No Land To Stand On (protest, Palestine And Being Unfree In America)

By (author) Khalil, Mahmoud
Short description/annotation:
A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage, and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime
Description:

''With its spiritual and intellectual power, Mahmoud Khalil''s book is already a classic of dissident literature'' - Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime

‘Are you Mahmoud Khalil?’ With this question, ICE took the Palestinian student and US legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His ‘crime’: exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account of becoming the target of a lawless regime shredding basic rights.

Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, shocking detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. In tandem, he tells the multigenerational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of his flight from Assad’s regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine.

An era-defining account of the cost of dissent and a work of immense courage, resistance and moral clarity, No Land to Stand On is a call to all of us to defend the right to safety, freedom and a place to call home.

Review quote:
No Land to Stand On not only recounts, with chilling precision, an intimate experience of the free world''s sinister new tyrannies, but it also describes a longer and ongoing ordeal of exile and ostracism. And yet, while troubling our consciences, Mahmoud Khalil opens our minds and hearts with his dignity, compassion and hopefulness. With its spiritual and intellectual power, his book is already a classic of dissident literature, a true peer of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope and Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind
Biographical note:
Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria. He fled Assad’s Syria at the age of eighteen and holds Algerian citizenship. He studied computer science at the Lebanese American University while working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, then served as programme manager at the British Embassy in Beirut. He moved to the United States in 2022 to attend Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he became a prominent figure during the student protests against the war on Gaza. Mahmoud lives in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. No Land to Stand On is his first book.
Promotional headline:
A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage, and imprisonment in America''s deportation regime