'This is not a pro-Hamas protest': Palestinian Americans fight charges of antisemitism

Jaweed Kaleem
Thu, December 21, 2023 

Demonstrators wave Palestinian flags from atop a car during an Oct. 28 protest for cease-fire that took place near Los Angeles City Hall. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)


Roy Alnashef walked into the crowd around Los Angeles City Hall clutching a poster in each hand.

As a Palestinian American, he was heartened that pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country were drawing hundreds of thousands of people. But he was also alarmed that some protesters were celebrating Hamas and the militant group's Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel or chanting slogans that many Jews viewed as antisemitic.

So he brought two messages to his first rally in late October.

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“This is not a pro-Hamas protest,” said one of his homemade signs.

The other read: “Hey Jews. If you were here, you’d be safe. We don’t hate you.”

Around him, other activists were accusing Israel of being an "apartheid state" whose bombardment of the Gaza Strip was nothing short of "genocide." Some held signs comparing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

Alnashef said he believed those criticisms were accurate.

“But I don’t know if those words help right now,” he said.

The Palestinian cause has never received as much attention or support in the United States as it has in the last two months: the massive protests, the debates roiling college campuses, the support from Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups.

But some in the Palestinian American community, which numbers about 220,000, say the movement has a messaging problem that leaves it vulnerable to charges of antisemitism.

Roy Alnashef, a Palestinian American who lives in Reseda, holds up his handwritten posters at a pro-Palestinian protest in downtown Los Angeles on Oct. 28. (Jaweed Kaleem / Los Angeles Times)

That is not much of a concern when it comes to the most basic demands of the protesters: a cease-fire, an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and equal rights for Palestinians. But the more far-reaching goals of some demonstrators put the movement in dicier territory. Those include allowing Palestinians to reclaim their ancestral homes in Israel and replacing Israel — home to half of the world's 16 million Jews — with a Palestinian state.

"We don't want two states, we want ’48," goes a popular chant, a call for a return to a time before the 1948 founding of Israel.

Read more: How antisemitism came roaring back into American life

Alnashef, a software designer from Reseda, said he worries that much of the protest rhetoric undermines the Palestinian cause because it can leave the mistaken impression that the entire movement is aligned with Hamas, which routinely calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.

"A lot of Palestinians here in America are trying to hold two thoughts together," he said. "The first is how we are angry and in pain over decades and decades of history that has hurt our people. But the other is, how can we be strategic and accomplish the goals to stop the violence against us and not give Americans more reasons to be suspicious?"

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In a recent poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% supported the Oct. 7 attack, in which Israel says Hamas militants killed at least 1,200 people, most of them unarmed civilians, and took more than 240 hostage.

The survey, conducted during a recent cease-fire, also found support for Hamas as a political party has nearly doubled — to 44% — as Israel continues its assault on Gaza, a campaign that health authorities there say has now killed over 20,000 people.

It is unclear how common those views are among the Palestinian diaspora, because no such polling exists.

But in interviews, some Palestinian Americans said they were acutely aware of the perception that demonstrators support Hamas — which the U.S. government designates as a terrorist organization — and the ways that could hurt the cause.

"You have to be very careful in what you say and who you associate with," said Iman Jodeh, a Palestinian American and state representative in Aurora, Colo. "Because along with the support we are getting also comes the risks."

Jodeh, 41, who maintains a family home in Ramallah in the West Bank and has relatives in Gaza, has constituents whose relatives have been killed in Gaza.

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When she began talking publicly in early October about the Hamas attack and Israel's bombardment of Gaza, she condemned the militants and called for hostages to be released.

She also described Gaza — which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt — as an "open-air prison" and blamed President Biden's "unconditional support" of Israel for a "genocide" of Palestinians.

The Denver Gazette news website responded with an editorial that called her an "antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-American" legislator and accused her of defending Hamas.

"Some people from my Arab community think I can come off as if I'm not doing enough or I'm not being strong enough," Jodeh said. "But then people outside my community think I'm saying too much."

Particularly damaging have been the white supremacists who have shown up at various pro-Palestinian events and organized anti-Jewish demonstrations, including one in Walnut Creek, Calif., where neo-Nazis unfurled a sign over a bridge that said: "No more wars for I$rael."

Extremists "would love to be utilizing the Palestinian liberation push to further their antisemitic ideologies," said Sam Rasoul, a Palestinian American state legislator in Roanoke, Va. "We need to be cognizant of that and reject it."

A 42-year-old Democrat whose parents emigrated from Al Birah in the West Bank, Rasoul led a recent rally in his southwestern Virginia city, where he shouted into a megaphone that "Tax dollars should not be used to kill innocent people on the other side of the world."

A local blog, the Roanoke Star, said he was "parroting terrorist propaganda." He said his anger was directed at the Israeli government and U.S. foreign aid to Israel.

He and other Palestinian Americans said they are often lumped in with those who share some of their goals — including a cease-fire — but not others. Despite his belief that Israel has a right to exist, Rasoul said that he initially feared his public advocacy for Palestinians would result in him being labeled as antisemitic but that those worries have subsided as the rising death toll in Gaza brings more of the public into his camp.

The Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights group, describes much of the pro-Palestinian movement as antisemitic.

The group, which said it has logged a spike in antisemitic incidents in the U.S., says at least 905 pro-Palestinian demonstrations since Oct. 7 were anti-Jewish events with "antisemitic rhetoric, expressions of support for terrorism against the state of Israel" or anti-Zionist themes.

That rhetoric includes contested phrases such as "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." Pro-Palestinian activists say the phrase is a call for equality. Most Jewish groups see it as a cry to wipe out Israel.

The ADL also considers rallies antisemitic when protesters call for "intifada," an Arabic word that means "uprising." It has long been used to describe protests against Israel, including strikes, boycotts and violent attacks.

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"The problem I'm seeing today with the vast majority of these rallies is they're not calling for a two-state solution, they're not calling for a one-state solution, they're calling for a final solution," said ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, suggesting that nearly all pro-Palestinian demonstrations share the Nazi desire to eliminate Jews.

Jay Ulfelder, a Harvard University political science professor whose organization, the Crowd Counting Consortium, has tracked rhetoric at thousands of rallies since Oct. 7, said celebratory messaging about "resistance" has fallen off at pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

But the damage has been done.

"There have been very few events that have straddled the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli sides, few that have made those generic calls for peace, cooperation, return of hostages and prisoners and an end to killing altogether," he said. "It is highly polarized and contentious."

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In a widely shared political cartoon, a crying mother holds a dead child as microphones from CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are shoved in her face with the caption: "But do you condemn Hamas?"

The message resonated with Taleed El-Sabawi, a 38-year-old Palestinian American law professor at Florida International University.

For most of her career, she did not talk publicly about her Palestinian background out of fear that "people would not understand where I am from" or that it would cause people to judge her "negatively."

But in October, she stopped posting on X about public health — her academic focus — to focus on the Israeli attack on Gaza that she said amounts to a "second Nakba." The word, meaning "catastrophe," describes the experience of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled in 1948 from areas that are now Israel.

Her maternal grandparents were displaced that year from what was then the Palestinian town of Majdal, now the Israeli city of Ashkelon, and her parents grew up in Kuwait and Gaza.

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As dozens of her family members have died in Gaza, El-Sabawi has taken her grief and rage to social media. Fellow academics have replied that she should first speak out on the hostages taken by Hamas.

"Why do people assume that I don’t want the hostages released?" El-Sabawi wrote recently. "Just because I’m Palestinian American? ... Who says I don’t feel bad for their families or want the hostages released?"

"When we speak up as Palestinian Americans, I feel like our basic morality is questioned before we can talk about our people," said El-Sabawi.

Jodeh, the Palestinian American state representative in Colorado, said she is regularly asked about the subject. "It is not that we don't care about the hostages. Trust me, we do," she said. "It's that we are also seeing our own people killed, and we naturally end up focusing on that."

Among the dozens of groups organizing in support of Palestinians, there have been recent attempts to avoid messaging that could damage their cause.

At a November rally held by Northwestern University students in Evanston, Ill., that drew 100 demonstrators, one hoisted a green Hamas flag with white Arabic text. Organizers kicked the man out.

Two days later, a prominent Palestinian American activist used a megaphone to caution protesters at a Manhattan demonstration about the optics of pro-Palestinian participants tearing down posters that Israel supporters have put up in many American cities showing the faces of hostages being held in Gaza.

"There are provocateurs all across the city and what they are waiting for you to do is to waste your energy ripping down their little posters," Linda Sarsour, who is best-known for co-organizing the Trump-era Women's Marches, told the crowd.

"Sisters and brothers, you are better than that. ... And it ain't even helping the people of Gaza."

A prominent rabbi and pro-Israeli activists who saw video of the speech suggested it was antisemitic.

Read more: Are these things antisemitic? L.A. Jews tell us

Sarsour pushed back: "Their whole job is to take us out of context, their whole job is to try to insinuate that we are saying things that are antisemitic. That's their whole job. Why do they do that? Because they want to discredit us."

"We're always put on the defense," she said. "We are always put in a corner."

Sarsour said that the swelling of support in the U.S. made her more optimistic than ever about the Palestinian cause. At the same time, she asserted that Palestinian Americans are being unfairly tarred as antisemitic or pro-Hamas simply because of their ethnicity.

Sarsour has recently taken to Instagram to admonish activists who had spray-painted "Free Palestine" on the entrance to a Jewish after-school care center in Philadelphia.

"STOP THIS. You are NOT doing any justice to the Palestinian cause," she wrote. "Do not taint our movements for liberation. Hate is not welcome in our spaces."

Those kinds of messages are badly needed, said Alnashef, who worries that protests have becoming increasingly antagonistic, with "people pointing fingers" at perceived foes and "saying things they know will rile up people on the other side and get them angry."

"I wish we could look beyond that," he said.

Like many Palestinian Americans, he has his take on what should happen in the land where his grandparents once lived: an end to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza and eventually the creation of a single nation in which Palestinians have "full citizenship with all the rights and privileges that Jews experience in Israel."

But for now, he said, he only wanted "Palestinians to stop being killed.”

So he continues to show up to rallies — with one sign in each hand.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.