A bitter pill

I don’t trust a single word or a single move of the Trump regime. (I refuse to call it an administration.) Not one. Not even an iota of one. They’ve shown us exactly who they are. I do not believe they have anyone’s best interests in mind, least of all Jews.

The arrest of permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil is unconstitutional and thus threatens us all. Period. This is how governments like the one we have found ourselves consolidate authoritarian power, and they are following the playbook to the letter. For this and innumerable other reasons, I am appalled, alarmed, aghast, and angry.

I am simultaneously appalled, alarmed, aghast, and angry that Mahmoud Khalil is now the emblem of the very civil liberties that I will fight for on behalf of others whether they showed up for me or not. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a bitter pill.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), of which Khalil has been a leader, is not helping to bring about Palestinian liberation as much as promoting one-dimensional, historically faulty, and counterproductive (to peace, that is) narratives about Israel and Zionism that hold up Hamas as a legitimate “resistance” group whose tactics are justified.

So to see so many people defending him – even though I agree – brings me right back to the feeling of hypocrisy that has haunted and hounded me for the past 500+ days.

Where was the outrage when Jewish students had mezuzot ripped off their dorm room doors or when security guards were injured by protestors or when they had to climb out of windows in order to leave a building? Where was the outrage when Hamas returned babies in tiny caskets from tunnels Hamas built with money that should have gone towards Gazan infrastructure like schools (yet it is apparently *only* Israel’s fault that there are no universities left standing in Gaza)? Where was the outrage from feminists when women were raped and brutalized and dismembered?

I sound angry because I am. I rarely write from this place. It’s not productive, I tell myself (and mostly believe this to be true). I am also alarmed at the opposite Jewish response, that Trump is doing us a favor, that finally someone is doing something about antisemitism. Far from it. Trump and his goons are using Jews to further their evil agenda – and it is evil, bone-chillingly so.

We Jews will soon celebrate Purim. It was a hard sell, once again this year, to celebrate anything but we will, because this is part of what has allowed us as a people to survive for more than 5,000 years despite attempts in every generation, in every corner of the world, to make us disappear.

None of this means I think Israel is blameless in this war. Far, far from it. I also know not everyone who has protested Israel or called for a ceasefire has acted in ways that were threatening, intimidating, harassing, bullying, or violent towards pro-Israel/Zionist Jewish students. Do I need to say this? Do I need to name that I value nuance? I feel I do. I have found all of this phenomenally difficult to write about for this very reason.

Mahmoud Khalil is no friend of mine. But I will still defend his rights. Because that is what makes this country a democracy – something that feels like it is slipping into the past tense by the hour. But the antisemitism that the likes of Mahmoud Khalil have contributed to under the guise of anti-Zionism stands alone, and I would be remiss not to say as much, if only in my own heart. I drafted the following, originally intended as a stand-alone op-ed, days before Khalil’s arrest. Perhaps it is more, not less, relevant given this latest news cycle.

In 1995, I was a Barnard senior completing a thesis about Soviet-Jewish identity. As a 21-year-old undergrad with little Jewish education who had never been to the Middle East, Israel was an idea that carried a sense of longing and mystery. It has taken decades of concerted intention, time, and effort to begin to encounter Israel as an achingly real place.

Today, I am a rabbinical student – and Zionist – who is pained by recent scenes of masked mayhem and intimidation occurring at my alma mater.

When keffiyeh-clad protestors stormed a class on modern Jewish history being taught by Israeli guest professor Avi Shilon, refusing his invitation to join the class, I saw people who either don’t understand what “globalize the Intifada” means – or do. I’m not sure which is more terrifying. I fear that these protestors hold no interest in learning anything about Israel beyond one-dimensional narratives that allow for this tiny country to remain more of an idea than a real place, despite being home to half of the world’s Jews and a quarter-million Palestinians.

Perhaps this is why the New York Times headline on March 6, 2025 got under my skin: “Pro-Palestinian Activists Occupy Barnard Building for Second Time in Week”.

This kind of “activism” is not getting us anywhere. Like those who cheered on October 8, tore down posters of hostages, and denied the sexual savagery Hamas used as a tactic of terror, these young people are not ultimately helping Palestinians move toward liberation; if anything, their tactics continue to drive once-liberal American Jews further to the right. I am not alone in my assessment; Resident Senior Advisor at the Atlantic Council Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has said it more plainly: “Contemporary ‘pro-Palestine’ activism is the most pathetic, useless excuse of a movement & is why the Palestinian people still don’t have a free state.”

I regularly listen to the “For Heaven’s Sake” podcast with Yossi Klein-Halevi and Donniel Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where I studied last summer. Every episode teaches me about addressing conflicting and sometimes seemingly irreconcilable realities and viewpoints with respect, and holding fast to one’s values while still being willing to sit with someone whose beliefs you find challenging. More activists need to engage in this kind of hard and holy work.

If we are ever going to move towards breaking this endless trauma loop, we need more listening: To the freed hostages, to the families of hostages who were murdered in captivity, to the families of hostages who are still in Gaza, to the women whose warnings before October 7 the Israeli government ignored, and to Palestinian voices who accept Israel’s existence and condemn the suffering Hamas inflicts on its own people. We need to learn how to listen to people to our right and our left, and to those who, like me, have found themselves in a political wilderness.

I might spend the rest of my life in layers thin as tissue paper and deep as time, trying to understand what it means to be a Zionist committed to pluralism and progressive values in today’s world.

What I do know is that Jews may be one people, yet we are no more a monolith than any other group. Our entire tradition rests on rigorous turning over and over of our own texts. Certainty is not the goal.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, wrote: “Judaism has sometimes been called a ‘culture of argument.’ It is the only religious literature known to me whose key texts… are anthologies of arguments. That is the glory of Judaism. The Divine Presence is to be found not in this voice as against that, but in the totality of the conversation.”

Are we arguing for the sake of heaven? For power? Or for truth? What is truth and who gets to claim it? It’s ultimately lazy to hide behind a mask and call it activism. Barnard is not a place for intellectual and ethical laziness but for rigorous, challenging learning and growth. I pray that some of these “activists” will find their way to engaging in the incredible opportunities available to them – ones that might actually make a positive difference.