Pro-Israel organizations are increasingly targeting pro-Palestinian groups in the US, according to a report released by two legal advocacy groups on Wednesday.



In a report co-authored with the Center for Constitutional Rights, legal group Palestine Legal said it was called in to respond to nearly 300 incidents of attempted suppression of pro-Palestine activism and rhetoric in the past 18 months.

“These numbers aren’t telling the full story,” said Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal. “They are really the tip of the iceberg with incidents that go unreported.”

The report found that, overwhelmingly, these incidents took place on university campuses, which have become the focus of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in recent years.

The movement encourages organizations and institutions to boycott and divest from Israel until “the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel” have been recognized.

It has been branded antisemitic by several pro-Israel groups and the Israeli government. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson held a closed-door meeting of fellow pro-Israel billionaires and activists in June in an attempt to combat efforts to divest from Israel.

The report’s authors say that conflating pro-Palestine activism with antisemitism is one of the key ways pro-Israel groups attempt to constrain their activities.

Incidents documented in the report include criminal investigations, lawsuits, and the suspension of pro-Palestine student groups.

In one such example, more than 175 faculty members from 16 New York City colleges wrote an open letter to the City University of New York system in September 2014, alleging that pro-Palestinian student groups were treated unfairly, compared to other student groups.

The report also mentioned an incident in May, when an unknown group launched a website which profiled people associated with pro-Palestinian student groups, to dissuade potential employers from hiring them.

“It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees,” the Canary Mission website warned.



Of the 152 incidents Palestine Legal responded to in 2014, only 12 were not campus-related. This year, it has so far responded to 140 incidents, 28 of which were not campus-related.

“We’re not just talking about a handful of isolated incidents,” Khalidi said. “This is really a widespread problem that affects hundreds of people across the country.”

The report claims that dozens of pro-Israel groups are connected to attempts to suppress free speech, including the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the AMCHA Initiative and StandWithUs.

Roz Rothstein, CEO of pro-Israel group StandWithUs, was critical of the report. She said that pro-Palestinian activists in the US were simply upset because they wanted to continue participating in work that was both anti-semitic and anti-Israel.



“The perpetrators are crying victim,” Rothstein said. “They are harassing the pro-Israel community on campus and they are crying victim.”

She said she considers the work of these groups anti-semitic because it meets the “3D test of antisemitism”, defined as demonization, double standards and delegitimization.

“If you apply the 3Ds it is antisemitism and they can cry all they want, but it happens to meet the definition of antisemitic,” she said.

Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights are calling on universities to be more responsive to activities that they believe suppress pro-Palestine groups’ right to freedom of speech.

They also called on the US government to be more clear about the difference between criticizing Israel’s policies and antisemitism.