The fragile and faltering left-wing government of France is beholden enough to the pro-Hamas faction of its population that it has agreed to reward the terrorist group by recognizing Palestinian statehood at next month’s United Nations General Assembly. But even France understands the sovereignty of its own statehood. After a Gazan university student in Lille had her scholarship revoked for praising Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians, the French foreign minister put the kibosh on the country’s program to receive Palestinian refugees from Gaza and referred the student for possible deportation.

The United States is not France. Foreign nationals do have First Amendment protections when on U.S. soil. But our Immigration and Nationality Act clearly does qualify noncitizens for deportation for “endorsing or espousing” terrorist activity. And French President Emmanuel Macron‘s Renaissance Party is not President Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The former is proudly progressive in a way that would place it squarely in our stateside center-left.

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So it’s notable that whereas France’s liberal government has conceded that its ability to vet Palestinians has failed, the American Left continues to lionize Hamas sympathizer Mahmoud Khalil.

Since being released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention after the Trump administration tried and failed to deport the former Columbia University student, Khalil has been on a public victory lap, shutting down the streets for more protests and making the media rounds. During a long-form interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, Khalil is finally giving the lie to his Democratic defenders and saying the quiet part out loud.

Klein asked Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian citizen who only came to the U.S. in January 2023, about Oct. 7 of that year. Crucially, Klein does not ask about Israel’s military response after — he simply asks Khalil what he thought the day of the massacres.

“To me, it felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle,” Khalil said. “I remember I didn’t sleep for a number of days, and Noor [Abdalla, Khalil’s wife] was very worried about my health. It was heavy. I still remember. I was like: This couldn’t happen.”

When Klein pushes back on the insinuation that Oct. 7 was an inevitability, Khalil doubles down.

“You can see that the situation is not sustainable,” Khalil said. “You have an Israeli government that’s absolutely ignoring Palestinians. They are trying to make that deal with Saudi and just happy about their Abraham Accord without looking at Palestinians — as if Palestinians are not part of the equation. They circumvented the Palestinian question.”

If Khalil’s justification of the single largest slaughter of Jews since World War II sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s Hamas’s stated reason for executing Oct. 7.

“There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly,” since-slain Hamas boss Yahya Sinwar warned just five days before Oct. 7 in meeting minutes later unearthed by the Wall Street Journal. Hamas then planned an “extraordinary act,” specifically “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause.”

That extraordinary act, designed to stoke up the support of Iranian proxies to derail the Saudi realignment, was ultimately too cute by half. Instead of lying down like good victims and allowing Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to slaughter Jews with impunity, Israel struck back, extricating Hezbollah from power in Lebanon, allowing the full-scale collapse of the Assad regime in Syria to be replaced by a ruthless but evidently pragmatic and anti-Iranian Turkish-proxy regime, and bringing Hamas to its knees in Gaza.

Khalil makes clear that it’s the Jewish predilection not to be murdered that irks him the most.

“Having lived in the Middle East most of my life, unfortunately, the only Jew you hear about is the one who’s trying to kill you,” Khalil said when Klein asked him about his pre-Oct. 7 activism. “For those in Gaza and the West Bank — that’s the only Jewish person they encounter: the one at checkpoints, the one raiding their homes.”

Let’s step back a moment and consider Khalil’s personal biography.

Khalil was born in Syria in 1995. His mother descended from Algerian revolutionaries who were allegedly “displaced” to the Ottoman Empire. His grandparents left Tiberias for Syria after Israeli forces responded to an Arab attack on the city. Khalil and his family left Syria for Lebanon in 2013, where he lived until he moved to New York 10 years later.

Now let’s revisit his claim: “Having lived in the Middle East most of my life, unfortunately, the only Jew you hear about is the one who’s trying to kill you.”

Jews have historically and consistently lived in both Syria and Lebanon since antiquity. At the start of the 20th century, around 100,000 Jews lived in Syria, whereas 5,000 Jews lived in Lebanon, primarily in the Beirut metropolitan area. By the century’s midpoint, the Syrian population had fallen to 30,000, but the Lebanese population approached 10,000. At the time of Khalil’s birth, Jewish populations in both countries had fallen to about 200. As of 2020, Arab News found that just 29 Jews still live in Lebanon. Today, only six Jews, all senior citizens, live in Syria.

“Having lived in the Middle East most of my life, unfortunately, the only Jew you hear about is the one who’s trying to kill you.”

We can go back even further in Khalil’s history to Algeria and Tiberias, where, again, Jews have historically and consistently lived. Jews in Algeria faced the double-whammy of persecution by the local Muslim population and the Vichy French fascists during World War II, with Jews largely opting to flee to Israel or liberated France after the Algerian War of Independence largely instated Sharia law. The State Department estimates that only 200 Jews still live in Algeria.

Tiberias, another historical homeland of the Jewish people, was a multiethnic city in 1948. In response to the U.N. Partition Plan in 1947, Arab fighters began attacking the city. Khalil’s grandparents’ exodus was triggered not by the counteroffensive by the Haganah, the precursor to today’s Israel Defense Forces, but by the fact that fellow Arabs struck first, beginning a fight they couldn’t win.

Khalil only grew up around Jews disappearing or dying. The only ones he ever heard about from his ancestors were those who had the audacity to fight back.

Khalil doesn’t have the socialization to couch his antisemitism in the academic jargon skillfully deployed by much of the chattering class, which makes his interview all the more useful. When Klein tried to give Khalil the chance to differentiate between “Palestinian liberation” and Jewish genocide, Khalil couldn’t help but admit that he is not an Algerian citizen, a native-born Syrian, or even an American national. He does not discuss a post-Hamas future for Gaza, one where the Palestinian people can vote, engage in global commerce, or thrive. The only identity that matters to him, Palestinian, matters because it exists in opposition to Jews.

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“To me, as a Palestinian, as an oppressed, I always felt my duty to also liberate my oppressor from their hate and from their fear,” Khalil said.

To Khalil at least, Palestinian statehood requires “liberating” Jews from their own desire for statehood. Jewish sovereignty itself is the threat to his identity. It’s an embrace of victimhood even more than one of nationality, insofar as they are not one and the same.