Documentary Exposing Repression in West Bank Wins at Oscars; Free Speech Lawyer Jenin Younes on Double Standards for Israel's Critics
Lee Fang discusses the controversies surrounding the Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land" and the film's struggle to find distributors in the United States. PLUS: Civil liberties lawyer Jenin Younes on the continued censorship threats against Palestinian voices.
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My name is Lee Fong, and I'm your host for System Update.
Last night, the film No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary.
The film, which stars Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian activist Basil Adra, chronicles the occupation and destruction of Masafir Yata, a Palestinian village in the West Bank.
The film has been described as a testimony to friendship, solidarity, and resistance.
While much of the film documents Israeli attempts at land grabs and violence from Israeli military and settler forces from 2019 through 2023, it also juxtaposes snippets from old videos recorded by Adra's family and neighbors.
No Other Land features footage of protests filmed by Basil Adra when he was just seven years old.
As he sits with his mother in a field, his father is violently assaulted and then arrested by the Israeli army.
Here's a clip from the trailer.
Thousand Palestinians face one of the single biggest expulsion decisions since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began.
The road trip is the place that was broken in it.
The first picture was the first place.
This is the beginning and the end.
- Are you ready? - Are you ready? - - - I'm ready! - - - - - - - - -
At the Oscars, Yuval Abraham, the film's co-creator and also an investigative journalist for the Israeli media outlet 972 Magazine, in his Oscar acceptance speech, called for Israel to end the destruction of Gaza, for Hamas to release the remaining hostages. called for Israel to end the destruction of Gaza, for
and for the end of policies of, quote, ethnic supremacy in the West Bank, in which Israeli Jews like himself are treated differently than his Palestinian friend Basil Adra, who lives under a different set of laws and norms simply on the basis of race and ethnicity.
Because Basra is Palestinian, he cannot vote for the government that ultimately rules over him or for the Israeli military that decides the fate of millions of other Palestinians in the West Bank.
Here's a clip.
The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end, the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of October 7th, which must be freed.
When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal.
We live in a regime where I am free, under civilian law, and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control.
There is a different path, a political solution, without ethnic supremacy, with...
National rights for both of our people.
And I have to say, as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.
And...
You know, I... Why?
Can't you see that we are intertwined?
That my people can be truly safe if Basel's people are truly free and safe.
There is another way...
It's not too late for life, for the living.
There is no other way.
Thank you.
Now here's the rub.
Every other film awarded an Oscar last night had U.S. distribution.
No other land, despite winning the most prestigious accolade in Hollywood, could not obtain a U.S. distributor.
It is only shown in small and independent theaters.
Hopefully, this award changes that.
but the situation reflects an ongoing form of systemic censorship in American media.
Here's how the New York Times described the dynamic.
Despite a string of honors and rave reviews, no distributor would pick up the film in the United States, making it nearly impossible for American filmgoers to see it in theaters or to stream it.
This shortcoming made no other land part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.
Now, this claim about quote-unquote topical documentaries struggling to obtain distribution obscures the reality.
Let's take a look at the last decade or so of Oscar-winning documentaries.
The winner last year, 20 Days in Maripol, about Ukrainian forces fighting Russians.
That's a film that certainly revolved around a topic issue area, a topical issue area, and yes, they had a major distributor.
The year before that, the best documentary went to Navalny about the Russian dissident.
Another topical documentary that again had a distributor, in this case, Warner Brothers.
In 2019, the winner was the film produced by the Obamas, American Factory, about a Chinese-owned factory in Ohio and its struggle with union organizers and a culture clash about the nature of work.
Again, no problem finding a distributor.
Even the very controversial documentary Citizen Four, about Edward Snowden, which featured our esteemed host Glenn Greenwald, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2014, That film, which enraged the U.S. national security state, had a major distributor and the film was widely shown in U.S. theaters.
No, the issue is not topical documentaries failing to obtain distribution or streaming deals.
The issue is the aggressive and often successful attempt by pro-Israel pressure groups to prevent audiences from viewing films that are critical of Israel.
The Jordanian film about atrocities committed during the 1948 war in Israel.
There have been similar challenges for other films critical of Israel, including Tantora, 200 Meters, Little Palestine Diary of Siege, and Nihilah and the Uprising.
Recently, the American documentary Israelism, produced by left-leaning American Jews, investigates how American Jewish communities educate their members about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often in ways that erase the existence of Palestinians.
The film has faced an ongoing campaign of censorship.
The University of Pennsylvania refused to allow a Jewish student group to screen the movie, and Hunter College similarly canceled a screening.
Eventually, Hunter College allowed a screening, but only if a rabbi was featured to host a discussion after the film, and he was criticized for refusing to take student questions.
Screenings for the film have been blocked in other colleges and universities since October 7th.
The other incredible example of film censorship that really has no parallel in recent modern American history is that of Al Jazeera's explosive documentary, The Lobby.
This multi-part series featured an undercover reporter who infiltrated a pro-Israel lobbying group with a hidden camera and gained unprecedented access to strategy sessions from a constellation of pro-Israel organizations that touted their work covertly censoring, surveilling, and intimidating.
American activists and student groups.
The film also shows the close coordination with the Israeli government, regular meetings with the Israeli embassy, along with explicit direction and support from Israeli intelligence groups operating in the US. Let's watch a brief clip from the film.
We are all on the defensive, and I think we should move to the offensive.
Using especially cyber and internet tools to try and defeat this ugly movement.
I'm really honored to present my partners here, Brigitte General Sima Bakendil, the Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Sima Kis.
The fact that the Israeli government decided to be a key player leads a lot.
because we can bring things that usually are not existing in NGOs or civilian entities that are now enrolled in this thing.
The Israeli government can look at the big approach and actually create this coordination and cooperation,
But this explosive film was removed from the internet in 2018. In 2018, as the Qatari government, which funds Al Jazeera, We're
good to go.
Help play a key role in the negotiations.
And finally, I have my own story to tell that has not been previously reported.
In 2023, I worked with a Norwegian film company to produce Praying for Armageddon, a documentary about the role of Christian Zionism in fueling the crisis in Israel.
Many pro-Israel lawmakers here in the U.S. and policymakers have explicitly endorsed the removal of Palestinians from Israel and encouraged violent conflict as part of their interpretation of a biblical doomsday prophecy in which the second coming of Christ requires Jewish control of the Holy Land and a new world war that ends up killing or converting the world's Jewish population.
While it may sound like an anti-Jewish belief system, some of these Christian Zionists and allied pro-Israel groups encourage this belief because it builds American support for Israel's continued expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and communities.
Here's a brief clip from the movie.
We talked to members of Congress about Israel and the U.S.'s relationship.
All right, y'all go.
The U.S. has an intrinsic interest in making sure that Israel not only receives our best prayers and offers of success, but our armaments, our money.
And our ability to make sure that in a very dangerous reason this democracy survives.
There are some biblical prophecies that say that control of Jerusalem by the Jews is important for the second coming of Christ.
This entire matter is based upon faith of our maker, of our creator.
but it's also faith of a chosen people.
-Can you ask why the Democrats are using our law enforcement officers and political odds? -The Democrats who have been campaigning to defund our law enforcement as their people, BLM and Antifa, riot and loot in the streets, There's a new government in Israel.
Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the U.S. relationship with Israel?
There have been two nations created to glorify God.
Israel and the United States of America.
I will bless both.
I will honor both.
I will do all I can to stand and defend them.
Here, again, it was virtually impossible to find a single U.S. distributor or streaming partner.
Many European television networks and distributors showed the film.
However, after months and months, no one here in America said yes.
And I can say that again.
Fear of angering pro-Israel pressure groups played a major role in why this film could not find a single American platform, a streaming network, or a distributor.
Here's what's being censored.
I want to turn now to the ongoing crisis in the West Bank.
Much of the world's attention has focused on the crisis in Gaza, where Hamas is the governing body.
But the West Bank is different.
This is a region not governed by Hamas.
It had no relation to the October 7th attack.
Yet it has suffered immensely and continually, and Israel's repression, which had increased precipitously over the last decade, has only intensified over the last year.
The West Bank is a territory on the other side of Israel.
In recent months,
Israeli bulldozers Have moved to destroy street after street in West Bank cities.
Here are some clips from the destruction of Janine.
*Burge sound*
So So So So So So So So So
So So So So So So
So So So So Here is a territory seized by Israel in 1967 that has ruled over ever since.
We're told here in America that Israel is a Western democracy that is the only democracy in the Middle East.
But the reality is far more complicated.
Coming from a Western democracy like the United States, I saw nothing that resembled the equality under the law or basic civil liberties that we enjoy here.
Here's what the Israeli military blasted to Israeli residents in one small town of the West Bank on the evening of October 6th, right before the Hamas attack.
Following the stone-throwing incidents in Huara, Huara is, quote, closed for Palestinian cars and open for Jews only.
Such collective punishment based on identity is a daily occurrence here.
And this is exactly what I saw.
I saw segregation based on ethnic identity.
The major highways connecting the cities of the West Bank were traversed freely by Israeli vehicles and not by Palestinians.
Entire markets and thoroughfares in Hebron, in the West Bank, were, quote, sterilized by the Israeli military, where Palestinians could not walk, while Israelis and tourists were home free.
When I visited remote Palestinian villages, I saw firsthand Israeli settlers harassing Palestinians on motorbikes, engaging in what is reportedly daily intimidation.
When two babies are born in the West Bank, they face separate worlds based on ethnicity.
The Jewish baby born in the West Bank grows up with full Israeli citizenship rights.
They can vote in local and national elections, have complete freedom of movement within Israel, and when they are accused of a crime, they go to civilian courts.
When the Palestinian baby in the West Bank grows up, he will wait hours at hundreds of military checkpoints to move from place to place, require special Permission slips to travel to other parts of Israel and cannot vote in national elections.
And he has no voice in setting the policies that ultimately govern his community.
When the Palestinian is accused of a crime, he goes to military courts, for he is living under what is a quasi-permanent military occupation.
For more on this, on the film industry, free speech, and the Israeli-Palestine conflict, return now to Jedin and Yunus.
My guest is Janine Yunus, a civil rights attorney.
We actually got to know each other back in 2022 when I was doing some of the reporting around the Biden Department of Homeland Security and its interventions into social media.
At the time, that agency was building out an apparatus to pressure Twitter and Reddit and Facebook and some of the other platforms to police misinformation and disinformation and other alleged mal-information.
And you were one of the leading attorneys working on that issue.
So well before the Israel-Palestine issue, or we really even talked about that, we kind of collaborated in some of the investigations there.
Your litigation eventually transformed into Missouri v.
Biden, challenging the constitutionality of these interventions by the FBI, the DHS, and other three-letter agencies.
And shaping what we can read and what we can post and who's amplified and de-amplified, de-platformed from social media.
So, you know, you're someone who's worked on free speech issues on civil liberties for a very long time.
And I think you're incredibly principled here because there are many folks who claimed to support free speech and free expression when it was their side being censored and de-platformed.
But now that it's, one could argue, overwhelmingly.
On these platforms, it's pro-Palestinian voices.
It's now leftists who are being removed from these platforms, who are being silenced.
We're seeing some fair-weather supporters of free speech, the same folks who were active a few years ago when we were first collaborating on this issue, are nowhere to be found.
Or in fact, they're calling for increased censorship and deplatforming.
So, Janine, could you just talk a little bit about your background on this issue?
How you came to this issue?
What you work on today?
Sure.
I'll try to keep it as short as possible.
So I was sort of considered myself more on the left, although I always had some issues with the left, but I was a public defender in New York for quite some time.
I immediately was opposed to COVID restrictions when they started happening.
I thought there were a lot of civil liberties issues.
I doubted that the government really knew what it was doing, even though they expressed a lot of certainty.
It seemed like a lot of certainty from scientists and government officials.
With very little knowledge.
So the more I read, the more I realized that I thought they were misguided, that what they were doing was both problematic from a civil liberties perspective and also going to hurt the poor and working class a lot in terms of shutting down schools, businesses, that kind of thing.
So I started working in civil liberties law in order to fight those restrictions, eventually vaccine mandates.
And it came to my attention in early 2022 that some of my clients were being censored on social media.
For questioning the vaccine.
And these were mostly right-wing people.
As most people can recall, most of the questioning of the COVID vaccine came from the right.
There was very little on the left.
So I ended up bringing the cases you talked about a little bit.
And most of my clients you would describe as conservative.
Not all of them.
A couple of them were scientists who I think are more apolitical, nonpolitical.
But it was sort of considered conservative speech.
And I certainly worked with a lot of conservative lawyers.
There were a lot of lawyers who wrote amicus briefs for us, supporting us.
I talked about it a lot.
I got invited to talk about it a lot.
And then after October 7th, I was very, very surprised by a significant shift.
The people who I had worked with on these issues were suddenly not only failing to defend censorship of pro-Palestine speech, but Part of the apparatus working to censor them.
And what you always see is, you know, it's under the guise of, well, we have to stop anti-Semitism or we have to stop violence or terrorism.
People never say like, oh, we're just censoring political speech.
Of course, nobody ever says that.
So a lot of the same people, lawyers and other people who I worked with on the COVID-related issues were part of Finding ways to censor pro-Palestine speech and saying that the protests were anti-Semitic, that this was material support for terrorism.
And when you really looked at it, it was really a bunch of students saying, free Palestine from the river to the sea.
And we can get into whether that's a call for genocide or not.
I think for the vast majority of people, it's not.
But even if it is, that's actually protected speech.
No, that's right.
And if you look at the justification for censoring COVID speech, It was very similar.
There were claims that if you opposed lockdowns, you supported killing your fellow countrymen, that you were spreading a virus that was harming people.
It was very couched in this language of protecting innocent lives.
Even if you drove down and you could maybe argue with the policies or the statistics that were being cited, that was the moral justification for censorship.
In the same way that Any kind of demand for centering pro-Palestinian students, it's again couched in this moralistic rhetoric, even though if you drill down the chants or the flyers being distributed, for the most part, almost all of the speech was benign.
Right.
Exactly.
And I mean, nobody ever says we're censoring the speech because it's political speech and it might make people think differently.
But that's the real reason, of course.
It's always hate speech.
It could incite people to violence.
It's dangerous.
And as he pointed out, it was the same with COVID. Joe Biden said they're killing people.
The social media companies are killing people by not censoring anti-vax speech because people might see it in anti-vax speech and decide not to get the vaccine.
And that's completely antithetical to the First Amendment, which...
Recognizes that the government is not our parent, that Americans are adults who have the right to hear all the different points of view and to make their own decisions, especially about important political issues.
When it comes to the pro-Palestine speech, a lot of people said, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, is an implicit call to genocide of the Jews, because they're basically saying all the Jews would have to be killed.
I don't hear that in that chant, and I don't think that's what most people mean.
What they're calling for is what we would call a one-state solution, where the land that's now Israel and Palestine is a single state where everybody has equal rights, Palestinians and Jews.
Now, people might not like that and they're entitled not to like that, but that's exactly why we have a First Amendment, why we have debate and discussion and we don't censor things.
So I think that these censorship efforts have been very cynical.
I think that most of the people who are behind them know exactly what they're doing and what they're trying to do is to shut down Well, you know, yesterday, the film No Other Land, the documentary, the Israeli-Palestinian documentary, won Best Documentary at the Oscars.
And as the New York Times reported, this is a film that received no U.S. distribution rights.
No major streaming platforms picked up the film.
No major distributor.
It is shown at some small independent theaters that kind of individually took it up.
But there's no major distribution.
And that's unlike all the other Oscar winners.
And according to the New York Times, this is typical for topical controversial documentaries.
But you look into the recent history of political documentaries, whether they're about labor rights or even gender issues, or the war in Ukraine, which or Russia, the last two winners of the Oscar for best documentary related to Russia.
These are all films that had major distribution that Netflix or Amazon and the major carrier major major streamers picked up.
It seems to be a pattern that's applied to any film that is critical of Israeli human rights of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
We've seen over a dozen films struggle to obtain distributors in the US or even some films have been kicked off of Netflix and you know those licenses have not been renewed.
Thanks to a very concerted, very organized pro-Israel pressure campaign that if you stream these films, if you show them in the US, you're going to be pressured or attacked by these interest groups.
And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this because it's not necessarily, it's possible that there's a government role in this.
It's not clear if there is any.
It's simply kind of the censor of a third party.
Using intimidation, using criticism, and it's effectively blocking American audiences from viewing these films.
I think that might change for No Other Land after this accolade in Hollywood.
But for the most part, we've seen many films fail to obtain distribution.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this dynamic.
Sure.
I always say there are two components.
There's censorship, like actual government censorship, or even censorship not necessarily from government, but universities.
And then there's cancel culture, which is different.
I think in many ways, cancel culture is a little bit more insidious.
It means you might lose your job if you say certain things.
Allowing people to hear the perspectives of Palestinians, pressure campaigns in these types of situations.
To silence one set of voices.
And it's very effective.
I think that Americans have kind of unequivocally, for the most part, supported Israel for many decades because they haven't heard the Palestinian perspective at all.
We hear constantly about the Israelis' perspective, about the historical suffering of the Jews, which of course I don't want to downplay, but we don't hear this other side.
Someone asked me really early on, In COVID, why I was skeptical of the propaganda around it.
And I said, and it's true, that I had been attuned to the fact that the U.S. media is very good at propagandizing people because I was aware of what happens around the Palestine issue.
My father's from the West Bank, and so I grew up hearing his stories and just very, very aware of...
How one-sided the view that Americans hurt is.
And there's a very good reason for this.
I think that if Americans knew the horrendous conditions the Palestinians suffered in the occupied territories and in Gaza, they would not support it.
They wouldn't be okay with it.
I mean, just the occupation, the oppression, imprisonment without charges, killing children, constantly strangling the economy, just overt racism, the lack of equal rights.
More so in Gaza and the West Bank versus Israel than Palestinians who live in Israel.
That's always twisted.
That's another thing.
But I think the fact that the film couldn't find a distributor here is very indicative of this issue.
And it's just been so successful, so successful.
And you're also deemed anti-Semitic if you say that because you're sort of saying there's this Jewish...
Cabal that's making sure these voices can't be heard.
And that's not what I'm saying, but there clearly are orchestrated efforts to silence Palestinians' voices.
That's right.
And I think it really also brings attention to what's been happening in the West Bank.
I think Americans...
Generally, do not pay attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, even though they see these figures of billions of dollars in foreign aid and military aid going to Israel.
They see kind of these episodic eruptions in violence.
They don't pay attention to the day-to-day, particularly in the West Bank.
And there's this kind of dichotomy between Gaza and the West Bank where people conflate the two issues.
They say, okay, well, Hamas engaged in October 7th, so of course.
There's going to be repercussions on the Palestinian people, whether you agree or not.
That's perhaps the mindset for a lot of Americans.
Many do not realize that Hamas is not in control of the West Bank, that the repression in the West Bank has been ongoing well before October 7th.
And in seeming retribution for October 7th, the repression has increased in the West Bank over the last year and a half.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and about your family's roots in the West Bank.
Sure.
My dad grew up there.
He's from a village near Janine.
It's actually closer to Nablus, but I think Nablus didn't make for as good a girl's name as Janine.
He was from a very small village.
It was actually founded by his grandfather.
Everyone who lived in the village was a very close blood relation.
He grew up very, very poor.
He was about 15 when the West Bank fell under Israeli occupation.
It had been Jordanian occupation.
And he said actually at first it was relatively benevolent and there were more economic opportunities, so they were happy.
They didn't hate Israel because they were Jewish, they actually preferred it.
But then there were some...
Violent attacks against Jewish people and that resulted in, you know, more crackdowns and increasing security measures in the occupied West Bank.
So increasing oppression and what this means in the daily life of Palestinians, which I could go on about forever, but I mean, you have no rights whatsoever.
So you can be killed by an Israeli soldier and Probably the soldier won't suffer any consequences or very minimal.
You can be imprisoned without charges indefinitely.
Your property can be taken, and it is all the time.
You can't travel easily.
You have to go through checkpoints.
That's a huge part of a lot of people to get to work or to visit family or to...
Travel at all.
They have to go through these checkpoints where they have to wait for many hours.
They can be searched.
They can be strip searched.
They can be killed.
Their property can be taken.
It's extremely humiliating.
And they just don't have any rights whatsoever.
So the life under the occupation is really brutal.
And my dad came to the United States for that reason.
That was one reason he pursued an education, so that he could come here.
This has been going on since 1967 in the West Bank.
Before that, Palestinians in Israel proper were dispossessed, but that's kind of another story.
So, yeah, most Americans don't know about this.
Another issue is that typically very religious Jewish settlers have been coming in and taking the land.
Actually, half of our family's land was taken for an Israeli settlement a couple decades ago.
We can like, you can point to the settlement and see it on the other mountain.
So they just take the land and there's nothing you can do about it.
And the Israeli government doesn't do anything about it.
Yeah, it's a brutal situation.
Yeah, and it seems like the repression has just been increasing.
One thing that I struggle with, I'm kind of just as a journalist, as a spectator, as someone who's interested in these issues.
I'm hoping for a positive outcome.
I want people to live in peace and to see each other's common humanity.
And one problem I see on both the right and the left is just incredibly dehumanizing rhetoric.
You see this on the activist left, sometimes on college campuses and in the streets of these demonstrations where they kind of attempt to delegitimize all of Israel or claim that rather than A Jewish project that resembles white supremacy, which is simply inaccurate.
You see some calls for violence, but really just kind of an angry disposition that I don't think it helps resolve the issue.
I mean, at the end of the day, you have neighbors living alongside each other in the West Bank and other parts of Israel that they just need to get along.
They need equal rights and rhetoric that kind of separates the two.
Does not kind of get us onto that path.
And I'm interested in kind of the horseshoe theory of some of the critics of the film, No Other Land, because I've seen pro-Israel voices that are associated with the right or associated with the Israeli government say, you know, this is a disgusting film that's anti-Semitic.
I'm totally erasing the fact that there were several Israeli filmmakers and Israeli journalists who helped create this film.
And on the American left, some on the far left saying, Oh, you know, these are collaborators working with the occupiers.
Why is it an Israeli filmmaker working with the Palestinian?
You know, it's kind of the same argument, but from different sides of the spectrum.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, it's an opportune moment because I spent the morning arguing on Twitter with some of the extreme pro-Palestine people who were criticizing, especially Yuval Abraham, who was the main Israeli director, and saying, you know, he had spoken At his speech, he had said something about October 7th and how Hamas had acted horribly, which it had, because targeting of civilians is always wrong, and we should all agree on that.
And this novelist, for example, Susan Abdelkwala, who I think is from the Janine area, she wrote something like, this wasn't Yuval's film.
This is all just, you know, he's like a...
I forgot what the term was, but he's just part of the colonial project.
This was Basel.
Basel was the Palestinian.
This was really Basel's film.
Congrats to Basel.
And Yuval was welcomed by Basel's family, but he deserves no credit.
And I'm just like, what is this?
This is so cruel and nasty and petty.
I mean, we have to work together.
The people who want peace on both sides of this have to come together and find their common humanity.
I don't think that's like a silly, naive point of view.
I mean, you either just keep killing each other, which is what's happening now, or we start to find ways to work together and live in peace.
And I thought also just being angry about the film, getting recognition at the Oscars or complaining about it for this reason, because Yuval was part of it, I think is also silly.
I mean, it's a huge moment for Palestinian suffering to get two or three or four moments at the Oscars of airtime.
This is how...
Fringe ideas become mainstream is through these kinds of cultural institutions.
I think Conan O'Brien said a billion people were watching, maybe a billion people heard about this, a lot of whom probably know nothing about the Palestinian side of the story.
That's huge.
I was kind of frustrated with these people.
I think it's actually very unhelpful.
It turns people off.
It makes Palestinians look like extremists.
It makes them look like they're not willing to work with other people.
So, I mean, right now there are babies being starved to death in Gaza.
Like, let's stop that.
That's what needs to stop.
Yeah, it reflects perhaps a pathology on the left that is maybe motivated by some type of anti-authoritarian vibe, but it actually...
In effect, it is self-ostracizing.
They prefer to be an underground movement.
They prefer to be on the fringes.
So when their causes gain mainstream recognition, they almost act with disgust because anything mainstream or corporate is seen as an anathema to them.
So it's a very unhelpful dynamic because it really distances the actual cause of Helping Israelis and Palestinians find common ground and end this conflict.
If you have activists that just are reflexive in terms of hating any type of mainstream coverage or recognition.
The reality of the situation is that most of the people we have in Congress don't even see Palestinians as human.
They've sneered at the idea of their suffering for 16 months.
There were reports I'm sure you know about 65 healthcare workers in Gaza said that they were seeing a pattern of children shot in the head, which made it clear that IDF soldiers were targeting children and purposely executing them, which is really shocking.
And it contradicts Israel's claim that any civilian deaths are accidental.
You can also see from the mass carnage they're not accidental, but I think this really drives it home.
Those 65 healthcare workers testified in Congress, and not a single senator showed up, not one.
They couldn't be bothered.
If this was testimony about Israeli children being shot in the head by Hamas, you can bet every single senator would be there.
So, I mean, the dehumanization of Palestinians is so extreme, and they're being killed right now.
And right now, Benjamin Netanyahu just said that he was closing the border so that no aid would be let into Gaza.
This is going to harm lots of people who need food and medical care and other supplies.
This is a moral emergency, not just a moral emergency.
This is an emergency, and this needs to stop now.
And being nitpicky because this isn't exactly how you would have wanted the film to just be Palestinian directors.
Okay, let's argue about that in 10 years, but not right now.
No, I think that's right.
I also wanted to ask, while I have you, you've been on the forefront of challenging censorship and platform discrimination during the Biden administration, but now we're in the second Trump administration.
And it seems like there's a tension or a contradiction in how this administration has approached speech issues.
At his inauguration, President Trump was very clear in saying that the era of censorship It's over.
This administration stands for free speech.
She signed a free speech executive order on his first day in office at the Oval Office.
During the campaign, some of the major television ads and internet ads were talking about whether it's political correctness or any other issue.
This administration will stand up for free speech.
No longer are you going to be silenced for exercising your First Amendment rights.
Simultaneously, this administration has been working with voices in Congress who say that they want to expel or deport students on foreign visas who engage in pro-Palestinian protests, claiming that doing so supports material terrorist support, although that has never been defined.
As you mentioned, many of these allegations are just simply benign calls for protests against Israel's conduct.
In Gaza and elsewhere, there's been talk about encoding the IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, which goes beyond the hatred or discrimination against Jews, but in fact, redefines antisemitism to claim that some forms of criticism of the state of Israel is a form of illegal discrimination and could in some states and how they're enshrining this.
Would relate to increased prison terms and criminal enforcement for criticizing the state of Israel.
And these are many allies of the president.
The IHRA was even mentioned in one of these kind of stopping anti-Semitism executive orders so that the administration is even inching in this direction.
I was wondering if you could just talk about this contradiction in terms of Fighting, I think, in some ways, very justified ways for free speech, and at the same time, moving backwards on the issue of Israel-Palestine.
Right.
Yeah, so he seems to have moved in the right direction with my pet issue over the past few years, which is government involvement in social media censorship, but taking a step back when it comes to campus censorship.
Because of his executive order, I can't tell whether or not some of these issues will play out in the internet sphere, but I think it's clear that they're going to be targeting campuses.
So there are the EOs that you mentioned.
There was an antisemitism task force created as part of one of the executive orders, which is sort of meant to police campuses and make sure that they're enforcing these speech codes.
And as you mentioned, the IHRA definition So it lists a lot of things as anti-Semitism, and included in that is like holding Israel to a double standard, which is an incredibly vague term, criticizing Israel for conduct that another country engages in, which is also, I mean, that's ridiculous.
So you can't say Israel has killed children well.
You're not saying Sudan has killed children.
I mean, that's just silly.
That's not how conversation works.
And of course, what I think is the purpose of all these EOs, they may never, ever be used to try to deport or discipline anybody.
And I actually think they may not be.
Their power lies in their chilling effect, right?
People are just not going to have these conversations because they're going to be afraid.
They don't want to get punished.
They don't want to be expelled from school.
They don't want to be deported.
So they err on the side of caution.
And that's a major concern we have in First Amendment law.
And it can be the basis for a lawsuit.
So I'm definitely keeping my eye on this.
And then Congress has resurrected the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which couldn't get through the Senate.
And codifies the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and basically would make it very difficult to criticize Israel on college campuses.
So it's very concerning.
And then I see sort of little state actors who I think may be...
Doing things because of these executive orders.
For instance, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, for instance, just told Hunter College that they had to remove a posting for a Palestine Studies professor, that we couldn't teach Palestine Studies because it's anti-Semitic.
That may very well be a response to the EO because they're saying that colleges can't do this kind of thing.
I don't have direct proof of that.
I would have to Get more information to know that, but there's a very concerning trend.
Frankly, this illustrates exactly why we don't have hate speech laws, which a lot of Americans don't understand.
I often see people say things like, it's not protected speech, it's hate speech.
Hate speech actually is First Amendment protected.
Almost all speeches, there are some exceptions, and direct incitement to violence.
If I say, go kill Whatever, Jane Smith.
You know who Jane Smith is.
That's different.
But however you define hate speech, it's protected.
And the reason for that is exactly this, because the definition can be stretched so much that it's really ripe for abuse.
So that's why America doesn't do this.
A lot of European countries do, and they have They have shown that this is a really bad idea because they've been putting people in prison, arresting people, not letting them into the country, like journalist Ali Abunima.
Two journalists, Richard Medhurst and Sarah Whittaker in the UK, have been charged and were detained for supposedly anti-Semitic speech for pro-Palestine activism.
So this is why in America, the First Amendment doesn't allow us to do this.
Thank you so much for joining the program.
I know you're a friend of the show and you've appeared multiple times with Glenn, but thanks for joining me for the show tonight.
