The New York Times reports tonight that the federal government has arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University who has been active in pro-Palestine protests on campus and who is a permanent legal resident of the United states.

Given that neither Khalil’s lawyer nor his eight-months-pregnant wife knows where in the United States he is currently being held, “detained” seems like a euphemism. Kidnapped seems more appropriate.

Secretary of State Marc Rubio said today, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” Khalil has a green card, which means, I repeat, that he has the legal right to live and work in the United States.

Shai Davidai, the Columbia professor who was launched to fame last fall over his claim, on Twitter, that he and other Jews feel unsafe at Columbia, has called on Rubio to deport Khalil. Columbia’s Jewish Alumni Association has also praised Khalil’s disappearance.

We all know the familiar passage from Hosea: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

Less well known is this indictment, which comes a few lines later:

Though they hire allies among the nations, I will now round them up, and they will begin to diminish under the oppression of the king of princes.

“They hire allies among the nations.” Just let that sink in.

The alliances being forged between pro-Israel groups and the Trump administration, which build on last year’s alliance between these groups and the state, are preparing the ground for something truly terrible, none of which can be good for the rest of us who are Jewish.

Of course, it’s not good for people who are not Jewish as well.

Thinking more about how last year’s repression of anti-Israel protest has paved the way for the hell we are in now, I’m reminded of this passage from the second paragraph of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, which is being reissued this month by the Library of America, and which has taken on a completely new yet all too relevant meaning in the current moment:

There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage our common sense.

During Trump 1.0, a lot of the people on the left were worried that it was a rising popular movement, on the right, against the Jews, that portended a new and terrible turn of events. I never agreed with that view, and I still don’t. Particularly because it has turned out to be a movement from the top, not from below, and not on the right only but from the liberal-center as well, putatively to protect the Jews, that now truly does portend a new and terrible turn of events. For everyone.

One other thought on Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.

At the height of the war on terror, around 2004, Schocken Books reissued Origins with an introduction by Samantha Power. Where the original text, published in 1951, was used by Cold Warriors to make sense of the Soviet Union and communism, the reissued text, in 2004, was used by the war-on-terror warriors to make sense of political Islamists. In both cases, they relied on part 3 of Origins, which is about the dynamics of fascist and communist movements and regimes.

At the time of that reissued publication, I wrote a review of the Arendt revival, arguing that part 3 of Origins was in fact the least reliable and least useful part of the book. But if people did want to make use of the book, they should look at part 2, called “Imperialism.” It was there, I argued, that we saw the makings of our current moment, back in 2004, which was punctuated (and is now remembered) less for the terrorism of Islamism than the imperial ambitions of the United States.

So now we come to the publication of this new edition, which is much more of a serious scholarly affair than the Power edition. I can’t know for certain, but I suspect we’ll see a lot of think pieces on how we can use part 3—again—in order to understand Trump and Trumpism. There will be a lot of trenchant hand-waving about the mob and the elite, and so on.

But once again, there is another part of the book, which is Part 1, that might actually be useful to understanding our current moment but which, I suspect, will go completely unremarked or misunderstood. That’s the part on Anti-Semitism. And it’s useful, as I said above, not because we’re in a heightened moment of anti-Semitism, but because of, well, what I said above.