Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat responds to the arrest of Columbia University student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and situates it in the long, bipartisan history of anti-Palestine suppression of free speech. “It was the Biden administration, it was the Democratic establishment, that has created the conditions that we are now seeing taken advantage of,” she says of Khalil’s targeting by the Trump administration for deportation. Erakat calls for continued resistance and study of U.S. imperialism and Zionism in the face of racist repression. “This is the precise moment we should be studying Palestine in order to understand ourselves and what’s coming and our responsibility in the world as an imperial power.”
