Editor’s (admin’s) note. This post started out journaling about Timothy Snyder’s warning about the Trump regime’s flirtation with antisemitic and Russian fascist tropes. As Snyder commented on similar tropes in Trump’s attempt to deport a Palestinian activist at Columbia, it morphed into my thoughts on what I believe is the regime’s dangerous attitude toward Israeli-Palestinian relations in general. I had been revisinng it to keep up, but today when MSNCB commentator Ayman Mohyeldin said on air — quite correctly, I believe — the action against Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil “might be he case through which fascism and totalitarianism are normalized,” I decided I’d better go ahead with what I’ve got now and get back to it later,
Jeffrey Salkin writes a column called Martini Judaism (aimed at readers “who like to be shaken or stirred”) for Religion News Service. Author of several books and rabbi of a Reform Jewish congreation in Florida, he’s no fan of President Trump’s. But antisemitic wasn’t the first word that came to his mind when Trump and Vice President Vance ganged up on the Jewish president of Ukraine in an Oval Office photo op.
For the record. Automobile accident did come to mind. So did national embarrassment. And the worst moment in American diplomacy. At first he dismissed the idea that Trump’s bluster was antisemitic But when he wrote up the meeting 10 days later, he had reconsidered.
In the end, Salkin’s lede was a classic bit of understatement. It deserves extended quotation:
A friend of mine said something to me that has stuck in my mind. “Zelenskyy is of Jewish origin; I wonder if that was part of what was going on.”
I did not think so. This was too paranoid — even for me.
But now, I wonder.
What made Salkin wonder was a Substack essay by historian Timothy Snyder of Yale, auther of On Tyranny and several well-regarded books on 20th-century dictatorships in Eastern Europe. Salkin explained:
Timothy Snyder is my go-to expert on Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Holocaust and the dangers of tyranny in modern society. Two of his books — “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” — are, in my opinion, required reading for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of the Holocaust, and the geopolitics that birthed it.
In a recent sub-stack, Snyder re-visited that Oval Office carnival and concluded there was a dynamic going on, right below the surface.
That dynamic? Zelenskyy (or, as Snyder prefers to spell it, Zelens’kyi) is Jewish. [Links in the original.]
Headlined “Antisemitism in the Oval Office: A confrontation seen with a historian’s eye,” Snyder’s March 7 essay made the case compellingly. Like the phenomenon of antisemitism itself, his case was complex, intuitive and subtle. It deserves extended quotation:
Last Friday I happened to start watching the discussion at the White House between Zelens’kyi, Donald Trump, JD Vance and Brian Glenn towards the end, when Vance was already yelling at the Ukrainian president: “you’re wrong!” I took in the tone and the body language, and my first, reflexive reactions was: these are non-Jews trying to intimidate a Jew. Three against one. A roomful against one. An antisemitic scene.
And the more I listened to the words, the more that reaction was confirmed. I won’t speak for how Zelens’kyi regards himself. Ukrainian, of course. Beyond that I don’t know. These things are complex, and personal.
But not for the antisemite.
It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down.
Even worse, Snyder added, the three goyim who ganged up on Zelenskyy all have a well-documented history of extreme right-wing and/or outright antisemitic behavior:
If we consider for a moment the men who tried to humiliate him, however, the picture only sharpens and clarifies. The man who asked him about his clothes, Brian Glenn, is a conspiracy-theorizing far-right journalist. It is not clear why he was in the Oval Office; but he does seem to know Marjorie Taylor-Greene, she of the Jewish space lasers and the determined defense of Russian propaganda. The man who demanded deference and spoke of “propaganda tours,” JD Vance, had just returned from Germany, where he made a point of publicly supporting the German far right. Vance presents Zelens’kyi as a corrupt liar, with no evidence beyond what was brought to him by an internet which has, apparently, found his vulnerabilities. The man who insisted that the Americans (and indeed he himself personally) were the real heroes, Donald Trump, told Jews last fall they would be held responsible if he lost the election — among many other things. [Links in the original.]
All of this was more than enough for Saltkin. In his March 10 column, he noted:
What is particularly powerful here? To the best of my knowledge, Timothy Snyder is not Jewish. He grew up in a Quaker family in Ohio. To me, his un-Jewishness only serves to boost his credibility; he sees things many of us might not want to see, and he has no emotional investment in the truths he proclaims.
To Saltkin, the part that stood out was when Snyder said, “in the actual world in which we actually live, Jews are humans, perilous and beautiful like the rest of us,” and Zelenskyy “represents his [Ukrainian] people, facing challenges that those who mock him will never understand.” Saltkin’s conclusion was as nuanced, eloquent and, I think, empethetic as Snyder’s essay. Again, it deserves extended quotation:
We cannot know to what extent Zelensky’s ethnic Jewish background was of any importance in that meeting, to what extent his vulgar interlocutors even knew or understood that background.
And, surely, not every negative thing that a Jew encounters is antisemitic.
But I salute Snyder. He is a man of overarching knowledge and wisdom about the recent European past, and the implications of that past for the current moment — and for the future. Moreover, his sense of smell is appropriately sensitive; he can discern the whiff of hatred and tyranny, even when the vast majority of us are blithely unaware or resistant to those truths.
And, like I said, he is not Jewish.
Me? I am acutely aware of my enemies.
And, even more acutely aware of my friends. Timothy Snyder is one of them, and for that, I am deeply grateful.
What can a whitebread mainline Protestant from East Tennessee who now lives amid the corn- and beanfields of central Illinois, where antisemitism isn’t a day-to-day issue, add to Snyder’s assessment? Not much, in all honesty. My knowledge of Judaism I acquired largely in grad school from reading Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (this was before Portnoy’s Complaint) and, especially Chaim Potok. As an aspiring scholar, I was especially drawn to Potok’s yeshiva students navigating a secular world largely indifferent to their scholarship and values. Not a bad introduction to someone else’s culture, but hardly enough to make me an expert.
Similarly, in 2012 I visited the Holy Land with a Lutheran tour group. Granted, you don’t get an expert knowledge of anything from a 10-day tour, but I like to think I came away from it with a deep sympathy for both the Israeli and Palestinian cultures. In addition to visiting Christian holy sites and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, we met with Jewish and Palestinian peace activists; NGO workers; Israeli settlers in the occupied territories and a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which holds the portolio for minority religions in Israel; as well as our counterparts from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land.
I was thoroughly enchanted with Israel, which reminded me of Arizona with its intensive irrigation, its arid climate and informal, multicultural atmosphere. From our tour bus windos, we saw street signs n Nazareth in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian in what is Israel’s largest Arab city. That night, we heard evening prayers broadcast from a mosque as we walked past the Church of the Annunciation, founded in the fourth century by St Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine I.
And, as we drove through the lovely city of Tiberias, founded on. the Sea of Galilee by the Roman king Herod Antipis of New Testmannt fame, using back streets because the center city was crowded with black-suited ultraorthodox Jews in town for the funeral of a Hasidic leader whose name I didn’t get, our tour guide mentioned the nearby grave of Maimonides (also known, widely quoted and revered, as Rambam), a Talmudic scholar of the 12th century; and I had a moment of recognition as I remembered reading about his work in Chaim Potok’s novels.
By the Sea of Galilee (in Israel proper), we stayed and ate at lakeside kibbutzim, similar to planned communities in America, and the food blended Ashkenazi fare that reminded me of kosher delis in New York and Chicago, with Middle Eastern olives, salad greens, hummus and shawmara. When we went through the West Bank separation barrier into occupied Bethlehem, the food — and culture — were also multicultural, but more predominantly Arab. It reminded me, in fact, of crossing into Mexico at Nogales, Ariz.
We toured several schools, NGOs and Lutheran churches in the occupied territori, and I was reminded of the hardscrabble economic development projects I’ve seen growing up in Appalachia. Bethlehem wasn’t quite as touristy as the shrines on the other side of the separation wall in Galilee or Jerusalem, but the Church of the Nativity — parts of which date back to the 500s — was a spiritual experience in itself, even as gaudy, noisy and exotic as it seemed to a Protestant visitor from North America.
Sunday morning, our group joined an Arabic-language service at Christmas Lutheran Church (founded as the Weinachtskirche in the 1800s by German missionaries). One advangage to liturgical worsship — you can follow along even if you don’t know the language, and we were provided translations of key parts of the liturgy; we felt more than welcome, more than included. We were reminded of what it must have felt like at the first Pentecost.
Yet, in the occupied territories I sensed a familiar atmosphere, not quite omnipresent but always in the background, I can only describe as Jim Crow. Later I read books on theology, postcolonialism and the Palestinian Christian experience by the Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb and Dr. Munther Isaac, who succeeded him as pastor at Christmas.
I came away from the experience, after listening to Arabs and Israelis alike, with a deep appreciation for both cultures (I must add: cultures, not political systems) and a hope that one day they can live in peace as neighbors. One culture’s Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) is the other’s Nakba (the Arabic word for the forced displacement of 750,000 indigenous Arabs in 1948) : both words mean “catastrophe,” and both peoples live with deep grief and anger
So when Timothy Snyder returned to the theme of Trump and antisemitism a week after his first column in a March 14 Substack piece headlined “‘Antisemitism’ and “Antisemitism” (with appropriate scare quotes), I was eager hear what he had tlo say.
In the second column, Snyder saw the same Russian fascist tendency at work as Trump labeled all his perceived enemies on US college campuses as antisemites. If the Ukranians, inclding their Jewish president, can be labeled antisemites, then pro-Palestinian students at Columbia can be labeled the same way. Time after time, Snyder said, history shows that Jewish people, sooner or later, will find themselves in the crosshairs when language is abused and categories of hatred are blurred:
The Musk-Trump policy today is to defund, harass and persecute American universities on the grounds that they permit antisemitism. The word “antisemitism” is being used to justify actions that, aside from many other wrongs, will harm Jews, and we should consider whether they are designed to do so.
The federal government is undertaking to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, on the grounds that as a student he led protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza. There is no accusation that Khalil committed a crime. He is being singled out, in what amounts to a test case for American authoritarianism as a whole, for the expression of his views. The Constitution protects his right to freedom of expression no less than it protects that right for American citizens. [Link in the original.]
Ironically, if Trump’s Justice Department follows the canons of due process, any charges or findings against Khalil may well be dismissed by a court of competent jurisdiction for lack of evidence. The only accustations I’ve been able to find in news accounts are vague and seem to be based on hearsay repeated by opponents of the pro-Palestinian groups on campus.
“He de-escalated when the university refused to negotiate in good faith,” Columbia campus activist Maryam Iqbal told the Guardian. “It’s why we made him lead negotiator. […] He was always that voice of reason that we would run to when it felt that things were too much to handle,” Iqbal said. “He would calm us down and help us through the psychological toll this university took on us since day one.”
Turns out that Khalid, who worked for the British embassay in Beirut before he came to America for grad school, came by his diplomatic skills naturally. Born to a Palestinian refugee family in Syria, he fled to Lebanon and helped administer a British program for Syrian refugees studying in the UK.
“The British government relies on people like Mahmoud all over the world,” Andrew Waller, a former British diplomat who worked with Khalil in Beirut at the UK office for Syria, told the Guardian. “Without them the UK could not operate overseas. It could not conduct diplomatic activity without this raft of employees who do this kind of work.”
Waller also noted that British diplomatic personnel who are recruited overseas typically undergo strict screening. “This is a naked example of the US administration arresting someone for their political opinions, and I think the British government should be exercised about this,” he added.
In fact, Khalid’s few on-the-record statements on Israel tend to be studiously even-handed. After his arrest, Chelsea Bailey cited several he made to CNN reporters from the time of the spring semester encampment:
[…] long before he was arrested by federal agents Saturday night, Khalil told CNN he felt called to advocate for the liberation of both the Palestinian and Jewish people as a refugee.
“As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.
“Our movement is a movement for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone,” he said. [Link in the original.]
More flashes of recognition: Bailey reported that before 1948, Khalil’s family was “from Tiberias, an Israeli city that was once known for its mixed Jewish and Arab population.” And his call for “liberation of both the Palestinian and Jewish people” is very much like Mitri Raheb’s vision — and Munther Isaac’s — of a “one-state solution” with a bi-national state, perhaps federated, offering full rights to all Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze and other citizens without regard to religion, race or cultural background.
In fact, I noticed that when Trump announced his pipe dream of buiilding a luxury “Riviera in the Mideast” on the ruins of Gaza, Jeffrey Silkin said he wants instead an Israel that can “bring true peace, security and dignity to all peoples of that region,” and hopes instead for “a plan that would call for the ultimate creation of true Palestinian sovereignty.”
I’m not at all certain that Silkin would endorse a student protester’s take on Palestinian rights (in fact, last year at the height of the Columbia protests he wrote a column, “Grandpa, Tell Us About Abbie Hoffman,” that had this aging hippie laughing till his sides ached, and, alternatively, deeply embarrassed by some of the rhetoric of the anti-Vietnam movment of his youth. Not all flashes of recognition are as pleasant as mine regarding Rambam and pre-Nakba Tiberias).
All of that said, it still may be worth pointing out there’s nothing in Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence to preclude Mahmoud Khalil’s vision of a one- or two-state solution that provides safety and opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians alike. While its language is aspirational instead of binding, like that of similar documents throughout history (including our own US Declaration of Independence), the 13th paragraph of Israel’s declaration envisions just such an inclusive future:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the Ubut nited Nations. [Link in the original]
None of this is likely to happen today or tomorrow. Or even the day after. But it would be a better outcome — and one more likely to bear fruit — than the performative flirtation with antisemitic tropes so recentlu on display in Trump’s White House.
Links and Citations
Chelsea Bailey, “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests,” CNN News, March 11, 2025 https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-ice-green-card-hnk/index.html.
Anvee Bhutani. “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests,” Guardian, March 11, 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/12/who-is-mahmoud-khalil-arrest-palestinian-activist-columbia.
Declaration of Israel’s Independence 1948: Issued at Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948 (5th of Iyar, 5708), Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, New Haven https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/israel.asp.
Ruth Michaelson, “Columbia graduate detained by Ice was respected British government employee,” Guardian, March 12, 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/13/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-british-government-work.
Jeffrey Slakin, “America taking over Gaza is a very bad idea,” Religion News Service, Feb. 5, 2025 https://religionnews.com/2025/02/05/america-gaza-israel/.
__________. “Grandpa, tell us about Abbie Hoffman,” Religion News Service, May 28, 2024 https://religionnews.com/2024/05/28/college-demonstrations-israel/
__________. “Zelenskyy is Jewish. Does it matter?” Religion News Service, March 10, 2025 https://religionnews.com/2025/03/10/zelensky-trump-jewish/.
Timothy Snyder, “Antisemitism in the Oval Office,” Thinking about…, Substack, March 7, 2025 https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-in-the-oval-office.
__________. “‘Antisemitism” and Antisemitism’: The abuse of the word and the spread of the phenomenon,” Thinking about…, Substack, March 7, 2025 https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-antisemitism.
Diana Stancy, “Who is Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel Columbia University activist ICE arrested?” Fox News, March 11, 2015 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/who-mahmoud-khalil-columbia-university-anti-israel-activist-ice-arrested.
Added in Editor’s note: Stephanie Kaloi, “MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin Warns Mahmoud Khalil’s Detention May Be How ‘Fascism and Totalitarianism are Normalized’ in America,” The Wrap; rpt. Yahoo! News, March 16, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/msnbc-ayman-mohyeldin-warns-mahmoud-200131451.html.
[Uplinked March 17, 2025]
Ordinary Time 