From the Liveblog of
Friday, September 12, 2025
Columbia protest leader Khalil tells far-left Jewish group that anti-Zionist Jews ‘give us hope’
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Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-Israel protest leader at Columbia University made famous after his arrest by the Trump administration, tells a far-left Jewish group that anti-Zionist Jews “give us hope” and that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are separate.
Khalil speaks to IfNotNow, a far-left Jewish activist group based in New York City, during a virtual membership drive for the group.
He highlights the “importance of such anti-Zionist Jewish spaces,” saying that “Palestinian and Jewish liberation are intertwined.”
“We both deserve self-determination, both deserve living in safety and peace,” he says. “My vision for Palestine, whether it’s a 10-state solution, 100-state solution, doesn’t matter as long as we want people to actually live in freedom.”
Anti-Zionism is the rejection of Jewish self-determination in Israel.
He also blames the Trump administration for antisemitism.
“This administration in specific, but also I would say the Zionist lobby at large are trying to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and this is what really fuels antisemitism,” he says.
“Seeing people who are anti-Zionist Jews is what actually gives us hope, is what goes against the narrative that it’s a religious war,” he says.
Khalil was a leading figure in Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups at Columbia that led anti-Israel protests on the campus.
The group has voiced support for violence, distributed Hamas material at a university library, and caused repeated disruptions on campus following the war. In a newsletter this week, the group applauded Hamas and defended Tarek Bazrouk, an activist who pleaded guilty to assaulting Jews in New York City, and Elias Rodriguez, who killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
A university antisemitism task force has reported widespread discrimination on the campus targeting Jews and Israelis.
Last week, at a pro-Palestinian conference in Detroit, Khalil took a more combative tone in a call to dismantle Israel.
“Zionism only depends [on] portraying Israel as a normal state, it’s an ordinary state, but our work is to strip that facade until Israel stands exposed as a pariah state, until the Zionist genocidal project and the ideology of supremacy that it’s built on collapse completely,” he said.
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