Mahmoud Khalil and Nan Goldin in conversation

This story is taken from the autumn 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from September 11. Pre-order a copy here.

On March 8, 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was accosted by a group of masked men in the lobby of his own home in New York City. In front of his then-pregnant wife, Khalil – a legal green card holder of Palestinian descent – was taken by the group, who only identified themselves as Homeland Security.

The 30-year-old student had been a negotiator during protests at Columbia University, calling on the Ivy League school to divest from companies with ties to Israel. The protests spread to campuses worldwide, prompting a pushback from President Trump that amounted to a staggering assault on academic freedoms. International students were threatened with deportation, and universities that allowed protests on-site were met with threats to withdraw federal funding.

To justify Khalil’s arrest, Trump’s administration cited a rarely used provision of US immigration law, alleging that his presence in the country undermined foreign policy. When a judge ruled that his detainment was likely unconstitutional, they appeared to change tack, claiming he was being held for failing to disclose information on his green card application in 2024. But to the rest of the world, the truth seemed obvious: Khalil was arrested for exercising his right to free speech, on a subject that had become a testing ground for the government’s ongoing crackdown on civil liberties.

As Khalil remained trapped under threat of deportation for more than three months, events in the outside world continued to escalate: around the same time that his wife, Noor, gave birth in his absence, Israel broke a temporary ceasefire, worsening the already dire situation for Palestinians in Gaza. My family, immigrants to the US who had grown up in Palestinian refugee camps in Syria like Khalil, watched on incredulously as Khalil’s case, and the smear campaign against him led largely by the White House itself, unfolded. How could this moment of blatant repression happen in America? How could this wrongful imprisonment take place in what they’d believed was the land of the free? We, along with other Palestinian Americans, innately understood our government intended to turn Khalil into an example, a pawn in their attempt to suppress support for Palestine. In truth, Khalil turned out to be a canary in a coal mine, one of the indicative sparks of what was to come in the form of a string of inhumane abductions by the US’s Immigrant and Customs Agency [Ice]. More so, though, Khalil turned out to be a victor.

Since his release in June, Khalil has been catapulted into prominence and reluctantly anointed with several titles ranging from wrong and repulsive – “terrorist sympathiser”, “ringleader” – to revered: political prisoner, freedom fighter and, most prominently, activist. In late July, I hosted a conversation between Khalil and the artist, photographer and fellow activist (even though they both reject the title) Nan Goldin to discuss his detention, the struggle for liberation and their hopes for the future.

Nan Goldin: How are you, Mahmoud?

Mahmoud Khalil: I’m still in the processing phase. To comprehend what happened to me, but also to plan for the future, and think about what’s next for me and my family.

Nan Goldin: Did you know what people were doing for you outside?

Mahmoud Khalil: Not really. They wouldn’t allow me to call anyone for three days.

Nan Goldin: Did the men ever say who they were?

Mahmoud Khalil: No, they told me they were from the Department of Homeland Security. They said that this was a DHS investigation and my visa was revoked. I told them I have a green card, not a visa, and they were visibly confused.

Nan Goldin: Did they think maybe they had the wrong person?

Mahmoud Khalil: I don’t think so. I saw they had a photo of me on their phone. That was one of the most shocking moments of my life – that this can happen in America.

Nan Goldin: It’s shocking to us as Americans that this can happen.

That’s a pretty big sacrifice to make in the end – months of your life that were wrongly taken from you. When you first got out of detention, you immediately brought the attention back to the people who were inside the facility. Can you tell us why you kept on fighting when you came out?

Mahmoud Khalil: To me, it’s all relative. I always say that I consider myself one of the lucky Palestinians who made it out. I have this privilege of actually speaking out, to be a voice for my people. What I went through is only one drop in the sea of sorrow that Palestinian families go through.

Nan Goldin: That’s something I hear often, and I respect, but you also experienced something horrible. You need to validate your own pain. Not only as a comparison to the suffering of others. What were the people like inside the detention centre?

The fact they are going all this way to criminalise our speech, to criminalise dissent, means that what we’re doing matters – Mahmoud Khalil

Mahmoud Khalil: There were brilliant, incredible men all around me. That’s one of the things that really saddened me. People know my story, but there’s so much hardship and so many stories out there that no one is actually paying attention to.

Nan Goldin: What did the people themselves think? Did they have hope?

Mahmoud Khalil: I would be lying if I said they do. A lot of them were taken from their court hearings, their Ice check-ins. They were in the process of obtaining documents and yet they were brought in. You can see the hopelessness. I believed I would prevail. But for them there was no light at the end of the tunnel. And you can sense the depression around you. We had this room of over 70 people, and they were just sleeping all the time. When I would wake up at 2am, I could see people crying.

Nan Goldin: There was no privacy?

Mahmoud Khalil: No, 70 men in one room.

Nan Goldin: Did you know you were going to be released?

Mahmoud Khalil: No, that was the most difficult part – we didn’t know what was going to happen next.

Nan Goldin: Have you ever had the chance to go to Palestine?

Mahmoud Khalil: No, never. I tried once. In 2011, Palestinians had their own version of the Arab Spring, when we tried to march to the borders and peacefully enter Palestine. It was met with violence. I was shot in my leg by the IOF [Israel Occupying Force].

Nan Goldin: Marching from where to where?

Mahmoud Khalil: This was from the Golan Heights in Syria. Four people were killed and about 20 to 25 were injured. It was a one-day action, similar to the Great March that happened in Gaza, where people wanted to go peacefully back to where they are from. But it was met with violence.

Nan Goldin: I grew up in a Jewish family, and my brother went to Israel. I was taught that Palestine was a land of Bedouin tribes, and there was nothing there.

Mahmoud Khalil: History is repeating itself now. We grew up learning about all these propaganda narratives – that Palestine was a land without people.

Nan Goldin: Ultimately, it’s ethnic cleansing, but do you think the end game of this is a land grab?

Mahmoud Khalil: It’s colonialism, so it is about land-grabbing and having that outpost there to protect the interests of the colonial west.

Nan Goldin: Do you think the boycotts are making any difference?

Mahmoud Khalil: Absolutely. You don’t have to be part of an institution to actually make a difference.

Nan Goldin: You said something in an interview – you were talking about how Jews were historically at the forefront or a big part of [progressive] uprisings. And you said it makes sense because Jewish culture is based on helping other people and teaching compassion. Nobody else has said that – thank you for saying it. It’s really important.

Mahmoud Khalil: I went through this phase of “why is this happening?” and wanted to explore that point of view. I read a lot of Jewish and Israeli literature, just trying to understand, and met all these people and I saw that it’s the total opposite – that actually a lot of these people are speaking out against Israel because of Jewish teaching about justice and standing with the oppressed. This solidified my belief in the righteousness of the Palestinian cause. There were always Jewish people in Palestine. My grandmother used to tell me about the Jewish neighbours she had when she worked in a Jewish farm in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. We were never raised to hate Jews, or to blame Jews for what is happening.

Nan Goldin: I heard it was important to Palestinian people at the beginning when Jewish people were organising for them in the United States?

Mahmoud Khalil: That’s absolutely right. Even at Columbia, especially during the encampment, we wanted to have a joint Palestinian and Jewish press conference just to show that all this disinformation online about the encampment being inherently antisemitic is very far from the truth. But a lot of the time I disagree with the idea that as a Palestinian you have to work with a Jewish person just to get validation.

Nan Goldin: Really? I never heard that. I hear the opposite, that we need to be sure to follow the lead of Palestinians.

It’s shocking for us as Americans to think that this can happen – Nan Goldin

Mahmoud Khalil: I do it out of solidarity, out of a belief in mutual liberation, not out of validation. I wouldn’t go and work with a Jewish person just to show someone that ‘oh look, we’re working together’. I would do it because I believe, deep inside me, in this mutual solidarity between us. Because unfortunately, when an average American hears from a pro-Palestine Jew, that would weigh much more [for them] than hearing from a Palestinian. And this is what I don’t like about it, this imbalance. Especially now, when B’Tselem and another [Israeli] organisation have finally said what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. Palestinians have been saying that for at least a year. To me, if you believe in the innate equality of all people, that’s how it should be. I don’t have a problem building a country alongside Jews and Christians and everyone else. The ultimate goal of life is to live happily, not to be superior. And this is why I continue to shed light on the mutual liberation beyond ethnicity, beyond religion.

Nan Goldin: I wanted to ask you: what do you think is going to happen?

Mahmoud Khalil: There is immense hope now that the public is waking up and they’re learning – not only about Israel’s atrocities, but also about how the public in general is complicit in maintaining this genocide and occupation, and how the US government is complicit, too. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the killing will stop immediately.

Nan Goldin: Do the people really have any power?

Mahmoud Khalil: If it weren’t for the people, Israel would have done worse in Gaza. Initially they wanted to kill everyone – and they still want to kill everyone – but now, because of the protests, they’re slowing it down.

Nan Goldin: The agenda is still the same. When they feared sanctions were going to be placed, they bombed Iran. It reinvigorated the Israeli public to support their agenda. And most of all it distracted the world from Gaza.

Mahmoud Khalil: The agenda is the same. Since day one, they wanted to ethnically cleanse two million people. They said it out loud, but the people [took to] the streets. They had to change the plan from one to another. But even now, with the starvation – they know that people are watching. Of course, they’re still doing everything – I’m not saying that they are not doing that – but it’s on a different scale.

Nan Goldin: It’s levels of evil I’ve never heard of.

Mahmoud Khalil: Yeah. And they can do worse.

Nan Goldin: It takes imagination to do worse than that. Do you think people are gonna survive now, with the starvation?

Mahmoud Khalil: No, no… They want to finish the job as soon as possible because they know the public is waking up, the tide is turning. Eventually institutions will follow suit.

Nan Goldin: You would have thought that would have happened much sooner with the degree of public support.

Mahmoud Khalil: Yeah, but unfortunately – you may know better than me about social movements and mobilisation – it takes time to have that change on an institutional level. We can see what they are doing with Zohran Mamdani [pro-Palestine candidate for New York City mayor, who has been subjected to racist attacks by prominent Republicans].

Nan Goldin: But he’s still hanging in there, right?

Mahmoud Khalil: He’s still doing well, but the attack against him is so vicious. You can see how coordinated it is – not only from Republicans, but from Democrats and billionaires.

Nan Goldin: Do you think he could possibly win?

Mahmoud Khalil: I believe he has a very good chance.

Nan Goldin: What can we do now? That’s my biggest question.

Mahmoud Khalil: To me, the thing is just to not lose hope and to continue putting pressure on the system, because they want us to feel hopeless. They want us to feel useless, like we cannot do anything. But the fact that they’re going all this way to criminalise our speech, to criminalise dissent, means that what we’re doing matters and is making change.

Nan Goldin: It’s impressive to hear that you have hope.

Mahmoud Khalil: We don’t have an option.

Nan Goldin: I don’t have hope. But I won’t stop. So we do what we’ve been doing? We talk? We protest?

Mahmoud Khalil: And we escalate our work. I do believe we’re making change. Unfortunately, people are still getting killed. People are still being starved. And nothing will make up for the lost lives. But I just don’t think we have an option. We shouldn’t lose hope, because that’s how they think they will defeat us: if we feel that we are against this big machine.

Nan Goldin: We are.

Mahmoud Khalil: Yeah, we are, but so was apartheid South Africa. We just need to be persistent. It’s not going to be this linear change. I’m not trying to give false hope. I’m very grounded in the realities and the immensity of the injustice of this machine against us. But we don’t have any other option. Had you ever thought that the president of America would go after a student for speaking?

Nan Goldin: No. I grew up in the time of Vietnam. When I was a teenager, students weren’t expelled, they weren’t villainised – except for Kent State, where they got shot. But generally, freedom to protest was very much part of society. I had no idea when I signed the Artforum letter [criticising Israel’s actions in Gaza, which sparked backlash and led to the firing of the magazine’s editor-in-chief]. I was shocked at the reaction. I didn’t know that you couldn’t speak.

Mahmoud Khalil: And [the US government] use Palestine as a smokescreen for a lot of things, whether it is DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion], LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights…

Nan Goldin: They want a white, heterosexual America that’s also not educated. What do the things that happened to you, Mahmoud, say about the state of free speech in this country and also on campuses where dissent is allegedly welcomed?

Mahmoud Khalil: I always believe that there’s a Palestine exception. There is a democracy of convenience in America – as long as it’s convenient to those in power. I thought that the institutions were solid, that the constitution is solid when it comes to protecting free speech.

Nan Goldin: I do think it’s a Palestine exception. Because when I had a group that went up against a billionaire family who were making pharmaceuticals that were killing people and ignited the overdose crisis, we didn’t get pushback like that. We got support, actually. As a small group of 12 people, we succeeded because we were able to focus on one bad actor. We had the support of the media, the most complicit force in the war on Gaza. But even then, the New York Times was the only one who defended the powerful.

Mahmoud Khalil: Yeah, when you have universities changing their long-standing rules and procedures just so they can criminalise speech about Palestine... it’s because of their donors, and they want to align with power, because universities are becoming for-profit and about protecting the prestige of the board of trustees. It’s practically a requirement, you have to be a billionaire to be on the board of trustees. You’re running an academic institution: you should be an academic or just someone from the community.

I don’t usually like the label ‘activist’. It’s being a human, it’s not just being an activist. Putting the label on it takes a lot away from our humanity – you don’t have to be an activist to care about human beings – Mahmoud Khalil

Nan Goldin: It’s the same with the museums – it should be artists in charge. But the boards control who’s shown, because they want the people they’ve collected to be shown. Queer art was not shown for a long time because of that. They have a lot of power. Personally, my career tanked – my market tanked from one day to the next because of my support of Palestine. I’ve learned that many of the rich collectors in New York are Zionists.

Mahmoud Khalil: How does that feel to you?

Nan Goldin: Financially, it’s scary. I have a studio I support so I have seven people who live off my pay and I care deeply about them. Gabor Maté, the doctor, philosopher and author who’s been a mentor to me, said, ‘If I don’t make another penny in my life, I’m OK. So I can say whatever I want.’ And that’s the problem. It comes down to economics, and they just want me to shut up. And I’m absolutely not going to shut up. I boycotted the [New York] Times and some collector called the gallery and said, ‘That’s the last straw, I’m sending her work back.’

Mahmoud Khalil: For me it’s easy, I’m Palestinian – I have to do that. It’s my people who are being killed. I’m a human being, I have to do it. I always do what I have to do.

Both of you are seen as activists in the public eye. What do you think makes an activist? Do you have to choose to be one?

Nan Goldin: I’m not sure the word has any real meaning any more. It’s become an identity marker.

Mahmoud Khalil: You’re absolutely right. I don’t usually like the label ‘activist’. It’s being a human, it’s not just being an activist. Putting the label on it takes a lot away from our humanity – you don’t have to be an activist to care about human beings.

Nan Goldin: I do all the things that activists do without the label. It’s what keeps me alive.

Mahmoud, you just had a son and obviously you care a lot about people in your community. What kind of world do you envision him being brought up in?

Mahmoud Khalil: It’s a cliche answer, but it’s about what we’ve all been fighting for: justice, freedom, dignity for everyone. And, in this particular case, I just want him to be human and live his life. I don’t want him to live with the burden of being Palestinian, if Palestine is still not free and his people are being killed. I really want him to care about them, but also to care about other people, because there’s a lot of injustice around the world. I don’t want the fact that he’s Palestinian or American to separate him from other people, I want him to care about other human beings around the world, no matter who they are.

Styling for Mahmoud Khalil and Noor Abdalla Zara Mirkin, make-up for Nan Goldin Manana Saralidze using YSL Beauty, set design Alex Feagans, floral artist Naoko de Oliveira, photographic assistant Zach Hussein, styling assistant Jesa Chiro, production Jay Chary at C.A.V.E.