get rid of Jews. Cuz honestly, I see a lot of sloppiness on that front.

And to all of you who pick up sticks, bottles, knives, guns, or worse against the others: No. You use violence, you lose any claim to moral superiority. Can’t you just spit on each other? It’s gross and insulting, but it’s so, so satisfying. Done right, it’s even kind of hot.

Quick check: Is there anyone I haven’t offended yet? If so, here we go: I want a one-state solution, forcing Jews and Palestinians to share power and find a way to get along. I want a no-state solution, with Israel and Palestine administered, for the next couple of centuries, by a randomly selected U.N. member country for 12-year terms. Vanuatu and Paraguay surely couldn’t do worse than Likud, Hamas, and the P.L.O. Failing that, I’d be fine if an unrelated country—North Korea would be ideal—nuked the entire region, killing everyone (including, sorry guys, several of my friends and family members) and turning the Holy Land to glass, uninhabitable for 10,000 years. Of course, the war would continue, the wastelands fought over now by zombies versus mutants, all still hell-bent on a victory that will never arrive.

All of which is to say I don’t give a shit about Mahmoud Khalil’s politics. What I care about is his lack of due process: He has not been charged with a crime. Instead, the Trump administration—the self-appointed protectors of free speech—decided that it didn’t like what Khalil was saying, and that he, and others like him, must be punished, and in a manner that evades long-established legal precedent.

[There was a good piece on NPR this morning in which a lawyer cited a provision of immigration law that allows the Secretary of State to deport an immigrant if they find the person’s speech would irreparably harm U.S. foreign policy. The NPR piece isn’t online yet, but here’s (ugh) Reason’s take, which also mentions this was challenged—successfully!—in 1945, and unsuccessfully in 1952.]

It’s no surprise, I know, that the Trump administration does not particularly care about the rule of law, due process, or the exercise of constitutional rights. The president and his cronies are actively engaged in erasing whatever checks and balances the Constitution provides for, and dismantling the most basic functions of our government, the law itself be damned. But if they’re going to start going after activists based on words, without even the pretense of gathering evidence and bringing charges, then we are all in big trouble. If—when—they get away with this, they can come after you, they can come after me. And they will. Could my support here for Khalil be construed as support for Hamas? Only if you’re an idiot or acting in supremely bad faith! Both of which accurately describe the goons taking over this country.

(Perhaps this is the place to make the vain declaration that to be pro-Palestinian is not equivalent to being pro-Hamas, and that it is not antisemitic to oppose Netanyahu or Zionism¹ .)

Finally, let’s channel a bit of our ire at the Anti-Defamation League, which decided to celebrate Khalil’s arrest with this simpering, jackboot-licking tweet:

To be clear: No one should support the extrajudicial deployment of state violence, especially not Jews who know how quickly it can be turned on them. Whatever Mahmoud Khalil’s sympathies, whatever his actions (or inactions), he deserves to be accused fairly, publicly, and in a court of law where he can mount a defense, not hustled off at night into a labyrinth of far-flung prisons.

Eight decades back, there were Jews who assisted the Nazis in their crimes against humanity. They were called kapos³ , and today the ADL, which should know better, stand proudly as kapos themselves, complicit in enabling an amoral government that will, at the first chance it gets, turn against them as eagerly and slaveringly as it has now against their putative common foe. The ADL, and all who support this action against Mahmoud Khalil, have sacrificed any moral authority they might once have had in exchange for extremely short-term political gain. I hope they realize their mistake before they suffer its consequences—before we all do.

In the course of writing this piece, the sirens have silenced, the flashing lights have driven off. Someone fired a weapon, someone else was hit, and Brooklyn moved on. Tonight was awful, but it’s worse elsewhere, for other people. We were the lucky ones. For now. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt

1  Whatever the fuck you want that to mean.

2  But not in the West Bank villages they’ve occupied.

3  If you want to get historical, there’s plenty of argument about whether the kapos in the concentration camps were acting willingly or were coerced, but the insult has become so pointed, so powerful, that I want to lob it at the ADL simply because it hurts.