Americans Can't Be Free Until Palestinians Are Free—And That Terrifies The Powerful

The United States is setting itself on fire, and it’s doing it to keep Israel warm. A country that warns of dictatorship in Russia or China is handing its universities over to state control.

The United States is setting itself on fire, and it’s doing it to keep Israel warm.

How else do you explain a nation so eager to gut its own freedoms, to self-mutilate on behalf of a foreign state that bulldozes homes, snipes journalists, and brags about its “killing arabs”? How else do you explain Columbia University turning into a police state? Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian doctoral student, arrested in broad daylight, in front of his 8 month-pregnant wife, by unnamed agents wearing Avengers shirts. “We have you,” they say, refusing to read him his rights, refusing to explain why he’s being taken away. His crime? Condemning Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza. The government admits it outright—he’s not being punished for breaking a law. He’s being punished for being pro-Palestinian.

He is not the only one. A second Columbia student has been arrested for participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations. An Indian doctoral student, Ranjani Srinivasan, had her visa revoked under vague accusations of “advocating for violence and terrorism.” When asked for proof, officials offered none. She fled the country before she could be deported. A Palestinian woman, arrested at Columbia’s protests last April, has been detained by immigration authorities in Newark for overstaying a visa.

But not everyone protesting at Columbia is treated like this. Take Shai Davidai, an Israeli Assistant Professor who has spent the past two years ranting about Palestine, harassing colleagues, and protesting so aggressively that he was suspended. And yet—no deportation order. No ICE agents knocking at his door. No headlines branding him a threat to national security. Why? Because his views align with those of the powerful. Because in America, it’s only certain foreigners, who are in touch enough with their humanity, to stand up against genocide, mass starvation, they are the ones expected to shut up and be grateful, like Rabbi Shmuley once tried to get me to do on CNN.

History does not forget its sharpest tools. Laws designed for domination do not simply disappear; they recede, waiting for a moment of necessity, for a ruler who understands their true purpose.

The Alien Enemies Act is such a law—conceived in a time of fracture, wielded in service of power, and preserved long past the moment it should have been cast aside.

Two centuries old, born in the fever of war, the Alien Enemies Act was never meant for times like these. But Donald Trump has dusted it off, sharpened its edge, and set it loose upon a nation at peace—if peace is what this is.

He says it is about a gang. He says Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan syndicate, is a national terrorist organization. He says Venezuela is a hybrid criminal state. He says an invasion is underway. He says many things.

Trump is doing this, not to surgically excise a single criminal network but to grant himself the authority to sidestep due process, to erase legal protections, to turn mere suspicion into a sentence. He will cast the net wide—too wide—and in its entanglement, thousands who have nothing to do with crime or gangs will be swallowed whole.

The law, twisted just right, will likely bend to his will. The question is what happens when a country turns its back on its own promises, when legality becomes a vessel for cruelty, when the past reaches out with iron fingers and drags the present into its grasp.

If a president can do this, it begs the question, if he can wield war powers in a time of peace: then what, really, can’t he do?

The Ministry of Punishment

The Trump administration has sent Columbia University a ransom note: comply with our demands, or lose $400 million in federal funding.

• Expel, suspend, and revoke the degrees of students involved in last year’s Hamilton Hall protest. Columbia has already started, expelling six students, including Grant Miner, president of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) union—coincidentally, just one day before the union’s contract negotiations with the university were set to begin.

• Hand over control of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department to the federal government. A concept so cartoonishly authoritarian it would make McCarthy blush. The new department chair would be chosen by Trump’s officials, who would oversee hiring, firing, and curriculum design.

• Ban masks on campus, except for religious or health reasons. Anyone covering their face must wear their ID outside their clothing—because apparently, we are one step away from labeling protesters with numbers.

• Adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with bigotry, legally enshrining the idea that Palestinian self-determination is a hate crime.

With all eyes on Columbia, other universities are quietly falling in line. UCLA just canceled a public health course on Palestine, proving that even academia is allergic to the most documented public health catastrophe of the 21st century—Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

John Adams and his Federalists, gripped by fear of opposition, sought to suffocate dissent. They forged the Alien and Sedition Acts not as instruments of governance, but of control. They silenced voices, criminalized speech, and pressed against the very boundaries of the First Amendment. The anti-sedition laws were eventually erased, but they were never truly undone.

Jefferson’s victory may have unseated the Federalists, but it did not dismantle their architecture of suppression. The Alien Enemies Act remained, buried but intact, a relic of a republic still uncertain of its own principles. And now, more than two centuries later, the law has returned to the hands of those who see in it not a shameful remnant, but a powerful means to an end.

The same media that greased the wheels for this repression is now feigning concern. The New York Times has suddenly discovered student deportations, publishing op-eds about the dangers of Trump’s immigration policies. Conveniently forgetting that it was their own reporting that branded these students as threats, their own coverage that turned campus protests into a national antisemitism crisis. When the first encampments popped up, when students were yelling for divestment from genocide, the Times changed its main headline to “Antisemitism on Campus.”

They manufactured consent for these deportations. It’s hard to overstate how, and much of the media should be deeply ashamed of being involved in this, do long, and so deliberately.

Ethnic Cleansing in Real Time

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel tightens its grip. Israel continued bombing the Gaza Strip despite the ceasefire deal, killing at least nine people, most of them aid workers, in a drone attack on northern Beit Lahiya.

It has been 13 days since Israel imposed a total blockade, starving civilians en masse. But still, starvation is not enough. Palestinians in Gaza are facing a severe water crisis and struggling to get basic items as Israel’s blockade on the Strip enters its third week.

And today we received confirmation that Israel is reviving the Madagascar Plan—except this time, the victims are Palestinian.

U.S. and Israeli diplomats have been approaching East African nations, offering financial payoffs in exchange for taking in Palestinian refugees. Sudan and Somalia have refused. But Somaliland—a breakaway region with no international recognition, desperate for legitimacy—might comply.

Inside Israel, the plan is accelerating. After Netanyahu’s latest White House meeting with Trump, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has laid out the logistics: relocating most of Gaza’s population within six months, processing 10,000 people per day. A new migration authority, under the Israeli Defense Ministry, will oversee the mass displacement.

Let’s be clear: Israel will call this “voluntary relocation.” But no Palestinian wants to move to Somaliland, a territory with one of the lowest income levels in the world. This is forced ethnic cleansing. This is what genocide looks like when it is pre-packaged for international approval.

Screenshot of quick search for propaganda at the top of a Google search query.

And in the midst of all this, the U.S. doubles down on its allegiance. South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, has been declared persona non grata, barred from the country. His crime? Telling the truth. Calling out Trump’s role in a global white supremacist movement. Taking Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide.

This is what happens when a country sells its soul to a settler-colonial project. Zionists are willing to sacrifice every institution, every civil liberty, to protect Israel’s rogue regime.

A Foreign Lobby That Calls the Shots

A sitting U.S. congressman, Rep. Thomas Massie, is being politically exiled because he dared to ask:

Why doesn’t AIPAC have to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act?

AIPAC—the most powerful foreign lobby in America, the group that funds attack ads against politicians who dare speak about Palestine—operates with full immunity. Massie’s own party is making sure he regrets the question.

Because in Washington, loyalty to Israel is never questioned. The U.S. government does not hesitate to sacrifice its own citizens, its own students, its own democracy, in the name of a genocidal ally.

This Is How a Nation Dies

A government that can purge students for protesting can purge anyone. A government that revokes visas over speech can silence anyone. A government that allows a foreign lobby to dictate policy is no longer governing itself.

A country that prides itself on fighting authoritarianism abroad is welcoming it at home. A country that warns of dictatorship in Russia or China is handing its universities over to state control.

And still, amid all this, there is silence. The kind of silence that serves dehumanization. The kind of silence that enables genocide.

But silence is a choice.

Now is the time to speak, because Americans will never be free until Palestinians are free.