The Chris Hedges Report Show with Dylan Saba, an attorney with Palestine Legal, November 2023

The following is a transcription from Chris Hedges's podcast, The Chris Hedges Report. The episode is found in video form right here: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-chris-hedges-report-show-with-33b

Information on trucks that were circling the campuses of Columbia University and Harvard University. They publicly list the names and show the faces of students who signed a letter calling on the university to cut ties with Israel.

All highlights are courtesy of Niklas Pivic.

Chris Hedges: These trucks are now being parked in front of students' homes. Another truck is at the University of Pennsylvania calling on the university president Liz McGill to resign following complaints the university fostered anti-Semitism by allowing for a pro-Palestinian festival in September. Major donors to these universities including the billionaire Marc Rowan, the chief of the private equity giant Apollo Global Management who donated $50 million to the University of Pennsylvania's business school, have announced they will withhold donations and demand the resignation of university presidents at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard^[1].

The prominent law firm Davis Polk rescinded three job offers that had made to students suspected of signing the Harvard statement and a similar statement at Columbia University^[2]. This public harassment is only a tiny illustration of the widespread campaign to silence anyone who decries the siege of Gaza and calls for ceasefire. Hundreds of social media accounts say the world's largest social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok are censoring accounts are actively reducing the reach of pro-Palestinian content^[3], a practice known as shadowbanning.

The US activists journalists and filmmakers contend that hashtags like #FreePalestine and #IStandWithPalestine, as well as messages expressing support for civilians killed by Israeli forces are being hidden by the media platforms.

Major conferences on the Middle East have been forced to cancel. The Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce, for example, successfully pressured Hilton hotels into canceling the US campaign for Palestinian rights event in Houston^[4], at which the Congresswoman Rashida Talib was to have been the main speaker, calling it 'a conference for Hamas supporters' and 'Jew haters'. The Chamber is also campaigning for Starbucks to close stores and dismiss thousands of workers 'who support Hamas', after their union posted a statement on saying solidarity with Palestine. It is even launched a boycott of the coffee chain under the slogan drinking a cup of Starbucks is 'drinking a cup of Jewish blood'^[5].

The Council on American Islamic Relations was forced to cancel its annual banquet in Arlington, Virginia after receiving bomb threats^[6]. The rare Palestinian voices that do get through the media blockade, such as Noura Erakat, a Palestinian American human rights lawyer who appeared live on CBS and ABC are often then erased. Erakat saw the segments in which she spoke removed from the playbacks of the shows online^[7]. The Frankfurt Book Fair was accused of quote unquote shutting down Palestinian voices after an award ceremony to honor a novel by the Palestinian writer, Adnia Shibli was canceled^[8]. Meanwhile, official Israeli spokespeople and politicians as well as their supporters are given ample airtime to accuse anyone who objects to Israel's slaughter of Palestinians and Gaza as being apologists or spokespeople or terrorists.

Joining me to discuss this censorship is Dylan Saba, a staff attorney with Palestine Legal, he was commissioned by an editor at the Guardian newspaper to write about the campaign, the silence voices critical of Israel's assault but was then informed shortly that the piece was to be published that the newspaper would not run it. So let's begin with this level of censorship, which is probably unprecedented since maybe immediately after the events of 9/11 anyway I was one of them attempting to address the calls to invade Iraq. But let's lay out its intensity, its reach and then let's go into perhaps the causes of it.

Dylan Saba: Thanks Chris, and thanks so much for having me on and raising and elevating this important issue. As you said, this is a level of suppression that is completely unprecedented in the mark of the Palestine solidarity movement. So I work for Palestine legal, we're a legal nonprofit representing folks who speak out Palestinian rights. And we were founded in 2014 and we've never seen anything remotely like this we've had hundreds of requests for legal assistance over the past several weeks, completely eclipsing the total number of intake requests we've had for the entirety of all of last year.

So it's an exponential surge. It's reaching students, employees, professors, folks in all different industries. We've seen a wave of retaliatory firings proposed made on private social media accounts supporting Palestinian rights. We've seen student groups surveilled suppressed from levels ranging from the federal government to state government to individual campus administrations. We've seen professors had classes canceled being locked out of emails. The range of political expression that is being targeted is wide, you know, from from very banal calls to a ceasefire to more radical statements. And it is widespread.

I think it's important to note a couple of things. One is that this is a response to a massive upsurge in pro Palestine support in the United States that the movement has made major gains the Palestine solidarity movement has made major gains and more and more you have folks who are willing to speak out for Palestinian freedom. Now, of course, this is met with suppression that this growing movement is a threat to the Israel lobby. It's a threat to Israel advocacy organizations and folks who have the interests of the US government and US and real interests in, you know, who share those interests as well. I think that the comparison to the post 9/11 era of those I was a child that then is probably apt and we have been describing this as a McCarthyite level of suppression.

But I do want to raise a key distinction here. This is now happening in the era of social media, and that has particular concerns and implications for regular individuals who may not be famous or notable names and and that's the introduction of doxxing as a as a particularly heinous tactic. You mentioned this with with reference to the trucks on campuses. What we're seeing is college students, individuals who are speaking out, or even, you know, for an action is benign as removing a poster are being filmed. That footage is being sent then to major media outlets such as Fox News, and you have folks on the Internet who are digging into it, finding out who these students are publicizing their names, releasing their names, and then those individuals are being hit with a torrent of discriminatory comments, threatening texts, emails, phone calls, death threats, heinous remarks, and are basically being bullied into silence. And this is a widespread tactic that we're seeing. And it, you know, has the, the negative consequences of chili speech folks are scared to speak out, because they worry that they're going to be smeared that they're going to lose their job or future employment activity, a future employment offer. And, and, and the doxing tactic is something that the Israel groups have been using for a while so folks are probably familiar with canary mission stopantisemitism.org which are some online black list that have really honed in on this tactic of, of smear online smears and doxing, but we're seeing it in an unprecedented level right now. Well, as you know, this isn't new. It's just exponentially exploded because there's been long years long assaults against the BDS movement, especially at universities banning I spoke at Northeastern right after they had banned students for justice in Palestine. And, and so it's building and of course that is use the power of donors in the past.

SPEAKER_01: So there was already a kind of foundational system in place. Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, the tactics are not, are not new. And in general, I think that this tactic of suppression and silencing has been the major move of Israel advocacy groups in the past 10 or 15 years, in part because folks realize that you know pro Israel folks realize they can't really win the argument on substance right. So the fact that these debates are happening in workplaces on college campuses is really bad news when Israel has, you know, has its most right wing fascist government that it's ever had, and has really only had right wing governments for recent memory. So, and meanwhile, dispossession of Palestinian land continues unabated. You have settlement expansion, regular assaults on Gaza, and really no political hope, you know, for progress on any kind of negotiation front. So there's not really much in the way that you can say to justify the Israeli regime and what they're doing. And so the tactic has basically been okay then we need to suppress this criticism, lest it start to have an effect on on on US government policy.

SPEAKER_00: So what do we know about those who are behind these groups oftentimes on campuses that will use LLL houses as kind of outpost of a pack but what can you tell us about the structure how it works.

SPEAKER_01: We do know that there's some major organizations that have as their, you know, function, the suppression of this kind of grassroots organizing so this is organizations like the adl and the Brandeis Center that purport to fight against anti semitism, but in large part what that means is suppressing pro Palestine speech, which has the effect of clouding the definition of what anti semitism is in a way that's very harmful for Jewish students, and also targets Jewish students, because Jewish students, you know, make up a large part of the Palestine solidarity movement in the US. And, you know, especially, like as you mentioned, the role of hello, which is, you know, an organization that has an explicitly pro Israel policy and yet purports to be a home for all Jewish students on college campuses. And so, you know, the way that they are in college campuses makes it such that anti zionist Jews don't have a religious home that supports them on campuses and are, you know, are being targeted along with Arab and Muslim and Palestinian students for their organizing. And so, you know, we have, you know, some, some extremely racist elements of this suppression and of various forms of surveillance surveillance, you know, that emerged kind of the from the post 911 legal paradigm and, and security state infrastructure, where you have groups surveilled activists surveilled, and, and this is particularly harmful for, for Palestinian urban Muslim students.

SPEAKER_00: Well, the documentary, the lobby, which never aired in the United States electronic into thought of put up a pirated copy, but they sent a student undercover into these Jewish American Jewish scientists pro Israel groups. And one of the things that came out was how they would essentially recruit students to spy on other students.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's I mean we've, we've seen that, you know, spying infiltration surveillance these are all threats to Palestine organizing on on campus.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely. Let's talk about the media. There's really only one voice, virtually. And that's heard about this conflict. But this, of course, control of information this censorship has extended to mainstream media platforms.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of what we're seeing in terms of employment retaliation is in the media. So you have editors magazines being fired for, you know, merely amplifying calls for a ceasefire. This was the art was this art forum. That's right. That's right. You have, as you mentioned, Palestinians going on major news and not having their segments added in you mentioned nor but there are other examples as well. Basically any Palestinian who goes on to the news and does anything other than lament the dead in Gaza, anyone who's offering necessary political context for understanding what's happening is being is being centered, censored in silence. And this is a process of the media, manufacturing consent for what the United States is supporting in Gaza and that, and that is intentionally about removing context. And it's also about refocusing the worries of Americans on to these panics about what college students are doing and saying, it's extremely dangerous that you know you have these horrific atrocities being committed by Israel with the full backing and support of the United States and Gaza with many have called a genocide, including the preeminent genocide scholars and and and that's a very dangerous, that's a very dangerous message for for folks who are supportive of of Israeli policies of Israeli apartheid and and what's happening right now. And that dissent is very is very dangerous so it so the censorship is key the refocusing or attempted refocus of the American attention on, you know, on the concerns around what what college students are are saying are all attempts basically to stifle out political dissent in, you know, one of the most key moments for political dissent in the country's history.

Chris Hedges: They've done a very effective job of controlling the language. So I think it's not deniable that the firing of rockets by Hamas is a war crime indiscriminate or certainly what the killing of civilians at the rave is a war crime. But while they're very quick to denounce Hamas for war crimes, they will not employ the same standards towards Israel, which has carried out egregious war crimes for decades we can go all the way back to the ethnic cleansing in 1948 and the 50 villages where there were massacres^[9] right up to what they're doing today in the West Bank but talk about that difference in terms of standards and in terms of language because there's, it's a black and white issue Israel is in clear violation of international law, not only in terms of what it's doing to the people in Gaza, but in terms of the occupation itself.

Dylan Saba: You're touching on a key point and what that differentiation rests on is racism. It is precisely anti-Palestinian racism that allows people to say that there is no distinction between Palestinians in living in Gaza and Hamas, which is exactly the messaging of the Israeli government. They're saying it openly. They're saying that they're not treating them differently and they're saying that that Gaza is full of terrorists right that that distinction is is based on racist assumptions about Palestinians. And that's on the ability to paint Muslims and Arabs and Palestinians with a with a with a broad brush that is to paint them as a threat to Israeli safety and Jewish safety. And that is what allows the kind of naked genocidal rhetoric on the Israeli side and on the on the US side and supporting these actions. That's what's able. And that allows that rhetoric to be perpetuated and the frankly BS statements from Israel that they are respecting international law or that they hold themselves to international law. When it's evident you just have to look at the images coming out of Gaza. And that's a really big issue of obliterating civilian infrastructure that is clearly a war crime you can look at the, the casualty counts that no one is disputing. Although there was some indication that Biden was casting doubt on them, although I think he's walked that back. And being being killed the number of civilian casualties is is insanely high. There's no way that it meets the disproportionate disproportionality standard of international law and that's not even to mention the collective punishment actions of cutting off electricity and and water. The naked violations of international law that are being blatantly ignored by by the media and then you have complicity in in in conflating the Palestinian, you know, the Palestinians living in Gaza, you know, of whom half our children and the actions of Hamas.

Chris Hedges: To what do you attribute this cowardice on both within the media and the political class is just expediency careerism. What do you think is driving it because it's very hard to walk away from those images and not understand what's going on

Dylan Saba: I think that there is, I think that is, I think that there are people are worried about their jobs. I think, I think that we've, you know, we at Palestine legal have seen over 100 threats to employment that and then that's just what has come into us. There are dozens of people who have already been fired. And we've seen this trend in the media as well. I think that folks are intimidated because there are higher-up people at a lot of these establishment media institutions, who, frankly, are zionist and do support the actions of Israel, and you're freaked out that you have a growing chorus of people in the United States who are rightly identifying this, what Israel is doing as genocide. And, you know, in moments of crisis like this, we are put on the back foot in terms of, you know, put in a defensive posture because there's this massive wave of racism and retaliatory backlash, but we're also seeing major discursive jumps. We're saying people come out in support of Palestinian rights in numbers that we've never seen before hundreds of thousands of people taking the streets, not just in the United States, across the world. And then people talking about what's happening to the Palestinians, what Israel is doing in new terms. And that has, that has represented a major leap, a major leap in people's thinking that images are horrific and shocking and that's really moving people. And I think that poses a real threat to people who are invested in the continuation of United States support for Israel and Israel's genocidal and expansionist policy, politics and policies.

Chris Hedges: And the tactics they have employed, especially against BDS activists, is to criminalize within the legal code. People who speak about Palestinian human rights. Can you talk about that as a tool.

Dylan Sabas: Absolutely. So this is part of the legal infrastructure that came out of the post 9/11 world, and even before and these are a set of really broad. Well, so there's two things there is, there is the laws passed against BDS. But also what we're seeing is a use of, or reference to laws about material support for terrorism. And these are extremely broad and vague laws that have been used to stifle political dissent and, you know, in criminalized, you know, aid sending aid to Gaza, and other forms of advocacy. That's how that's how they arrested the Holy Land Foundation. That was a charity. Exactly right. And we, you know, just last week, DeSantis, Governor DeSantis in Florida, issued a directive to the University of Florida system to deactivate the SJPs^[10]. That's Palestine student groups in the University of Florida system with reference to these laws. Now, it's a ridiculous accusation. It's a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It will absolutely be challenged in court. But it's an example of the kinds of suppressive efforts taken at the state level. Now, it's not just the state level. You have also a resolution that was passed unanimously, but I believe the Senate condemns student organizing and basically equates them with Hamas. And this is an incredibly, incredibly dangerous threat to our civil liberties in this country. It's an incredibly dangerous threat to the rights of folks to engage in political organizing and political dissent. Also, you know, as you made reference to, there have been organized attempts to criminalize the, or to make a legal boycott divestment and sanctions movement. There are anti-BDS statutes and the majority of states at this point. Trying to delegitimize nonviolent organizing in support of Palestinian liberation.

Chris Hedges: You come from, you are of Palestinian-Jewish descent. I think one of the things that I've always found interesting is, and you made reference to this, is that when I do meet with students for Justice Palestine groups on universities, a significant percentage of those students are Jewish. Can you talk about your generation of people who come out of the Jewish community because I don't think that they are standing behind Israel. And then I want you to talk about the importance of the Christian right because I don't think the Christian right is a factor in this because it is also a political force that stands with the far right in Israel.

Dylan Saba: Yeah, absolutely. So as you know as you made reference to, I'm both Jewish and Palestinian, and I've been an organizer now and on this issue for about 10 years, 10 years, 10 years ago I was, I was a college student and the younger Jewish community in the United States is far more open to Palestinian liberation is far more active on this issue than the generations prior and it's posed a real generational divide within the Jewish community. But it's, but it's also inspired a lot of hope that we can actually build a pluralistic justice movement on this issue, and that poses a threat that poses a threat to, you know, to pro-Israel groups to the older generation who counts on that support from the Jewish community to justify his real crimes, and they're losing that support and the data indicates that they're losing that support, and that's a growing trend.

And it's beautiful to see. When I was an SJP as a student, it was an incredible diverse group of students, you know, Jewish students yes Palestinian students yes Muslim students, also other students, and increasingly what we've seen in the past 10 years is that students from other affinity groups black students Asian students on students part of other justice struggles are recognizing the connection with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and we're seeing a wide range of anti racist groups standing solid with the Palestinians, and that too is a threat, that too is a threat to folks who are wary of growing consciousness around racial justice, and are wary of the Palestinian struggle, including that message for, you know, the threat that that poses to their to their narrative.

You're also right to point to to the Christian right as a key player here, you know, people don't necessarily realize this but most Zionist in the United States are not Jewish, they're Christian. Christian Zionism is a is a, you know, is a huge movement people, people support Israel for, you know, their own kind of religious reasons but also because of its, you know, affinity within the right wing project more broadly. And so that you know that is a key point when you know we're often put in a position where we have to articulate something that should be obvious which is that anti-zionism and antisemitism are totally separate.

Antisemitism is hatred of someone for religious identity. Anti-zionism is a political position principle that is not related to religion. It's about opposing Israel's policies of genocide of apartheid of settler expansion. And, and, and, you know, we are often the major smear made against Palestine organizers and the justification for a lot of his suppression. A lot of the surveillance is is anti semitism and it's fundamentally cynical. It's fundamentally a misapplication of discrimination principles and an excuse to to stamp out political dissent in a way that's very dangerous as I mentioned before, because it is not in the interest of Jewish students of Jewish people more broadly to to confuse the meaning of what antisemitism is.

Chris Hedges: Well, the other problem is that it essentially by conflating the two. It increases, I think, attacks of antisemitism because those attacks become confused with anti-zionism.

Dylan Saba: Yes, absolutely. So, you know, you have people making the argument, right, in a legal forum and elsewhere in the media that being Zionist is a fundamental component of Jewish identity. Now, as you know, as we're saying, we know that that's not true. We know that a growing portion of the, you know, of of young Jews are anti-zionist are standing in solidarity with Palestinians. We know that Zionism is or to a host of political ideologies and beliefs that have nothing to do with the Jewish religion. And yet, folks want to insist on that argument. And as you said, that has a lot of nasty consequences down downstream.

Chris Hedges: Where do you see this going? You do have a powerful grassroots movement, even in small towns, I live in Princeton, there were probably 500 people out on the street on Monday in the solidarity with the Palestinians. And yet the political class is kind of calcified the media itself. Where do you see all this headed?

Dylan Saba: Yeah, that's a good question. As you said, the grassroots movement is, it's growing rapidly and it's the largest it's ever been. There's about to be a march on Washington on November 4 organized by the Palestinian youth movement and others that by all parents is going to be absolutely massive. And we're sending a message to policymakers in Washington to university administrators that this is a force that cannot be suppressed, that this dissent from what you asked the United States is supporting is something that cannot be ignored.

The people in Washington will have to take us seriously. If Joe Biden wants to win in 2024, he's going to need young people to come out for him. He's going to need people voters in Michigan, which has a large Arab population to support him. And, and more broadly, he needs to stick up for something stand for something right, you have people of conscious[ness] all over this country saying, you know, 'you are complicit in a genocide' and demanding a ceasefire. Now, as of right now, that that call has not made that much traction and Congress for the reasons that you're saying, I hope and expect that that will change with each passing day more and more people are becoming conscious of Israel's crimes are seeing the images coming out of Gaza and are saying, I don't stand for this, not, you know, not on my dime, not in my name.