A Columbia Activist Sought Middle Ground on Gaza. The U.S. Detained Him.

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A Columbia Activist Sought Middle Ground on Gaza. The U.S. Detained Him.

Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested at a citizenship interview in Vermont. He had spent a decade trying to understand the conflict that shaped his life, his supporters say.

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, addressed pro-Palestinian demonstrators in November 2023.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

By Ana LeySharon Otterman and Anvee Bhutani

Published April 16, 2025Updated April 17, 2025, 1:42 a.m. ET

As Columbia University’s student protest movement careened toward the center of the nation’s political discourse last year, one of its most ardent leaders suddenly fell quiet.

Mohsen Mahdawi had been a key organizer of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but he said he walked away from that role in March 2024 — well before the rallies reached a fever pitch as students set up encampments and broke into a campus building.

A fissure had been growing. By the fall of 2024 it had widened: Parts of the movement were becoming more radical, and some students were distributing fliers during a campus demonstration glorifying violent resistance. Mr. Mahdawi, meanwhile, was approaching Israeli students, hoping to find middle ground in the divisive Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, for decades, had unleashed horrors on both sides and in his own life.

He told friends that he was being sidelined in part because he wanted to engage in dialogue with supporters of Israel, a stance many pro-Palestinian activists reject.

His calls for compassion did not protect him from President Trump’s widening dragnet against pro-Palestinian student organizers on campus.

At an appointment to obtain U.S. citizenship on Monday in Vermont, Mr. Mahdawi, who is expected to graduate next month from Columbia, was taken into custody by immigration police.

A witness filmed Mohsen Mahdawi, a student protest organizer at Columbia and legal permanent resident, being detained by immigration officials before his citizenship interview in Vermont.CreditCredit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, asserted in a memo justifying Mr. Mahdawi’s arrest that his activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment.”

Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, Mr. Mahdawi, 34, witnessed violence that included seeing his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier. But rather than calling for vengeance, since immigrating to the United States in 2014, he has delivered more than 100 lectures at churches, synagogues and colleges extolling empathy as the key to a resolution in the Middle East. He is a practicing Buddhist, he said.

“The human being is not an enemy,” a slide from one of his presentations reads. “The enemy is fear, segregation and ignorance.”

This portrait of Mr. Mahdawi and his journey from the West Bank to New England — and then to the center stage of demonstrations after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s war on Gaza — is based on interviews with more than a dozen friends, professors and mentors. It also draws from lectures he has given that are posted online and earlier interviews with The New York Times.

Representatives for Columbia declined to comment, citing federal student privacy regulations. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the State Department, whose officials declined to comment.

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Mr. Mahdawi was detained by U.S. immigration officials in Colchester, Vt., on Monday.Credit...Christopher Helali, via Associated Press

David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, met Mr. Mahdawi at a retreat last summer that brought together activists and scholars trying to achieve a new approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They stayed in touch.

“This is a person who stands for precisely the values we want to raise up at this moment of such starkness and such blindness and such division and polarization,” said Mr. Myers, who formerly led the New Israel Fund, a philanthropic organization for progressive Jewish people. “This person constitutes a bridge, and we’ve torn that bridge down instead of embracing it.”

An evolution begins

Mr. Mahdawi’s great-grandparents lived near the Mediterranean Sea on land that is now in Israel. Along with thousands of other Palestinians, they fled the area in advance of Jewish forces, ending up in the Al-Far’a refugee camp in the West Bank, he explained in a March 2024 lecture he delivered to a class in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Three generations later, Mr. Mahdawi was born there in September 1990.

He often felt “at the mercy of 18-year-old Israeli soldiers about whether you can leave or not,” Mr. Mahdawi told the Valley News in Vermont, in one of several local newspaper features that have been written about his life.

After he turned 7, his life became a mounting series of traumas. His mother left that year, and his father remarried. A year later, his younger brother died after suffering from paralysis related to an untreated fever as a toddler.

After the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, Mr. Mahdawi and his best friend, Hemida, decided they would try to throw rocks at Israeli tanks in their camp, as other Palestinian boys were doing. An Israeli soldier shot at them, fatally striking Hemida, about 12, in the chest, he said.

One day, as he sought solace from the chaos of war, Mr. Mahdawi sat with his favorite uncle under an olive tree that shaded the graves of his younger brother and best friend.

While many young men were turning to militancy, his only escape would be through an education, his uncle told him.

“Hope is your only way moving forward,” he recalled his uncle saying in the 2024 Santa Barbara lecture.

Mr. Mahdawi followed the advice. He had always done well in school, but after his uncle was also killed in the Intifada, he deepened his resolve to excel academically.

At 18, he enrolled at Birzeit University in the West Bank, two hours from the camp, to study computer science and engineering. He became active in campus politics and was elected to the student council.

One day outside class, Mr. Mahdawi met the woman who would become his wife — an American student named Meagan Dechen. (Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.) They fell in love while he gave her lessons in Arabic. When she returned home, he took dramatic steps to get a visa to join her, including sneaking over the barrier wall built to separate the West Bank from Israel to get to the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, he said.

Peace through understanding

Mr. Mahdawi made it to America in 2014, and the two settled in Vermont’s Upper Valley, near Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where his wife was a medical student. They married, but two years later, they divorced. He got his green card in 2015 and took a variety of jobs, including as a bank teller. Then, in 2018, he enrolled at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania to study computer science, while organizing events on subjects like storytelling to inspire peace, the local paper reported.

He transferred three years later to Columbia, where he began to study philosophy on a full scholarship, family friends said, with the goal of going on to a graduate degree in law or diplomacy.

In the fall of 2023, wanting to give voice to Palestinians on campus in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, he became a leader of the pro-Palestinian student movement on Columbia’s campus. He founded a Palestinian student union with Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow demonstrator who has also been detained by immigration officials and accused of undermining the U.S. foreign policy goal of halting antisemitism.

The demonstrations he helped lead brought together a wide spectrum of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Some Jewish students complained that they felt threatened by the slogans that were chanted, including “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” which they saw as a call to genocide. Mr. Mahdawi tried to explain what the slogan meant to him.

“Palestine will be free for everybody,” he said, through a megaphone to applause, “For Jews, for Christians, for Muslims. No more apartheid, no more genocide.”

When a demonstrator cursed Jewish people, amid a heated atmosphere of protesters and counterprotesters accusing each other of supporting genocide, Mr. Mahdawi reacted strongly.

“I said to him, shame on you,” he recounted in December 2023 in an interview with The New York Times. “And about 400 students who were present, they repeated after me. ‘Shame on him, shame on him three times.’ So it was a clear statement that we do not tolerate antisemitism.”

Aharon Dardik, 24, an Israeli American junior at Columbia double-majoring in philosophy and computer science, said that he and Mr. Mahdawi collaborated on a proposal more than 65 pages long that they felt would promote Israeli-Palestinian peace.

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Aharon Dardik, founder and lead organizer of Columbia University Jews for Ceasefire, said that he and Mr. Mahdawi collaborated on a proposal that they felt would promote Israeli-Palestinian peaceCredit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

“Mohsen spoke of a future where Jews and Palestinians alike were able to live freely and equally,” said Mr. Dardik, who considers Mr. Mahdawi a good friend, and who earlier this month was part of a group of Jewish students who chained themselves to a Columbia gate to protest Mr. Khalil’s detention.

Caught in the middle

Like Mr. Khalil, Mr. Mahdawi was always unmasked at protests, and his openness made him a target. Vans circled the campus with Mr. Mahdawi’s face plastered on LED screens, labeling him an antisemite.

The Canary Mission, a hard-line pro-Israel group, compiled an exhaustive online dossier cataloging his activism, with screenshots of his social media pages and selective quotes from his speeches on campus and media interviews. They cite one in which he says, “We were accused by the administration that we are calling for genocide, while the administration itself is ignoring the current genocide that is taking place in Gaza. Shame on you, Columbia!” In another example taken from a newspaper interview, they quote him saying, “Hamas is a product of the Israeli occupation.”

The group claims that he wrote a poem in 2013 praising a Palestinian terrorist, Dalal Mughrabi, who committed a 1978 attack in Israel. They also cite a mournful social media post in 2024 he wrote about one of his cousins, whom they called a Hamas fighter killed by Israel. Mostly, though, they condemned him for supporting divestment from Israel and what they called the “pro-Hamas” protest movement more generally.

Mr. Mahdawi empathized with Hamas as well as Israelis. This left him criticized by both sides. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview. “This is for me the path moving forward.”

Professor Myers praised Mr. Mahdawi as a “person of dignity, integrity and courage” and criticized the effort of right-wing Jewish groups to attack him and get him deported.

“If you want to find a way to not only dislike someone, but brand them an antisemite, I’m sure there’s always some way you can do so, but what you’re doing is engaging in an act of moral blindness,” Professor Myers said.

Over the past year, Mr. Mahdawi stepped back from leadership of the pro-Palestinian movement he helped found on campus, which had become increasingly hard-line in its rhetoric.

David Bisno, a friend in Vermont who talked to Mr. Mahdawi every few days, confirmed that he quit showing up. “He said, ‘I can’t have anything more to do with this,’” Mr. Bisno said.

But he supported the encampment that formed last April, praising it as a peaceful effort in media interviews. He continued calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

As protests and counterprotests caused chaos on campus, he worked with Professor Jean E. Krasno, Mr. Dardik and other students on a project they called “the Peace Initiative for Israel/Palestine.” Their goal was to work out how this idealistic vision they had for the region might actually function in practice.

“When he’s on campus, he meets with Jewish students, Israeli students and other international students to build a kind of consensus, to share ideas,” Dr. Krasno, a lecturer in the political science department, said. “He is working on a peace process. That is what is so ironic about it. It is just the complete opposite of what the government is painting him as.”

Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian student who has been involved in the protest movement, said that she was frustrated by the Trump administration’s targeting of Mr. Mahdawi. “There is no perfect Palestinian to people who do not see us as human in the first place,” she said.

In recent weeks, Mr. Mahdawi had been in hiding, worried about being picked up by immigration police after Mr. Khalil’s detention. He reached out to Columbia for help, asking to be moved to on-campus housing, which he thought would be safer. It didn’t happen. An extreme pro-Israel group, Betar, warned on social media that he was next.

But he was determined to go to his citizenship appointment in Vermont, even though he feared it was a trap. He alerted Vermont’s senators and representative in case things went wrong, and before the appointment, gathered in a nearby hotel breakfast room with a few friends, his lawyer, and a state lawmaker, Becca White.

They quizzed him on the Constitution, prepping him for the test they were hoping would be real. They also hugged him, just in case.

Don Foster, a retired foreign service officer who has been friends with Mr. Mahdawi for a decade, said the mood was subdued.

“One thing that gave me hope in that meeting Monday morning with him was I heard him tell Becca not to worry,” he said. “Because since he had been studying meditation, he was going to use his time in prison to meditate and make heaven for himself there.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Ana Ley is a Times reporter covering immigration in New York City.

Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.