Winter Events with Palestine Legal

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Palestine Legal staff are participating in a number of events this winter on topics ranging from attacks on Palestine advocates in the U.S. to free speech and the right to boycott.

View our spring events here.

Past Events

Capitol Calling Party: Resisting Attacks on Palestinian Human Rights Activists

Amal Thabateh, our Michael Ratner Justice Fellow, joined a panel about Palestinian human rights activists who refuse to be silenced, despite an intense crackdown on advocates for Palestinian human rights.

In the U.S., the Israel lobby has vilified educators, targeting Palestinian human rights advocates with enemy lists and demanding they be fired. Abroad, Israel has outlawed six prominent NGOs for advocating for Palestinian rights, labeling them terrorist organizations.

Learn about the work of Palestine Legal, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Against Canary Mission and the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel — and take action in solidarity with those resisting the crackdown. Organized by CODEPINK and Massachusetts Peace Action Network.

Censorship Against Palestine: Free Speech and the Right to Boycott

Staff attorney Zoha Khalili spoke at the 2022 Getting Radical in the South (GRITS) conference.

In the United States, the movement for Palestinian rights is growing. From BLM activists in Ferguson to dockworkers in Oakland to the floor of the U.S. House, people of all races and creeds are coming together to put an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people. (Even Ben & Jerry’s has joined the cause.) Unfortunately, non-violent forms of protest—like boycotting certain products—have come under fire from Israeli advocacy groups.

Almost every state in the South has passed laws to try and stifle free speech on this issue. Some states limit a government contractor’s right to boycott. Other states conflate any criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism. How will these issues play out in the courts? And what impact, if any, do these laws in the United States have on the struggle for human rights around the world?

Featuring:
Faizan Syed, Executive Director of Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR - DFW)
Zoha Khalili, Staff Attorney at Palestine Legal
Ahmad Abuznaid, Executive Director, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights
Moderated by Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy Director, Project South.

Transcending the Israel lobby at Home & Abroad

Senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath spoke at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs’s 2022 conference.

Radhika analyzed events on college campuses and elsewhere that constitute an assault on free speech and exercise a chilling effect on students, professors, and others who attempt to discuss or organize against Israeli apartheid and other forms of repression. She explained —and how often—Palestine Legal responds to the campaign against freedom of speech that is being waged throughout the United States. 

A New McCarthyism? Academic Freedom and Palestine

Director Dima Khalidi gave the University of Michigan Faculty Senate’s 31st Annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom.

Amid a nationwide push to curtail the teaching of institutional racism and the dark sides of US history, we can learn important lessons from another subject on which campus communities have long experienced attacks on free speech and academic freedom: Palestine.

In what can only be characterized as a "Palestine Exception to free speech," academics, students, and others who speak out for Palestinian rights are routinely falsely accused, investigated, surveilled, harassed, and sometimes suffer severe consequences to their reputations and careers. Right-wing efforts to dictate what academics can and can't say, teach, or write are proliferating.

Is this a "new McCarthyism"? What is at stake? What can we learn from Palestinians and their allies whose histories, narratives, and experiences are constantly denied, erased, and criminalized, even in academia? How can we ensure that universities can be bastions of academic freedom, and not enforcers of corporate, lobbyist, and governmental litmus tests?

Morally Consistent: Standing for Palestinian Rights and Against Antisemitism

False accusations of antisemitism remain a major obstacle in building support for policies that end Israel’s occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Given the violence and trauma of historic and current antisemitism - and its weaponization by white nationalists - there is an important distinction to confront.

This program will discuss the real dangers of antisemitism and expose how the distortion of the definition of antisemitism - conflating it with criticism of Israel - is being used to silence political debate and enact legislation that targets advocates for Palestinian rights.

Featuring: Palestine Legal director Dima Khalidi and Rabbi Brant Rosen of the Tzedek Chicago congregation.

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