Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to a campus gate across from the graduate School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) this week, braving rain and cold to demand the school release information related to the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former SIPA student.

Democracy Now! was at the protest and spoke to Jewish and Palestinian students calling on the school to reveal the extent of its involvement in Khalil’s arrest.

• READ MORE: Israel kills mostly children as 33 ‘massacred’ in Gaza school shelters
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Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Here in New York City, Jewish students chained themselves to gates at Columbia University on Wednesday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now in an ICE jail in Louisiana.

On March 8, federal agents detained Khalil at his university-owned apartment building, even though he is a legal permanent resident of the United States. They revoked his green card.

I went up to Columbia yesterday and spoke to some of the students at the protest.

PROTESTERS: Release Mahmoud Khalil now! We want justice! You say, “How?” We want justice! You say, “How?” Release Mahmoud Khalil now!

CARLY: Hi. My name is Carly. I’m a Columbia SIPA graduate student, second year. And I’m chained to this gate today as a Jewish student and friend of Mahmoud Khalil’s, demanding answers on how his name got to DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and which trustee specifically handed over that information.

We believe that there is a high chance that our new president, Claire Shipman, handed over that information. And we, as Jewish students, demand transparency in that process.

Protesting Jewish students chain themselves to Columbia gates.  Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: What makes you think that the new president, Shipman, gave over his [Khalil’s] information?

CARLY: There was a Forward article with that leak. And there has not been transparency from the Columbia administration to Jewish students, when they claim that they are doing all of this to protect Jewish students.

We would like to be consulted in that process, instead of being spoken for. You know, as Jewish students and to the Jewish people at large, being political pawns in a game is not a new occurrence, and that’s something that we very much are here to say, “Hey, you cannot weaponise antisemitism to harm our friends and peers.”

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about being chained. Are you willing to risk arrest or suspension or expulsion from Columbia?

CARLY: Yeah, I mean, just for speaking out for Palestine on Columbia’s campus, you know that you’re risking arrest and expulsion. That is the precedent they have set, and that is something that we all know at this point.

We are now in a situation where, for many of us, our good friend is in ICE detention. And as Jewish students, we feel we need to do more.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you know Mahmoud Khalil? You said you’re at SIPA. What are you studying there?

CARLY: Yeah, so, I’m a human rights student, and we were classmates. We were classmates and friends. And it’s been a deeply troubling few weeks. And, you know, everyone at SIPA, the students at SIPA, we really are just hoping for his safe return.

For me as a graduate in May, I truly hope we get to walk together at graduation.

AMY GOODMAN: Did he hear that you were out here? And did he send you a message?

CARLY: Yes. So, it has gotten back to Mahmoud that Jewish students are out here chained to the gate, and he did send a message that I read earlier that expressed his gratitude.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me what he said?

CARLY: Yes, I can pull up the message. I don’t want to misquote him. OK.

“The news of students chaining themselves to the Columbia gates has reached Mahmoud in the detention center in Louisiana, where he’s currently being held. He knows what’s happening. He was very emotional when he heard about it, and he wanted to thank you all and let you know he sees you.”

SARAH BORUS: My name is Sarah Borus. I am a senior at Barnard College.

AMY GOODMAN: Why a Jewish action right now?

SARAH BORUS: So, the government, when they abducted Mahmoud, they literally put — Donald Trump put out a post that said, “Shalom, Mahmoud.”

They are saying that this is in the name of Jewish safety. But there is a reason that it is four white Jews that were on that fence or that were on that gate, and that’s because we are not the ones that are being targeted by the government.

It is Muslim students, Arab students, Palestinian students, immigrant students that are being targeted.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you respond to those who say the protests here are antisemitic?

SARAH BORUS: I have been involved in these protests for my last two years here. The community of Jewish students that I have found is one of the most wonderful in my life. To call these protests antisemitic, honestly, degrades the Jewish religion by making it about a nation-state instead of the actual religion itself.

SHEA: My name is Shea. I’m a junior at Columbia College. I am here for the same reason.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a keffiyeh and a yarmulke.

SHEA: Yes. That’s standard for me.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to be expelled?

SHEA: If the university decides that that is what should happen to me for doing this, then that is on them. I would love to not be expelled, but I think that my peers would also have loved to not be expelled.

I think Mahmoud would love to not be in detention right now. This is — I obviously worked very hard to get here. So did Mahmoud. So did everyone else who has been facing consequences.

And, like, while I obviously would prefer to, you know, not get expelled, this is bigger than me. This is about something much more important. And it ultimately is in the hands of the university. If they want to expel me for standing up for my friend, for other students, then that is their choice.

PROTESTERS: ICE off our campus now! ICE off our campus now! We want justice! You say, “How?” We want justice! You say, “How?” Answer our demands now! Answer our demands now!

MARYAM ALWAN: My name is Maryam Alwan. I’m a senior at Columbia. I’m also Palestinian, and I’m friends with Mahmoud. I’m here in solidarity with my Jewish friends, who are in solidarity with all Palestinian students and Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza.

We are all here today because we miss our friend, and it’s inconceivable to us that the board of trustees are reported to have handed his name over to the federal government, and the fact that these board of trustees have now taken over the university.

Just yesterday, the University Senate at Columbia released an over 300-page report called the Sundial Report, which reveals that the board of trustees has completely endangered both Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish students in the name of quashing dissent and cracking down on protests like never before, eroding shared governance, academic freedom.

And so this has been a long-standing process over 1.5 years to get us to the point where we are today, where people are getting kidnapped from their own campuses. And we can’t just sit by and let the federal government do whatever they want to our own university without standing up against it.

So, whatever we can do.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does it mean to you that it’s Jewish students who have chained themselves to the gates?

MARYAM ALWAN: It means a lot to me, especially because of all of the rhetoric that surrounds these protests saying that we’re violent or threatening, when, from day one, I was part of Students for Justice in Palestine when it was suspended, and we were working alongside Jewish Voice for Peace from day one.

The media just completely twisted the narrative. So, the fact that my Jewish friends are still to this day fighting, no matter what the personal cost is to them — I’ve seen the way that the university has delegitimised their Jewish identity, put them through trials, saying that they’re antisemitic, when they are proud Jews, and they’ve taught me so much about Judaism.

So it just means a lot to see, like, the solidarity between us even almost two years later now.

AHARON DARDIK: My name’s Aharon Dardik. I’m a junior here at Columbia. And we’re here to protest the trustees putting students in danger and not taking accountability.

AMY GOODMAN: Why the chains on your wrists?

AHARON DARDIK: We, as Jewish students, chained ourselves earlier today to a gate on campus, and we said that we weren’t going to leave until the university named who it was among the trustees who collaborated with the fascist Trump administration to detain our classmate, Mahmoud Khalil, and try and deport him.

AMY GOODMAN: Where are you originally from?

AHARON DARDIK: I’m originally from California, but my family moved to Israel-Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: And being from Israel-Palestine, your thoughts on what’s happening there?

AHARON DARDIK: There’s never a justification for killing innocent civilians and for war crimes and genocide that’s being committed now. And I know many, many other people there who are leftist Israeli activists who are doing their best to end the occupation, to end the war and the genocide and to end Israeli apartheid.

But they need more support from the international community, which currently sees supporting Israel as synonymous with supporting the fascist Israeli government that’s perpetrating this genocide, that’s continuing the occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Voices from a protest on Wednesday when Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to university gates in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student protest leader now detained by ICE in a Louisiana jail.

Students continued their action into the early hours of yesterday morning through the rain, even after Columbia security and New York police arrived on the scene to cut the chains and forcibly remove protesters.

Special thanks to Laura Bustillos.

Republished from Democracy Now! under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Freedom of the press — a bedrock principle of American democracy — is under threat in the United States.

Here at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism we are witnessing and experiencing an alarming chill. We write to affirm our commitment to supporting and exercising First Amendment rights for students, faculty, and staff on our campus — and, indeed, for all.

After Homeland Security seized and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs, without charging him with any crime, many of our international students have felt afraid to come to classes and to events on campus.

• READ MORE:  Arrests at Trump Tower as Mahmoud Khalil demonstrations continue
• ‘I am a Jewish student at Columbia. Mahmoud Khalil is one of the most upstanding people I have ever met’
• Other US free speech reports

They are right to be worried. Some of our faculty members and students who have covered the protests over the Gaza war have been the object of smear campaigns and targeted on the same sites that were used to bring Khalil to the attention of Homeland Security.

President Trump has warned that the effort to deport Khalil is just the first of many.

These actions represent threats against political speech and the ability of the American press to do its essential job and are part of a larger design to silence voices that are out of favour with the current administration.

We have also seen reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport the Palestinian poet and journalist Mosab Abu Toha, who has written extensively in the New Yorker about the condition of the residents of Gaza and warned of the mortal danger to Palestinian journalists.

There are 13 million legal foreign residents (green card holders) in the United States. If the administration can deport Khalil, it means those 13 million people must live in fear if they dare speak up or publish something that runs afoul of government views.

There are more than one million international students in the United States. They, too, may worry that they are no longer free to speak their mind. Punishing even one person for their speech is meant to intimidate others into self-censorship.

One does not have to agree with the political opinions of any particular individual to understand that these threats cut to the core of what it means to live in a pluralistic democracy. The use of deportation to suppress foreign critics runs parallel to an aggressive campaign to use libel laws in novel — even outlandish ways — to silence or intimidate the independent press.

The President has sued CBS for an interview with Kamala Harris which Trump found too favourable. He has sued the Pulitzer Prize committee for awarding prizes to stories critical of him.

He has even sued the Des Moines Register for publishing the results of a pre-election poll that showed Kamala Harris ahead at that point in the state.

Large corporations like Disney and Meta settled lawsuits most lawyers thought they could win because they did not want to risk the wrath of the Trump administration and jeopardize business they have with the federal government.

Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos decided that the paper’s editorial pages would limit themselves to pieces celebrating “free markets and individual liberties.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration insists on hand-picking the journalists who will be permitted to cover the White House and Pentagon, and it has banned the Associated Press from press briefings because the AP is following its own style book and refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

The Columbia Journalism School stands in defence of First Amendment principles of free speech and free press across the political spectrum. The actions we’ve outlined above jeopardise these principles and therefore the viability of our democracy. All who believe in these freedoms should steadfastly oppose the intimidation, harassment, and detention of individuals on the basis of their speech or their journalism.

The Faculty of Columbia Journalism School
New York

From France to Australia, university pro-Palestine protests in the United States have now spread to several countries with students pitching on-campus camps.

And students at Columbia and other US universities remain defiant as campuses have witnessed the biggest protests since the anti-Vietnam war and anti-apartheid eras in the 1960s and 1980s.

But authorities have cracked down at some institutions against the peaceful demonstrations with at least 550 being arrested in the US, reports Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Other War on Gaza reports

Clashes between students and police officers have been reported across the US during intensifying university protests with encampments in at at least 20 institutions.

Ali Harb, a Washington-based commentator on US foreign policy, Arab-American issues, civil rights and politics, says the Gaza-focused campus protest movement “highlights a generational divide over Israel” in the US.

Young people are willing to challenge politicians and college administrators across the country, he says.

“The opinion gap — with younger Americans generally more supportive of Palestinians than the generations that came before them — poses a risk to 81-year-old Democratic President Joe Biden’s re-election chances,” says Harb.

“It could also threaten the bipartisan backing that Israel enjoys in Washington.”

Divestment from Israel
What started as the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, where students camped inside campus to push their institute to divest from companies linked to Israel, has since spread to campuses in California, Texas and other states.

The students are protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza, where Israel’s military offensive has killed more than 34,000 people and its blockade has caused starvation.

Students have been demonstrating worldwide in support of Gaza since the outbreak of the war on October 7.

Following the Columbia encampments, the protests have further spread to universities from France to Australia. Here is a summary:

In Paris, France, Sorbonne University students have taken to the streets. Additionally, the Palestine Committee from Sciences Po, is organising a protest where students set up about 10 tents on Wednesday. Despite a police crackdown, the protesters regathered on Thursday.

In Australia, students from the University of Sydney set up pro-Palestine encampments on Tuesday, and they were continuing to protest yesterday. Also, University of Melbourne students have pitched tents on the south lawn of their main campus.

In Rome, Italy, students from Sapienza University organised demonstrations, sit-ins and hunger strikes on April 17 and April 18.

Investigating Israeli ties
In the United Kingdom, students from the University of Warwick’s group Warwick Stands With Palestine have occupied the campus piazza. In Leicester, a protest broke out on Monday in which students from the University of Leicester Palestine Society also participated.

Last month, students from the University of Leeds occupied a campus building in protest against the university’s involvement with Israel.

Hicham, a student protesting at Sciences Po, which is also called the Paris Institute of Political Studies, told Al Jazeera, “We have a few demands but one of them is to start investigating all of the ties they [Sciences Po] have with the state of Israel, which [are] academic and financial”.

The students are calling on the French government to provide more help to the Palestinians.

Safeguard Gaza universities plea
Meanwhile, nearly 30 Palestinian academics in the UK have called for “swift” action to safeguard universities in Gaza.

The statement, whose signatories include Ghassan Abu Sittah, who has worked at al-Shifa and Alhi Arab hospitals in Gaza during the war, urged “friends and colleagues to take immediate steps to defend the integrity of Palestinian universities in occupied Palestine against the current plans and measures seeking to destroy them”.

It added: “Having turned the universities of Gaza into detention centres before demolishing them, forcibly rendering Palestinian scholars, scientists, researchers and students homeless once again, Israel’s campaign of scholasticide has turned its attention to eliminating future independent Palestinian educational life in Gaza.”

The academics also said they demand the institutions created by Palestinians in the face of “immense challenges” are not destroyed “but instead are rebuilt”.

“They serve as a symbol of resilience and hope for the Palestinian people as a whole.”

STATEMENT: Palestinian academics in the UK are urging swift action to safeguard Gaza’s universities and are calling for public commitments to aid in their rebuilding efforts. pic.twitter.com/NEtz2mFqUW

— British Palestinian Committee (@BritPalCommitt) April 26, 2024

Students and activist staff at Australia’s University of Sydney (USyd) have set up a Gaza solidarity encampment in support of Palestinians and similar student-led protests in the United States.

The camp was pitched as mass graves, crippled hospitals, thousands of civilian deaths and the near-total destruction of infrastructure haunted Gaza with Israel’s war on the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave passing the 200 days milestone.

Nearly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and more than 14,500 children killed in the attack, which critics have dubbed a war of vengeance.

• READ MORE: In numbers: 200 days of Israel’s war on Gaza
• University students in Cairo, Sydney launch protests for Gaza amid crackdown in US
• Other war on Gaza reports

In Sydney, according to the university’s student newspaper, Honi Soit, the camp was established on the campus when tents were pitched “emblazoned with graffiti reading ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘from the river to the sea’”.

Students form several Australian universities were in attendance for the launch of the encampment, which was inaugurated with a student activist “speak out” on the subject of the war on Gaza and the demand for USyd management to drop any ties to the state of Israel.

According to the student newspaper: “Many chants that were used on US campuses in the past week were repeated at the encampment tonight like “disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest” followed by “Albanese/Sydney Uni you will see, Palestine will be free”.

Making our message clear!

We won’t let our university get away with being complicit with the weapons companies that arm the genocide in Gaza.#gazacampusyd #FreePalestine #FreeGaza #fromtherivertothesea pic.twitter.com/LHOqFsRg1B

— USyd SFP | Join the Gaza Solidarity Camp! (@SFP_USyd) April 24, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protests are gaining momentum at colleges and universities across the United States with street protests outside campuses as police have cracked down on the demonstrators.

Students at New York University, Columbia, Harvard and Yale are among those standing in solidarity with Palestinians and demanding an end to the war on Gaza.

Tensions flare at US universities over Gaza protests.

Tensions between pro-Palestinian student protesters and school administrators flared at several US universities Monday, as in-person classes were cancelled and demonstrators arrestedhttps://t.co/ByWzL8ZWhN pic.twitter.com/W5I08JqoBg

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 23, 2024

Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey, reporting from New York, said student demonstrators from New York University (NYU) gathered for hours in a park just off the campus to protest against the genocide.

The protest moved to the park following the mass arrest of 133 students and academic staff who had participated in a protest on the NYU campus the night before.

“As news spread of their arrests, so have demonstrations around the country — at other colleges and universities,” Saloomey said.

Columbia announced that it was introducing online classes for the the rest of the year to cope with the protests.

Watch Saloomey’s AJ report:

Columbia protests: Chants of ‘Azaadi’.               Video: Al Jazeera

The Al Jazeera Explainers team have put together a comprehensive report detailing the numbers that highlight the unprecedented level of violence unleashed by Israel on Gaza in the 200 days of war.