The War on Gaza and the War on Free Speech
On the Ongoing Suppression of Pro-Palestine Activism
On 28 October 2023, Israel imposed a communications blackout in Gaza, cutting off the ability of anyone inside the strip to communicate with the outside world. This thirty-four hour blackout came as Israel announced that it was expanding its ground operations inside Gaza. It was to be one of ten communications blackouts during the Gaza genocide.
Double Standards
Protestors around the world have been trying to stop this war. On 24 October, the tube driver for the Central Line of London’s Underground was suspended from his job and may be fired. His crime? In a train full of passengers headed to one of the largest protests in London’s history, he led the chant “free Palestine.” The driver wanted to get the day off work in order to attend the protest but could not. His words were full of joy and hope, and not hostile to anyone.
Transport for London (TFL), the company that runs the tube, responded swiftly, stating that they were “urgently and thoroughly investigating the footage appearing to show a Tube driver misusing the PA system and leading chants on a Central Line train on Saturday. A driver has now been identified and suspended whilst we continue to fully investigate the incident in line with our policies and procedures.” It was later reported that the driver — who remains anonymous — was compelled to apologize privately to Jewish groups, and that unspecified disciplinary action has been taken against him. Since the driver’s identity is not public, it is not known whether he has been fired or not. The Evening Standard ominously notes: “The driver now faces an uncertain future.”
For those uninitiated into the West’s double standard on all matters relating to Palestine, the driver’s expressions of solidarity might have appeared fully in line with TFL policy. After all, a year earlier TFL proudly announced its plan to offer for free travel to Ukrainian refugees. In March 2022, the Newport bus system in Wales painted one of its buses in blue and yellow, the colours of the Ukrainian flag. These expressions of solidarity were cheered by the media and politicians, with zero pushback from any politician.
Banning and Punishing Protest
Meanwhile the dangers of speaking out against Israel’s war on Gaza are felt at all levels of society across Europe and North America. In early October 2023, a freelance journalist for one of the largest US newspapers told me that her freelancer contributor status was terminated due to her social media postings expressing “solidarity to the over 4,000 Palestinian people killed in recent days, along with expressing sympathy to the innocent Israeli people being killed by Hamas.” She retains her anonymity due to fear of retaliation and has deactivated her account on X.
Pro-Palestine protests have been banned across Europe, and many who have spoken out on behalf of Palestine have lost their jobs. In Dublin, an employee of the Israeli-owned internet company Wix, best known for its personalized websites, was fired for posting on Instagram in support of Palestine. It later emerged that this international company had been encouraging its employees Dublin-based employees to “show Westernity” in their social media posts and to show the world that “unlike the Gazans, [Israelis] look and live like Europeans or Americans.”
In Berlin, a tour guide at the Jewish Museum was removed from his role after using the term apartheid on one of his tours to describe the situation in Israel today. He has recently gone public about his experience:
A senior staff member at Ofcom, the UK’s broadcasting authority, was suspended from her position for liking an Instagram post calling the British government’s support for Israel a “vile colonial alliance” and for posts describing Israel as an “apartheid state.”
In the US, job offers that had been made to new graduates from Harvard, Columbia, and New York University’s law schools were rescinded by the law firms Davis Polk & Wardwell and Winston & Straw after these students signed open letters in support of Palestine.
A Canadian doctor was suspended from his job (and recently reinstated) following pro-Palestinian social media posts. His home address was published on a public website for rating doctors, which led to death threats, a police investigation, and advice from the police to leave his home for his own safety.
The corporate office of Starbucks sued its own union for expressing support for Palestine while using the Starbucks logo. This sparked an international boycott of the coffee chain, which, in a rare case of good news amid the genocide, has significantly affected Starbucks’ profits.
For merely saying “Our enemies are not in Gaza. Our comrades are in Gaza,” the Executive Director of the Connecticut branch of the Service Employees International Union, with which Starbucks Workers United is affiliated, was forced to resign.
Crackdowns in the Art World
Perhaps most shockingly, David Velasco, editor-in-chief for Artforum, one of the most prominent arts magazines in the US, was fired following complaints by influential art collectors and donors. On 19 October, Velasco organized a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and published it on the Artforum website with several thousand signatories from leading artists. Michael Eisenberg, the inheritor of the company Bath & Beyond and owner of millions of dollars worth of artwork by many of the signatories, successfully pressured four of them to withdraw their signature.
Velasco was then summoned to a meeting with Penske Media Corporation, the conglomerate that owns Artforum, and was fired that same day. Velasco’s antagonists appear to be embroiled in an information war. Shortly after the letter calling for a ceasefire was posted on Artforum website, a rival letter began to circulate with the signatures of influential art collectors and gallery owners. The rival letter condemned the Artforum letter as “uninformed” and called for “empathy and unity” without mentioning the high number of casualties in Gaza.
Among the early signatories of this rival letter was influential art dealer Amalia Dayan, granddaughter of Israeli politician and military commander Moshe Dayan. Velasco’s letter calling for a ceasefire has since been deleted. In an impressive act of solidarity, three of Velasco’s colleagues at Artforum resigned after he was fired.
The dangers of speaking out about Palestine have been clear for decades. In the UK, the process of criminalising Palestine solidarity dates back to 2016, when the UK adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The stakes of this erasure are higher than ever now, at a moment when Israel has killed over thirty thousand civilians — nearly half of them children — and wounded another ninety thousand.
Blocking a Ceasefire, Perpetuating Genocide
Israeli leaders have openly announced their intentions of committing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, with astonishingly little pushback from the West. As Palestinian content creator Bisan Owda said from Rafah, near Gaza’s border with Egypt, her biggest fear is “to live, after all this war to live, and face the reality that our cities, our homes, our homeland, everything is destroyed.”
While arming Israel, the US has resolutely blocked the international community’s efforts to bring about a ceasefire during the 2023 war on Gaza through UN resolutions. This practice is unfortunately consistent with many other atrocities in which the US did not perceive a strategic interest in stopping, including the Rwandan genocide, which could have been stopped if the US had been willing to acknowledge publicly what members of the administration knew all along. Instead, the Clinton administration prevented the world from acting to stop genocide, and choose to engage in a semantic debate about the meaning of the term.
As with Rwanda, so with Gaza: the Biden administration has consistently cast doubt on the ability of Palestinians to tell their own story. When Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital was bombed, Biden eagerly adopted the Israeli narrative and blamed it on Palestinian insurgent groups, despite evidence to the contrary. When a reporter asked Biden about the casualty figures in the war on Gaza, Biden replied: “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
The Biden administration was willing to give Israel the benefit of the doubt for acts that it was later proven to be responsible for, such as the murder of Al-Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. For politicians like Biden, even in their death, Palestinians cannot be taken at their word.
We are not Powerless
Historically, anti-colonial liberation movements have been won in the sphere of public opinion while fighters were in the trenches. The turn of French public opinion against the Algerian War was a major contributor to the end of French aggression. The US war on Vietnam was only over when the American public was no longer willing to tolerate the growing death toll of the young men who were drafted into war that US politicians came to understand the Vietnam war as too politically costly. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa did include moments of violence, but the decisive measures that brought apartheid to an end were rooted in non-violent resistance tactics, including boycotts.
As consumers, we have an opportunity to practise these successful tactics through a strategic boycott of the companies that are complicit in Israel’s system of occupation and apartheid. As readers, viewers, writers, and academics, we can engage in the cultural and academic boycott advocated by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
History teaches us that, although those of us in Europe and North America are heavily implicated in Israeli violence, we are not powerless. Protest has brought apartheid to an end in the past and it will do so again. Our protest and boycotts can and do make a difference. But we can only make this difference by exercising our right to protest. Only by using our free speech rights can we interrupt the lies our elected representatives are spreading in order to justify the war on Gaza.
The United States of America is funding Israel’s war on the people of Gaza through multibillion dollar funding packages that have funded Israel’s military actions for many years. The current military aid package, which extends from 2017 to 2028, comprises $38 billion. Now, Biden will be adding to this extraordinary amount an additional $14 billion of military aid, specifically for Israel. Among the weapons the US supplies to Israel are KC-46A Pegasus tankers, CH-53K Heavy Lift Helicopters, and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. These arms trades are documented in detail by the Congressional Research Service, along with the names of companies, such as Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin, that manufacture them.
Josh Paul, the State Department official who resigned on 18 October 2023 in protest against the US’s continued flow of arms into Gaza, explained that he agreed to previous arms transfers because he believed that so-called Leahy vetting procedures that are supposed to protect human rights would be applied by the State Department. Prior to his resignation, Paul had hoped that the strong evidence of Israeli human rights abuses during past wars on Gaza would stop the US from arming Israel. When it became clear to Paul that there would be no adequate human rights-based scrutiny in the case of Israel, he decided to resign in order to speak out against US support for Israel’s war crimes.
How Can we Make a Difference?
For those of us outside Palestine, there is only one effective way of resisting the racism underwriting Biden’s words and of stopping the bloodshed in Gaza: protest.
When we are suppressed for speaking out about Palestine, the effort to silence our protests must be documented. The erasure of pro-Palestine protests is part of the erasure of Palestine itself, which Israel is seeking to bring about in Gaza and the West Bank. Documentation is an act of resistance, because it makes visible what the censors want to hide.
When we come under pressure for our protests, rather than give in, we should push further. We should insist that our politicians who defend the state of Israel clarify how far they are willing to go.
Will they support the extermination of the entire Palestinian people simply for the sake of supporting our “strategic” interests in Israel?
There will come a point when our elected representatives will give in to the demands of the electorate, if not to the demands of their own conscience. We must do everything in our power to bring that moment about as quickly as possible.
If you face suppression for supporting Palestine, report the incident to European Legal Support Center (in Europe) or Palestine Legal (in the US). You are not alone! The more you speak out the more you empower others to do the same.
For more articles on Medium relating to the struggle for Palestinian liberation, see my list:
Also see my most recent book, Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom