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READ | 'I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump' by Rashid Khalidi

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I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump.

The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible.

By Rashid Khalidi

Published in The Guardian on August 1, 2025
Read this op-ed on The Guardian’s website here.

Dear Acting President Shipman,

I am writing you an open letter since you have seen fit to communicate the recent decisions of the board of trustees and the administration in a similar fashion.

These decisions, taken in close collaboration with the Trump administration, have made it impossible for me to teach modern Middle East history, the field of my scholarship and teaching for more than 50 years, 23 of them at Columbia. Although I have retired, I was scheduled to teach a large lecture course on this topic in the fall as a “special lecturer”, but I cannot do so under the conditions Columbia has accepted by capitulating to the Trump administration in June.

Specifically, it is impossible to teach this course (and much else) in light of Columbia’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition deliberately, mendaciously and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel, so that any criticism of Israel, or indeed description of Israeli policies, becomes a criticism of Jews. Citing its potential chilling effect, a co-author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, has repudiated its current uses. Yet Columbia has announced that it will serve as a guide in disciplinary proceedings.

Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, culminating in the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza with the connivance and support of the US and much of western Europe.

The Armenian genocide, the nature of the absolute monarchies and military dictatorships that blight most of the Arab world, the undemocratic theocracy in Iran, the incipient dictatorial regime in Türkiye, the fanaticism of Wahhabism: all of these are subject to detailed analysis in my course lectures and readings. However, a simple description of the discriminatory nature of Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law – which states that only the Jewish people have the right of self-determination in Israel, half of whose subjects are Palestinian – or of the apartheid nature of its control over millions of Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 58 years would be impossible in a Middle East history course under the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

It is not only faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of speech that is infringed upon by Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s diktat. Teaching assistants would be seriously constrained in leading discussion sections, as would students in their questions and discussions, by the constant fear that informers would snitch on them to the fearsome apparatus that Columbia has erected to punish speech critical of Israel, and to crack down on alleged discrimination – which at this moment in history almost invariably amounts simply to opposition to this genocide. Scores of students and many faculty members have been subjected to these kangaroo courts, students such as Mahmoud Khalil have been snatched from their university housing, and Columbia has now promised to render this repressive system even more draconian and opaque.

You have stated that no “red lines” have been crossed by these decisions. However, Columbia has appointed a vice-provost initially tasked with surveilling Middle Eastern studies, and it has ordained that faculty and staff must submit to “trainings” on antisemitism from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League, for whom virtually any critique of Zionism or Israel is antisemitic, and Project Shema, whose trainings link many anti-Zionist critiques to antisemitism. It has accepted an “independent” monitor of “compliance” of faculty and student behavior from a firm that in June 2025 hosted an event in honor of Israel. According to Columbia’s agreement with the Trump administration, this “Monitor will have timely access to interview all Agreement-related individuals, and visit all Agreement-related facilities, trainings, transcripts of Agreement-related meetings and disciplinary hearings, and reviews”. Classrooms are pointedly NOT excluded from possible visits from these external non academics.

The idea that the teaching, syllabuses and scholarship of some of the most prominent academics in their fields should be vetted by such a vice-provost, such “trainers” or an outside monitor from such a firm is abhorrent. It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration.

I regret deeply that Columbia’s decisions have obliged me to deprive the nearly 300 students who have registered for this popular course – as many hundreds of others have done for more than two decades – of the chance to learn about the history of the modern Middle East this fall. Although I cannot do anything to compensate them fully for depriving them of the opportunity to take this course, I am planning to offer a public lecture series in New York focused on parts of this course that will be streamed and available for later viewing. Proceeds, if any, will go to Gaza’s universities, every one of which has been destroyed by Israel with US munitions, a war crime about which neither Columbia nor any other US university has seen fit to say a single word.

Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.

– Rashid Khalidi

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

Photograph: Danielle Amy

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ATTEND | Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy Conference, 7/29-31

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Join the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute for International Studies at Brizeit University for
Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy
July 29-31
In-person and Online


The "Engineering Destruction: Militarization and the War Economy" conference is held amidst a brutal war of extermination waged by the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people and those in solidarity with them. This moment lays bare, with unprecedented ferocity, the deep structures of militarization and machinery of death, revealing how massacres are managed as part of an interconnected economic and security system that regards human beings not as lives of value, but as testing grounds for instruments of violence and repression or as resources to be exploited. Within this violent context in Palestine and beyond, the conference seeks to critically examine the structural relationship between militarization and the war economy. It rejects the narratives of dominant states and actors, and instead re-centers dispossessed, oppressed, and resisting communities as essential to understanding our world today.

Wars are not accidental or exceptional events; they are instruments used to reshape political geographies, entrench economic domination, and expand surveillance and repression. From the occupation of land to the militarization of the skies, from precision killing technologies to policies of siege and isolation, the conference interrogates how societies are transformed into laboratories for the development of weapons and tools of control, particularly in the era of neoliberalism and the alliance between capital and security corporations.

The conference traces the silent spread of militarization into all aspects of life: in universities, on streets, through separation walls, and on the bodies of refugees and detainees. It also sheds light on the systematic repression targeting student movements and activists resisting authoritarian regimes, and those in solidarity with Palestine across the globe.

This conference, however, does not stop at diagnosing the engineering of destruction. It also listens to the voices of resistance: from the boycott of complicit corporations, to the building of transnational solidarity networks, to the reclamation of public spaces as sites of struggle. Militarization is not only confronted through arms, but through collective awareness, refusal, and the reconstruction of alternative and more just realities.

This conference constitutes a collective space for critical thought and political action, reinforcing our commitment to dismantling systems of oppression and confronting their material and symbolic structures in a historical moment that demands moral clarity and intellectual courage. Even within this militarized world, there have always been energies and tools striving to create a future grounded in justice and freedom.

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READ | Race and the Question of Palestine, Edited Volume by Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin

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This book develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race and the Question of Palestine explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system.

Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy.

Contributors: Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Seraj Assi, Abigail B. Bakan, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Yinon Cohen, Noura Erakat, Michael R. Fischbach, Neve Gordon, Alana Lentin, David Palumbo-Liu, John Reynolds, Kieron Turner

The book is available for pre-order here 20% off with Discount Code: QUESTION20

CONGRATS | Areej Sabbagh-Khoury Awarded SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize

We are delighted to share that an article by former Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow (Fall 2015) Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, 'Settler Colonialism and the Archives of Apprehension' (2022), has been awarded the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize. According to the prize committee, the award recognizes 'an outstanding paper from the year published in the journal, noted for its originality, innovation, significance, and influence in the field.'

Read more here.

ATTEND | "Our American Israel" Panel Discussion, 05/06/25

Tuesday, May 6
6-8PM | Prime Produce
424 West 54th Street
New York, NY 10019

"No other book goes so deeply into American culture and intellectual life to explain the bond between two countries” – Rashid Khalidi

An essential account of America's most controversial alliance, Our American Israel sheds light on how the "special relationship" between Israel and the US came to be and how that strong and divisive partnership plays out in our times.

Through an impeccably researched examination of popular narratives in American news media, fiction, and film, Amy Kaplan shows how cultural stories helped create a shared sense of identity between two nations that both had histories as settler societies.

Since its oringinal publication in 2018, the events of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent destruction of Gaza have made Kaplan’s insights more urgent than ever. It is therefore our honor to celebrate the release of Our American Israel in paperback, so that its imperative message can help to educate more people and may continue to inform the conversation about the U.S.’s deeply embedded relationship with Israel.

Books will be available for sale. If you wish to order the book from the publisher, you can save 20% before April 30th with the code OAI20.

AUTHOR
Amy Kaplan was Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Our American Israel, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, and The Social Construction of American Realism, she was a past president of the American Studies Association and was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study before her untimely passing from brain cancer in 2020. For more information about the book and Kaplan's work, click here.

SPEAKERS
Simone Zimmerman is a Jewish American activist and co-founder of the IfNotNow Movement. Her story is featured in the film 2023 documentary Israelism.

Andrew Ross is a social activist, writer and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. He is author of numerous books and articles, including Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality (with Julie Livingson) 2022, and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Newsweek, and Al Jazeera.

Moustafa Bayoumi is a writer, journalist, and professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, winner of American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award.

Shoshana Akua Brown is an organizer, popular educator and healer who offers trainings on such topics as Pedagogy of the Oppressed, restorative justice, and antiracism. Co-founder of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective and US Director of Pedagogy and Training for the Diaspora Alliance, Shoshana hosts the radio show Beyond The Pale on WBAI, with Rafael Shimunov.

ATTEND | Screening of 'Partition,' directed by Diana Allan, 05/04/25

 
 

Sunday, May 4
4:30 pm | Linder Theater 
New York Premiere 

Director in Attendance: Diana Allan
2025 | 61 min | Palestine

Consisting entirely of documentary footage captured during the British occupation of Palestine (1917-1948), Partition subverts the colonial archive. Director Diana Allan overlays the film with audio from Palestinians, whose stories challenge colonial narratives embedded in the archival imagery. Intergenerational voices discuss a fearful existence under the British mandate, a fraught moment that precipitated the displacement of 1948. In re-examining the historical record, Allan renders a vision of Palestinian community beyond catastrophe. 

This screening of Partition is part of the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Use the code "MEAD5" to receive the discounted ticket price of $5.

READ | ‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’ by Nadia Abu El-Haj

‘Mahmoud Is Not Safe’
by Nadia Abu El-Haj

Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is the result not just of the Trump administration’s agenda but of more than a year of moral panic around pro-Palestine protest. 

Mahmoud Khalil has been a public face of the pro-Palestine student movement at Columbia University and Barnard College since last spring. I have known him for over a year. During the encampment on campus he served as the lead negotiator with the Columbia administration: a mature, gentle human being and a sophisticated political thinker, he worked to deescalate the situation and bring about a peaceful resolution. 

Last week Mahmoud joined a student sit-in at the college’s Milstein Center. Most of the participants wore masks to hide their identities out of caution, fearful of the Barnard administration and hoping to avoid the vicious campaigns perpetrated online by some of their fellow students and amplified by outside groups—among them the longstanding blacklisting enterprise Canary Mission and a more recently formed organization called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus. Mahmoud was not masked. Images of his presence were circulated on social media both by a Columbia undergraduate and by the business school professor and enfant terrible Shai Davidai, who tagged Marco Rubio and urged him to expel Mahmoud from the country: “Illegally taking over a college in which you are not even enrolled and distributing terrorist propaganda should be a deportable offense, no?” Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus echoed Davidai, explicitly calling on Rubio to revoke his visa. And now here we are. 

A Palestinian refugee, Mahmoud was raised in a camp near Damascus. He fled to Beirut when it became too dangerous in Syria, and eventually he made his way to the US to enroll in an MA program at Columbia’s School of International and Foreign Affairs. Now, a week after ICE agents arrived at his university-owned apartment in Morningside Heights and took him away, he is incarcerated at an immigration detention center in Louisiana, his green card has been revoked, and he is at serious risk of deportation. He may well be displaced yet again. 

Let us be clear: Mahmoud has been abducted and detained for his political speech. It is political speech that some of our colleagues and students—together with Zionist organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Canary Mission—do not like. This is political speech that makes them not just uncomfortable but enraged. Over and over again, they have harnessed that rage to paint pro-Palestinian politics as antisemitic, even as providing material support for terrorism, with no evidence to back up the claim. 

We now know quite a bit about the campaign against Mahmoud and his peers. On January 29—the day Trump signed an executive order that laid the groundwork for deporting students with foreign citizenship for their pro-Palestine speech—the far-right Zionist youth group Betar posted that it had sent Mahmoud’s information to the government. “He’s on our deport list,” it boasted. Last month The Intercept reported that pro-Israel Columbia alumni and parents have maintained a WhatsApp group in which they discussed, among other things, reporting student protesters to law enforcement, including the NYPD, the FBI, and ICE. (It remains unclear whether Mahmoud was among their targets.) The Zionist activist Ross Glick told The Forward that on the day of the Milstein sit-in he “discussed Khalil with aides to Sens. Ted Cruz and John Fetterman who promised to ‘escalate’ the issue.” (Neither senator returned The Forward’s request for comment.) Glick also alleged, without elaborating, “that some members of Columbia’s board had also reported Khalil to officials.” The day after Mahmoud’s arrest, another recently formed group called the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association praised his detention on social media: “Reportedly, Khalil’s green card is being revoked. Good. A green card is a privilege that millions wait years for. So is studying at Columbia. Khalil threw them away…. No one should feel sorry for him.”  

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This behavior—naming specific individuals, tagging them for arrest and deportation—amounts to a witch hunt the likes of which we have not seen in this country since the Red Scare and McCarthyism. How did we get here? How did we get to the point that a mild-mannered, thoughtful Palestinian political activist—a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime—can be picked up by ICE agents and shipped o# to a detention center a thousand miles away?

The peril Mahmoud and others face today did not materialize out of thin air two months ago, when President Trump returned to the White House and the Republican Party secured all three branches of the federal government. The range of Democratic politicians and liberal citizens who, over the last year and a half, have vilified Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists merit their own share of the blame. From the minute protesters converged on college campuses and on the streets of American cities to oppose the slaughter in Gaza, they were portrayed as a danger to the wellbeing of Jewish Americans and as enemies of the country’s interests. Long before encampments were set up or a building occupied, Columbia’s administration and a number of its supporters were already cracking down on dissent and implementing draconian disciplinary measures: banning Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace barely a month into the genocide; establishing unreasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations. When a peaceful encampment emerged, rather than make any serious attempt at negotiating, the administration sent in the riot police on the second day—all in the name of student safety, particularly the safety of Jewish students.

The university’s Task Force on Antisemitism, appointed in November 2023, has meanwhile issued a lengthy report depicting the university as a decidedly dangerous place for Jews—all Jews, any Jews—and e#effectively equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, thereby also dismissing the voices of anti-Zionist Jewish students. Last September dozens of Jewish faculty members sent the administration a ten-page letter enumerating a number of deep flaws in the document. It failed, they noted, to “recognize (save for a single fly-by phrase) Israel’s decimation of Gaza,” effectively effacing the fact that “protesters were reacting to a moral and material catastrophe” rather than denigrating Jewish identity as such; it neither corroborated many of the stories it was told by Jewish students who claimed to feel or to be unsafe, nor clarified when the alleged incidents occurred off campus; and it made “no effort to distinguish” between “incidents of genuine bias, discrimination, lack of safety or exclusion” and “discussions or chants that made some Jewish students feel uncomfortable or that they disagreed with.”

As I have argued in these pages, such appeals to “safety” regularly conflate actual, physical safety with students’ feelings of discomfort and rely on overbroad definitions of antisemitism that encompass almost all anti-Zionist and, for that matter, almost all Palestinian political speech. The Task Force’s report is no exception: the “working definition” of antisemitism it proposes “for pedagogy and training purposes only” includes “certain double standards applied to Israel,” among them “calls for divestment solely from Israel”—a definition that would encompass virtually the entire pro-Palestine student movement. In his newsletter this week for the Chronicle of American Higher Education, Len Gutkin wrote that, under the “current circumstances” of the right’s campaign against elite universities, the Task Force’s reports “read a bit like the accused slipping a confession to the prosecutor.”

All of my colleagues who promoted this rhetoric—each and every member of the Task Force, each and every colleague and student who tweeted unsubstantiated accusations against individual students and student groups: they, too, made Mahmoud’s arrest possible. Their speech has produced dire material consequences. Mahmoud is not safe. This is not a matter of how he feels. He is in real danger, and everyone who helped fashion a moral panic around students fighting to stop the outright annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza—and increasingly also in the West Bank—bears moral responsibility for that fact. They have helped produce and empower a narrative that has, in effect, made it a crime simply to be Palestinian in this country, and Mahmoud Khalil is paying an unconscionable price.

Nadia Abu El-Haj

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Olin Whitney Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and codirector of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology; and most recently Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post–9/11 America.

Originally published in the New York Review of Books on March 15, 2025.