Just days after taking office, President Donald Trump made it clear that he intends to use the full power of the federal government to quell pro-Palestinian advocacy. On Jan. 29, Trump issued “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” an executive order that threatens to deport foreign students who participated in college encampments and protests against the genocide in Gaza. In an accompanying fact sheet, the White House claims that these students are “Hamas sympathizers” who joined “pro-jihadist protests,” and are thus eligible for deportation under U.S. immigration law for expressing support for a designated terrorist organization.

This move to use immigration law to suppress political speech, experts argue, is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. But it hardly comes as a surprise — in fact, as a new book reveals, it is a strategy to target Palestine-related organizing that goes back decades. 

Zaha Hassan, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as one of the leading experts in Washington on Israel-Palestine and U.S. foreign policy, is a co-editor of “Suppressing Dissent: Shrinking Civic Space, Transnational Repression and Palestine-Israel”. Published just two days after the November elections, the volume brings together scholars, lawyers, and analysts to show that, even with a long history of repression, the space for civic discourse on Palestinian rights is rapidly diminishing.

The collection of 14 chapters traces this trend across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as well as in the United States and, increasingly, the Arab world. It also details the deeply worrying phenomenon of transnational repression: the Israeli government’s documented efforts, for at least the last decade, to export its suppression of Palestinian civil society and shut down Palestine advocacy in the United States, with troubling implications for the free speech rights of all Americans.

Since October 7, the backlash against pro-Palestinian activists and students across the United States, and universities’ submission to government pressure, has seemed stunningly swift and severe. Here, “Suppressing Dissent”makes an important contribution by outlining the key legal and regulatory mechanisms that have enabled this crackdown — from the ban on material support to terrorist organizations, to the elevation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to delegitimize criticism of Israel. These are mechanisms with deep roots in Congress and executive action, and now they will be at Trump’s disposal.

Hassan spoke to +972 Magazine about the book, her research at the Carnegie Endowment, and what she’ll be monitoring in Washington over the coming months. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Could you start by talking about how the book came together, and your interest in the shrinking space for civil society in Israel-Palestine, as part of the project you’ve led at Carnegie?

Given that we don’t have an environment for a political resolution [in Israel-Palestine], civil society is going to form the basis and support for a future that allows Palestinians and Israelis to live in dignity with equal rights. This idea of focusing on the health of Palestinian civil society came out of another Carnegie project, which [detailed] a very problematic outlook, and we were concerned about what that was going to mean for people trying to live their daily lives.

Immediately after we published that report, the May 2021 escalation started. These were the protests that followed Israel’s crackdown on worshippers [attending prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque] in Jerusalem during Ramadan, and also the eviction of refugee families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The demonstrations captured the imagination of Palestinians everywhere — because it was Ramadan, because it involved Jerusalem, and because it centered on refugee rights, which is really the core of the Palestinian issue. Palestinians inside of Israel were connecting with Palestinians in the occupied territories and with the diaspora.

We saw this incredible organizing taking place: mass protests, a call for a general strike across the historic Palestinian homeland, the Palestinian diaspora creating content online and reporting on what was going on in real time. But we also saw a crackdown on this activity, a unified Israeli policy toward the protests, with Palestinian citizens facing the same treatment as Palestinians living under occupation — arrests, [police] brutality, and surveillance, in coordination with the settlers who were coming into the mixed Palestinian-Jewish communities to attack Palestinians.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority was trying to keep the protests in check so as not to get on Israel’s bad side. And abroad, there was also an online backlash from the content moderators against those who were posting about what was going on. There was a lot of online censorship, as well as a failure to prevent some of the incitement that was leading to organized attacks on Palestinians — Israelis who were coordinating attacks on Palestinians in WhatsApp and Facebook groups.

Immediately, some colleagues and I agreed that this was something we needed to study closely: the repression not just of civil society Israel-Palestine but also of pro-Palestinian speech abroad, and how it affects the civil rights of ordinary Americans. We wanted to show the connection between U.S. foreign policy, what happens in Israel-Palestine, and the blowback: a crackdown on our own civil liberties.

We created a study group of subject matter experts on Israel-Palestine to try to understand what we were seeing and come up with recommendations to policymakers. Within the first few meetings, it became clear that the [simultaneous] backlash against civil society activism in Israel-Palestine and in the United States was not an accident. There was some coordination going on, with similar techniques being used in both places. There was an interest in connecting the dots to be able to tell the story in a more meaningful way, and that’s why we ended up turning it into a book.

Your own chapter in the volume hones in on Palestinian community-based organizations, humanitarian workers, and human rights defenders, and shows how they’ve been criminalized as the occupation has grown more entrenched. Readers will perhaps be most familiar with the suppression of pro-Palestinian voices here in the United States, but how has this criminalization and repression in Israel-Palestine increased over the past years?

It’s probably going to be surprising for people to know that pretty much any political activity in Palestine is illegal. In the occupied territories, all the political parties and factions are illegal organizations under [Israeli] military law. And so even Fatah, which is the ruling party of the [Palestine Liberation Organization], is an illegal organization. Despite the fact Israel has a peace agreement with the PLO [Israel recognized it as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people ahead of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s], that’s never been reversed. Since 1967, Israel has outlawed about 400 Palestinian organizations and international NGOs in Palestine.

In the years before October 7, Palestinian civil society organizations had some freedom of operation, because Israel wanted social services and some kind of stability in the occupied territories. So they allowed them to help support the community through organized activities, because otherwise the occupying power has to provide them.

Things started to change as the settler movement grew stronger [in the government], and as it became clearer that there was an opportunity to seize more land with less pushback from the international community. [In this context], there was a targeting of these community-based organizations, [particularly those] that provide vital services in Area C of the West Bank — whether health care in areas that are slated for settlement construction, or support to farmers to access water for irrigation.

Palestinian human rights organizations, which document the situation in the occupied territories, had previously escaped being targeted. They had been subject to harassment, but [prior to October 2021, when Israel designated six prominent groups as terrorist organizations] they hadn’t been outlawed before. That was because of the linkages they have with international human rights organizations abroad, and how bad it would look for Israel to target them.

That went out the window when these [Palestinian] human rights organizations were able to access international mechanisms of accountability. Once Palestine became a non-member observer state of the UN and acceded to the Rome Statute in 2014, these groups were able to help support complaints by victims to the International Criminal Court. So they became a problem for Israel, which began to surveil them.

But it wasn’t until March 2021, when the ICC opened a case against Israel, that staff at Palestinians human rights organizations realized their phones were being hacked by Israeli spyware. Just before they were going to announce [this discovery, in October 2021], that’s when those human rights groups were designated as terrorist organizations. Then nine months later, their offices were raided and sealed shut and they were told that they couldn’t operate anymore.

From the timeline, you realize why they decided to criminalize these organizations: it had a lot to do with the push for legal accountability.

Turning to the suppression of pro-Palestine speech in the United States, you note in the book’s introduction that “Congress has imposed a regulatory regime over the course of decades to circumscribe and restrict Palestinian advocacy and agency.” Could you talk about how this regime and a variety of other mechanisms — from the ban on material support to foreign terrorist organizations, to the elevation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism to tar and delegitimize criticism of Israel — set the stage for the crackdown we’ve witnessed over the past 15 months?

The use of the terrorism label is the first mechanism we highlight in the book. We have a wonderful chapter by Nour Soubani and Diala Shamas, who trace the use of the word terrorism [over time]. The first introduction of the word into legislation by Congress [in 1969] had to do with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), [based on the idea that] members of Palestinian guerrilla groups might become UNRWA staff.

The first efforts to silence Palestinian advocacy in the United States came in the form of ideological exclusion laws and immigration laws, [which attempted] to link Palestinian advocacy to support for communism and socialism. McCarthy-era laws were used to prevent Palestinians from entering the United States, including to prevent Palestinian representatives from setting up offices.

In 1987, a group of Palestinian students and a Kenyan woman, who were supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), were passing out flyers about a Palestinian event. U.S. immigration authorities rounded them up at their homes, arrested them [for supporting an organization that advocated “world Communism” under the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act], and tried to deport them — a case that would come to be known as the L.A. 8.

The government conceded that the only reason they wanted to deport them was because of their pro-Palestinian advocacy. There was no criminal or terrorist activity. In other words, they were basically being used as a test case to see whether it was possible for the United States to get away with deporting people based solely on speech, and specifically in this case, Palestinian advocacy.

This case went through the court system, and when judges would rule against them, the government even started passing new laws to apply retroactively. In 1990, Congress passed a law that created a presumption that if you are speaking on behalf of the PLO or you’re a member of the PLO — and the PLO represents not only political factions, but Palestinian civic organizations and unions and syndicates — then you’re presumed to be engaged in terrorist activity and you’re excludable from the United States. That became part of immigration law.

In 1987, too, Congress formally designated the PLO as a terrorist organization. Even after the United States invited PLO officials into the White House to sign an agreement with Israel, it is still considered a terrorist organization and they need a waiver to enter the country.

Now, instead of focusing on public officials or members of political factions, the legislation we’re seeing is cracking down on civil society actors and Palestine advocacy groups on college campuses. The new mechanism now is, rather than just terrorism, to try to redefine what is considered legitimate speech and what is hate speech or antisemitism. 

Speaking about the Palestinian lived experience or Palestinian history, which includes the history of displacement and dispossession at the hands of Zionist militias and the Israeli state — [legislative efforts are seeking to ban that] activity as prohibited speech and antisemitic. If universities want to continue to receive their public funds, they can no longer allow that kind of coursework or student activity on their campus, or any kind of protest that involves this kind of speech.

The other mechanisms we highlight in the book include mass surveillance and hacking — how new technologies are being used to monitor Palestinians and to control their movement, specifically in the occupied territories, but also to some extent inside of Israel. Then there’s the online space, a new development over the last 15 years, where private companies have become involved in monitoring and censoring Palestine-related speech online.

Another key contribution of this volume, as I see it, is highlighting the dangerous phenomenon of transnational repression. Some of this seems to function by virtue of the “no daylight” U.S.-Israeli relationship: when Israel designates an individual or organization as being associated with terrorism, the United States acts almost automatically to punish and repress them, or they may become subject to U.S. civil litigation. But there’s also a more covert form of this transnational repression, which is the Israeli government’s own efforts to fund and oversee a network of pro-Israel groups that silence advocates of Palestinian rights in the United States. Could you talk about how this form of transnational repression has operated, and what impact it’s had?

Yousef Munayyer does a brilliant job tracing this development — [showing] how the loss of our civil liberties is directly connected to efforts in Israel. The Israeli government [began these efforts] after its 2008-9 bombardment of Gaza and the recognition by UN investigators and commissions of inquiry that Israeli forces had committed grave human rights violations. The Goldstone Report, named for the South African jurist who led the commission, recommended an inquiry by the ICC and accountability for what happened. The commission also flagged that the Palestinian resistance groups, [including] Hamas, should be investigated.

After that report, there was this real outcry by Israeli officials, and that’s when you start seeing this [effort] to control the narrative that’s coming out about Israel and Israeli practices in the occupied territories. There are conferences and discussions at think tanks in Israel. Then in 2015, [the Israeli government mandates] the Strategic Affairs Ministry to combat the “delegitimization of Israel” by the global movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) that started back in 2005. An entire ministry [is enlisted] just to figure out how to combat this narrative that Israel is engaged in human rights violations and denying Palestinians their human rights.

The ministry decided that the best defense is to go on offense: it created opportunities for collaboration and coordination between various networks that operate around the world to help support a [pro-Israel] narrative and to push back against [perceived] delegitimization. The mechanisms that I mentioned help these networks in advance, because even if it’s not funding — and in many cases there is funding involved, with money passing hands between the [Israeli] government and these private actors — there is information sharing, and the talking points get spread around about how to frame certain activities that Israel has engaged in.

[For example, after] October 7, you start to see these claims about beheaded babies, and [the narrative that] UNRWA is a terrorist organization, and all the other inflammatory genocidal statements that really have no bearing in reality. There is no evidence of these things, but they end up having a life of their own. How do different public figures all get the same stories and continue to repeat them even without any evidence and even without media companies questioning the veracity of the allegations? It’s because there’s a coordinated effort that’s going on.

What’s brilliant about Yousef’s chapter is he uses only primary sources to show that this is taking place. It’s all out of the mouths of the people that are orchestrating the coordinated activities — public officials from Israel saying exactly what they’re doing, who they’re working with, how they’re engaging in this activity, and why they’re doing it.

After October 7, instead of us talking about the mass atrocities [in Gaza], the ICJ case [accusing Israel of genocide] and what it means, or having Congressional hearings about why we need to send 2,000-pound bombs to Israel while all the human rights organizations around the world are saying Israel is engaged in what looks like a genocide, we’re talking about college campuses, whether we should allow students to have courses on Palestine, and whether speaking about the lived experiences of Palestinians is antisemitic. This [effort] has been very successful in changing the subject.

But what’s also been shown after October 7 is the incredible tenacity of college students in this moment. I think there’s a real recognition because of this backlash — because of the way they’ve been so brutally treated during the protests and their encampments — that this is really about more than just Palestine. It’s about whether or not we can still have a so-called democracy with freedom of speech and dissent, and to be able to change U.S. policy.

The whole point of the book was to point out that this development that we’re seeing in Palestine and with the restrictions on speech in the United States is going to impact us all at some point. We didn’t realize it was going to be so vivid and come so quickly after we started the project. But [the period since] October 7 really underscored everything we were concerned about from the start.

In Yousef’s chapter, we also see Israeli officials openly acknowledge that the anti-BDS strategy in some ways failed because it went too far — it overstepped U.S. free speech protections and there was some judicial pushback. But then they see the potential to weaponize the antisemitism accusation, by framing BDS as antisemitic.

And you see why it was so important after October 7, when the allegations of genocide [in Gaza] were coming out, that there needed to be a narrative that switched the script to rape, beheadings of babies, carving up pregnant women, and putting babies in ovens. We were hearing all of this stuff and they were being repeated at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The president was talking about beheaded babies.

Why would you need to create this narrative? What happened on October 7 was bad enough. The point was to justify cracking down on speech that was [articulating a different narrative] — talking about a live-streamed genocide in Gaza. You had to change it. And the only way to do that was to come up with these really inflammatory genocidal narratives about Palestinians, to be able to say that these students are actually promoting and providing material support to terrorists, so we have to shut them down.

But that’s why it’s really important for us to keep our eyes on the student situation. I talk about this in the book’s introduction: from the 1960s and ’70s, social change germinates and takes root on university campuses. That’s where we learned about the civil rights movement, where we pushed for anti-apartheid policies, and where the #MeToo movement got its legs.

Yousef also makes that point toward the end of this chapter that since Israel’s war in Gaza has been categorically more destructive than anything that came before, the scale of dissent to Israeli policy around the world will follow suit — but that Israel, too, will depend even more on its transnational repression efforts, in coordination with the United States. Going forward, what arenas of suppression will you be following most closely? Are there certain legislative or regulatory developments that, amid the chaos of Trump’s return, might go under the radar? 

I think we’re going to continue to see campuses as a focal point for the Trump administration. Trump brought with him into office a group of people that have really strong feelings about Israel-Palestine. Elise Stefanik, for instance, who’s nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was the one who went after the university presidents during the House hearings [in December 2023, castigating them] for not cracking down further on what is essentially Palestinian human rights speech on campus.

But Trump has been more than just symbolic. On Jan. 29, he issued an executive order to prevent the entry of foreign students and faculty to the U.S. or to deport them, and to begin investigating what further actions could be taken against them [under the pretext of combatting antisemitism]. It is clearly defined as a way to go after pro-Palestinian speech: he’s talking about terrorist organizations and material support for terrorism, but he believes that speaking about Palestinian human rights is supporting Hamas, and so that’s terrorism.

There’s also legislation we need to keep our eyes on that targets campus speech. It needs to be voted on, but the College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability (COLUMBIA) Act would allow the government to impose “antisemitism monitors” on campuses that receive federal funding. Supporting Palestinian human rights would be considered antisemitic, and that would provide the pretense to deny federal funds to university programs.

There’s also the legislation the House passed last session to strip the non-profit status of organizations that the Secretary of Treasury determines are engaged in terrorism. Think about student groups and civil society organizations that are engaged in advocacy around Palestine — especially those organizations that have been sued in the past, like the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, based on allegations of supporting terrorism, and were dismissed — now the Secretary of Treasury could come out and say, “We think you’re a terrorist organization, your activities support Hamas, and therefore, you no longer have non-profit status.” That’s going to impact their fundraising, in particular.

There’s also a good chance that the Antisemitism Awareness Act [which has just been reintroduced in Congress] will pass. This is the adoption of IHRA [by the federal government], but it goes even beyond IHRA in how it links antisemitism to critique of Israel or Zionism. I think you’re going to see stronger efforts [to pass this and similar legislation], given that we have a Republican-led Congress, and there are enough Democrats who would be supportive of such initiatives.

The first battle will be on college campuses. But there’s going to be an impact on all NGOs that work on Palestinian human rights in the United States. The pump has been primed, so to speak, and all [Trump] has to do now is to start letting it flow.