Culture & Community | Politics | Arts & Culture | Woodbridge | Palestine Museum U.S. | Palestine
Khalil, surrounded by artwork at the Palestine Museum US. To his left is Fayez Elhasani’s 2013 The Farewell; to his right is Ghassan Abulaban's 2002 Lean On Me. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Behind activist Mahmoud Khalil, a duet of artworks at the Palestine Museum US seemed to be breathing. In Fayez Elhasani’s The Farewell, three women extended their arms beneath the body of a child, his chest unmoving. Smears of blood dotted his shirt and pants. Beside it, artist Ghassan Abulaban had rendered a woman in a sunshine-yellow thobe, exhausted as she slouched against another figure. Just feet away, a portrait of the slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh looked out over the room, her eyes scrunched and still full of light.
“By coming after me, they are actually coming after every single one of us,” Khalil told a crowd of 150 assembled before him, his voice gentle but firm, and every ear in the room hung on to the words. “That’s why I feel that it is my duty to continue to advocate for my people … I’ve found a place where I can’t be silent.”
All around him, artists made the same case for the preservation of cultural heritage with no words at all, showing in real time the lives, livelihoods, and traditions that are upended by years of constant violence, destruction, death and forced migration.
Khalil brought that message to the Palestine Museum US Saturday afternoon, as Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP) and the Middle East Crisis Committee presented him with the inaugural Dorothy Day Award, in honor of his activism at Columbia University and arrest and detention at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials earlier this year. As he spoke, he returned multiple times to the importance of telling the Palestinian story—the same task that the museum takes as its charge each day.
Named in honor of 20th-century journalist Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker newspaper, the award has existed since April, when PEP members gathered to announce its first recipient at the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL). Khalil—who was the primary negotiator during Columbia University’s pro-Palestine encampments—couldn’t be there at the time, because he was still in detention at an ICE facility in Louisiana.
Top: Khalil in discussion with PEP's Stanley Heller. Bottom: Dr. Justine McCabe, part of the Middle East Crisis Committee.
Saturday, members of the group said they were thrilled to welcome him in person, and celebrate his freedom even as he fights to stay in the U.S. In addition, PEP gave its now-annual Courage Award to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and neonatologist who, even after the death of his own son, kept operations at Kamal Adwan Hospital, located in the north of Gaza, going until it was raided and shut down by Israeli forces at the end of last year. Currently, the Israeli government is holding Abu Safiya in Ofer Prison without charges.
“You know, Palestine is very rich with its culture, especially the art,” Khalil said in an interview after the event, noting the role of movements like Artists4Ceasefire in raising awareness around what the U.N. has deemed a genocide for over a year. “Palestine is not only about destruction, not only about violence. There’s so much richness in that. And I think especially in the past two years … we see the role of art in bringing people together. In bringing people toward an easy way to show solidarity.”
Throughout Saturday’s ceremony, that was very much on display, from the setting itself to poetry that filled the space between the presentation of awards. Located in a quiet office park just off the Litchfield Turnpike in Woodbridge, the museum is dedicated to the art and activism of Palestinians across the diaspora, with galleries that have sprung up where water coolers, steadily clicking keyboards and receptionists' ringing phones might be in another life.
Since its opening in 2018, it has become a space not only for art, but also education, with a bookstore, online and in-person viewing materials, satellites that have popped up at locations like the Venice Biennale and a new branch in Scotland that opened in May. In addition to its own exhibitions, which celebrate the rich art, craft and history of Palestine, Director Faisal Saleh schedules weekly programming including a film series that teaches Palestinian history one film at a time.
Its mission resonates with Khalil's own story, a history of exile, violence, forced migration and activism that for many has become a cautionary tale about government overreach and the threat of rising authoritarianism. Born to Palestinian parents in a refugee camp in Syria, Khalil spent the first years of his life in Damascus, learning at schools operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
His roots, however, are in Tiberias, in the north of Palestine, from which his parents fled in April 1948, a month before what is now recognized as the Nakba. When they crossed into Syria, they always hoped that they could return to their home, he said. For years, the fear of displacement and of oppression lived over them, pushing them into silence about their own history.
“The hurtful thing is that the Syrian regime back then, the Assad Regime, used Palestine as a way to oppress its own people,” he said during a dialogue with PEP’s Stanley Heller. As Khalil came of age in the camp, ‘I felt that I needed to join Syrians in their revolution against that regime that’s using Palestine to go after its own people.” He was around 16, and becoming an activist felt like part of his survival.
For two years, he worked with displaced persons, making his first foray into political organizing. Then in 2013, two of his friends and fellow organizers were kidnapped “off the streets,” he said. He was terrified that he would be “next on the list,” and fled to Lebanon. Khalil lived there for a decade, completing his undergraduate studies and then working in the country.
As he spoke, Ghassan Abulaban’s Lean On Me, hovering just above his left shoulder, felt like a metaphor, as an exhausted figure at the left melted into the person beside her, their bodies suddenly one. Behind them, smears of orange and green swirled through the frame, heads and shoulders emerging in the cloud of color. 
Laura Schleifer, the program and development officer at Promoting Enduring Peace.
Each work tells a story, of course: Abulaban is a Palestinian artist living in Jordan, to which his family migrated when he was a child in the 1960s. A few feet away, a viewer can spend hours with the detail in The Farewell, a painted pyramid of bodies clothed in vibrant embroidery, and learn the story of Elhasani, a Palestinian artist who spent years teaching in UNRWA schools in Gaza. In October 2023, he lost his wife, children, and grandchildren in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis. He now lives in Australia, to which he was evacuated for medical care two years ago.
Had a listener wandered into the gallery one room over, they could have tapped into that same history of migration in artworks from Mohammed Alhaj, whose long shapes, which are human and also not, stretch over the landscape with the sense that they might be walking forever.
Back on the stage of the museum, Khalil had brought the audience to early 2023, when he arrived in the U.S. for his graduate studies at Columbia University. Initially, he was involved in organizing talks and events around Palestine at the university’s School of International Affairs, he remembered. When he felt pushback from the university administration, he saw it as in direct tension with Columbia’s rich history of student activism and free speech.
“From that moment, I felt like all this free speech, academic freedom is just like a facade, it’s not really—it’s when it’s convenient, you get these vibes. But when it is about something that the administration and the board of trustees of Columbia they don’t like, they shut it down,” he said.
“That was eventually what got me detained,” he added. In the months that followed Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s near-immediate bombardment in response, Khalil emerged as the lead negotiator during students’ “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” which ran from mid to late April of 2024. At the time, the Gaza Ministry of Health was reporting that over 34,000 Palestinians had been killed, with thousands more displaced.
Dr. Lisa Goldman Huertas, who with Dr. Phil Brewer has become a leading figure in Healthcare Workers for Palestine. The group holds a vigil each Tuesday outside of the Yale School of Medicine. During a portion of the afternoon dedicated to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, she read a letter from his children.
As he sat down with school administrators, he also watched students urge the university to divest in corporations that support the Israeli government, a movement that he likened to protests at the university to divest from apartheid South Africa in 1985. These include, for instance, the asset management firm BlackRock and the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, to which university board co-chair Jeh Johnson was affiliated (Johnson resigned from Lockheed Martin’s board of directors in November 2024).
“The students were so brave,” he said. “They were very aware of the political climate around them, about what’s happening. They invested a lot in community building and political education. They would teach each other about Palestine, about solidarity, about Black and Palestinian solidarity, for example. About Jewish and Palestinian solidarity. About all kinds of solidarity … just to build community with themselves.”
But Khalil also worried for his safety, he acknowledged—and he was ultimately right to. In March of this year, he was arrested by federal ICE agents in the foyer of his Manhattan apartment building after coming home from an Iftar with his wife, Noor Abdalla. At the time, she was eight months pregnant, and watched officials take him away as she filmed. Their son Deen was born a month later, while Khalil was still in ICE detention in Louisiana.
In part, that’s where New Haven comes in. Each week, he received letters from members of PEP and the Middle East Crisis Committee, who wrote about the rallies and vigils they were organizing back in the Elm City, hundreds of miles outside of the prison walls. It strengthened his resolve to fight, he said. He didn’t ask to be thrust into the spotlight, but he took seriously the responsibility that came with it when he realized what his detention meant.
“And that gave me so much support, so much hope, that’s what actually kept me going,” he said. “You know, the U.S. government gave me a choice of leaving tomorrow, and you don’t have to be detained, or just languish in detention until we deport you.”
As he spoke, the walls teemed with artwork from makers across the Palestinian diaspora, all of them speaking volumes—and amplifying his message—without any words at all. Tucked behind a speaker, there was a portrait of Abu Akleh that Jacqueline Bejani, a Lebanese artist now living in Luxembourg, completed after Israeli Forces killed the reporter while she was on assignment at Jenin Refugee Camp.
Close to the back windows, where chairs had replaced a table that is usually heavy with books, photographs by Tabea Marie Kerschbaumer shone vividly, resplendent with the intricate Palestinian embroidery known as taṭrīz. One room over, hundreds of rose petals spilled from woven baskets, collected after a “Liturgy for Gaza” in West Rock Park last year. Together, all became a reminder of the histories, passed down through generations, that are frequently suppressed and erased in the midst of violence and war.
Shelly Altman, an organizer with Jewish Voices for Peace New Haven, and Victoria McEvoy.
“As a Palestinian, to have that amplification from artists through different ways, it’s really important,” Khalil later said, and the words rang true to every nook and cranny in the room. “To use every medium to do that.”
Back on the stage, Khalil listened to questions, most animated when he talked about not just his work, but also his family. Khalil’s son, Deen, just turned seven months old, and by the end of the evening, he was trying to extricate himself from conversations and make it home by his bedtime, in that deeply human, hard-fought dance all parents know. When asked by a member of the audience about fatherhood, he seemed more at ease than he had all afternoon.
“Most of us here, we have kids, and you know that feeling, precious feeling, of having family,” he said. “We’re doing well, and trying to take it day by day, and looking at the filled half of the cup. At least, now, we’re safe.”
As he ceded the floor to speakers honoring Abu Safiya, it was also easy to see why peers tapped him to be a negotiator in the first place. Khalil—as the writer Hanif Abdurraquib has written about poetically—is funny and warm, with an understanding of both decades of history, and how humor can be a coping mechanism for intense trauma.
“I did not choose to be high-profile, ICE did,” he said at one point, with a timing that made the whole room burst into unlikely laughter. At another, he urged attendees to keep calling their representatives, telling the stories of Palestinians, and raising their voices, even when they feel helpless or afraid. Inside the museum’s normally-quiet walls, it was as if hundreds of artists agreed all at once.
“For a lot of people in Palestine, they feel they are being seen,” he said. “Someone is actually talking about them. So that actually gives them hope to continue their life.”
He’s still fighting for freedom of speech, he added. Khalil is now the plaintiff in a federal habeas case against the Trump Administration, which has alleged fraud on Khalil’s initial Green Card application. Last week, he also filed a case against the Trump Administration for colluding with doxxing groups—Canary Mission may be the most high-profile—that put him and other students at risk. Months after his arrest and detention, he still believes that Columbia’s connection to those groups landed him in ICE detention.
“We know that we make the law,” he said. “The people make the law. We should always continue to advocate, to get our rights, because those in power, the greed and the power is blinding them.”