Welcome to The CULTURED Book Club, a monthly read selected by our editors that helps parse through the issues of our time. This October, we turn our attention to No Land to Stand On, Mahmoud Khalil’s account of the more than 100 days he spent in an ICE detention center in 2025 at the behest of the Trump administration after he protested Israel’s war on Gaza at Columbia University. In the below excerpt, Khalil rewinds to a protest he joined 14 years earlier as a teenager living in Syria, where he was born in 1995 to Palestinian refugee parents. On May 15, 2011, the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, Khalil and hundreds of other displaced Palestinians marched to the border of Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The day’s events and fallout, detailed below, would prove formative for the young Khalil. (After you’ve read the excerpt, stay tuned for our deep-dive interview with the author.)
KHAN ESHIEH CAMP, SYRIA
My father gathered my three brothers in the living room and warned them not to leave the house the next day. They had no choice but to agree. I was on the floor, my head bent over a math book, but the warning was not addressed to me. I had a trigonometry exam in the morning. I was the quiet one, the sensible one, as my father liked to call me.
It was the eve of Nakba Day, May 2011. For the first time there was talk of a march of return to Palestine. Watching uprisings spread across the Arab world, Palestinians in exile wanted an uprising of their own. Pages appeared on Facebook calling on Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan to walk to the border, in the direction of the homeland none of us had ever been permitted to stand on. The Assad regime, its hands full with crushing the revolt that had broken out two months earlier, did an unusual thing: They let Palestinian refugees come close to the border.
I betrayed trigonometry. In the morning, I went to school intending to sit the exam. Walking through the corridor, I passed my math teacher, a Palestinian, and he stopped me. “Aren’t you going to the march?”
I asked if I could sit the exam the next day instead. He agreed. I called my friend Abulmurr, who had mentioned the march to me days before, and said I was coming. I thought about my father for exactly as long as it took to decide he would never know. My parents believed I was stuck at my desk doing trigonometry. My brothers would not be there. I was, I told myself, covered on all sides.
The meeting point was loud when we reached it, a stream of white buses lined up with their doors open. Abulmurr and I climbed onto the first bus we found. Adrenaline soared through my body. I was supposed to be at school. I was supposed to be the sensible one. I was not supposed to be here climbing these rickety steps to a passenger deck full of strangers. And yet it was the only thing that made sense.
I held on tightly to the handrail and took a final step onto the bus. My eyes traveled upward, prepared to see the blurry faces of other Palestinians whom I might not have known but who shared my steadfastness and conviction. Instead, I met the familiar eyes of my father. He saw me come up the steps. For half a second his face was nothing but anger. Then it folded into a smile because he remembered that he was not supposed to be here either.
We drove steadily toward the starting point of the march. It was at one end of a place they called the Valley of Screams. It was a minefield. On the far side sat Majdal Shams, a Syrian town in the Golan Heights that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. Majdal Shams was close enough to see. Close enough that on ordinary days of commemoration people stood at the border and yelled across the valley through loudspeakers to relatives they were not allowed to reach. Our plan, as far as there was a plan, was to do that. Go right up to the border. Shout across and turn back home.
Our lives, that afternoon, shrank to the width of a tractor tire. The young men and women, carried by their excitement, marched through the valley. By the time our bus emptied, rows of marchers were pressed up against the Syrian border guards, demanding to continue down into the valley. The guards refused, warning the crowd of the mines. But the protesters massed too quickly to hold them back. There were hundreds of marchers at this point. And then suddenly the guards were not holding the line. People began streaming down the steep slope in single file, one behind the other, rolling a great tractor tire ahead of them and walking on the path it cleared. They trusted their lives to the span of that tire and the body immediately in front of them. The loudspeakers, which usually broadcast slogans, were blaring something else across the valley. Fi alghaam, la wara—there are mines, go back. Abulmurr and I ignored the warning and followed the line.
At the bottom of the valley was the Israeli fence, and on the other side of it, a few Israeli soldiers lined up. They had already opened fire on the marchers ahead of us. The young men put their weight against the fence and brought it down. The air by then was white with tear gas fired into the crowd by Israeli soldiers. It burned in my throat and chest and I felt them close. My eyes shut against my will and would not open. I could not see. I could not breathe in without coughing the breath back out. That is, until a stranger pushed an onion into my hand and told me to breathe through it, “like you would breathe through cloth.” Someone else tossed me a can of 7UP. I was thirsty and drank it. “Rinse your eyes!” he yelled.
I kept moving forward toward the fence, following the steps of the men in front of me looking for a way to reach the town. The mines, it turned out, were heavy anti-vehicle mines, sown in 1973 and buried in the ground ever since. As I reached the fence, my leg jumped, as if it had been shocked by electricity. For a second or two I felt nothing and kept walking. Then I looked down. My leg was draped in blood, more than seemed possible for the amount of pain, which had not yet arrived. Until it arrived all at once. I collapsed.
I had been shot, but this was not my first thought. My trousers were. I had come to the march straight from school. I was wearing my uniform and the blood was spreading across the trousers in a way that could not be washed out. My mother is going to be furious, I thought.
I did not get as far as Majdal Shams. More than a hundred people did that day. They crossed over the fence and reached the town, where the residents came out into the streets to greet them, with water, with apples, with onions. It was the largest crossing over the border since 1973. The Israeli border patrol had not expected it. By the end of the day, they had killed four protesters.
The return from the fence was harder than the way there. By the time the protesters entered Majdal Shams, I was going the other way, carried on shoulders. The men holding me were doing their best. They frequently touched my wound by mistake. Each time it happened, the pain rang through me like a second shot.
The slope up from the valley was almost vertical, and the men could not carry me all the way. Someone found a rope. They tied it to me and hauled me up the far bank like cargo, my body dragging against the dirt, until I reached the top, where an ambulance was waiting. My phone fell out along the way.
Rumors move faster than the wounded. The news was in the camp before I arrived at the hospital: Mahmoud has been killed, Mahmoud is a martyr. My mother could not believe it. She thought her youngest son was at school, finishing the exam he had spent the evening studying for. She held on to that story until her phone rang and it was me, telling her I had been shot in the leg. Afterward my friends took to calling me the living martyr.
The shrapnel is still in my left calf. The surgeons never managed to take it out. I have carried the border in my body ever since.
For a Palestinian, the line between an ordinary morning and a minefield is not one you draw for yourself. It was drawn for you, generations before you were born, and it runs through wherever you happen to be.
My grandfather was expelled from Tiberias during the Nakba in 1948. He left his belongings in a cave near his house, certain the exile would last only days. He never returned. He spent two years in tents in the Golan Heights, close to his home, and the rest of his life in a refugee camp built for people like him—people who were permitted to survive but never allowed permanence. My father was born within that arrangement. In 2015, with life in Syria unraveling, he fled to Germany. The night before he left, he buried our valuables in the garden of our house, beneath the wall, as his father had done before him.
In New York, eleven years later, I myself faced exile across the border. A government pressed its full weight toward deporting me, not for a crime, but for what I had said, and for who I was.
These are not three images. They are one. The cave, the wall, the border, built and rebuilt in each generation by whichever state had the power to build them, renamed every time so the world would not notice that the line is always the same. But the line can move. The terms of belonging can change. Today, Palestine is the exception to those rights the world claims as universal. In reality, it is the warning. The rights we are denied were never only ours to lose.
Excerpted from NO LAND TO STAND ON: Notes from Detention by Mahmoud Khalil. Published by Metropolitan Books. Copyright © 2026 by Mahmoud Khalil. All rights reserved.
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