US Senator Bernie Sanders met Tuesday with Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel protest leader at Columbia University whom the Trump administration is seeking to deport for supporting Hamas.
In a post on X alongside a photo of them together, Sanders wrote that Khalil was “imprisoned for 104 days by the Trump administration for opposing [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s illegal & horrific war in Gaza. Outrageous.”
“We must not allow Trump to destroy the First Amendment and freedom to dissent,” he added.
Sanders, who is Jewish and volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz in his youth, has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics in the US Congress, which he first entered in 1991 as a representative, becoming a senator in 2007.
The senator, who caucuses with the Democrats in Congress despite not being a member of the party, disappointed some of his far-left supporters by initially rejecting calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and supporting Israel’s right to defend itself following the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, which killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, sparking war in the Strip.
But Sanders grew increasingly critical of Netanyahu as the war dragged on, and has called on the US to stop sending arms to Israel. Legislation he introduced to that effect has been roundly rejected in the Senate.
In May, he accused Democrats of not speaking up against the war due to fear of the pro-Israel lobby.
The meeting came as Khalil was interviewed by CNN, which asked him if he “explicitly condemns Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, not just for their actions on October 7.”
Khalil responded by saying he condemns “the killing of all civilians,” prompting one of the interviewers to ask twice again if he will specifically denounce Hamas, and noting that the Trump administration is accusing him of sympathizing with the Palestinian terror group.
“I simply asked and protested the war in Palestine. That’s what I did. That’s my duty as a Palestinian, as a human being right now, is to ask for the stop of the killing in my home country,” he said, before claiming that asking him to specifically denounce the terror group is “disingenuous and absurd.”
“That’s why I wouldn’t really engage much into such questions on condemnation or not. Because selective condemnations is not, wouldn’t get us anywhere. It’s just like hypocrite, to be honest,” Khalil said.
He also said that the Trump administration’s continued pursuit of him is “simply the weaponization of antisemitism to silence freedom of speech.”
Khalil served as a negotiator and spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student coalition that spearheaded anti-Israel protests at the New York school.
CUAD has praised “violent resistance” by Palestinians, including, explicitly, the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. The group also hosted a number of pro-Hamas figures on campus, including Khaled Barakat, who was later listed by the Biden administration as a specially designated foreign terrorist.
In addition, Khalil served as a negotiator and spokesperson for the anti-Israel encampment at Columbia last year, and for students who broke into and occupied a university building, unfurling a banner calling for “intifada.” He is not personally accused of participating in the building occupation, however, and wasn’t among the people arrested in connection with the demonstrations.