feature image photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images 

In 2018, the founder and publisher of the Arkansas Times, Alan Leveritt, received an ultimatum in his inbox from one of his paper’s longtime advertisers. It stated that, in order for his paper to continue receiving ad dollars from them, he would have to certify in writing that his company would not engage in any boycott of Israel now or in the future.

This baffled Leveritt. Soon after receiving this note, he sued the state of Arkansas, arguing that requiring him to certify he wasn’t boycotting Israel violated his First Amendment rights. Initially, in 2021, a three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Leveritt, finding that a boycott of Israel was constitutionally protected speech. However, in 2022, the full Eighth Circuit reversed this decision, ruling that Arkansas’s anti-BDS law did not violate the First Amendment because it regulated economic activity rather than speech. Despite the ACLU’s efforts, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in February 2023, leaving the Eighth Circuit’s ruling in place.

As of 2022 in the United States—a country where a single boycott against British imperial taxes ignited the American Revolution, later celebrated as a principled act of protest—thirty-five states have enacted laws that penalize or restrict state contracts with those who boycott Israel, similar to the law in Arkansas.

I wrote the above sentence in 2022, after learning of Leveritt’s failed attempt to sue Arkansas. At the time, I was desperate to prove a point to a class full of apathetic liberal arts students. I needed to prove that fascism was not just on the rise, and it wasn’t just an orange blob of a presidential candidate we needed to be worried about.

Fascism was here, ripe and ready, growing steadily but profoundly in our own backyard.

Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) is a nonviolent, Palestinian-led movement created in 2005 that calls for countries, companies, universities, and all other institutions to oppose Israeli occupation through boycott, divestment, and sanctions. In so doing, BDS hopes to hold the Israeli government accountable for its human rights violations. I need to be repetitive for a moment and highlight a fact I’ve already stated, because I don’t want your eyes to gloss over a significant detail: The BDS movement was created in 2005, almost 20 years ago.

For well over 13 months, my social media feed has been drowning me with photos of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the people in Gaza, broader Palestine, and now Lebanon. I hesitate to use the word drowning, because I am a Palestinian alive and safe in the comfort of my apartment in America, holding an American passport. But the consistency for which the live-streamed, horrific genocide has flowed from my distant homeland into every single person’s pocket, if they wish to see it, feels like a kind of drowning, suffocating in its clarity.

After a year of watching prestigious and elite private or public American organizations fire their employees who sign petitions honoring Palestinian human rights or universities authorizing police force to storm college campuses and dismantle pro-Palestinian encampments, it feels ridiculous to have to bring up this same point — that fascism is here, that our rights as American citizens to speak freely, to protest freely, to boycott freely (which is considered a constitutionally protected form of free speech and expression under the First Amendment) is under threat and has been under threat.

But bring it up I must.

Systems of control, censorship, and dehumanization employed against Palestinians echo disturbingly within American policies and university campuses, where students advocating for Palestine are censored in direct contradiction to democratic principles like free speech and the right to dissent.

I want to be very clear: I am not and have never been in support of a Donald Trump presidency, a reality I am now forced to process and mourn once again. But I also don’t believe he and his followers are the only ones to blame for the growing fascist movement in our country. We didn’t wake up on Wednesday and suddenly find ourselves barreling toward fascism. Regardless of which party holds office, our political leaders have been violating and will continue to violate their sworn oaths by failing to uphold the constitutionally protected right to free speech. And as much as we’d love to believe this rise in fascism has to do with one party or particularly racist, sexist, or bad-apple candidates, the defining factor of free speech for both Democrats and Republicans has been agreed upon in one particular issue: The Palestine Exception, which refers to the unique and deliberate silencing of Palestinian advocacy, where the right to support Palestinian rights is restricted in a way unmatched by any other international issue.

In 2015, Tennessee was one of the first states to formally condemn the BDS movement, legalizing their condemnation by passing SJR-170. Like other states that have since followed, Tennessee’s law requires that anyone who enters into a contract with a state agency must certify that they are not involved in any anti-Israel boycott. Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee signed into law that all state contracts must include “a written certification that the company is not currently engaged in, and will not for the duration of the contract engage in a boycott of Israel.” Within this law, ‘Israel’ includes not only the State of Israel but also the Israeli-controlled territories, Gaza, and their settlements in the West Bank.

In June 2016, New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that required state agencies to divest from organizations and companies that participate in any form of boycotts of Israel. During a speech at the Harvard Club in Manhattan, Cuomo described the BDS movement as an ‘economic attack’ on Israel and that “if you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you.”

In 2021, after the ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s decided to stop selling products in the occupied West Bank territories, the state of New York divested from Ben and Jerry’s parent company, Unilever. Shortly after, New Jersey followed New York’s lead and divested $182 million dollars worth of Unilever PLC stocks and bonds.

But perhaps these examples don’t feel serious enough, don’t demonstrate the extent to which our government has been silencing any condemnation of Israel long before chanting free, free Palestine became acceptable parlance. These laws haven’t just impacted large corporations. In Kansas, the state refused to allow one of their employed teachers to participate in their teacher-training program because she wouldn’t sign an anti-Israel boycott form. Arizona refused to pay a lawyer for his work on behalf of incarcerated people because he declined to sign a form certifying that he would not participate in a boycott of Israel or Israeli settlements. In Texas, an independent speech pathologist lost her contract with a local school district because she also refused to sign such an agreement. Artists asked to give lectures at the University of Houston have also been required to sign such forms — or lose their contracts. In fact, the University of Houston has gone as far as to require all of their contractors and employees to sign their Anti-BDS waiver.

Even Hurricane Harvey victims in Texas were required to sign away their right to boycott Israel before receiving their disaster aid. What did their disaster aid have to do with Israel? It’s not clear, but it proves just how broad these laws extend, often for irrelevant reasons. Although these individuals were not specifically refusing to sign such agreements because they were outspoken for Palestine, necessarily, it’s essential to note what these laws surreptitiously do in the reverse: undermine and endanger anyone who not only might speak out against an ethnostate, such as Israel, but any future aligning and voicing support for Palestinian human rights under occupation. This is very calculated. Tell someone that it’s illegal to protest Israel enough times, and perhaps we will stop asking why and follow orders. These anti-BDS laws are uniquely tailored to Israel and don’t extend to other U.S. allies, such as those in NATO.

This kind of monitoring of behavior and speech is not new in America’s history. Programs like COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), operated by the FBI, were used to monitor and undermine anti-war groups, civil rights organizations, and left-leaning activists. COINTELPRO was officially terminated in 1971 after its existence was publicly exposed, leading to widespread condemnation and legal reforms. However, its legacy had a lasting impact on activism in the U.S., creating an environment of distrust between activist groups and law enforcement. This systematic targeting of activists for their political beliefs is a hallmark of authoritarian, if not fascist, tactics.

Just as COINTELPRO sought to undermine movements for civil rights by labeling them as threats, anti-BDS laws attempt to paint solidarity with Palestine as a form of dangerous dissent that must be controlled. While COINTELPRO targeted the Black liberation, civil rights, and anti-war movements, they had a singular aim: silence dissent and restrict political activism. Those aims are the same for anti-BDS laws: limit specific forms of political expression and advocacy that challenge established policies or state-aligned interests.

The Palestine Exception is a reinvention, a repackaging of COINTELPRO, and it’s happening on the state level under the guise of anti-BDS laws which have now insidiously informed informal American workplace protocols and college campuses. David Velasco, the editor-in-chief of Artforum was dismissed after publishing an open letter from artists calling for a ceasefire and “Palestinian liberation.” His firing led to resignations from other editors in protest. Steve Bell, a long-standing cartoonist for The Guardian had his contract terminated after the newspaper declined to publish one of his cartoons, which was interpreted as critical of Israel. But it’s not just single, high-profile individuals who are meeting their fate in terms of speaking out for Palestine’s liberation. Google terminated over 50 workers following protests against its provision of technology to the Israeli government amid the Gaza conflict.

Suppress dissent, reinforce ideological uniformity, or support a dominant national narrative — that’s what we are seeing over and over again with these chilling actions. And these actions of suppression whether covertly done or not, are, of course, not new to the history of authoritarian or nationalist regimes. The most obvious historical example is South Africa, which for decades suppressed and barred Black people, people of color, and Indian South Africans from holding positions of influence and voting. Those who protested, like Steve Biko, faced imprisonment, violence, and, in many cases, death. This institutionalized racism aimed to enforce racial hierarchies and prevent challenges to the state’s authority.

I don’t believe it is dramatic to make connections between the way in which our American government is silencing certain voices and how that specific silencing could lead to further authoritarian actions. If the two candidates who were just running for the seat of arguably the most powerful position in the world agree that America will and must continue to financially enable and support Israel with weapons and diplomatic cover in the United Nations, what makes you think these candidates aren’t similar in their beliefs about anything else?

America’s fight against fascism cannot succeed without confronting the Palestine Exception. Unless we face this head-on, our democratic values will continue to erode. This silencing is strategically bolstered by equating Zionism with Judaism, deflecting legitimate critique of an ideology. You cannot in good faith compare a 100-year-old Zionist land grab ideology with a 3,000-year-old religion.

Recognizing Palestine’s role in exposing these repressive mechanisms is essential to preserving democracy. It is the last barrier against a future where erasing facts and silencing history distort our understanding of truth. In actively erasing Palestine’s narrative, those seeking to rewrite history are also working to engineer a more authoritarian future.

If Israel is shielded from criticism, it sets a dangerous precedent that other governments may also claim immunity from critique, eroding the principles of accountability and transparency that are essential to democracy. It would mean that politicians who critique their own countries, a freedom in the United States that Jamaal Bowman and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have taken advantage of when they point toward racist policies like the filibuster, the electoral college, or gerrymandering as sources for continued systematic oppression, should perhaps be censored because of the very nature of their critique. It suggests that those studying Canada’s actions when building a pipeline that disrupts one of their Indigenous communities should also be silenced. It would mean that when Russia annexes more and more Ukrainian land, making refugees of their neighbors and bombing one village after the next, Russia’s actions are also irrefutable.

If the very nature of governing bodies today is not to be reconsidered and challenged, whether that be reflecting on their colonizing history or recent actions, then the possibility of countries righting their own wrongs could also vanish as no nation would be held accountable. Germany could stop paying their continued reparations to Holocaust survivors which, in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, now includes the 8,500 Ukrainian Holocaust survivors currently suffering through Russia’s attacks. Those who openly spoke out against Germany and Hitler before and during WWII may never have been heard, may have been censored, and thus could have created a reality where Germany, a nation whose history has been deeply analyzed and critiqued, never needed to condemn and remedy their actions.

Solidarity with Palestine isn’t just a gesture of justice far from home; it’s a stand for the democratic ideals we claim to hold dear.

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