When I was 9 years old, I learned that my maternal grandparents were Palestinian refugees. I was visiting them in Lebanon, where they had resettled, when the country’s civil war unexpectedly resumed. To distract me from the bombs exploding around us, my grandfather described his former home and olive groves in what is now Israel, which he had been forced to flee in 1948.
When I graduated from Harvard Law School 18 years later, my dad warned me: “Don’t say you’re Palestinian. Clients won’t hire you, and other lawyers won’t work with you.” As a Christian immigrant from Egypt, he had faced discrimination in the old country due to his faith, and he was concerned that I could face something similar here. “Dad,” I told him, passionately. “This is America—not Egypt! Here, you can be who you are and believe what you want, without fear. That’s what makes this country so beautiful. Don’t worry!”
Maybe my dad was right.
Last month, a Palestinian green card holder and Columbia University student, Khalil Mahmoud, was arrested, detained without charges, and designated a threat to national security solely because of his participation in pro-Palestinian protests. In response, administrators at Columbia’s Journalism School advised students to avoid publishing work about Gaza. When a Palestinian student objected, the school’s dean responded: “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.” Since then, the federal government has sought to arrest and deport at least five other students for participating in nonviolent pro-Palestinian protests.
After Mahmoud’s arrest, President Donald Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, that students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests—many of whom are Jewish—had “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” Trump ordered the federal government to withhold $400 million from Columbia University for failing to crack down hard enough on pro-Palestinian protestors. A few days later, when asked about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) opposition to his tax plan, Trump said contemptuously that “Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I’m concerned.”
Other Republicans have mirrored Trump’s anti-Palestinian language. Twenty-six Republican senators wrote a letter calling students protesting the Israeli military campaign in Gaza “anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist mobs.” (Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), himself Jewish, disagreed: “They are out there not because they are pro-Hamas. They are out there because they are outraged by what the Israeli government is now doing in Gaza.”)
As for the Palestinians in Gaza, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said “they are all antisemitic,” and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) called them “the most radicalized population on the planet who are taught to hate Jews from birth.” Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) said on the House floor, “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of ‘innocent Palestinian civilians,’ as is frequently said. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said at a town hall that we “shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid” in Gaza and, instead, “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” When a protester raised concerns about the deaths of Palestinian children, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) responded, “I think we should kill them all.”
The discrimination against Palestinians has even extended to the arts. Although a film jointly directed by two Israelis and two Palestinians about Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation won an Oscar for best documentary last month, it has been unable to secure any distribution in the United States. When a nonprofit theater in Miami dared to screen the film, the mayor took steps to terminate the theater’s lease and denounced the film for “disseminating antisemitism.”
These examples are part of a widespread campaign to intimidate and silence critics of Israeli government policy by demonizing Palestinians. After all, if Palestinians are all subhuman antisemitic terrorists, then no one should care about their suffering, and Israel can dispose of them how it sees fit. So long as Palestinians are violent Jew-hating savages, the conflict has nothing to do with Israeli occupation and all to do with the wickedness coursing through Palestinian blood. Under this framework, advocating for Palestinian rights amounts to supporting the twin evils of terrorism and antisemitism.
By the way, I’m not antisemitic. My first love, who I lived with for five years, was a Jewish girl from Pikesville, Maryland. In college, I studied abroad for a semester at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. I danced in night clubs in Tel Aviv until the sun rose; joined candle-lit Shabbat dinners in Jerusalem imbued with the warmth of togetherness; and was moved by the heroic resistance of Jews at Masada, who chose death over slavery. As a lawyer, I’ve represented Holocaust survivors in lawsuits against corporations who profited from Nazi-era slave labor. Have I provided enough evidence to establish that my Palestinian heritage doesn’t make me antisemitic?
This whole exercise of proving the absence of antisemitism as a prerequisite to criticizing Israeli government policy is absurd. Such criticism is directed at government decision-making, not at anyone’s faith or ethnicity.
In Israel itself, huge protests have emerged against the Netanyahu government, which is the most-right-wing, violent, and religiously fanatical since the country’s formation. Recently, more than 100,000 Israelis filled squares in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to demand both an end to the war in Gaza and Netanyahu’s resignation. Some carried signs that said, “Stop the Genocide.” These are not “anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist mobs.”
Those who equate being pro-Palestinian with being antisemitic have constructed a false binary equation. One can be pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli. Indeed, any champion of human rights must be both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.
They must care about the security of Jews in Israel, many of whom are children of victims of the worst genocide in human history, when six million Jews were systematically murdered by bullets and gas chambers during the Holocaust. After thousands of years of Jewish persecution, many Israelis only feel secure in a country that is majority Jewish and perceive the creation of Israel as a miracle that finally provided a haven for the Jewish people.
And any human rights advocate must also care about the freedom and survival of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, who have been stateless and deprived of basic rights of self-determination for more than 75 years, suffering the severe restrictions and daily humiliations of living under brutal Israeli military occupation. These Palestinians are entitled to that which we are all entitled: liberty.
Indeed, numerous Israeli political leaders express sympathy for Palestinians and assert that Israelis can only be secure when Palestinians are free. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak—who is one of the most decorated soldiers in the country’s history—said last year that “if I were born Palestinian, I probably would have joined one of the terror organizations.” Ami Ayalon—who is the former commander of the Israeli Navy and former director of Israel’s intelligence agency Shin Bet—said last year that Palestinians are “people who dream about freedom and don’t see it” and that if he was Palestinian, “I would fight against Israel to achieve my liberty.” He explained that “we control the lives of millions” and “we Israelis shall have security when they have hope.” Michael Benyair, the former attorney general of Israel and former judge in the Israeli Supreme Court, wrote in 2022 that Israel “is permanently depriving millions of Palestinians of their civil and political rights. This is Israeli apartheid.” He asserted that “Israel’s ongoing domination over these territories is a gross injustice that must be urgently rectified.”
If a political leader in the United States made similar statements, she would be smeared as antisemitic and pro-terrorist. And if a green card holder did so, she could be arrested without charges and swiftly deported.
In the current political climate in the United States, criticizing Israel for blocking food aid to deliberately starve Palestinian civilians is labeled antisemitic, while advocating for the annihilation of Palestinian children is part of legitimate political discourse.
More than 30 years ago, I became a citizen of the United States. After the naturalization ceremony, I wept at the beauty of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which reads in part: “‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she with silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'”
America, do not demonize Palestinians. They are yearning to breathe free.
George Farah is a partner at the law firm Handley Farah & Anderson, where he litigates class action cases on behalf of underpaid workers and victims of civil rights abuses. He is also a political commentator and author of the book No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates (Seven Stories Press).”
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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