The arrest of Palestinian advocate Mahmoud Khalil for campaigning for an end to the oppression and genocide of Palestinians, would be un-American if the US state were devoted to ending exploitation and oppression. But inasmuch as it is ruled by and for an exploiting and oppressing class, Khalil’s arrest is American to the core.
By Stephen Gowans
March 11, 2025
US president Donald Trump has ordered the arrest and deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and legal permanent resident of the United States, for espousing what Trump denounces as “anti-American views” (which apparently means views at odds with his own.) Khalil’s arrest, Trump promises, is only the first of many. The US president has pledged to deport pro-Palestinian college students on visas who participate in what he deems “illegal” protests (which is to say those the monarch dislikes.) He has also threatened US citizens with permanent expulsion from their universities and their possible arrest for protesting against Israeli apartheid and the Zionist campaign of genocide.
As a student protest organizer at Columbia University, Khalil has been a vociferous advocate of an end to the oppression of Palestinians. This is what counts, to the fervently pro-Israeli Trump, as anti-Americanism. Trump professes to be (without hyperbole for once) the most pro-Israeli president ever. There is no question that he has made signal contributions to the Zionist project of despoiling Palestinians, as well as Syrians in the Golan Heights, of their countries, land, homes, and property—perhaps more than any other president has. As far as Trump is concerned, the rape of Palestine and southern Syria can proceed unhindered except for the resistance of Palestinians and Syrians, and with his unqualified support—not only in the provision of diplomatic and military aid in repressing the native resistance, but also in repressing the resistance at home.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has denounced Khalil’s arrest as “un-American.” It would be more accurate to say that the detention belies the myth of America; it hardly stands as an exception to the reality of America. Systematically suppressing political advocacy, where it opposes the right of the wealthy to exploit labor, and the prerogative of the strong to take the property of the weak by violence, extortion, or law, has been a regular and predictable feature of US political life since the country’s birth. After all, the United States was built on a policy of manifest larceny—the theft of the country, land, and property of indigenous Americans and the stolen labor of enslaved Africans.
The 1919-20 Palmer Raids (organized by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) saw 6,000 people arrested and 556 deported for expressing views deemed anti-American (advocacy of socialism or opposition to war). Through the late 1940s and 1950s, the US engaged in widespread repression of political speech in what is now called the Second Red Scare. (The first red scare followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution).
The New York Times’ Julian E. Barnes recalled the repression of “anti-American” speech during the First World War.
Congress first passed the Espionage Act in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson [in] a bid to quell dissent against the United States’ support for World War I…
In 1918, a set of amendments prohibited speech considered disloyal or abusive to the United States.
During the war, for example, the producer of a film, “The Spirit of ’76,” was prosecuted under the act and sentenced to prison in 1918 because the government believed the movie undermined the British, a World War I ally, and was therefore seditious.
In 1918, Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a speech criticizing the wartime draft. [1]
Political speech is regularly repressed in the United States when the business-connected elite that runs the state on behalf of its class believes that the values it defines as “American”—namely, its own—are threatened.
As the philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo explained:
In reality, although protected by the Atlantic and Pacific, every time [the US ruling class] has rightly or wrongly felt imperilled, [it] has proceeded to a more or less drastic reinforcement of executive power and to more or less heavy restrictions on freedom of association and expression. This applies to the years immediately following the French Revolution (when its devotees on American soil were hit by the Alien and Sedition Acts), to the Civil War, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War. Even in our day, the sequel to the attack of 11 September 2001 was the opening of a concentration camp at Guantanamo, where detainees have been imprisoned without trial, and without even being informed of a specific charge, regardless of age. [2]
Losurdo went on the point out that the principals of the US state are energetic critics of rival states that suppress political advocacy in times of crisis–for example during invasions, military occupation, and threats of nuclear destruction (often engineered by the United States itself)–yet ardently repress political advocacy within their own borders in response to crises that are far less formidable than those the United States visits upon enemy states through its aggressions.
The notion may be shocking in light of what we have been taught to believe about the United States, but the truth of the matter is that every state is a police state—the US, and other self-described “free world” and liberal-democratic states, included. States exist both to advance the interests of their society’s dominant class, and to repress the resistance of those who the dominant class exploits. The political advocacy of the resistance is policed by the state, hardly at all when the resistance is weak and quiet, and more openly and viciously when it gathers strength and raises its voice. It is in periods of political tranquility, when the resistance of the exploited class carries on as a largely silent part of everyday life, that the character of the state qua police state is hardly evident, and the state favored by quietude fosters the myth that it is not a police state at all, but a champion of political liberty. It is easy to champion freedom of political advocacy when no one advocates ideas you don’t like, or those who do are voices crying out in the wilderness. But when the quietude of the subordinate class is disturbed, when its voice begins to establish reach, when it mobilizes and its actions become disruptive, the proclivity of the class in control of the state is to repress the militants, coopt the moderates, and threaten the remainder until they return to their accustomed passivity—in other words, the inclination is to reveal the police state for what it truly is. We should not say at these times that this is un-American, or un-Canadian, or un-British, and so on, but that the veil has once again been lifted from the police state because we are once again growing strong.
It’s important to understand that:
- The US state (hardly alone among capitalist states) represents the interests of its wealthiest citizens and cares only for the interests of the many so far as doing so is necessary to create stable conditions for the tranquil transfer of economic surplus from labor to itself.
- US domination of West Asia, a strategic and economic area of colossal importance, is significantly aided by the presence in the region of a Jewish settler state committed, by the very demands of its own survival, to repress the Arab and Islamic opposition to both its existence as a state as well as the United States’ existence as a regional tyrant. The relationship of the United States to Israel is one of symbiosis, based on sharing a common enemy, namely, the region’s forces of independence and national assertiveness.
- The United States is the largest settler colonial state in world history, and is thus predisposed by its own traditions to support other settler colonial states, ceterus paribus; that is, when it makes sense to do so in light of the strategic and profit-making interests of the United States’ wealthiest citizens.
- Christian Zionists—who believe it is their religious duty to support Israel—comprise a sizeable part of the US electorate. While their views are a matter of indifference to US policy-makers, the reality that they broadly support US policy (one that, unbeknownst to them, is rooted in the economic and strategic interests of the US ruling elite), is helpful in hiding the authentic reasons for US support of Israel behind a democratic facade. It can be said, falsely, that US policy reflects, in large measure, what US voters want. In reality, it reflects what the corporate and finance elite wants.
In light of the foregoing, we can conclude that in the face of growing support for Palestinians, and in the context of increasing opposition to the Zionist project, that the inclination of the US state—despite its professed commitment to liberal democratic values—is to ignore popular opinion and to try to crush political advocacy which contradicts its policy preferences. The myth of America not only includes the notion that the state is committed to free expression and political advocacy, but that it is responsive to popular opinion. The latter myth is contradicted by two important studies.
- One in 2005 by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, found that “public opinion has virtually no effect on foreign policy, which instead strongly tracks the preferences of internationally oriented corporations, which favor open access to trade and investment abroad. Page and Jacobs noted that experts seemed to have some effect on foreign policy, but that experts are also likely influenced by business groups.” [3]
- A 2014 study of over 1,700 US policy issues by Page and his fellow political scientist Martin Gilens discovered that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial impacts on government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” [4]
In other words, growing popular momentum on behalf of the Palestinians and against their oppression by Israel will not turn US policy-makers into pro-Palestinians or significantly shift US foreign policy. US policy-making and US public opinion operate in non-overlapping spheres, with the former largely immune and indifferent to the latter. To paraphrase George Carlin, US policy-makers and their wealthy backers belong to a club, and 99 percent of US citizens are not in it.
Accordingly, growing support for an end to Zionist apartheid and the genocide against Palestinians will cause officials, not to shift policy in the name of democracy, but to lift the veil from their police state and to crack down on resistance to their preferred pro-oppression policy positions.
Is the state’s aversion to popular opinion and democracy and preference for repression in the face of growing opposition to its conduct, a reason to return to quietude? Hardly. It’s an invitation to look at political struggle realistically, as a class war in which violations of ostensibly cherished rights will happen, as they have always happened, when the latitude of those at the top to exploit and oppress those below is threatened by resistance. Victory is possible only if illusions are shed about the identity of the enemy and its true character. The United States, as much as any other state, is not a paladin of political liberty, but a police state standing on guard for the political and economic interests of its ruling class. For the rest of us, it is a police state, and always has been.
1. Julian E. Barnes, “What Is the Espionage Act and How Has It Been Used? The New York Times, August 15, 2022.
2. Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, Verso, 2015, p. 258.
3. Christopher McCallion, “A Better Foreign Policy Abroad Requires a Strong Labor Movement at Home”, Jacobin, May 30, 2022
4. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, September, 2014.
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