A militant Zionist group threatens activists online with a ‘deport list'

Washington Post

31-03-2025

Almost six weeks before federal immigration officials detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a group called Betar US said on its X account that it had put the pro-Palestinian activist on 'our deport list.'
'It's 10 p.m. and ICE is aware of his home address and whereabouts,' the group posted on Jan. 29 under a video of CNN interviewing Khalil at a campus protest, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 'We have provided all his information to multiple contacts.'
Khalil, a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was detained on March 8. Three days later, Betar shared with The Washington Post a list of potential next targets it said it had recently flagged to Trump administration officials. At the top was Momodou Taal, a Cornell University graduate student who was suspended twice last year for his role in pro-Palestinian protests there.
Now Taal, too, is fighting to stay in the country. Betar US, the newly revived and rapidly growing U.S. chapter of a century-old militant Zionist group, is claiming a share of the credit and moving on to the next names on its list.
The Post couldn't determine whether the group played a role in the Trump administration's decision to target Khalil and Taal for deportation. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE 'is not working with or received any tips through the ICE Tip Line from the group identified as Betar.'
But the Zionist group claims the government is listening, and so do attorneys for Khalil and Taal, whose student visa has been revoked: Both cited Betar in their respective lawsuits alleging that their clients are being targeted as part of an illegal crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.
'We provided hundreds of names to the Trump administration of visa holders and naturalized Middle Easterners and foreigners,' said Daniel Levy, a spokesman for Betar. 'These jihadis who oppose America and Israel have no place in our great country.'
Last fall, Betar was banned from Meta's platforms after it made veiled death threats to pro-Palestinian lawmakers and college students. Now the group's social media presence is unrestrained as it aligns itself with the Trump administration's enforcement of executive orders calling for the expulsion of foreign nationals who engage in antisemitism or support terrorism.
Betar's rising profile shows how Trump's policies and rhetoric have emboldened a new crop of uncompromising Zionist groups that use social media to target individuals they view as antisemitic or sympathetic to Hamas — including some Jews.
In November, a stranger approached Taal in person at a protest in New York and handed him an electronic pager — a nod to Israel's exploding-pager attack in September that killed or maimed scores of suspected Hezbollah members.
Handing pagers to pro-Palestinian activists, and calling on X for its supporters to do the same, has become Betar's signature tactic. Its targets consider it a death threat; the group says it's just an edgy joke.
On March 13, Betar published on X what it called a 'deport alert' for Taal, noting his Cornell affiliation and visa status and quoting from his past X posts that the group said show his support for Hamas, which the United States has deemed a terrorist organization. The group quoted Taal as saying 'glory to the resistance' after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people.
Responding to a question about whether he supported the group, Taal told The Post: 'It is absurd to say that attending protests against the genocide makes someone a member of Hamas. I categorically reject this effort to conflate free speech with terrorism.'
Taal and two others filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York on March 15 asking a judge to block the Trump administration from enforcing its executive orders against Taal and others in similar situations. The suit attributed his 'growing fear that he will be the target of an ICE removal operation' to 'a pattern of escalating attention' from Betar and other Zionist groups 'with the power to influence immigration enforcement decisions.'
The fear turned out to be well-founded. On March 19, officials from the Department of Homeland Security visited Taal's residence in Ithaca, New York. Two days later, his attorneys received an email from Justice Department attorneys inviting Taal to surrender to ICE custody. A judge heard Taal's request for an injunction and temporary restraining order Tuesday and could rule at any time.
Both Taal and Khalil had high-profile run-ins with authorities at their respective campuses before Betar began campaigning for their removal, and there's no direct evidence that Betar influenced the government's decision to pursue either of them. Nor is Betar the only pro-Israel actor claiming credit for helping the administration identify alleged Hamas sympathizers.
The day after Khalil was detained, a group called Shirion Collective posted a memorandum on X that it had sent to DHS on Jan. 27, laying out the 'legal basis' for the Syrian-born Algerian's 'immediate detention and removal.' Shirion didn't respond to a request for comment.
Another X account, called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U, had posted about Khalil the day before his arrest, calling on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revoke his visa, not realizing that he was in the U.S. on a green card.
And after the government's detention last week of Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University fellow from India, the conservative think tank Middle East Forum linked his arrest to a February article in which it reported on Suri's ties to a Hamas official.
Following ICE's request for Taal to turn himself in, Betar spokesman Levy told The Post that the group has 'more and more reason to believe' that others on its list would soon be detained and deported as well.
'We want to say Shalom to many more Mahmouds and many more Momodous,' Levy said.
Betar was founded as a paramilitary Zionist youth movement in Latvia in 1923 by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who believed a Jewish state in British-held Palestine could only be established by force. Among its alumni were conservative Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and the group still boasts strong ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling Likud Party.
Though Betar faded from political relevance once Israel was established, 'the movement's historical image is one of aggressive right-wing nationalist and militant activism,' said Guy Fiennes, a researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
The revival of its U.S.-based chapter came only after Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel, said Ross Glick, who joined the resurgent group last year as its executive director, a role from which he stepped down in January.
Glick, an entrepreneur and marketing consultant in New York City, said he was 'devastated' by the attack. When he saw pro-Palestinian demonstrators celebrating it on the streets of New York, 'a switch flipped' and he became enraged. He began trying to document the demonstrators' identities for potential investigation by law enforcement.
He linked up in 2024 with Ronn Torossian, a politically connected public relations executive with a colorful past who shared Glick's penchant for confronting activists. Torossian was working to resurrect Betar in the U.S. as a hard-line Zionist movement.
Before a visit to the University of Pittsburgh last fall, Glick announced on Instagram his plan to hand out pagers to members of the activist group Students for Justice in Palestine. That group reported Glick's post to law enforcement as a bomb threat, and Instagram's parent company, Meta, banned him and Betar from its platforms.
Undeterred, Betar refocused its social media efforts on X, which has generally dialed back content moderation while taking a more restrictive line against anti-Israeli slogans. There, on its verified account, it has challenged numerous pro-Palestinian activists, often exhorting its followers to 'hand them a pager.'
In January, Betar posted on X that it aimed to raise $1,800 to hand a pager to a prominent Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani. The post linked to a GoFundMe page for the group, where it said it was a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
That irked Jenin Younes, a D.C.-based First Amendment lawyer whose father is Palestinian and who considers herself a supporter of the Palestinian cause, though not of Hamas. Younes is no advocate of online censorship: She represented some of the conservative plaintiffs in a 2023 Supreme Court case that accused the Biden administration of pressuring social media platforms to censor conservative speech that it deemed misinformation. But she drew the line at what she considered to be a threat on Kiswani's life.
Younes responded to Kiswani's post on X and said it was criminal conduct that neither X nor GoFundMe should allow. Betar quickly turned the tables, suggesting that its supporters give her a pager, too.
Younes said she reported the posts to X but received no response. Within hours, she said, she began receiving dozens of calls a day from an unknown number. On at least one occasion when she picked up, the caller began cursing and telling her to go back to her 'Islamic s---hole.'
'I think when a group like this is making open death threats or threats of violence and nobody's doing anything about it, that emboldens them,' Younes said.
X didn't respond to a request for comment. GoFundMe said Betar's efforts had been reviewed and found 'in compliance with our terms of service.'
In February, Al Jazeera journalist Laila al-Arian posted what she said was a list of names of 'Palestinian babies Israel killed before they reached their first birthday.' Betar responded, 'Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!' The post was removed, but Betar has since reposted screenshots of it.
Betar has also gone after Jewish people who criticize Israel, such as the liberal commentator and City University of New York journalism professor Peter Beinart. In February, Betar told its X followers that if they see Beinart on New York's Upper West Side, they should give him a pager.
'Oppose my ideas all you want,' Beinart responded on X. 'But when you urge people in my neighborhood to give me a pager — in the wake of Israel's pager attack in Lebanon — that sounds like a death threat.'
In a phone interview, Beinart said: 'It's probably not coincidental that in a moment of enormous political thuggishness, in which Donald Trump sets the tone, there are a lot more people and groups that might be inclined to speak in that tone.'
In February, the Jewish civil rights group Anti-Defamation League added Betar to its glossary of extremism and hate, reporting that the group 'openly embraces Islamophobia and harasses Muslims online and in person.' Betar is the only Jewish group on the list.
Glick said he has met with both administration officials and lawmakers who welcome his input, including Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and James Lankford (Oklahoma) and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania). He has posted selfies and a video of himself interacting with Fetterman in a Capitol hallway in November, with Fetterman saying 'I love it' when Glick described the 'pager stunt.'
Neither Cruz nor Lankford returned requests for comment on their relationship with Betar. A spokesperson for Fetterman said the senator 'strenuously denies any involvement whatsoever' and has never interacted with Glick or Betar beyond a single, incidental hallway run-in.
Glick stepped down as executive director of Betar in January after critics of the group resurfaced a scandal from his past, and Levy said Glick no longer speaks for Betar. Torossian declined to comment for this story.
Since the run-in with SJP in Pittsburgh, the tables have turned in Betar's favor. Meta has reinstated Betar to its platforms, and earlier this month the University of Pittsburgh temporarily suspended SJP from its campus.
On Thursday, Betar posted on X a video of ICE officers arresting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student from Turkey. 'She was on our list,' the group said, adding that it plans to send ICE a new list Monday of 'approximately 1800 more jihadis.'
Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who is one of the attorneys representing Taal, said the degree to which Betar sets or merely aligns with the Trump administration's agenda is immaterial.
'They're still chilling speech, they're still intimidating, they're still creating a climate of fear,' he said, adding: 'It's ironic that a Jewish organization is putting together lists.'