No Land to Stand On
Join the Center for Palestine Studies and the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism for an evening with MAHMOUD KHALIL in conversation with NADIA ABU EL-HAJ. Introduction by AZMAT KHAN.
A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage, and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime
This event is only open to CUID holders and advanced registration is required for all attendees.
Registration does not guarantee a seat, so please plan accordingly.
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“Are you Mahmoud Khalil?” The question marked the start of a politically charged odyssey that took the Palestinian graduate student and legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country, and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His “crime”: exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account, the story of a man confronting the reality that he had become target number one for a lawless regime shredding basic rights.
Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, page-turning detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. There is humanity, too, in the men’s acts of care—their mutual help with documents, the prison cake they make after Mahmoud can only follow the birth of his son on the public payphone. In tandem, he tells the multi-generational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of flight from Assad’s regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine.
A work of courage and resistance, No Land to Stand On is a call to integrity, to staying true to one’s life’s mission, and to defending the inalienable right to safety, freedom, and a land to stand on.
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MAHMOUD KHALIL is a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria. He fled Assad’s Syria at the age of 18 and holds Algerian citizenship. He studied computer science at the Lebanese American University while working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, then served as programs manager at the British Embassy in Beirut. He moved to the United States in 2022 to attend Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he became a prominent figure during the student protests against the war on Gaza. Mahmoud lives in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. No Land to Stand On is his first book.
NADIA ABU EL-HAJ is Barbara Chamberlain and Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg '30 Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.
AZMAT KHAN is a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter whose work exposes the true human costs of wars waged or supported by the United States. She is the Patty Cadby Birch Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, where she leads the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism. She received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for “The Civilian Casualty Files,” based on five years of fieldwork in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan and a legal fight for military records.
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Light refreshments will be served.
The event will be followed by a book signing, with copies of No Land to Stand On available for purchase.
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This event is only open to CUID holders and advanced registration is required for all attendees. Registration does not guarantee a seat, so please plan accordingly.
Please note that no outside food or drink will be permitted and that bags must be checked at the door. Coat check will be available.
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Presented by the Center for Palestine Studies and the Simon and June Li Center for Global Journalism.
