On Friday, 21 March – two weeks after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Syria; a week after Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian graduate student, fled to Canada to avoid being detained by ICE; and just a few days after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, killing more than four hundred Palestinians in less than 24 hours – Columbia University capitulated to the Trump administration’s menu of demands, including a ban on the wearing of non-medical masks on campus, adherence to a broad and highly tendentious definition of antisemitism that would forbid almost any criticism of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, and the imposition of a ‘senior vice president’ to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.

Columbia’s surrender – a ‘shameful day’, in the words of Sheldon Pollock, who oversaw MESAAS – took place hardly a week after the Trump team presented its ultimatum. Four hundred million dollars in federal funds for scientific research were at stake, but it would be a mistake to view Columbia’s decision as a painful concession under financial pressure. The university could have compensated for the loss by dipping into its $14.8 billion endowment; it could have taken the administration to court for its extortionate assault on academic freedom and the right to assemble; it could have sought to build a united front with other universities facing unconstitutional demands from the White House. Instead, the board of trustees – stacked with supporters of Israel – took advantage of Trump’s ultimatum to accelerate a campaign against pro-Palestine dissent launched when Joe Biden was in office.

Pro-Israel faculty, as well as prominent deans and a representative of Jewish alumni, had met in February with the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, urging her to ‘get ahead’ of the Trump administration with new restrictions on protest. Esther Fuchs, a co-chair of the antisemitism task force at Columbia, said that ‘a lot of these things are things we needed to get done and were getting done, but now we’ve gotten done more quickly.’

Paul Weiss, a liberal law firm, has followed suit, agreeing to work on $40 million in cases approved by Trump, and to donate tens of millions of dollars to a group combatting antisemitism. Up next is the University of Pennsylvania, under threat of losing $175 million in research grants for allowing a transgender woman to compete in the women’s swimming team.

That Columbia was first on the list was predictable, not just because of the scale of the protests there but because of Trump’s personal animus against the university. More than 25 years ago, Columbia’s then president, Lee Bollinger, turned down a Trump development project, the price of which would have been – by coincidence – $400 million. ‘Destroy Columbia University’ was among the proposals advanced by Max Eden of the American Enterprise Institute last December, in an article headlined ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Overhauling Higher Education’. Eden advocated arresting Bollinger: ‘Perhaps the college presidents could learn a valuable lesson from the sight of him in an orange jumpsuit.’ Trump is also aligned with right-wing Zionists in the United States who loath Columbia for having been the home of Edward Said (the ‘professor of terror’) and for its Middle East Studies programme, which they called ‘Birzeit on the Hudson’.

There’s nothing surprising about Trump’s attack on the universities, or on the liberal law firms that he also despises. What is shocking is the ease with which his attack has so far succeeded. Like the academics and politicians in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, American college administrators and lawyers are responding to Trump’s bullying as if it were an opportunity to carry out ‘reforms’ – and as if they were secretly relieved that their hand has been forced by the Leader. This is a tale not so much of capitulation to an authoritarian leader as of collusion with him.

The groundwork for Trump’s assault was laid by the universities themselves, and by the Biden administration, which supported the crackdown on the encampments. In the show trial Congressional hearings that led to the firing of Claudine Gay and other university presidents, Gay and her colleagues never contested the claim that slogans such as ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’ amounted to ‘calls for genocide against Jews’. In effect, the universities ceded the ground to Israel and its supporters, allowing them to paint the protesters as antisemites calling for the murder of Jews – and conveniently distract attention from the actual genocide unfolding in Gaza.

There were disturbing incidents of aggression against Jewish students on some campuses, including Columbia. But there were also cases of physical violence against Palestinians and pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including a mob attack at UCLA, and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont, one of whom was left permanently paralysed. Columbia and other universities could have punished individual incidents of anti-Jewish hatred, while defending the right of student protesters – many of them Jewish – to call for divestment from a state that, with American weapons, has carried out the destruction of an entire society.

Instead, Columbia embraced the narrative of its accusers, amplified by highly selective accounts of the protests by ‘liberal’ writers sympathetic to Israel. On this view, the protests were themselves antisemitic, or at the very least caused Jewish students to feel unsafe, and therefore could not be tolerated. The rights of Palestinian students, whose voices, unlike those of conservative Jewish students, are not echoed by members of the board of trustees, were ignored, as were their much more serious concerns over discrimination and safety.

In an email to the administration in January, Mahmoud Khalil warned that he and other student protesters faced ‘severe and pervasive doxxing, discriminatory harassment, and very possibly deportation in retaliation for their lawful exercising of their rights to freedom of speech, expression and association’. An organised campaign against Khalil and others was already underway, both within the university and in right-wing Jewish organisations such as Betar and the Anti-Defamation League (which celebrated his arrest). Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, denounced Khalil as a ‘terror supporter’ on X, and, in another post, suggested deporting him, tagging Marco Rubio. The night before his arrest by agents from the Department of Homeland Security, Khalil wrote to the university administration: ‘I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home.’

Armstrong not only failed to come to his aid; she has not been able even to mention his name in any official correspondence since he was handcuffed in his apartment, where he had just returned from dinner with his pregnant wife. As the Trump administration hailed the detention of Khalil, a green card holder and legal resident (‘Shalom, Mahmoud,’ the White House wrote on X), Armstrong claimed that her university was committed to making ‘every student, faculty and staff member safe and welcome on our campus’.

Shortly after Khalil’s detention, in a meeting with international students, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, urged them to remove posts about the Middle East. ‘Nobody can protect you,’ he said. ‘These are dangerous times.’ True enough. Nonetheless, it was extraordinary that the dean of the country’s most prestigious journalism school was advising students to practice self-censorship – and expressing, in effect, the ‘learned helplessness’ that the American government has so often sought to instill in its critics. On 21 March, Armstrong and the board of trustees effectively buried the Columbia University of C. Wright Mills and Richard Hofstadter, of Edward Said, Barbara Fields and Eric Foner.

The response of some liberal commentators to Trump’s attack on Columbia has been to argue that ‘antisemitism’ is simply a pretext for his effort to impose his will on institutions of higher learning. There is some truth to this. But the choice is hardly accidental. Trump is surrounded by antisemites and himself prone to making antisemitic comments about sinister globalists. By styling himself as a warrior against antisemitism, he packages a highly repressive – and discriminatory – campaign as a crusade against bigotry. The charge of antisemitism is, more importantly, a way of delegitimising the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence, and strengthening Israel’s efforts to inflict ‘politicide’ on Palestine. It is the logical corollary of Trump’s support for Israel’s resumption of the war on Gaza, and his call for the creation of a Palestinian-free ‘riviera’. Those who raise the mildest of objections – even the Zionist ultra Charles Schumer, the minority leader of the US Senate – can be derided as ‘Palestinian’. Protesters will find themselves at the mercy of the Justice Department’s Joint Task Force October 7, which seeks to ‘investigate acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies and their affiliates, as well as acts of antisemitism by these groups.’ In other words, students who protest against Israel’s war on Gaza could be charged with material support for ‘terrorism’ and possibly jailed.

The Trump administration’s approach to the policing of pro-Palestine dissent is ruthless, but not much more than that of universities like Columbia. Other universities are falling into line. Harvard recently endorsed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a pillar of Israel’s efforts to muzzle discussion of its oppressive practices. Susan Neiman coined the term ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’ to describe the situation in Germany, where writers, artists, museums and cultural institutions that receive state subsidies have seen their funds cut for expressing support for Palestinian rights, and where many left-wing Jews have been assailed as antisemites. Philosemitic McCarthyism in Germany has underwritten a policy of unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu, while doing nothing to curb the rise of the neo-Nazi AfD party. The AfD, whose pro-Israel credentials are impeccable, is this week headed to Israel for a conference on ‘combating antisemitism’.

Mahmoud Khalil, who never wore a mask, had a strong premonition that he would be arrested. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Syria and fled the civil war, he’d never had the luxury of safety, unlike his accusers. As a Palestinian, he knew his rights were conditional – even in a ‘country of immigrants’. After his unlawful detention, only thirteen members of the House signed a letter demanding his release. In his letter from prison in Louisiana, he said:

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Khalil’s invocation of the ‘right to have rights’ is an allusion to Hannah Arendt. Arendt was thinking of Jewish refugees like herself, whom the Germans had stripped of their citizenship. Today it is refugees from the Global South, and above all Palestinians, whose right to have rights, whose very existence as a people, is under threat. (The law under which Trump seeks to deport Khalil is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which originally targeted suspected Communists among Jewish immigrants who had escaped the Holocaust.)

Liberals in the West – on our campuses and in our politics – have contributed to an anti-Palestinian hysteria by carving a ‘Palestine exception’ into their liberalism. What they have chosen to overlook – the ethnocratic, racist character of the Israeli state; its brutal, authoritarian policies towards Palestinians – has now been embraced as a model for their own societies by Trump and the far right. The right to have rights was always asymmetrical, but its denial has now been radicalised by MAGA to include virtually anyone who incurs the disfavour of the Trump administration.

There is of course a difference between hypocritical liberalism and violent right-wing authoritarianism. But the one has helped pave the way for the other. Behind Armstrong’s cowardice, and the cowardice of her accomplices in the university administration and faculty, lies the hope, or the calculation, that caving to Trump’s ultimatum will allow Columbia to function ‘normally’ again. Research funds will return, along with donations from wealthy supporters of Israel, and the campus will be quiet. But the result is to make a mockery of the academic freedom the university claims to uphold, and to ensure the erosion – the destruction – of the university’s values. The campaign of repression is already spreading to other targets. Submission is no way to stave off fascism.