Palestine Legal’s Top 5 Stories of 2022
/Palestine advocacy in the U.S. made important strides in 2022 - despite continued harassment and censorship attempts by university administrations and anti-Palestinian orgs.
Throughout 2022, our clients endured, and often overcame, a number of challenges to advance solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
Our most read and engaged stories of 2022 reflect the intense backlash against students on university campuses, including Berkeley Law and George Washington University, as well as backlash organizers face when confronting tech giants like Google, whose employees challenged the company’s complicity with Israel’s systematic human rights abuses. They also reflect the collective difference we can make when we mobilize to expose and challenge the repression, and show the anti-Palestinian racism at the heart of Zionist attacks.
Palestine Legal is committed to uplifting important stories reflecting the widespread suppression of Palestine advocacy, and challenges to it, that don’t get national attention, while providing needed context and analysis on the stories that do. As we begin 2023, here’s a look back at our top five stories from 2022.
Palestine Legal warned Google against unlawful worker retaliation as thousands of Google and Amazon employees called on their employers to end contracts with the Israeli government, including the billion-dollar Project Nimbus.
Together with a coalition of civil rights organizations, we wrote in October 2021 that “[R]etaliation against Google employees for voicing concerns about corporate complicity with Israel’s systematic human rights abuses violates multiple state and federal laws.”
In response to our complaint of anti-Palestinian discrimination on behalf of a university staff person, the D.C. Office of Human Rights charged George Washington University and opened an investigation. GW retaliated against university staff for providing support to Palestinian students who were grieving Israeli state violence last spring, and effectively shut down the office that provides services for students experiencing trauma when it dared to offer those services to Palestinians.
Read more about the case here.
In October, law students at the University of California at Berkeley began to face a vicious disinformation campaign by anti-Palestinian media & advocacy groups because of their commitment not to host speakers who support Israeli apartheid.
Our staff spoke to a number of media outlets and wrote Op-Eds to counter the campaign of lies fueled by Israel lobbyists, and in defense of the Berkeley law students’ free speech rights. You can read the full media round-up here.
In November, Palestine Legal sent a letter urging the Department of Education to immediately open an investigation into Palestinian student Ahmad Daraldik’s civil rights complaint against Florida State University, which was filed on April 9, 2021.
The letter exposes how OCR has acted with great speed when opening or otherwise making a determination into Title VI complaints targeting speech supporting Palestinian rights. In stark contrast, Ahmad’s complaint about the months-long campaign of racist anti-Palestinian harassment and cyberbullying he faced has remained in limbo for nearly two years.
In written decisions issued in December, George Washington University cleared Students for Justice in Palestine and its president, Lance Lokas, who were wrongly charged with misconduct relating to property after SJP organized a postering campaign critical of the Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinians.
Palestine Legal represented them in two disciplinary hearings, and supported the students in exposing the ways they were unfairly and discriminatorily targeted for their protest activities.
Stay tuned for our annual report on 2022 trends in suppression!
If you’re a journalist interested in covering these stories or learning more about efforts to suppress Palestine advocacy, reach out to media@palestinelegal.org.