(RNS) — There is a famous scene in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”:
Man: He’s right, and he’s right — they can’t both be right.
Tevye: You know — you’re also right.
Over the past week, that scene has played itself out in the hearts and minds of American Jews. It has been an intellectual and spiritual wrestling match — true to our name, Yisrael, the ones who struggle.
I am speaking of Mahmoud Khalil — a 31-year-old Palestinian and a recent Columbia University graduate — who, in the United States on a green card, was taken by the Department of Homeland Security on March 8 and spirited away to the Central Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana.
Khalil emerged as a lead spokesman and negotiator on behalf of the pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia last spring and the student-led Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, which has expressed support for violent resistance and which led many of the post-Oct. 7 protest actions at Columbia.
This is the first thing that is right: Khalil has been involved in anti-Israel activism. However, it is hard to know, precisely, to what extent his actions fall under the definition of free speech, or when they have moved into hate speech.
To quote The New York Times:
Mr. Khalil has been involved in demonstrations as recently as January, when four masked demonstrators entered a class on the history of Israel taught by an Israeli professor at Columbia to accuse the school of “normalizing genocide.” Videos of an unmasked Mr. Khalil at a related sit-in were soon circulated on social media among critics of Columbia’s protest movement, with some calling for him to be deported.
Similar things are happening, to some extent, on college campuses all over the country.
You can join the debate over whether this was an exercise of free speech or if it ventured into hate speech. But ask yourselves: What other minority group would be expected to tolerate anything remotely approaching this? Imagine the Ku Klux Klan marching on campus or interrupting classes. Would the free speech people be coming out in force to support them? I don’t think so.
The students who interrupted that History of Modern Israel class also passed out anti-Israel flyers, one of which featured a picture of a jackboot stomping on a Star of David, interfering with the professor’s ability to teach and the students’ ability to learn.
You know that whole thing about “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”? Do Jews on campus deserve those, as well?
Here is Franklin Foer in The Atlantic:
Columbia [has been] the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall — which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices — and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May.
Here is the second thing I know to be right: Whatever else you think of Mahmoud’s ideas, words and actions, he deserved due process. To spirit someone away in the middle of the night, torn from his pregnant wife? Something is wrong here. This is what happened in Argentina during the “Dirty War” of the late 1970s to early 1980s. America was not supposed to be Argentina, though some would greet that prospect gleefully.
But, here is the third thing that I know to be right. The Jews are being used.
My fellow Jews might relish this administration’s purported support of the Jews.
Not so fast.
Here is what I see: an administration that is apparently comfortable with antisemitism.
- President Donald Trump has uttered his own share of antisemitic epithets.
- He warned that if he had lost the election, it would have been the Jews’ fault.
- This administration has welcomed antisemites — such as Kingsley Wilson in the Department of Defense.
Moreover, President Trump pardoned known antisemites who were responsible for Jan. 6. There was Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the far-right group the Proud Boys, the antisemitic group that marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and chanted: “The Jews will not replace us.”
And, then, Robert Keith Packer — you know him as The Guy in the Camp Auschwitz Sweatshirt.
To quote Yale history professor Timothy Snyder:
Rulers who deploy the word “antisemitism” can themselves be antisemites or promoters of antisemitism. The abuse of the word “antisemitism” is meant to generate a sense of plausibility, confuse opposition, and create more space for the actual phenomenon of antisemitism. And this misdirection is an integral part of the effort to replace a constitutional order with an authoritarian one.
Here is what is really happening.
The Trump administration is waging a war against the universities, especially “elite” universities. It is a blatant manifestation of anti-intellectualism.
The Trump administration is using the Jews as its main weapon in that war, and Jews should know anti-intellectualism invariably becomes antisemitism.
Again, Snyder:
Jews in the United States are being instrumentalized in an effort to build a more authoritarian American system. The real and continuing history of the oppression of Jews is transformed into a bureaucratic tool called “antisemitism” which is used to suppress education and human rights — and so, in the end, to harm Jews themselves.
In a few weeks, we will be celebrating Passover. I return to the account of the crossing of the Red Sea: “The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.” (Exodus 14:22)
This is the Jewish experience: facing the walls on the left and the walls on the right.
On the left (center left to extreme left): Some applaud Khalil’s beliefs and actions. Some don’t applaud the substance of what he said but support his right to free speech (or, as it might be, hate speech). Some would make him the symbol for their (quite necessary) concerns about ICE’s actions. It is difficult to know whether those who want to “free Mahmoud” support his ideas or oppose the way he was handled. I tend to think the former.
On the right (center-right to the more extreme right): There are those who, rightfully, abhor Khalil’s beliefs and actions. But their hatred of his ideas might make them willing to ignore or justify the lack of due process.
I return to the story of the Israelites crossing the sea. They walked through the path that the parted waters created — through the middle.
This is what a middle position would look like. It would vociferously condemn Khalil’s ideas and actions — those ideas encouraged and enable antisemitism.
But a middle position would likewise condemn the methods the government used against him — because, as I said, there is such a thing as due process, and this is still America.
Can we carry those two truths in the same mind?
I hope so. The future of Jewish discourse depends on it.
And the future of America — likewise.