In the past year—especially over the last two months—unprecedented developments in the Middle East and the United States have pulled the Palestinian struggle for justice into the heart of American politics. For the first time in the century-long Israel-Palestine conflict, an emerging national counterforce is taking shape in the United States to push back against the long-dominant pro-Israel focus of American foreign policy and militarism in the Middle East since the Second World War. As Israel’s 17-month, Washington-enabled genocide in Gaza continues to spur protests in the United States, Israel has partnered with President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Make American Great Again (MAGA) movement to silence and criminalize pro-Palestine advocacy nationwide. This development has linked Palestine’s struggle for justice with ordinary Americans’ fear that their constitutional rights to free speech, due process, and equal treatment are threatened. As Americans and foreign nationals who are forced out of their positions as professors, graduate students, or other professionals and instantly lose their rights and their livelihoods, they have started to strategize, organize, and resist.
It is early days in this contest about American constitutionalism, pluralism, and democracy. But the protagonists and battle lines are clear. Israeli and pro-Zionist American forces that, almost virtually unopposed, have shaped American policies in the Middle East since the 1940s are now challenged by grassroots and national actions by concerned Americans who see the current situation with pro-Palestine activism as akin to the McCarthyism of the 1950s.
Visible Historic Dimensions
New coalitions of politically active Americans sparked by their common commitment to Palestinian rights and ending the Israeli genocide in Gaza include groups that never previously engaged with the Israel-Palestine conflict—because it was always a faraway issue that did not seem to affect their communities or personal wellbeing. These coalitions encompass groups and individuals who reflect many parts of American society: lawyers, political and community leaders, civil society and human rights organizations, labor unions, marginalized minorities like Arab-Americans, African-Americans, and Latinos, Christian and Muslim groups and progressive Jews, environmental and LGBTQ activists, and university students, administrators, and professors, to mention the most prominent ones.
Many such groups are quickly taking legal action against US government agencies or institutions (such as universities) that arrest, expel, silence, or otherwise punish American citizens or resident foreign nationals who are in the United States legally. They act to neutralize the weapons that MAGA-Israel uses against critics of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza: laws and regulations on terrorism, immigration, national security, and anti-Semitism. Numerous court cases against the detentions are underway and will soon clarify the constitutionality or lack thereof of the Israel-MAGA onslaught.
The organized activism of Arab- and Muslim Americans and their allies contributed to the Democratic Party’s 2024 election loss.
The organized activism of Arab- and Muslim Americans and their allies contributed to the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential election loss. Perhaps the first time that the Palestine issue influenced American politics was the Uncommitted movement in the 2023 Democratic Party primaries, in which voters warned Kamala Harris that they would abandon her if she continued President Joe Biden’s enthusiastic support for the Israeli genocide. The movement is likely to have a more significant impact on US politics if it expands and deepens. Democratic Party activists in one important Midwestern swing state recently told this author that candidates to head the party in the state had already approached Arab-American Uncommitted leaders to seek their support.
Legislative and judicial special elections underway in several states may hint at the future impact of these new domestic political forces that have come to life because of two overarching factors. One is the cruel excesses of American-backed Israeli actions in Gaza; the other is concerns about the fate of domestic issues such as immigrant rights, the role and autonomy of universities, the government’s authority to detain people for their political views, and the balance between executive and judicial authority.
Many Americans who had never agitated for Palestinian rights but protest now can do so because they see the Palestinians and their supporters, along with foreign students with temporary visas, as the easy victims who are targeted first. They fear that if this trend is unopposed, the MAGA-Israel forces will next try to silence or jail Americans who advocate for other issues on their hit lists, such as the climate crisis; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); gender; labor unions; and university curricula.
A Turning Point
The turning point in the current situation was the arrest of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil on March 8, 2025. He was sent to a detention center in Louisiana on vague and publicly unsubstantiated charges that his presence in the country could have an adverse effect on US foreign policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that on this basis, he has the authority to deport Khalil, regardless of his status as a US legal permanent resident. An immediate Habeas Corpus petition on his behalf resulted in a judgement that Khalil should be returned to stand trial in New Jersey, closer to his home in New York, to determine if there is legal ground to detain or deport him. Another foreign student facing the same fate is Turkish national Rumeysa Osturk, a PhD student at Tufts University, who was arrested on March 25 by hooded ICE agents and also moved to a detention facility in Louisiana.
In other court cases in the past month, federal judges have ordered the Trump administration not to deport people they detained, but to appear in court to assess the constitutionality of the charges against the detained men and women. Such instantaneous legal action to support the right of individuals in the United States to speak freely and not be detained without due process directly challenges Zionist-MAGA goals and may become the new normal.
University of Colorado Law School professor Wadie E. Said calls Khalil’s plight “a test case in amending the Constitution by executive action, free from the safeguards that make amendment such a difficult process.”
Columbia University faculty (via the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers) also sued the US government to get back the $400 million in federal research grants that the Trump administration withheld in part over allegations that the university had failed to adequately counter alleged anti-Semitism on campus. The plaintiffs argued that the government’s move is unconstitutional and represents “an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university.” The Trump administration also suspended $175 million in grants to the University of Pennsylvania because it allowed a transgender athlete to compete on the women’s swim team.
These developments in their early days mark a historic third phase for the powerful pro-Israel and Christian Zionist lobbies in the United States, which now face formidable domestic pushback that did not exist previously. The first phase, a century ago, ignored Palestinians as invisible people whose homeland was portrayed dishonestly as an empty terrain that Zionists could use to build their Jewish state. The second phase, roughly from 1967-2020, sought to silence and punish any critics of Israel, including targeted members of Congress who advocated for Israeli-Palestinian equal rights and were branded (again, dishonestly) as anti-Semites.
The pro-Israel lobby today uses laws on anti-Semitism, immigration, terrorism, and national security to pressure autonomous institutions—universities, media outlets, corporations, cities, and states—to suppress and punish those who advocate for Palestine or criticize Israeli policies. Targeted universities have also engaged in such acts as teaching the full dimensions of the Israel-Palestine conflict or exploring American complicity in the Gaza genocide.
One analyst has called this strategy “outsourcing censorship to universities” by using “existential terror” against Columbia, which is “a case study in preemptive acquiescence.” This is “not going to end with Columbia,” the analyst said, continuing, “…the assault on academic freedom is not going to be limited to discourse about Israel. This battle is, in a real sense, the front lines.” Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote recently that “If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow.” He added, “Trump’s efforts to censor criticism of Israeli misconduct is a recipe for endless war and atrocities”—as we perhaps watch in today’s frightening slow-motion shuffle toward potential war between Iran and the United States and Israel.
Trump’s Department of Justice has set up a task force to examine how universities and colleges address complaints about allegedly unchecked anti-Semitism. The task force has announced that it plans to visit 10 campuses and four cities to investigate, and wrote to warn 60 other US higher education institutions. Scores of universities have already acceded to federal government warnings, including 240 colleges that scrapped some or all of their DEI initiatives, and others that downgraded their Middle East offerings or changed faculty leads that Israel-MAGA had criticized.
A central element in the Israeli-Trump strategy to silence Palestinian advocacy is the adoption of the definition of anti-Semitism formulated in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, under which some criticism of Israel could be deemed anti-Semitic. Harvard and other universities have already adopted this definition, a move that is already having a chilling effect on the actions of students and faculty.
A central element in the Israeli-Trump strategy to silence Palestinian advocacy is the adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
A new survey by the respected Middle East Scholars Barometer revealed that 73 percent of Middle East academic experts surveyed said the adoption of the IHRA definition would have a negative impact on their work, and just 1 percent said it would have positive effects. Survey co-director Dr. Marc Lynch notes that adopting the definition while imposing draconian penalties for alleged anti-Semitism “would make research, teaching, and public discussion of Israel, Palestine, and the broader Middle East virtually impossible.”
The new battleground in the United States between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine forces remains skewed in favor of Israel, given that a large majority of the US Congress that has long been close to Israel still provides political, military, financial, media, and diplomatic support for Israel’s positions and actions, while working to stifle pro-Palestine advocacy. But this situation may now be slowly shifting, as many Americans see the harsh arrests and detentions of scholars and immigrants as excessive and unconstitutional.
Recent polling by Gallup shows that more Americans support than oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: 55 percent are in favor and 31 percent opposed, while 14 percent do not have an opinion. This suggests that the American public support for equal rights in Israel-Palestine should help drive the growing protests against the MAGA-Israel clampdown on Palestine advocacy.
Court decisions, political actions, and elections will soon show if most Americans accept or reject that a legal resident foreigner or an American citizen can be arrested in broad daylight, bundled into a van, and shipped to a detention facility in another state in preparations for deportation, without a court warrant and apparently only on the basis of his or her ideas and speech. The battle underway between courts and the Trump-Israel combine has been manifested in dozens of recent incidents at campuses including Georgetown, Brown, Cornell, Tufts, and Swarthmore.
Georgetown University professor Nader Hashemi heads the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, whose postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri was recently detained by US immigration agents on charges of “spreading Hamas propaganda” and having “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist” without revealing any evidence. Lawyers for Suri say he was targeted for his political views and free speech. Hashemi says that “what’s clearly happening here is we have an alliance between these MAGA Republicans and these extreme Israel supporters in this country, who are really trying to undermine the basic legal and political architecture of the United States and freedoms that we just took for granted.”
Worth watching is how legal and professional groups join the fray, such as the American Association of University Professors, the Middle East Studies Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and even the United Auto Workers Union, among others who have spoken out or joined legal actions against the government’s behavior. Such nationally prominent actions are complemented by several initiatives by concerned citizens across the country at the local, city, state, and federal levels.
In recent journalistic reporting in Massachusetts and Michigan, this author has encountered dozens of students, lawyers, faculty members, and activists from other sectors who are working tirelessly to battle the Israel-MAGA assault on free speech and other constitutionally protected rights. They are organizing public protests and petitions; challenging and lobbying legislators; demanding that college and other institutions protect their staff and students from arbitrary detention and divest from companies that assist the genocide in Gaza. They are issuing statements by constitutional law scholars; launching public education actions; declaring themselves “apartheid-free zones”; holding public lectures and symposia on the Palestine-Israel conflict and the US government’s policies; disseminating flyers and tool kits on how ordinary citizens and immigrants can protect themselves. They are also monitoring and protesting the mass media’s unbalanced reporting and analysis; initiating or joining lawsuits; and pushing back many other ways against the pro-Israel and MAGA groups that seek to silence Palestine advocates. Some rallies to support detained individuals have drawn a thousand or more people.
A fascinating case is the Council on American Islamic Relations’ lawsuit in an Illinois court against Canary Mission, the shadowy group that accuses Palestine advocates of anti-Semitism in order to intimidate and silence them. Other legal suits against the government’s detention of immigrant scholars have protected the individuals against deportation until they receive a fair hearing to determine if they have indeed broken any laws.
The broad national coalition of forces to protect free speech and limit the government’s arbitrary arrest of individuals whose opinions it dislikes, has clearly demonstrated its ability to mobilize, use the legal system to freeze detentions, and bring into the political fray individuals who never previously engaged on Middle East issues. For the first time in modern history, Israel and its extremist Zionist supporters in the United States are countered in the public, political, media, and legal arenas by technically proficient and highly motivated activists and organizations that simultaneously oppose the Israeli-American genocide in Palestine and the assault that opposition to the genocide has spawned on fundamental American values.
As these two dynamics merge into a single political and constitutional confrontation that combines foreign and domestic issues, it is making history. Its outcomes remain to be seen but could shape conditions in the Middle East as well as political rights and power dynamics in the United States itself.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Christopher Penler
