It’s not Islamophobia, it’s anti-Palestinian racism

Since October 7 and the subsequent waves of student protests over Gaza, college administrators and politicians have spent a lot of time talking about antisemitism and Islamophobia. But there’s another form of discrimination that’s often left out of these conversations: anti-Palestinian racism.

The harsh university responses to campus protests — in which administrators called police on students because of vague concerns over safety — are one recent example of how schools can engage in anti-Palestinian racism. That’s why students and advocacy organizations have filed complaints and sued universities, including Columbia University, alleging anti-Palestinian discrimination.

So what is anti-Palestinian racism and why is it important to recognize it as a unique form of bigotry?

While it’s often conflated with Islamophobia, the two forms of discrimination are distinct: Islamophobia targets people for being Muslim and their religious beliefs, while the other targets people because of their Palestinian identity or because they support Palestinian rights. Anti-Palestinian racism focuses specifically on Palestinians’ culture, heritage, and their movements for liberation, often manifesting through suppressing speech and activism related to the Palestinian cause.

To be clear, anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia have similar roots and can have a vicious feedback loop. The dehumanization of Palestinians as barbaric, primitive, or terroristic, for example, perpetuates racist tropes about not just Arabs but also about Muslims more broadly. And the depiction of Islam as an inherently violent religion — one that’s incompatible with the West — feeds into the idea that Palestinians, who are predominantly Muslim, aren’t capable of pursuing peace.

But they aren’t always the same.

For example, efforts to ban the keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf that is a cultural but not religious piece of clothing, are very specifically targeting Palestinians. Actively avoiding the use of terminology that describes the Palestinian experience, including the word “Palestine” in many media outlets, is a form of discrimination against Palestinians, not Muslims.

Yet many people are still inclined to use the term Islamophobia as a proxy for anti-Palestinian racism. That’s at best misleading — while the majority of Palestinians are Muslim, not all of them are — and at worst actively harmful, allowing pernicious discrimination against Palestinians to continue.

As with other forms of discrimination, anti-Palestinian racism doesn’t have a single neat definition because it manifests in many ways. According to a report by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, an advocacy organization that focuses on addressing anti-Arab racism, “Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.”

The insidious nature of anti-Palestinian discrimination goes beyond racist stereotypes: It has a chilling effect on speaking out about the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and creates an environment where Palestinians are discouraged from expressing their own identity. For decades, Palestinians and their allies around the globe have faced serious consequences for supporting the Palestinian cause, including retaliation in the workplace, government surveillance, and hate crimes.

And since the war in Gaza began, it has only gotten worse. While there’s no exhaustive national database for incidents of anti-Palestinian discrimination, in the three months after October 7, Palestine Legal, an organization that provides legal assistance to people facing backlash for speaking up for Palestinian rights, received more than 1,000 requests for legal support — more than four times the number of requests they received in all of 2022.

Anti-Palestinian racism is a constant in American politics, too, tending to escalate whenever tensions between Israelis and Palestinians rise and draw international attention. But the erasure of that racism is so pervasive that even when it manifests in horrific and violent forms, it’s not always recognized as the cause of violence.

In October, after a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy was fatally stabbed in Illinois, President Biden’s statement failed to explicitly acknowledge anti-Palestinian racism as a potential motivating factor, focusing only on the alleged killer’s anti-Muslim sentiments. “As Americans, we must come together and reject Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry and hatred,” Biden said. The suspect’s wife, however, told law enforcement that he was afraid his victims were going to “call Palestinian friends to come and harm” him, and he specifically confronted the boy’s mother, who survived the attack, about what she was doing to “stop the war.”

In January, when three Palestinian students wearing keffiyehs were shot in Vermont, the president once again didn’t mention racism, instead condemning violence and hate in broad terms.

Anti-Palestinian racism is not limited to incidents such as hate crimes. In many cases, it’s institutionalized. That includes governments monitoring Palestinians and pro-Palestinian organizations, and institutions like universities cracking down on pro-Palestinian protests in recent months, including banning student commencement speakers.

To prevent that kind of discrimination from happening in the first place, people, and more importantly institutions, have to reject euphemisms and conflations with Islamophobia and start recognizing anti-Palestinian racism as its own form of bigotry.

“I think it’s really important that university leaders, administrators, and officials name that the harm that is occurring is targeting Palestinians and that this is anti-Palestinian racism. Because to ignore that is to engage in anti-Palestinian racism and erasure in and of itself,” said Radhika Sainath, senior counsel at Palestine Legal. “What does it mean when you are not saying the word ‘Palestinian’? It means that you are not identifying the people that are harmed by the violence or the censorship.”

Anti-Palestinian racism also doesn’t only affect Palestinians. “It is something that can impact both Palestinians and non-Palestinians who are sharing or trying to amplify our narratives,” said Dania Majid, president of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association and the author of its report on anti-Palestinian racism.

In January 2023, for example, Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, was initially denied a fellowship at Harvard University after donors raised concerns about hiring him. Roth and others at the school alleged that donors specifically took issue with his statements criticizing Israel.

In 2020, the University of Toronto rescinded an offer to an academic to head its International Human Rights Program after a sitting Canadian judge and donor to the university raised concerns about her scholarship on Israel and Palestine.

Both of these incidents were part of a broader and well-documented pattern of universities denying jobs or promotions to scholars who engage in fierce criticism of Israel or pro-Palestinian advocacy.

As a result of the broader attack on the Palestinian narrative, Palestinians are at times unable to express their own identity or cultural heritage without facing backlash. Hesen Jabr, a Palestinian American nurse at NYU Langone Health, for example, was recently fired from her job for a brief acceptance speech she made after receiving an award for her work, in which she praised nurses and health care workers in Palestine and expressed grief for the suffering of Palestinians. “It pains me to see the women from my country going through unimaginable losses themselves during the current genocide in Gaza,” Jabr said.

NYU Langone said it had asked her “not to bring her views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace.” But this is one example of how insidious anti-Palestinian discrimination can be: Palestinians are routinely expected to stay silent about their plight and the pain they feel about their homeland.

Another way that anti-Palestinian racism manifests is under the guise of combating antisemitism. The US House, for example, passed a bill that attempts to define antisemitism, but it essentially conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry. Civil liberties groups warn that if enacted, the broad definition could chill Palestinian speech, making it even harder for Palestinians to express themselves. “It means that Palestinian students can’t talk about their own experiences, that they cannot criticize their human rights abuser,” Sainath said. “No other student is forced to do that.”

So long as anti-Palestinian racism goes unmentioned, it will obfuscate our understanding of the discrimination many people are facing, allowing incidents of bigotry to go unpunished.

An honest conversation about anti-Palestinian racism would go a long way toward helping explain why the police response to the recent pro-Palestinian campus protests was so swift and aggressive. As I wrote in May, protests are commonplace at universities, meaning administrators should have been able to handle the recent encampments. But the choice to call in police to arrest student protesters, who were overwhelmingly peaceful, should be recognized as part of a long history of colleges and universities suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and activism.

Anti-Palestinian sentiment has also led some pro-Israel protesters to not just engage in anti-Palestinian racism but to spew hatred toward others as well, including by smearing Muslims, Black people, and Jewish people who partake in advocating for Palestinian rights.

“Like many other forms of hate, there can be intersectionalities, and that’s also true when it’s allies of ours who are speaking for Palestinian human rights,” Majid said. “If it’s a Black ally, we will see anti-Black racism. If it’s an Indigenous ally, we will see anti-Indigenous racism. [If it’s] queer allies, trans allies, we will see homophobic and anti-queer rhetoric.”

Ultimately, if anti-Palestinian racism continues to be ignored, it will continue to go unchecked. “Anti-Palestinian racism isn’t invisible,” Majid said. “It is, at this point, still an accepted form of racism.” And that can only change if more people start to name it.