NYT Article on Campus Palestine Advocacy Erases Scope of Anti-Palestinian Attacks

Screenshot of NYT article, including a picture of Nerdeen Kiswani.

Last month, The New York Times published an article “What Zoom Does to Campus Conflicts Over Israel and Free Speech” that featured Palestinian CUNY Law student Nerdeen Kiswani, who has also been a Palestine Legal client.

Nerdeen faced a barrage of attacks last fall after being targeted by an app with ties to the Israeli government for a social media post she made. A few weeks later, Zoom censored a panel on Palestinian freedom that Nerdeen and senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath spoke on. 

The Times’ recent article featured components of each of these stories, but notably missed the bigger picture. 

Within Our Lifetime - United for Palestine, a grassroots organization which Nerdeen chairs, released the following comment on the article: 

The reporter successfully identifies the forces behind the attacks on Nerdeen, but fails to address the question of institutional power and structural racism head on. In doing so, they fall back on a de-facto zionist logic that equates Nerdeen being attacked by forces backed by the israeli government and the richest, most reactionary zionist mega-donor in modern US history with Jewish zionist students being “triggered” by anti-zionist speech and by the presence of Palestinian and Arab students.

In trying to show both “sides,” the article exposes how zionists use racist rhetoric to justify the ongoing criminalization and repression of Palestinians. Meanwhile Palestinians continue to struggle against the institutions that have been literally built on our dispossession.

The Times article mentioned that Act.il was likely responsible for flooding the school with complaints based on misinformation about the video, but failed to mention the application’s systematic cyberbullying of Palestinians and their allies or its ties to the Israeli government. 

Palestine Legal Michael Ratner Justice Fellow Amira Mattar issued her own thoughts on the missing context from the piece.

Palestine rights advocates have long confronted a well-oiled repression machine to silence their voices, now with a lending hand from Big Tech.

In missing this broader context, the article contributes to the erasure experienced by advocates for Palestinian rights.  

The power dynamics at play on campuses across the country are not two equal sides. It is a grassroots movement seeking freedom for a dispossessed people on the one hand, and a right-wing, well-resourced, supremacist state and its backers (including the U.S.) on the other.

Many NYT readers readily defend Israel, which was founded due to Zionist violence and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants.

But to do so requires vilifying and censoring past and present Palestinian resistance to this fate, the narration of our experiences, and our demands for life free from occupation. 

If university students and professors cannot question and oppose Israel’s foundational and ongoing violence without being attacked by Israel proxy groups, it’s more than a blow to free speech and academic freedom. It’s a gain to Israel’s effort to eliminate any form of opposition to its hegemony. The NYT should help readers understand this context, and the stakes for all of us.

The story unfortunately misses the opportunity to give more voice to Palestinian experiences of widespread targeting and censorship, instead forefronting how supporters of Israel feel about challenges to their defense of an apartheid state. Studies have confirmed this consistent bias. 

If you are disappointed in this coverage, you can write a letter to the editor or tweet @nyt to demand they provide crucial context and more Palestinian voices in stories that are about them.