In America...a fierce campaign to criminalize the Palestinian identity, and the youth are defiant

In the past nine months, national and local authorities in the United States have launched a fierce campaign to suppress Palestinian activism and criminalize any expression of Palestinian identity. This repressive campaign extended to all aspects of life, from politics and business to civil society, higher education, and culture.

This campaign manifested itself in various forms: the suppression of peaceful protests by the security forces, the directing of sweeping accusations of anti-Semitism against the demonstrators, and it even went so far as to describe some public figures - with bitter sarcasm - wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh and using the term “intifada” as a gesture to “wiping Israel off the map.” .

This frantic quest to erase the Palestinian identity reveals the desire of Israel and its American allies to erase the Palestinians from the pages of history. While the Palestinians confront the American-Israeli racist attack, they are at the same time forcing a serious debate about the historical roots and settler-colonial philosophy of Israel and the Zionist movement it gave birth to. Israel and Zionism collapse in the face of this systematic scrutiny of their foundations and practices.

Perhaps the most prominent attempts to silence the Palestinian voice were evident in the case of Rabih Ighbaria, the distinguished Palestinian lawyer and legal researcher. In November, the Harvard Law Review took the unprecedented step of blocking an article commissioned by Ighbaria, in which he presented the Nakba as a legal framework for understanding the Palestinian issue. The article was removed after it had gone through the stages of editing, reviewing, and approval by the journal's editorial board.

The attempts did not stop there. After this incident, the editors of the Columbia Law Review contacted Igbaria; To assign him to write another article about Palestine. After five months of hard work and intense editing, the magazine published the article entitled “Towards the Nakba as a Legal Concept.” However, the violent reactions did not take long, as the magazine's website was closed, and the editors were subjected to enormous pressure to delete the text, and even threatened to stop all of the magazine's work.

The fate of Agbaria’s writings in two of the most prestigious legal journals in the United States clearly embodies the raging conflict between those who seek to perpetuate the Israeli narrative and those who insist on making the voice of the Palestinian truth heard.

When Ighbaria was queried about the substance of his case, he spoke in depth about the colonial dimensions of Israel’s creation, the Nakba, and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights, saying: “The erasure of Palestinian existence is not just a passing event, but rather an unimaginable structural and material reality. It is an ongoing series since the Nakba.” It manifests itself in our systematic displacement, expulsion, and replacement. This erasure extends to the silencing of Palestinians in the United States and the West, and the exclusion of any dissenting opinion. My article seeks to dismantle the legal structures emerging from the Nakba, which view Palestinians as separate groups that are subjected separately.”

“Attempts at censorship and repression are being met with a wave of protests and resistance,” Agbaria added in a hopeful tone. “Legal cases, popular protests, and other actions taken to protect Palestinians in the face of the unprecedented massacre we are witnessing are an integral part of the growing movement to defend our rights. The people “They are increasingly aware of the falsehood of counter-propaganda. The Palestinian struggle has exposed the global colonial hierarchy of the post-World War II era, which is rooted in the global legal order.”

Abdullah Fayyad, who recently moved from the Boston Globe editorial board to Vox as a political correspondent, points out that the multiple tools used to muzzle Palestinians in the United States and abroad should be called by what they really are: “anti-Palestinian racism.”

Fayyad adds: “Like all forms of racism, it exploits the power of institutions and the state against individuals and groups, with the aim of suppressing Palestinian expression of their identity and rights.” However, this hatred directed against the Palestinians and their allies is ultimately doomed to disappear. Public opinion is beginning to discover the truth, while the Palestinians and their supporters continue to resist false and biased accusations.”

Fayyad highlighted in a recent article that this phenomenon long predates the war on Gaza, as Palestinians and their supporters around the world have faced, for decades, severe consequences for supporting the just Palestinian cause, including retaliation in the workplace, strict government surveillance, and abhorrent hate crimes.

Institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism is evident in numerous instances, including governments' surveillance of Palestinians and organizations supporting them, as well as institutions such as universities recently suppressing pro-Palestinian protests, including preventing speakers from speaking at student graduation ceremonies.

As for Brooklyn College professor, Mustafa Bayoumi, he believes that anti-Palestinian sentiment has an impact that goes beyond the borders of Palestinian society and the Palestinian issue in the United States. He wrote in a recent article in The Guardian that anti-Palestinianism has been fueling institutional Islamophobia in the United States for decades, with US authorities actively monitoring and suppressing any pro-Palestinian Arab-American organization since 1967.

The current crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices and activism is the culmination of these ongoing historic efforts. It is surprising that the role of the United States in this regard is a reflection of what the world witnessed a century ago, when the then imperial power, Great Britain, sided with the Zionist movement and helped it control all of Palestine, which led to the absence of its authentic Palestinian Arab majority.

In 1917, the British government issued the ill-fated Balfour Declaration, which pledged to support the creation of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, whose population at the time was 93% Palestinian Arabs. In 1920, the League of Nations granted Britain the mandate over Palestine, allowing it, to a large extent, to shape society according to its whims and ignore the rights and interests of the overwhelming Palestinian majority.

It seems that the United States today is following in the footsteps of Britain yesterday. As the leading imperialist power in the West, it ignores legitimate Palestinian rights, supports the genocidal policies practiced by Israel against the Palestinian people, and even protects them in international diplomatic forums, and colludes with them to criminalize and silence free Palestinian voices.

However, just as British imperial support for Zionism faced stubborn resistance in the last century, so American support today faces unprecedented resistance from the Palestinians and their American and international allies. This includes public protests, media and academic articles by distinguished scholars, legal challenges at the national and international levels, and coalitions of solidarity with marginalized groups in American society, including Blacks, Latinos, progressive Jews, indigenous people, students, and other segments of society.

This widespread mobilization in the United States against anti-Palestinian racism and oppression is now one of the main drivers of the global movement in solidarity with Palestine and its grieving people.

As Bayoumi wisely wrote: “It is critical that young Muslim and Jewish Americans who are at the forefront of today’s protest movements bring Palestinian rights back to the center of the struggle to defeat Islamophobia. Why? …For freedom. These conscious young people realize that liberating the United States from its anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish biases It inevitably requires the liberation of the Palestinian people from the yoke of oppression on their chest, and this is not only a circumstantial situation, but rather a profound lesson in how to overcome oppression and injustice in various parts of the world.”