Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University, was taken into custody by ICE last week. Donald Trump, without providing any evidence, associated him with pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.

Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder now held in immigration detention in Louisiana, previously served as a lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, CUAD.

His involvement in this role garnered significant attention during the pro-Palestinian protests last spring, prior to his notable arrest.

His detention marks the first publicly acknowledged attempt to deport someone linked to pro-Palestine activism under President Donald Trump.

Khalil was born in Syria in 1995 to Palestinian parents. At 18, he escaped to Lebanon two years after the onset of the Syrian conflict. He holds Syrian nationality and Algerian citizenship.

He served as a program manager at the Syria office within the British Embassy in Beirut from 2018 to 2022.

It was later exposed by Mint Press News that the professor involved in the Columbia University deportation controversy over Khalil is in fact a former official of Israeli intelligence.

Dr Karen Yarhi-Milo, the Dean of Khalil’s school and head of the School of International and Public Affairs, has a background as a former Israeli military intelligence officer and worked at Israel’s mission to the United Nations.

Prior to her academic career, Dr Yarhi-Milo was an officer and intelligence analyst in the Israeli military, where her fluency in Arabic likely involved monitoring the Arab community.

After her time in intelligence, she joined Israel’s permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York, where she met and married her husband, who serves as Israel spokesperson at the UN.

Despite Khalil being a student in her school, she refrained from commenting on his arrest.

Instead of addressing the concerns raised by activists, she opted to invite Naftali Bennett, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2021 to 2022 to speak at Columbia that week.

Sstruggle at Columbia University against Israel’s genocide

Columbia University has been at the center of a bitter struggle over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

On the one hand, the students led an inspiring wave of campus action and occupation, leading to the renaming of one of the buildings on campus, Hind’s Hall, after the Palestinian child Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israel, along with her family in horrifying conditions.

The symbolism of Hind Hall became so strong that US rapper Macklemore made a song in honor of it.

But on the other hand, in order to crush this student movement, several tactics were utilized. At one point, Zionist groups even used chemical spray on a pro-Palestinian gathering of students in hopes of dispersing them and intimidating them.

The Israeli who discharged the spray was then suspended by Columbia University, only to bring a lawsuit against the institution and be awarded $395,000 in a settlement with Colombia.

Another method of suppressing the support for Palestine on campus has been economic warfare, with the Trump administration recently announcing it has cut $400 million in government funding from Columbia University due to its inability to adequately shut down protest in support of Palestine.

A previous phase of the economic warfare was when Zionist lobbyists who fund the university began to pull out their investments.

Billionaire Robert Kraft cut funding to Colombia over the protest. In 2019, he founded the Zionist Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism, FCAS. Alongside the Israeli administration, he also funded Zionist adverts to air to millions of Americans during the iconic Super Bowl.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman also cut funds from Colombia over the protest. He has a history of funding Zionist project like AIPAC, the AJC, Chabad, the foundation for defense of democracies and friends of the IOF.

 Trump’s method of pressure on Columbia is certainly Zionist inspired and directed.