Pro-Palestinian views face suppression in US amid Israel-Hamas war
Conferences have been abruptly cancelled, media appearances suppressed and demands made to fire critics of Israeli policies
Widespread attempts to suppress pro-Palestinian views in the US after the Hamas
attack on Israel have forced the cancellation of major conferences,
prompted demands for the dismissal of workers who express support for
Palestinians and led to intimidation campaigns against Arab American
voices critical of Israeli policies.
Earlier
this week, a leading US Jewish group forced the cancellation of a major
Palestinian campaign organisation’s national conference by alleging it
was a front for Hamas, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis and
abducted about 200 people in its attack from Gaza.
Palestinian
American activists say television networks also have censored or
cancelled interviews. NPR and the BBC pulled advertising for a widely
praised new book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after a campaign
of “listener complaints”.
The Orthodox Jewish
Chamber of Commerce has declared a “victory” after pressuring Hilton
hotels into cancelling the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights event in
Houston later this month at which the congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was to
be the main speaker.
Duvi Honig, the
chamber’s founder and CEO, publicly denounced the USCPR meeting as “a
conference for Hamas supporters” and called Tlaib and other speakers
“notoriously proud Jew-haters”. Honig’s message was reposted repeatedly
on social media – with contact details for Hilton’s
president, Christopher Nassetta – where it gained traction, with the
USPCR being falsely accused of supporting statements by more marginal
groups praising the Hamas attack.
Ahmad
Abuznaid, director of the USCPR, a coalition of more than 300 groups
opposed to the occupation, said the conference venue was booked months
ago and that Hilton contacted him shortly after the Hamas attack to
discuss security.
“They said they were
receiving a lot of calls to cancel, people pressuring them, but that the
hotel takes no position on politics and just wants to put a security
plan in place,” he said.
There was no conversation. They just unilaterally decided to cancel
Ahmad AbuznaidAbuznaid said Hilton presented a $100,000 bill for security and gave the group 48 hours to pay.
“Obviously
that’s an enormous amount for an organisation like ours but we were not
deterred. And then the next day we got the email that they were
cancelling. They just said that security was the reason. There was no
conversation. They just unilaterally decided to cancel,” he said.
Abuznaid called the move unjust and discriminatory.
The chamber of commerce, based in New York, said the cancellation demonstrated the power of Jewish community groups “standing united against terrorism”.
“By
raising awareness and mobilizing public opinion, they effectively
conveyed the potential harm associated with hosting a group that
supports terror,” it said.
The hotel did not respond to a request for comment.
Supporters of Jewish Voice for Peace stage a protest on the National Mall in Washington DC on Wednesday. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, threw his support behind the cancellation.
“Texas
has no room for hate & antisemitism like that supported by Hamas.
No location in Texas should host or sponsor USCPR,” he posted on X.
The chamber is also campaigning to have Starbucks close stores
and dismiss thousands of workers “who support Hamas” after their union
posted a statement on X saying “Solidarity with Palestine”. The chamber
has launched a boycott of the coffee chain under the slogan: “Drinking a
cup of Starbucks Is Drinking a Cup of Jewish Blood.”
Starbucks
said it would be illegal to close the stores in response to the post
but it did agree to file a lawsuit against the union to prevent it using
the name “Starbucks Workers United” and the company’s logo.
Abuznaid said the campaign to pressure Hilton and other companies was not new but had escalated since the Hamas assault.
“This
is an old playbook to attack proponents of the Palestinian cause.
Accusations of antisemitism, accusations of support for terrorism,
accusations of being terrorists. However, what feels different in this
moment is the misinformation and attacks on activists across the US is
at a heightened pitch that we have not seen in recent years,” he said.
The
Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said it had cancelled its
annual banquet in Arlington, Virginia, on Saturday after receiving bomb
threats. Cair, which describes itself as the nation’s largest Muslim
civil rights and advocacy organization, said it called off the event
after talks with the Marriott hotel that has hosted the dinner for more
than a decade.
We will not allow the threats of anti-Palestinian racists and anti-Muslim bigots … to stop us from pursuing justice for all
Council on American-Islamic Relations“In
recent days, according to the Marriott, anonymous callers have
threatened to plant bombs in the hotel’s parking garage, kill specific
hotel staff in their homes, and storm the hotel in a repeat of the
January 6 attack on the US Capitol if the events moved forward,” it
said.
Cair said it had secured alternative premises but was not making the location public.
“We
will not allow the threats of anti-Palestinian racists and anti-Muslim
bigots who seek to dehumanize the Palestinian people and silence
American Muslims to stop us from pursuing justice for all,” it said.
Palestinian
American activists say the cancellation of the conferences is part of a
wider campaign by hardline Israel supporters, at times exploiting the
extreme rhetoric of some student and leftwing groups celebrating or
excusing the Hamas killings, to shut down views critical of Israel and
the part its policies play in perpetuating conflict.
Pro-Palestine protesters demonstrate outside CNN headquarters in Atlanta on Wednesday. Photograph: John Arthur Brown/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
Noura
Erakat, a Palestinian American human rights lawyer, appeared live on
CBS and ABC only to have the segments pulled from playbacks of the shows
online. She said she challenged pro-Israel narratives pushed by the
presenters and sought to explain the Hamas attack in the wider context
of occupation and oppression.
Erakat said that when she appeared on MSNBC’s Katy Tur Reports, she was asked repeatedly about Hamas.
“I
thought that it was necessary to underscore that there isn’t a military
option to defeat Hamas because Hamas is not comprised of ideologues but
primarily of young men who had grown up most of their lives under siege
and systematic warfare who we had not been given a shred of hope,” she
said.
“I received word that after the show the
top executive had returned to the booking producer and said that the
list of experts I was on would now be scrutinised because of the mistake
of bringing me on.”
In contrast, when the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, appeared
on MSNBC he was permitted to make a long and unchallenged speech in
which he likened discussion of the broader causes of the conflict and
Israeli policies to support for terrorism. He also compared the Hamas
attack to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and criticised the network for
showing “the rubble in Gaza” when he said it should instead talk to
Israelis whose families have been killed or abducted.
“Who is writing the scripts? Hamas?” he said.
They want us on to cry about our dead but not to provide context or discuss responsibility
Noura ErekatErakat
said she felt she was invited on to talk about the humanitarian
situation in Gaza but avoid the wider causes of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. After Erakat appeared on a CBS News show, Prime Time, in which
she was critical of what she saw as the pro-Israel framing of
questions, her appearance was excised from the programme when it went
online.
“They want us on to cry about our dead but not to provide context or discuss responsibility,” she said.
Other
Palestinian American analysts have described similar treatment by
television networks, including CNN. Some say scheduled appearances were
cancelled after producers called before a show to ask what the guest
would say and didn’t like what they heard.
Pro-Israel organisations have also targeted Palestinian American journalists.
A
secretively funded rightwing pressure group, the Committee for Accuracy
in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), which seeks to
influence media coverage, accused the Palestinian American managing
editor of the Los Angeles Times, Sara Yasin, of sympathy with Hamas and
breaching professional ethics after she reposted an article on X written by an Israeli in an American Jewish magazine critical of the attack on Gaza and for earlier retweets.
The LA Times robustly defended Yasin.
“Any suggestion that Sara Yasin sympathizes with Hamas is inaccurate, irresponsible and reckless,” it said in a statement.
Camera,
which is mostly run by Americans based in Boston, also attacks Israeli
journalists and others as not sufficiently pro-Israel. The group hangs
billboards on a building facing the New York Times newsroom, and on
bridges and buildings across the city, accusing the publication of being anti-Israel.
The
editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, Samira Nasr, drew fire for an
Instagram post expressing concern for ordinary Palestinians after Israel
shut down essential services to Gaza, which human rights groups say is a
war crime.
“Cutting off water and electricity to 2.2 million civilians … This is the most inhuman thing I’ve seen in my life,” she wrote.
After
a backlash within the magazine and fashion industry accusing Nasr of
minimising the killing of Israelis, she issued an apology for her
“deeply insensitive and hurtful comments” and said she was “not in
anyway sympathetic” to Hamas.
Palestinians
inspect the destruction following an Israeli strike on the Dhaheer
family home in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on Friday. Photograph: Ismail Muhammad/UPI/Shutterstock
An
Arab American journalist, who did not wish to be named, said that there
was a coordinated campaign to discredit reporters with Arab names as
biased.
“This is about silencing Palestinian
and pro-Palestinian voices. This is about saying there is only one
legitimate way of looking at what’s happened and nothing else must be
discussed,” the journalist said.
In Germany, the Frankfurt book fair was accused of “shutting down”
Palestinian voices after an awards ceremony to honour a novel by the
Palestinian writer Adania Shibli was called off after the Hamas attack.
More
than 350 authors including the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, the American
Libyan Pulitzer winner Hisham Matar and the British historian William
Dalrymple criticised the move.
The Jewish
American author Nathan Thrall was scheduled to speak at an array of
venues in the US and UK about his new and well received book A Day in
the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story, which the Guardian said “brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this”.
However,
Thrall said several events for the book have been called off along with
what he described as “very neutral advertising” for it on NPR and the
BBC’s American platforms due to “listener complaints”.
“They
refused to provide me with those listener complaints. I am very
sceptical. I’m quite sure that a book advocating for Israel would not
have had its advertisements pulled,” he said.
There’s an atmosphere that is wholly intolerant of any _expression_ of sympathy for Palestinians living under occupation
Nathan ThrallAmong
the venues to call off Thrall’s appearance alongside Abed Salama, the
Palestinian whose story is at the centre of the book, was the non-profit
Writers Bloc in Los Angeles. Its director, Andrea Grossman, praised
Thrall’s book but said an in-person event would be difficult at this
time.
“How does one promote a program on this
subject to a largely Jewish audience when people on all sides are being
bombed, killed and buried? The community is deeply polarised,” she said.
“I hope we can have it in person soon, when this dies down.”
Thrall
said that in the UK the police “directly intervened” to advise Conway
Hall in London to cancel his book talk in front of several hundred
ticket holders.
“There’s an atmosphere that is
wholly intolerant of any _expression_ of sympathy for Palestinians living
under occupation, any discussion of the root causes of the conflict,”
said Thrall. “My book is not a polemic. It’s been praised for showing
characters, both Jewish and Palestinian, in an empathetic way. For
events around that sort of a book to be cancelled, and ads for that sort
of a book to be withdrawn, is outrageous.”
Conway Hall did not respond to requests for comment.
Thrall
said that the space for a frank discussion about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict had opened up in recent years but he feared
lasting damage had been done by the Hamas attack.
“It
is so hard to know, in the middle of all of this, what is temporary and
what is not. There had been a shift in public opinion in the United
States toward a more open discussion of Palestinian lives under
occupation. The bar was very low but there was greater openness prior to
October 7. The real question for me is whether there has been a
long-term setback to that progress?” he said.