Hardly a day of Yakira Galler’s college career so far has been unaffected by the Israel-Hamas war. Galler was just weeks into her first semester at Columbia University when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, turning her campus into an epicenter of pro-Palestinian protest and a lightning rod for those who saw the protests as threatening for Jewish students like her.
Now, she is taking midterms as Columbia surges back into the news after President Donald Trump ordered immigration officials to arrest a campus Palestinian protest leader. Mahmoud Khalil, who was born in Syria and has a green card giving him permanent residency, is being detained while the Trump administration seeks to deport him.
The White House also cut off $400 million in federal grants to Columbia, mostly for science research, to penalize the school for anti-Israel protests on campus.
While Columbia University has not made specific statements directly referring Mahmoud Khalil, the university has issued two statements about the presence of ICE on campus, and the status of protected free speech, and encouraging students to communicate their concerns with the administration.Columbia/Barnard Hillel did not respond to a request for comment.
Galler said she has heard Jewish student activists on campus praising crackdowns purportedly on behalf of the campus’ Jewish community — but she doesn’t agree.
“I’ve definitely been frightened and disappointed in a lot of my Jewish peers’ responses to both the funding and also this incident,” she said, referring to Khalil’s arrest.
“Trump’s claim is that this is for me, as a Jewish student, but I don’t think it’s protecting me or anyone else,” Galler said. “People are saying, ‘in the name of Judaism’ and ‘in the name of their safety and protection.’ I just honestly find it disgusting and terrifying.”
Galler said she particularly objected to Trump’s “Shalom Mahmoud” social media post, which has drawn criticism for its flippant presentation of a high-stakes immigration decision.
“I really do think that the majority of the Jewish community — here, nationally, internationally — does not agree with that sentiment, and I think [these students are] presenting it as if it does.”
Indeed, the crackdown at Columbia has ignited a new wave of debate in Jewish communities about what is appropriate and advisable in the quest to ensure safety for Jewish students.
Liberal and progressive groups, including a number of pro-Israel organizations and leaders, have expressed alarm at immigration authorities seizing a lawful resident of the United States on the basis of his activism. Groups on the right, meanwhile, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, have largely cheered the arrest of a campus activist whose actions they say abetted Hamas.
Both camps have their adherents on campus.
“Good riddance,” Shoshana Aufzien, a first-year student in the double degree program at Barnard and the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote on X on March 10 in reaction to the news of Khalil’s arrest by ICE. “Terrorist sympathizers have no place on our campus.”
Galler, meanwhile, said she disagreed with the way Khalil has engaged in protests but was concerned that his due process rights had been trampled. He has not been charged with a crime.
“I live in a democratic country where people have rights, and there is a lawful way to be going about this,” she said. “And maybe he is inciting violence and maybe he is anti-American. However, that does not give Trump or anyone else the right to go about this in a way that is unlawful.”
At Columbia, the debate comes with added stakes. The White House is pressuring Columbia to give up the identities of other students who may be subject to Trump’s vow to deport non-citizen students who are “Hamas sympathizers,” a term it has not defined.
On Tuesday afternoon, about 40 students identifying as Jews against ICE gathered on the steps of Low Library on Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights, protesting what they said was the university’s complicity in Khalil’s arrest.
They were charging the university and its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, with aiding the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in locating Khalil and other student protesters — just as the White House press secretary said in a press conference that Columbia was “refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus.”
“Armstrong, you can’t hide, we will never let this slide,” the students chanted, while holding signs couched in Jewish terms: “Pigs are not kosher,” one said. Another read, “We were strangers too. ICE off campus.” A third alluded to the Nazis’ effort to deport Jews early in the campaign that resulted in the Holocaust: “Jews against deportation since 1933.”
A 22-year-old Israeli student in his first year at Columbia who stopped to observe the demonstration said he was confused by it. In his view, the school had acted aggressively when pro-Palestinian protesters had violated its rules.
“What do they expect her to do?” he said, gesturing toward the protesters as they repeated chants berating Armstrong. He declined to give his name.
“What the f—k are you supposed to do?” he added. “Sure, you detain some of them. Get the NYPD involved. You don’t have much to do other than that. Like, is Columbia supposed to … what? I don’t know. What else can they do?”
The Israeli student said he was in French class in Milbank Hall when protesters occupied the Barnard building in late February. They were responding to the expulsion of two students over a pro-Palestinian disruption of a class on the history of Israel. He said he saw a difference between that demonstration, in which Khalil negotiated on behalf of the students and materials praising Hamas were distributed, and the Jews Against ICE protest.
“I don’t like this, and I’m OK with it,” he said, gesturing toward the Low Steps protest. “But if they go into Milstein Library or occupy a building — as ironic as it is that they’re complaining about occupation by occupying it, but OK — if they occupy a building, everyone who is there should be expelled.”
He added, “If you really believe in this cause, in the Palestine cause, you should be willing to handle any type of repercussions or any type of punishment at the university.”
A junior from Israel, also standing near the demonstration, said she thought antisemitism on Columbia’s campus was egregious and was disappointed in how the university handled things. She said she thought consequences were in order — but she was worried about what effect Trump’s crackdown would have on Jewish students.
“I think if you’ve done something antisemitic, Columbia should pay for it,” she said. “But of course, I’m sure it’s just Trump’s way to make the Ivy Leagues weaker and cut funding in science. I know he wraps it nicely and [says it’s on behalf of] the Jews — which is also a problem, because I think that blaming the Jews still also puts us in a problematic position.”
She was speaking with a classmate, another international student, a biology major and a senior who said she had faced criticism after giving an interview last year lamenting the campus climate for Jews. Now, she said, she was worried about the climate in the country.
“It concerns me for the sake of the U.S.,” she said about the threat of deportation on the basis of certain kinds of speech, noting that some of the Jews Against ICE demonstrators were her friends. Of the notion that the Trump administration was asking for more names of protesters, she added, “It feels inquisitorial.”
Still, she said the ultimate responsibility came down to Columbia’s handling of the protests.
“I feel like the university has a big responsibility in this. And also, I feel like realistically, the university has responsibility in the political implications of the country,” she said. “The university didn’t do anything. People started to become really extreme. If the university knew how to deal with it — maybe he wouldn’t have been deported, maybe he would. I think we’ll never know.”
Two days after first lauding Khalil’s arrest, Aufzien expanded her thoughts on X after watching the Jewish anti-ICE demonstration. She said her takeaway was that the protesters were more interested in protecting the content of Khalil’s speech than his rights as an immigrant.
“If my classmates were genuinely open to discussing the legality of deporting permanent residents, I’d oblige,” Aufzien said, adding, “it was never about due process.”
With Columbia and DHS in a standoff, funding cuts starting to be felt and the nation’s eyes on Khalil’s case, all signs point to another spring where the campus and its Jewish students will face unusual scrutiny.
For Galler, it’s important for anyone watching from the outside to know that she and her Jewish classmates are OK.
“The rhetoric has been present all year long, but I’ve been able to be a normal student,” she said, adding that she’s been involved with the university’s frisbee team and Hillel, and had an internship at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank based in New York and Jerusalem.
She added, “They think that it’s been like this all year long, and actually, things have been really OK.”
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