Human rights activists launched a campaign this week to stop social media giant Facebook from adjusting its hate speech policy to classify the word ‘Zionist’ as a protected category, a move that would make any criticism of Zionism a violation of Facebook’s Community Standards and hate speech policy.
The campaign, entitled “Facebook, we need to talk,” was launched in response to efforts from Zionist organizations, backed by the Israeli government, to get Facebook to consider ‘Zionist” as a proxy for ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish.’
Facebook is in the process of assessing if posts of a critical nature on their platform that use the term ‘Zionist’ “fall within the rubric of hate speech as per Facebook’s Community Standards,” Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) said in a statement released Wednesday, adding that Facebook could be making a decision by the end of February.
If Facebook does decide to equate ‘Zionism’ or ‘Zionist’ with ‘Judaism’ or ‘Jewish’, it would penalize any criticism of the ideology and Zionist policies on the platform, a move that groups say could disproportionately effect Palestinians who criticize Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.
“The proposed policy would too easily mischaracterize conversations about Zionists – and by extension, Zionism – as inherently antisemitic, would harm Facebook users, and would undermine efforts to dismantle real antisemitism and all forms of racism, extremism, and oppression,” the petition, which had over 17,000 signatures as of Thursday, says.
If Facebook were to start penalizing criticism of Zionism on its platforms, “this would shut down conversations about accountability for policies and actions that harm Palestinians,” the petition says.
“Importantly, this move will prohibit Palestinians from sharing their daily experiences and histories with the world, be it a photo of the keys to their grandparent’s house lost when attacked by Zionist militias in 1948, or a livestream of Zionist settlers attacking their olive trees in 2021. And it would prevent Jewish users from discussing their relationships to Zionist political ideology.”
The petition goes on to note that many people who perpetuate antisemitism and racist tropes that are harmful to Jewish people (e.g. White supremacists and Chistian Evangelicals) are actually people who explicitly support Zionism and the State of Israel.
Along with JVP, the petition is undersigned by groups like Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and the Adalah Justice Project.
7amleh – The Arab Center for Social Media Development, one of the undersigned groups, urged Facebook not to be “swayed by the powerful interests of governments and organizations” and resist enacting policies that “deny Palestinians and other peoples living under occupation or oppressive political regimes from enjoying their basic human rights and digital rights.”
“7amleh warns that changes to Facebook’s Community Standards that make ‘Zionist’ synonymous with ‘Jewish’, would deprive people of their right to freedom of expression and inhibit them from documenting and describing human rights violations and sharing stories that accurately describe the daily lives of Palestinians and the violations committed on an ongoing basis by Israel and the Zionist movement,” the group said in a statement.
In recent years Zionist organizations have worked hand-in-hand with the Israeli government to pressure countries and global institutions to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which labels criticism of Israeli and Zionist policies as antisemitic.
The IHRA definition has been adopted by the European parliament and over 30 countries worldwide, including the United Kingdom.
In 2020, 120 right-wing Zionist organizations sent a letter to Facebook urging the company to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism as the “cornerstone of Facebook’s hate speech policy regarding antisemitism.”
Facebook has a history of cracking down on Palestinian activists on its platform, and for years has worked with the Israeli government to deactivate the accounts of Palestinians under the pretext of preventing “incitement.”
Last year, Facebook closed the accounts of over 50 Palestinian activists and journalists, saying the profiles did not adhere to the platform’s community standards.
Rights groups like 7amleh have documented hundreds of cases in recent years of Facebook shutting down or restricting Palestinian accounts. In comparison, the group says that Israeli incitement against Palestinians on the platform is rarely censored.
As long as Palestinian hater, Sheryl Sandberg, is calling the shots, you can expect this censoring of the terms ‘Zionist’ and ‘Zionism’ to be adopted as policy for Facebook, and the silencing of voices for Palestinian rights (while giving voice to anti-Arab racists) to continue.
Serious question here: Is “Palestinian” a protected category in Facebook’s hate speech policy?
If it is, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs might get in some trouble, in theory if not in practice, if it put the content of its website’s lengthy section on “Palestinian terror and incitement” on Facebook.
What kind of a nonsense is this? I most certainly DO NOT condone the actions of Zionists (especially against Palestinians) but this does not make me an anti Semite.
Being from Jewish background, I am ashamed of israel’s behaviour towards Palestinians. This censoring business is going to harmful extremes.
Not super on target but highly relevant: The New York Times has not yet covered B’tselems appraisal of Israel as an apartheid state, but the New Yorker – generally (stress on ‘generally’) known for high quality journalism, examines the issue. The author, Masha Gessen, is a human rights activist – she left Russia because she feared the anti-gay atmosphere there.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-an-israeli-human-rights-organization-decided-to-call-israel-an-apartheid-regime
Why an Israeli Human-Rights Organization Decided to Call Israel an Apartheid Regime…The paper argues that the Israeli regime of apartheid rests on four pillars: citizenship, land, freedom of movement, and political participation. Virtually any person of Jewish ancestry anywhere in the world can claim Israeli citizenship; immigration to Israel is all but impossible for Palestinians, and only a minority of Palestinians—about 1.6 million, out of seven million—who live on land controlled by Israel are citizens of Israel, and even then their rights are limited compared with their nearly seven million Jewish counterparts.
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There Is No Right to a State (jewishcurrents.org)
Jewish Currents, Jan. 27/21
“There is no right to a state” by Peter Beinart
EXCERPT:
“’LET’S BE CLEAR,’ tweeted the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) last month, ‘Arguing that the Jewish people is the only people in the world not entitled to self-determination is a form of antisemitism.’ It’s a claim that in recent years has become ubiquitous in American Jewish establishment discourse. On the same day as DMFI’s tweet, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), penned an op-ed declaring that ‘denying the Jewish people the same right to self-determination that you would extend to other people’ constitutes one of the ‘modern manifestations of the oldest hatred, anti-Semitism.’ Earlier this month, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations wrote a letter to Joe Biden requesting that ‘all federal departments and agencies should, in their work, consider the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] working definition of antisemitism (with examples).’ Those examples include ‘[d]enying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.’
“The timing of this push is not accidental; it is the American Jewish establishment’s response to the death of the two-state solution. For roughly a quarter-century—from the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel in 1988 until John Kerry’s last-gasp bid to broker the creation of a Palestinian state in 2014—the mainstream Palestinian national movement did not challenge Israel’s existence, which meant pro-Israel groups did not need to aggressively defend it. But in recent years, that has changed. As Israeli settlement construction has made the creation of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip increasingly unlikely, a new generation of Palestinian activists has begun advocating one equal state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Rather than challenge the status quo—one unequal state in which millions of Palestinians lack basic rights—establishment American Jewish groups have reacted by insisting that advocating for one equal state, which favors neither Jews nor Palestinians, constitutes antisemitism because it denies Jews the right to self-determination.” (cont’d)