On behalf of 400 medical, public health, and community leaders, the Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity is calling on Scientific American to immediately re-publish an article on Palestine solidarity that it removed, and to end its censorship of Palestinian voices.
The Scientific American has removed a piece calling for solidarity with Palestinians from its website after being pressured by pro-Israel groups.
The organizers of the Open Classroom event, “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine” say they had their right to free speech silenced by private tech companies Zoom, Facebook, and Eventbrite when the companies bowed to the fraudulent threat of prosecution. Now the organizers are calling on supporters to demand an end to corporate control of academia and an end to Israel lobby censorship and bullying.
On April 12 Facebook removed the event page for a panel on Palestine. The next day the tech company shut down the page for the academic program, the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program at San Francisco State University, that sponsored it.
BDS activists in Gaza tried to promote a video on Facebook that compares Israel and apartheid South Africa. The platform rejected the promotion and shadow banned the account. Unfortunately this is not an isolated case.
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.
Despite the challenges of remote learning, campus activism for Palestine charged forward this past year.
If digital platforms continue to have the power to dictate the terms of the conversation we can only expect a further restriction of what Palestinian scholar Edward Said called “permission to narrate”. As Palestinian feminists, we know the stakes of this moment all too well.
Jewish Voice for Peace, Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK, The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, 7amleh, and a number of other groups, are holding a digital day of action to draw attention to Facebook’s censorship of Palestinian voices.
On November 17, the British anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was informed by Twitter that his account was suspended permanently. No reason was given. It turns out that according to Twitter, comparing the siege of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto is a breach of rules whereas wishing Jewish anti-Zionists had died in Auschwitz is not.