For Americans perpetually enraged against Israel, the ordeal of Mahmoud Khalil has become an obsession. On March 8, 2025, the Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist was kidnapped from his home by federal agents and taken to a series of detention centers. Since then, he has fought tooth and nail against his expulsion. Khalil’s lawyers are asking Supreme Court to rescind last year’s expulsion order on constitutional grounds.
Khalil first gained notoriety following the massacre of October 7, 2023. In the ensuing turmoil on campus, he became the spokesperson – one of the few to be unmasked – for Columbia students, taking advantage of the Hamas-led massacre to demand that the university cut ties and divest from the Hamas-attacked state, Israel.
Today he has become a secular saint for New York’s progressive literati. His legal battle to remain in the United States is being waged by a team of more than 20 lawyers representing the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union and other progressive groups. The socialist mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdanihosted Khalil for a Ramadan dinner in March, paying tribute to his “profound courage.” The New Yorker compared the appearance of his 6-month-old son Deen to “a Rubens portrait of the baby Jesus, if the Flemings had been more realistic about the complexion of a Nazarene.” This month he spoke at a Yom Kippur gathering with anti-Zionist Jews in Brooklyn on a podium draped with a sign reading: “For the sin of genocide we atone.”
Khalil’s journey from Syria to Lebanon to Colombia and through the federal government’s immigration and deportation system is the crux of his new memoir released this week, No land to stand on. As might be expected, the presentations include praise of the anti-Zionist left. Peter Beinart calls it “the defining document of our time”. Beinart is right but for reasons different from those he imagines.
Gn world
