Israel Has Exported Anti-Palestinian Crackdowns To The U.S.

A new book lays out how Israel exported its crackdown on Palestinian activism and helped trample free speech in the U.S., explains co-editor Zaha Hassan.

Just days after taking office, President Donald Trump made it clear that he intends to use the full power of the federal government to quell pro-Palestinian advocacy. On Jan. 29, Trump issued “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” an executive order that threatens to deport foreign students who participated in college encampments and protests against the genocide in Gaza. In an accompanying fact sheet, the White House claims that these students are “Hamas sympathizers” who joined “pro-jihadist protests,” and are thus eligible for deportation under U.S. immigration law for expressing support for a designated terrorist organization.

This move to use immigration law to suppress political speech, experts argue, is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. But it hardly comes as a surprise — in fact, as a new book reveals, it is a strategy to target Palestine-related organizing that goes back decades.

University of Texas students protest Israel's war in Gaza and the arrest of students at a demonstration the previous day at a rally on campus.

Zaha Hassan, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as one of the leading experts in Washington on Israel-Palestine and U.S. foreign policy, is a co-editor of “Suppressing Dissent: Shrinking Civic Space, Transnational Repression and Palestine-Israel”. Published just two days after the November elections, the volume brings together scholars, lawyers, and analysts to show that, even with a long history of repression, the space for civic discourse on Palestinian rights is rapidly diminishing.

The collection of 14 chapters traces this trend across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as well as in the United States and, increasingly, the Arab world. It also details the deeply worrying phenomenon of transnational repression: the Israeli government’s documented efforts, for at least the last decade, to export its suppression of Palestinian civil society and shut down Palestine advocacy in the United States, with troubling implications for the free speech rights of all Americans.