Hundreds of Legal Community Members Demand Action To Stop Racist and Unlawful Targeting of Palestine Advocates

CONTACT: Danya Zituni, Palestine Legal | media@palestinelegal.org | (312) 547-0766

October 19, Washington, DC – Palestine Legal and over 600 legal organizations and professionals, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, released a new letter urging elected officials and institutional leaders to take urgent measures to address the surging racist attacks and unlawful retaliation against advocates for Palestinian rights. 

PHOTO OF 15K PERSON PROTEST IN SUPPORT OF PALESTINE IN CHICAGO on 10-14-23. SOURCE: LAILA ZAYED

The letter details an unprecedented barrage of extreme attacks that Palestinians and their allies in the U.S. are facing, including violent assaults, hate speech, employment discrimination, severe harassment and doxxing of students, law enforcement visits, and censorship in different arenas of civic and social life.

The letter notes that these attacks are the direct result of virulent anti-Palestinian rhetoric from Israel as it engages in egregious war crimes, including Israel’s recent bombing of the most important hospital in Gaza City that murdered an estimated 500 people and counting. Attacks on Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and members of other communities voicing opposition to Israel’s bombardment have been fueled in the U.S. by elected officials, institutional and community leaders echoing Israeli officials’ violent rhetoric.

According to the letter, “hundreds of incidents happening across the country signal a much broader effort to criminalize dissent, justify censorship, and incite anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim harassment, doxing and vigilantism against Palestinians and their allies. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is escalating at terrifying speed.”

The signatories call on all government and elected officials and institutional decision makers to urgently protect the civil and constitutional rights of people who are calling for Palestinian freedom by rejecting calls to condemn, monitor, or punish groups protesting for Palestinian rights, and publicly condemning incitement to violence and racist rhetoric against Palestinians and their allies, among other demands. 

“As the Palestinians of Gaza face a genocidal attack by the Israeli military, our communities in the U.S. are being hit with a tsunami of anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and blatantly racist attacks that are building on years of efforts to undermine the movement for Palestinian rights, and on pernicious ‘war on terror’ policies that contributed to a climate of hate and discrimination against Arabs and Muslims,” said Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal. “We join with hundreds of legal professionals and organizations in demanding that all government officials and people with institutional decision-making power act now to prevent a further decline into a McCarthyist purge against advocates for Palestinian rights and incitement against Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and allied communities.” 

Since 2014, Palestine Legal has responded to over 2200 incidents of suppression of Palestinian rights advocacy, many involving harassment and censorship attempts by university administrations and right-wing organizations aimed at intimidating Palestinians and their supporters into silence and inaction. In the last 11 days alone, the organization has responded to nearly 200 such incidents.

Read the full coalition letter here.