Since its founding in 2012, Palestine Legal has responded to thousands of incidents of suppression of US-based Palestine advocacy, providing holistic legal support to college students, grassroots activists, and affected communities. The organization has also monitored these incidents and produced reports and other resources to expose trends in the tactics used to silence Palestinian human rights activism in the US.
“We’ve seen escalated repression against Palestine activism in the US since October 2023,” said Palestine Legal Director Dima Khalidi. “While the tactics used to suppress the movement for Palestinian rights and to stop the genocide mirror what we’ve documented over the last decade, the volume and severity of incidents has multiplied. Thousands rely on us as a first line of defense when they face attacks for speaking out for Palestine.”
In 2024, Palestine Legal received more than 2000 requests for support, a 50 percent increase from the year prior, from people in 45 different states and Washington, DC. So far this year, they’ve already received 1000 requests. To meet the urgent needs, Palestine Legal has ramped up its activities and organizational capacity. This includes recruiting and engaging hundreds of new attorneys into a now 2,200-member network that refers, consults on, and serves as co-counsels on cases, as well as additional staff to help support the network and strengthen their infrastructure to manage the high-volume of requests.
While the higher number of reports has ranged from cases involving criminal investigations to adverse employment decisions to harassment and threats of physical violence, the most significant increase has been in campus-related incidents. For example, Palestine Legal successfully represented Sereen Haddad, a Palestinian American student, who, eventually had her degree restored after her university tried to deny it for her participation in an event memorializing the violent police arrests at their student encampment. In addition, the organization has filed ten discrimination complaints and three lawsuits on behalf of student groups since October 2023, including one against the University of Maryland (UMD) for banning all student events in order to bar a student vigil. That lawsuit resulted in a successful injunction that allowed students to have their vigil and a historic $100,000 settlement with the university. They’ve also filed several “friend of the court” or amicus briefs in key legal cases impacting advocates for Palestine in the U.S., including the lawsuit on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil and Columbia students. Palestine Legal argued that a Congressional request to disclose thousands of student records unlawfully targets and chills First Amendment-protected pro-Palestinian speech.
“The goal of repression is to shut people down, to create so much fear that people decide it’s not worth it to speak out,” Khalidi said. “Our job is to disrupt that fear and make sure people know that they’re not alone, that we and the thousands of lawyers and partners in our network are dedicated to supporting them to keep on speaking truth to power, especially now when we need it the most.”
Amidst these legal battles, Palestine Legal has worked with the Center for Constitutional rights to produce a report, Anti-Palestinian at the Core, which maps how anti-terrorism laws were initially designed to unjustly criminalize Palestinian human rights voices in the U.S. and have evolved to target other marginalized communities. While Palestine Legal leaders say their goal is always to successfully challenge repression, they also consider it a victory if their work emboldens people to continue their activism despite attacks.
