The Silencing of Palestinians

In the aftermath of October 7th, a string of media outlets quietly silenced top Palestinian experts and those speaking out on behalf of the Palestinians. CBS interviewed Noura Erakat on live TV, but then removed the segment from the recorded video. Yousef Munayyer and Omar Baddar had their CNN appearances canceled after describing what they planned to say. MSNBC sidelined hosts sympathetic to Palestinians like Mehdi Hasan and Ayman Mohyeldin, whose programs were incidentally taken off the air at the time their expertise was needed most. And that’s “left-wing” media. 

Mohyeldin probably felt a sense of déjà vu, since he was sidelined during Israel’s July 2014 War on Gaza as well. Executives were reportedly “nervous” about what Mohyeldin might say about the war in which Israel ultimately killed 1,600 Palestinian civilians, while Palestinian militant groups killed 6 Israeli civilians. 

The problem runs much deeper than a handful of press cancellations. A Jan 9, 2024 open-source study published by the Intercept found that The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7.”

Edward Said put it nicely in 1984 when he wrote that Palestinians lack “permission to narrate.” 

The erasure of Palestinians from mainstream media in the US has been more than a century in the making. Paola García examined hundreds of articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlanta Constitution from 1914-1930, concluding: “they primarily communicated the Zionist viewpoint, giving almost no attention to the Palestinian Arabs…the ‘Jewish question’ took up most of the space in articles on Palestine…the American newspapers…omit almost entirely any mention of the Arabs.”

By the 1970s, top US newspapers published a lot more about the Palestinians, but very little by Palestinians. Maha Nassar examined thousands of articles published from 1970 to 2019 in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation and the New Republic. For the New York Times, less than 2% of the 2,490 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was 1%, while the New Republic did not publish a single article about Palestinians written by a Palestinian:

Apparently, it never occurred to anyone to consult an actual Palestinian about Palestinian matters?

The silencing of Palestinian voices has leapfrogged from traditional print and cable media to the most important media company today, Meta. Human Rights Watch documented the suppression of over 1,050 posts by Palestinians and their supporters, including posts that were documenting human rights abuses. Their 51-page report, titled, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” found that Meta systematically removed content that was protected speech. This included peaceful expressions in support of Palestinian human rights. 

The problem at Meta has been ongoing for years. In 2021, a report commissioned by Meta itself found that the company’s flawed content moderation policies had stopped Palestinians from sharing on-the-ground documentation of “police and settler assaults in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where families were being threatened with forced displacement, and in the Gaza Strip, where Israeli fighter jets were heavily bombarding two million besieged people.”

The absence of Palestinian voices, or even adjacent or sympathetic voices, is dramatically worse in business, tech and venture capital media. In the weeks after October 7th, Scott Galloway, a popular business podcaster, transformed his shows about tech and business into a regurgitation of Israeli military propaganda. The All-In Podcast, another popular tech and business show, brought on Jared Kushner to explain the Gaza War. This is the same Jared Kushner whose proposed solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, dubbed “Peace to Prosperity,” called for Palestinian acceptance of a forever-occupation, euphemistically described as “overriding [Israeli] security responsibility for land west of the Jordan River,” in exchange for $50 billion in Gulf money. Then there’s the tech innovator Paul Biggar, who was removed from CircleCI board for a pro-Palestine blog post in which Biggar critiqued his industry for encouraging Israel’s mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza. Here is a segment from the piece:

“I look at my colleagues – the founders, the investors, my network, my friends, my advisors. I'm afraid to open their twitters…..People I thought were friends, were allies. So much humanity for those killed on October 7th, none for the people killed on the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, or in November or December [16]. 20,000 people, killed by deliberate, indiscriminate bombing [17]. None either for the people killed on Oct 6th, 5th, 4th [18]. For the people massacred in 1948 [19] and since. No protest of the illegal occupation [20] …They don't exist to them; they didn't happen.”

In higher education, the problem is not so much absence of Palestinian voices or lack of sympathy. No doubt, academics are more sympathetic to the Palestinians than almost any other group of people. 

But even in academia -- a supposed sanctuary of freedom of speech -- 69% of U.S.-based scholars have been self-censoring when speaking about the Middle East in academic and professional settings. On Israeli-Palestinian issues specifically, that number rises to a whopping 81% who self censor on “criticisms of Israel.” The reported reasons included fear of offending students, pressure from external advocacy groups, and discipline from academic administrators.

I can attest to this fear at a very personal level, as I’ve had multiple academic colleagues confess to me directly they’ve been warned to take caution when speaking up about Israel/Palestine, and they fear saying the wrong thing could cost them their job.

And how could we forget the silencing in the United States Congress. The only Palestinian member of the US Congress, Rashida Tlaib, was censured by her peers in a 234 to 188 vote  over her comments on the Israel-Hamas war. In the entire history of the US House of Representatives, twenty-six members have been censured, for things like bribery and sexual misconduct. Alas, now we can add speaking out against the risk of genocide to that list of grave offenses.

Now, a well-funded campaign has been launched to unseat her. Both Hill Harper and Nasser Beydoun have been offered $20 million dollars in campaign contributions if they were to run against Rep. Tlaib in the Democratic primary. That is where we are at folks. That’s a wrap for this week.

Much love, 

-Zach