Early in February, Rabbi Alissa Wise, an activist with New York City’s Jews Against the Occupation and Director of Campaigns at Jewish Voice for Peace, voiced her concern about Facebook’s prospective adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
In her op-ed penned to The Guardian, Wise recognizes the barricaded tech and social media landscape that Palestinians already face even without Facebook’s updated guideline aimed to reflect its hardline on hate speech and misinformation in light of its blatant culpability in monumental political events of the past decade. She goes further to highlight that under this new policy, Zionism would act as a proxy to Judaism, thus perpetuating the––ironically––anti-Semitic trope that all Jews, regardless of race or nationality, are allegiant to their own cause and progression, and are thus rendered disloyal and distrustful.
It is widely known and covered that Palestinian voices are silenced across all digital, academic, and political realms. Those living in the West Bank and Gaza are fearful of persecution or interrogation from Israeli government forces whilst diaspora communities are warned that sharing personal opinions could harm their public image and interfere in their career. This applies to non-Palestinians who vocally oppose the government’s segregationist policies that monitor or restrict Palestinian travel and access to basic necessities.
As expected, it is other individuals from marginalized groups that are reprimanded for such behavior, most notably in the United States, where lobby groups such as the American Israeli Public Affair Committee (AIPAC) have staunchly condemned anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli statements from public figures or members of Congress. In 2018, CNN’s long-time contributor Marc Lamont Hill was fired for publicly calling for a free Palestine; the imminent pushback accused Hill of supporting Hamas and espousing anti-Semitic sentiments. As a result, Hill, a renowned media studies professor at Temple University and author of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics tweeted that his support of Palestinian self-determination was not a call for the destruction of Israel nor did he encourage the “killing [of] Jewish people.” As such, power prevailed over justice in Hill’s removal from CNN, which served as a lesson for all watching: dissent does not come without a price.
Facebook is not alone in narrowing the margin for free expression. Palestinians have used the platform’s far-reaching and viral-learning algorithm to share their daily lives in their native lands, which has amassed a following from leftists around the world curious to watch what life in an “open-air prison” looks like. In addition to documenting their lives, Palestinians across the world have provided eager viewers with succinct and accurate series that explain the conflict in terms digestible to an audience of all ages and backgrounds. Culture is celebrated and authentic cuisine is shared, widening the world’s understanding of Palestinian life and Palestinian potential, thus squashing out the well-curated image of a community without agency or ambition.
Though TikTok has served well in forming a digital community that shares a national identity and pursuit for Palestinians all around the world, it is not exempt from the silencing seen on other social media platforms. Users who have garnered thousands of followers and views have had their accounts deleted without explanation. Unlike Facebook, TikTok’s policies are opaque and arbitrary, but the message is clear: there can be no public discourse on the Palestinian plight without consequence.
Palestinians’ digital lives continue to be surveilled and ultimately erased. The problem, however, extends outside the parameters of the Internet and encroaches upon the lives of those simply affiliated with liberation and self-determination discourse. Ismail Ajjawi, a Harvard-bound Palestinian refugee educated in Lebanon’s UNRWA schools, was denied entry into the United States after U.S. immigration officials confiscated his phone and laptop only to interrogate him about his friends’ social media activity. It took an international media campaign to reverse the decision to deport Ajjawi back to Lebanon, which ultimately delayed his class attendance and made him a worldwide exemplary of how no matter the scale of Palestinian achievements, there is no guarantee for a seat at the very table that determines their fate.
At present, the US House Judiciary Committee is at a standstill with its “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” which codifies the illegality of anti-Zionist language. The newly released Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA) rejects the IHRA’s conflation of anti-Zionist rhetoric with antisemitism and has over 200 signatories from scholars with specialties spanning from Middle Eastern Studies to Holocaust history. The Declaration highlights the risk of limiting free speech and the dangerous reinforcement of the idea that “Jews are a people for whom special rules need to be made,” a trope that only ostracizes Jews from conversations about racism––thus drawing a blind eye to the far-right threat increasingly visible in Western European and North American countries––whilst also enabling Israel’s apartheid regime to persist unchecked and uninterrupted. Thus, Facebook’s policy and the potential House bill exacerbate the landmine of self-surveillance that Palestinians have been forced to deal with for the past 70 years while harming the very community it purportedly aims to protect.
The only way out of such an entanglement of hate speech, digital rights, and identities would be to acknowledge the role social media plays in proliferating polarization. Its reliance on existing conflicts as grounds for perpetuating echo chambers through algorithms designed to create enclaves of communities only inflicts more violence and ‘trolling’ online, which will soon translate into real-time laws that restrict individuals from the universal right to free thought and expression. If that becomes the case, what pillars will the world’s democracies be left with?