We are in the third month of the catastrophic U.S.-backed Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the ensuing tsunami of anti-Palestinian repression that has swept the country.
Jinan Chehade, who was to be one of the only visible Arab Muslim woman associates at the white shoe law firm Foley and Lardner LLP nationwide, had a job offer rescinded because of her social media posts in support of Palestinian rights. But when I spoke to her, she was resolute and unswerving—she asserted, “The cost of my silence would have been much greater than the cost of speaking out.”
Jinan’s story demonstrates an unsilenceable truth: that the machine of anti-Palestinian repression is failing.
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At the time of writing, the estimated death toll in Gaza exceeds 19,000 Palestinians—higher than the Nakba in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes and the state of Israel was founded as a settler colonial project. The Israeli military is carrying out these atrocity crimes with billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. attack aircraft and precision-guided bombs.
The U.S. ruling establishment has failed miserably to control the narrative of this genocidal war. Stenographers to power are being widely mocked and protested for parroting the Israeli military’s comically bad disinformation brimming with debunked facts. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken increasingly bold actions to demand an immediate ceasefire, a position that the majority of U.S. voters now support, even as the Biden administration callously insists on a lone UN Security Council veto.
Because they cannot win the debate, the machine of anti-Palestinian repression has been working overtime to censor, punish, threaten, and criminalize the most basic expressions for Palestinian freedom.
At Palestine Legal, our team has witnessed an exponential surge in requests for support from people facing suppression of their advocacy for Palestine, like nothing we’ve seen before—over 1,000 since Oct. 7.
The architects of this machine of repression—hawkish pro-Israel interest groups like the ADL, Brandeis Center, AIPAC, and their billionaire donors—have spent decades lobbying universities, corporations, government actors, and other institutional leaders to enforce coercive economic and political sanctions against supporters of Palestinian rights. This has occurred amidst a political context where the highest levels of U.S. power have long supported voices endorsing their policy of unconditional U.S. backing for Israel.
The machine’s range of targets during this new wave of repression has ravenously expanded with no end in sight. We’re seeing severe harassment and administrative backlash against students and faculty at New York University, Harvard, George Washington University, Columbia, Cornell and many other campuses; multiple bans on Students for Justice in Palestine including an unconstitutional deactivation order in Florida that Palestine Legal and the ACLU have challenged in court; violent assaults including the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont; plus firings and employment discrimination across virtually every industry from Starbucks workers and award-winning writers to MSNBC hosts and corporate law firms.
We’ve exposed this repression as a McCarthyist assault on people’s future careers and livelihoods. It is built upon decades of systematic efforts to smear, silence or shut down Palestinian rights advocacy—what Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights have called the “Palestine Exception to Free Speech.”
Yet, even while the ferocity of this repression and the severity of consequences is unparalleled—it is failing, for the same reason that over 75 years of brutal Israeli military rule and a 16-year suffocating blockade of Gaza has unequivocally failed to break the spirit of Palestinian dignity, hope, and popular resistance on the ground.
The logic that turns the gears of the anti-Palestinian repression machine is that people of conscience can be blacklisted, bought, or bullied into tacit approval of the U.S.-supported Israeli onslaught. That we can be coerced to accept, in the words of the Writers Against the War on Gaza, a “perversion of meaning wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide.”
The reality is 180 degrees from that logic: despite the unprecedented wave of repression, the tide of public opinion continues to rapidly shift in favor Palestinian rights, as organizers have continued to mobilize radical political actions in historic numbers reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s, with no evidence of slowing down.
What Israel and its enablers fail to realize is that this movement is not only wide, deep, and diverse, it is also fueled by students and youth who know that they play a key role in turning the tide towards justice—like so many movements before it. And these youth organizers also know that justice in Palestine is inseparable from racial, climate, Indigenous, and gender justice—because the forces of injustice are interconnected.
In fact, youth organizers in National Students for Justice in Palestine and Dissenters who are confronting vicious campus-based crackdowns have affirmed: “repression is evidence of our power.” It is a reaction to the growing frequency of mass, creative, bold actions for Palestinian freedom.
Now more than ever, we need to defend the growing number of students, scholars, workers, activists, and all people of conscience who persist in speaking out against the onslaught despite the risks. The machine of anti-Palestinian repression will fail to silence our movement so long as we continue to throw every wrench we have into its gears.
