Palestine Legal: "The Great Difference a Movement Lawyer Can Make"

Hey, everybody, it's Rhiannon.

If you heard my intro on last week's episode, then you know our schedule is a little wacky over the course of the next couple of weeks because Peter got married.

So, today we are releasing an episode I did back in March with two attorneys from Palestine Legal, that's a nonprofit organization in the United States that seeks to support the Palestine solidarity movement by challenging efforts to threaten and harass activists into silence.

This was originally a Patreon premium episode, but today we're dropping it in the free feed for all of our listeners.

And speaking of all of our listeners, I have really appreciated all of the messages of support and solidarity for Palestinian liberation that we've gotten in the past week.

You yourself can get educated, you can teach others, you can use your voice and your power, and together we can build a better world.

If you're looking for an organization to donate to in that regard, you can donate to Palestine Legal, the organization we are talking with in this episode.

You can donate to them at palestinelegal.org or for contributing to emergency assistance for families in Gaza right now, you can donate to MECA, that's Middle East Children's Alliance.

You can donate to them at MECAFOPeace.org.

Next week on 5-4, look out for a Patreon premium episode in which Peter, Michael, and producer Rachel discuss the cinematic masterpiece, Legally Blonde.

So that's all for now.

Enjoy this episode with Palestine Legal.

And now I'm going to be turning it over to me back in March with the original introduction to this episode.

Stay strong, everyone.

Free Palestine.

Cool.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks for having us this week.

Should we take a selfie?

Yeah, we should.

Definitely we should take a selfie.

Hi, everyone, it's Rhiannon.

No Peter, no Michael this episode, because this is my special episode, okay?

Honestly, you're welcome.

This is the second episode in a little 5-4 side project that I'm doing.

A look into the work of lawyers who are advocating and fighting for social justice in all kinds of legal spaces.

From the environment to racial and gender equality, shrinking the prison industrial complex, queer liberation, expanding rights for the disabled, you name it.

We talk so much on the podcast about what's wrong with the law.

So I think it's important to talk about the good fight that's happening in the law right now.

People ask us all the time, how can I be a leftist and a lawyer?

What work is there to be done in the law?

Is it all hopeless?

This is why I was inspired to start these episodes.

Broadly, in this series, we're talking about movement lawyering.

Movement lawyering means taking direction from directly impacted communities and from organizers in our legal work.

Movement lawyering is about building the power of the people, not the power of the law.

So to that end, I was thrilled to talk to Radhika Sainath and Dylan Saba, two attorneys at Palestine Legal, an organization whose mission is to bolster the Palestine Solidarity Movement by challenging efforts to threaten, harass, and legally bully activists into silence.

Heads up, this episode is pretty different from our usual.

Our conversation was long and winding.

We talked about the historical context of the Palestinian liberation movement.

We talked about personal experiences and memories, how we each navigated finding social justice work and the law.

We talked about cases at Palestine Legal Right Now.

And we talked about intersectional cross-movement activism and solidarity.

I felt so much love while recording this episode, so much security and care among true comrades.

As we know, the personal is almost always political.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and apartheid suck.

I want to jump right in, so let's get started with intros.

Maybe let's just start with each of your names and your role at Palestine Legal.

Sure.

My name is Radhika Sinoth.

I'm a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

I oversee our intake and casework, and I'm based in our New York City office.

Been here for over nine years now.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

And I'm Dylan Saba.

I'm a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, also based in the New york city office i've been with the organization for about a year and a half and i do a number of different things within the organization i'm with a focus on intake work so representing clients directly and our public i oversee our public education program amazing thanks for being here dylan i'm really excited about this conversation when i was first sort of coming up with the idea of doing this mini-series.

I already had in mind Palestine Legal on my list.

So I'm really excited that it's our second stab at this.

So either one of you, let's kind of jump in.

What is Palestine legal?

What do you do?

We are legal defense for the movement for Palestinian rights in the United States.

We started about 10 years ago when our director, who's Palestinian herself, Dima Haladi, kind of surveyed the movement and was asking the question together with other movement lawyers, like at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

And the question was sort of like, how can lawyers best support Palestinian liberation?

How can U.S.-based lawyers support Palestinian liberation?

And there is this growing movement for Palestinian rights here.

It's exciting.

It's thriving.

But at the same time, there is also this organized effort to try to censor and stop that movement for Palestinian rights.

Yeah.

A powerful movement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Institutionally backed, money-backed, all of the things.

Exactly.

It's well-funded and activists are getting censored, punished, fired.

And so that's how Palestine Legal got started.

I was one of their first attorneys.

We did everything in the early days.

You know, the attorneys were out there on Twitter.

We designed our own website.

And we were also, of course, advising activists and, you know, trying to push back against this censorship machine.

Yeah.

So I saw you speak in Austin advising a student group there.

maybe eight years ago.

And I don't know, had you just started with Palestine Legal then?

It was in my early days.

I've been with Palestine Legal for nine years now.

And yes, one of the things that we do is we give know your rights workshops to student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine so that they have the tools to be able to defend themselves so that they can issue spot.

One issue that we see a lot is when student groups try to bring a speaker to speak to talk about what's happening with Israel's military occupation or the state of apartheid that they're censored or punished.

So being able to tell students like at your university, which is public, hey, this is a violation of your First Amendment rights.

You need to push back, you know, they understand that and to understand what to do, you know, if the police come knocking at your door

and those kinds of things.

So it's it's one of the funnest parts of the job.

And I'm glad post-pandemic, we're back out there now talking to student groups.

So if there are students listening and would like a know your rights workshop, you can invite me or Dylan or any of our, you know, six other attorneys to come speak at your college.

We love to do that.

Five out of five would recommend.

Dylan, turning to you, kind of put us in a legal space.

What area of law do you practice?

And then even beyond that, you know, I think probably a lot of our listeners know,

let's say, some basic information about a quote-unquote Palestine-Israel conflict.

Do you want to give us just a lay of the land?

What are we talking about in terms of a Palestinian liberation movement and what that looks like in the U.S.?

Totally.

So I'll start by talking about us and our practice and the kind of lawyers that we are.

Yeah.

So as Radhika said, we are the first line of defense for the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

And that movement, fortunately, is big and it's growing.

So we're actually seeing a lot of young folk, a lot of students starting to organize for Palestinian liberation in a way we haven't seen in decades, which is very exciting.

We're a small organization.

So there's only about 10 or 11 of us, six or seven attorneys.

And as you might imagine, big movement, small group of attorneys, we can't actually fully meet the needs of everyone and the issues that they're facing.

So you're right to point out freedom of expression, protest, the right to organize, and we see those issues come up a lot.

And we're regularly advising folks on those issues and those challenges.

But we see people who have immigration concerns, you know, about traveling to Palestine, Palestinians who want to go back home and visit family and are worried about the impacts of their organizing.

We see employment issues.

So people who are speaking out for Palestinian liberation in their workplace or even just being Palestinian in their workplace and facing discrimination.

We see people with those kinds of issues.

We see people who live in states that have anti-BDS legislation where maybe they are trying to get a contract for funding from the state for a project that they're engaged in and they're being made to sign a pledge that they're not going to participate in the BDS movement and they're trying to figure out what that means.

Is that something that they have to follow?

And the BDS movement, just to explain to listeners who might not know, BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.

This is a call from sort of civil society in Palestine to boycott and divest from Israeli companies, the Israeli government, et cetera?

Yeah, so we see a wide array of issues.

And because we're a small shop, a lot of what we do is connecting folks with people in our network who can represent them directly, right?

So we're a national organization.

We don't have attorneys in all 50 states, but part of what we do is field requests for legal assistance and connect folks with lawyers who know us and who, you know, we know them on the ground and make those connections.

But we also do legal advocacy and representation ourselves.

A large part of our work involves organizing on university campuses.

A huge portion of the Palestine Solidarity movement is the student movement, and it's very active and encounters a lot of repression.

So we see Zionist organizations really take a focus on student organizing and try and squash it.

That is a testament to its power, but it also shows us where the need is in the movement.

So a lot of what we do is intervene at the level of students on universities attempting to organize and facing backlash from either outside organizations or their university administrations yeah so we'll represent students through student conduct processes and you know we'll talk about some of these cases later but a lot of time palestine organizers face a whole level of scrutiny and repression that other political organizers on campuses don't face right and often what our role is is to step in and be a countervailing force to some of the outside organizations that are trying to defend Israel's name and squash out pro-Palestine advocacy.

Yeah, exactly.

I do want to take a step back and give us some Palestine context.

And maybe this was like the reverse order to do it, but I totally understand that, yeah, folks, you know, hear about Palestine, they hear about the Palestine movement, you know, it's kind of a leftist cause, you know, maybe some of their friends are like really into it and they're like, what's the deal with this?

Right.

It's tough to give a kind of snippet overview because it really is a question of history, of modern history.

That's right.

Right.

I really encourage folks to do their kind of own historical dives into some of these questions, but as an overview to kind of bring us up to the present, right?

Zionism, which was the ideological movement that inspired the creation of the state of Israel, is a modern colonial ideological project, right?

So it was established towards the back half of the 19th century in Europe at a time when empires were coming apart, new nationalist movements were forming.

A group of European Jews formed this movement for the settler colonization of the land of Palestine because of the ancient religious connection that Jews have to the land, you know, the land of historic Palestine, the land of Israel.

That movement turned into a full-fledged settler colonial project.

So you had waves of immigration that displaced the indigenous Palestinian people who were living on that land in waves and through contestation.

And it culminated in the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, which was the massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who became permanent refugees, exiled from their homelands.

I am the descendant of these refugees.

I know you're Palestinian, so I know that you have a connection to these events and that act of displacement.

Yeah, that's right.

I think most listeners might know, probably know that I am Palestinian.

My dad is Palestinian, born in Jordan.

My paternal grandparents were born in Yaffa, a city in Palestine, and forcibly expelled in 1948.

Exactly what Dylan is talking about when the state of Israel was created.

So, Jews are nationals in the state of Israel and enjoy a suite of rights that Palestinians don't enjoy.

That situation has sustained until the present day and is what people have described as apartheid.

So, within the state of Israel, legal distinctions between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis on the right to live in certain places, on the right to marry who they want, access to resources, and a number of other discriminatory policies.

In addition, since 1967, Israel has occupied with a permanent military occupation force the West Bank, large parts of East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights in Syria, and has held those lands in an illegal military occupation where the indigenous residents of those lands are subject to Israeli military law.

Right.

While at the same time, the state of Israel is moving settlers into those lands to colonize them.

And ultimately, you know, it is the ambition of this right-wing Israeli government to fully annex those into the land of Israel and and fully displace and dispossess as many Palestinians as possible.

Yeah, exactly.

That was an incredible summary.

Can we just say that?

Thank you.

That's a lot of history.

That's a lot of context and very clear and way better than anything I've ever been able to do.

So how did each of you come to Palestine Legal?

How are you activated on the Palestinian cause?

I understand, you know, Dylan and I, right, have a direct connection as we are Palestinian.

So how are you activated on the Palestinian cause?

What other experience do you have in movement lawyering or you know other sort of broadly say civil rights work in the US?

Sure.

So I'm originally from Southern California and in college I was involved in a lot of leftist movements around immigrants rights and workers' rights mostly.

And I was working as a union organizer when the second Intifada broke out in the early 2000s.

And I think that's when I really started paying attention to things as far as what was happening in Palestine.

So Palestinians were rising up to throw off the, you know, the occupation.

And I had a coworker whose friend was in Palestine and was working with a group as a volunteer.

It was called the International Solidarity Movement, which is a nonviolent direct action movement led by Palestinians.

And eventually I quit my job, I was a bit burnt out, and I went and joined the ISM in Palestine.

In Palestine, in the West Bank.

And this was in October 2002.

And I'd only planned to go for a little bit, for a couple months, to join this olive harvest campaign.

Basically, Palestinian farmers were being attacked by Israeli settlers while trying to go pick olives on their land.

And when I was there, it was when Israel started constructing the apartheid wall.

And it just so happened I was visiting a village when the Israeli army came and started bulldozing some olive trees.

And, you know, I was there with a few other Europeans and Americans.

And the mayor was like, oh, let's go down and see what's happening down there.

We were on the top of a hill.

When we got to the bottom, we saw that the mayor's son was running towards this Israeli army bulldozer because it was pushing over his olive trees.

And an Israeli soldier picked up his M16 and pointed it at this young man at like point-blank range.

And luckily, you know, because us foreigners were there with cameras and stuff, we were able to de-escalate the situation.

But it was like an incredible time because basically over the next few weeks, these villagers rose up to sit in front of these Israeli army bulldozers.

And it was during one of these protests where I was arrested by the Israeli army, along with a few others.

And I was not a lawyer at the time.

I had no idea what my rights were.

I was like, do I have the right to remain silent?

Right.

And it also in a foreign country.

And in a foreign country, under military occupation, I knew something about the U.S.

Constitution.

Yes, exactly.

And I ended up spending a few days in like an Israeli prison.

And it was through the intervention of Israeli leftist lawyers.

I got out and was allowed to continue my activism.

And I stayed there for about another year and a half.

And, you know, I really saw the difference that a great lawyer, a movement lawyer, I didn't know that word at the time can make when it comes to a movement, when it comes to activists.

And so I eventually, you know, came back to the United States, went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley.

and practiced civil rights law at a plaintiff's swaw firm called Hadzel Stormer in Los Angeles for a few years.

And then, you know, continued to be an activist on the issue of Palestinian rights here in California, where I'm from.

And then eventually joined Palestine Legal.

Amazing.

What you just said about your story, Radhika, is just activated my own memories.

So you were talking about, you know, these coordinated campaigns by the military occupation in Palestine and by settlers in Palestine to sabotage Palestinian economic activity, right?

This is an aspect of daily occupation that Palestinians live under.

And so things like sabotaging the harvest, right?

Tearing olive trees down.

Olive trees are unique in the number of years it takes to bear fruit.

So when you kill an olive tree, you are killing years of agricultural work and therefore any sort of economic stability of Palestinian farmers.

As a child, I have been able to visit Palestine one time.

I was eight or nine years old, and I witnessed in Jerusalem one morning that all of the Palestinian shopkeepers woke up, went to their shops in the old city in Jerusalem, and found that the locks to their shops had all been glued shut so that they couldn't open for the day.

They had to wait for somebody to come cut everybody's locks so that they can open their store, right?

To sustain their families, to make money the way they do every day.

You know, so these are aspects, again, that I just want to highlight of living under occupation, that it's not just the threat of a gun, right?

Which it is.

And Palestinians die, of course, all of the time under Israeli military occupation.

But it also is this sort of normalized, constant grind at your livelihood, at the stability of your family, at your housing, at the utilities that you have access to, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all down the line.

So, Dylan, what about you?

What brought you to Palestine Legal?

What's your legal background?

All of that stuff.

So I am Palestinian.

I'm half Palestinian.

My dad's from Gaza.

He grew up in Beirut.

My mother's Jewish American.

So I had this identity of being, you know, this conflict baby of both Palestinian and Jewish American.

I was going to cut through, you know, the blindness, the disagreements, bring people together.

I was born in 93 months after the, you know, the famous handshake, Oslo moment.

This was like the world that I came into, and it crumbled like when I got to college.

And basically, what happened is there just so happens to be a handful of Palestinian Americans in my entering class.

There were not any before in those numbers and there were not any after, I think for, you know, political reasons.

Interesting.

But so we had a very good reason.

We had a cohort and basically SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, which is like the predominant organizing container for US Palestine activism.

had been founded the year before.

But we had this influx of like young Palestinians excited to start organizing along lines that I at that point still thought of as a public education campaign.

Hey, everyone, have you heard about this thing?

The Palestinians, they're in some trouble over there.

We're just going to clarify some miscommunications and then get to addressing like issues of systemic justice.

Right.

That is not what happened.

We have this really intense discussion about whether or not we should do this new idea, this new thing that's floating around called Israel Apartheid Week.

It has just been like, it really just started

around that time about 12 or so years ago.

And we have this long drawn-out discussion.

We're like, look, this is apartheid.

I mean, like, there are different sets of laws for different people.

Of course, it doesn't look exactly like South Africa, but the system of separation based on like ethno-religious identity is the same.

Right.

So we.

In a so-called democracy, right?

In the new nation-state that is lauded as the only democracy in the Middle East.

Right, exactly.

So we have this series of events, and we get backlash like I've never seen.

What is Israel Apartheid Week?

Basically a programming week.

So SJPs host actions, sometimes protests, often speakers or educational programming to inform the student body about the cause, about Palestinian solidarity, about the threats of Zionism, and about Palestinian liberation.

So you participated in IAW and what happened?

Yeah, so we get attacked by professors, by students.

We are called into meetings.

It's the whole nine yards.

And that was a really, really radicalizing and transformative experience for me because I was like, oh, wow, people are not.

I mean, certainly some people are, but some people are not here to listen.

They are really threatened by what we are saying, which to me felt very uncontroversial to say.

Palestinians deserve their basic freedoms, deserve basic human rights.

This is clearly unjust and cannot sustain.

Right.

Right.

Uncontroversial to describe a material, concrete reality.

Right.

Yeah.

So in the backlash we faced was very radicalizing for me.

and i found solidarity with the people who i was organizing with after graduating i take a year off and then i come back i start law school it's 2016 i'm gung-ho i'm like i'm into palestine i'm into international human rights i'm gonna go you know do human right i didn't even know like a lot i'm sure this will get familiar for many people who are listening who are entering having just entered law school right the allure of these like noble justice causes that you then show up in law school and find out very quickly like are not are not like real fields that you can just like waltz out of your 3L and go into.

Well, you did intern with us.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

But so really what happened was in the fall of 2016, Donald Trump is elected, right?

Yes.

And it was this huge wake-up call and precipitated this shift in focus to the United States.

And basically everyone started asking the question, how did we get here?

And that for me meant a shift in focus towards issues of economic and racial justice.

And I graduated and I ended up taking a job after graduating doing eviction defense in New York City.

I wanted to get up close and personal with class struggle in the United States.

And there still is a really strong need for housing lawyers, especially in New York, where there's a statutory right to counsel in eviction proceedings if you're within a certain income threshold.

I did that work for two years.

I found it super enriching and engaging.

But then an opportunity opened up at Palestine Legal and it felt like the right move for me to come back to my home, like, which is in the Palestine Solidarity movement, and take those skills that I had developed and use them to try and uplift Palestine organizing.

Incredible.

Are you happy he's at Palestine Legal, Ronica?

Absolutely.

Okay, so before

we kind of move on, I want us to center back on Palestine Legal and talk about the work that you do there.

So I just wanted to read just the beginning of your end of year report, actually, for 2022.

I think this kind of gives us a basis for thinking about the influence, the impact that Palestine legal has, and then we can jump into maybe some of the cases that you have actually worked on in the past year or so.

So again, from the end of your report, Palestine solidarity activism in 2022 was characterized by bold campaigns, particularly by students and faculty, to draw attention to the Palestinian liberation struggle.

This emboldened advocacy was met with vicious silencing efforts by Israel-aligned groups, which went into overdrive to undermine activists.

Palestine advocates persevered through and often overcame repression on campuses in the form of increasingly aggressive disciplinary proceedings, censorship, and condemnations from administrators by mobilizing grassroots support to defeat censorship attempts and exposing the repression for what it is, an effort to shield Israel from accountability.

Palestine Legal responded to 214 incidents of suppression of U.S.-based Palestine advocacy in 2022.

70% of these incidents targeted students and scholars at 80 colleges, universities, schools, and school districts across the country.

Just another note: this is a little bit later in the end of your report.

State and federal lawmakers introduced at least 24 legislative measures aimed at silencing, condemning, or punishing advocacy for Palestinian rights.

These included bills targeting boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns, as well as those adopting a distorted definition of anti-Semitism that justifies classifying virtually any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Pushback from activists helped defeat anti-Palestinian bills in several states, including Georgia and Virginia.

So let's talk about some of your cases.

Who are your clients?

Sure.

So about 70 to 80% of the people who come to us are students or professors, because that's where change often happens.

It's the younger generation.

It's on college campuses.

Students have always been at the forefront of social justice causes, whether it was the anti-Vietnam War movement to the fight against South African apartheid, right?

And so that's where we see Zionist suppression machine kind of focusing their efforts.

But we have represented everyone from journalists to teachers to farmers, moms on Facebook groups, makeup artists and influencers, doctors and psychologists have come to us, law students.

children's book authors, you name it.

And if you have spoken out for Palestinian rights, chances are you have been, you know, disingenuously accused of anti-Semitism or accused of supporting terrorism or censored or punished or been called in by your boss for taking a principle stance for Palestinian rights.

Maybe we can start with a complaint at GWU George Washington University.

Just to give listeners a little bit of background, Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program that receives federal funding.

So even though GWU is a private institution, Title VI applies here and that's how you would sue on the basis of discrimination on these factors.

So talk about the complaint there.

Yeah, we recently filed a Title VI complaint with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

A school can lose its federal funding if it's found to violate Title VI.

And what we've seen at GW is a severe and pervasive pattern of anti-Palestinian racism and discrimination going back for years.

But some of the things that the complaint talks about is, for example, the denial of services to Palestinian students.

So in 2021, you had an office at GW that provided trauma support services to students.

And this was a really great office.

It met students where they were.

It posted statements in Solidarity of Black Lives on Instagram.

When there were the anti-Asian spa killings in Atlanta, it posted a statement in support of the Asian community at GW and reached out to Asian American students.

They provided services to BIPOC students, Brown students, black students, Jewish students.

And in 2021, when Israel was attempting to evict Palestinians in Sheikh Jara and East Jerusalem communities and was bombing Palestinian civilians in Gaza, a staff member in this office who's Palestinian herself noticed that the GW community was expressing trauma and tried to provide virtual healing circle for Palestinian students, but really open to everyone in the same way that they had done for other student groups in the past.

Right.

And immediately.

This is the purpose of this office.

Exactly.

This is what they set out to do.

And within 24 hours, they were called in by the highest administrators at GW.

They received a call from the executive director from Hillel and were told to cancel it and to apologize.

And meanwhile, our student, our client, was taking classes remotely in the West Bank at this time.

Wow.

And, you know, classes were all remote then, and she was living with her family.

And she was shot by the Israeli army at a checkpoint by a tear gas canister and had six stitches in her knees.

And she saw this post.

she saw that it was removed.

She saw that it was something that she would have liked to attend as someone who's, you know, processing this trauma while trying to take classes.

Right.

And, you know, was denied the service.

And to this day, that service has not been reinstated.

The office was effectively shut down after everyone quit because of such a hostile work environment.

They weren't allowed to post anything on Instagram after this.

So that's one of the things we talk about in this complaint.

There's a few other incidents as well where Students for Justice in Palestine, the DEI office at GW called the cops on SJP after they protested an Israeli army speaker outside Hillel and posted some flyers lawfully on public property.

Basically, GW tried to throw the book at SJP, even though a white Jewish student member of Jewish Voice for Peace admitted to posting one of these posters on Hillel's property.

So we talk about that, how students perceived to be Palestinian are treated quite differently.

Right.

And how hard it is for them because they had to, one of these students, Dylan represented actually on his student conduct hearing, had to defend himself through a finalist period.

Again, for something that he didn't do that GW knew that a white Jewish student admitted to.

Right.

And then the complaint also talks about a complaint where Zionist students complained to GW after a citizen of Israel gave a talk at an optional brown bag lunch at GW.

And they were in a class with Dr.

Lara Sheehi, who is represented by the ADC, who has been experiencing just a campaign of hate and harassment.

What is the ADC?

Anti-Arab discrimination.

The Anti-Arab Discrimination Committee.

Well, what is the status of the lawsuit?

Where are things right now with GWU?

So right now, the complaint is with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights.

We're hoping that they open an investigation, but we just filed it a couple of weeks ago, so we're in a wait-and-see period.

So do you want to talk about this amicus brief?

There's a lawsuit against the American Studies Association.

So, my understanding was that the lawsuit was filed by an anti-Palestine organization in response to the American Studies Association adopting a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

And listeners will remember if you listen to the Public Defender episode, an amicus brief is a legal filing you make to a court for a lawsuit in which you yourself are not a party, but you're telling the court why you want them to rule a certain way and why it's important to your party or organization.

Tell us about your brief.

Yeah, sure.

So basically the American Studies Association passed an academic boycott resolution nine years ago.

And this was in support of Palestinian rights.

And it basically said that they were going to boycott Israeli academic institutions that are complicit with Israeli human rights abuses.

And that was met by a wave of backlash, which was incredible nine years ago.

The resolution passed two to one, and professors with the ASA received thousands of hate mail messages.

They were violent, they were racist, they were homophobic, and it actually eventually led to the first of over 200 anti-boycott bills.

So we were involved from the very beginning advising the American Studies Association professors.

And you had back then, like a Mossad-linked Israeli law center, which threatened to sue the ASA unless it canceled its boycott.

So there was a wave of threats.

And eventually, the American Studies Association was sued in federal court by four professors who said like, oh, you can't do this.

This is outside of your, you know, your corporate charter.

We identified it as a slap suit, like a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

The law firm that represented these professors that sued the ASA were really clear that this was the purpose of this lawsuit.

Right.

To discourage public participation dialogue in this way, in this space.

Exactly.

And when other academic associations were trying to pass similar resolutions, this law firm, the Brandeis Center, sent letters saying, look, the ASA got sued.

You will too.

Hint, hint.

So this is sort of the context.

Eventually, you know, the lawsuit got thrown out of federal court.

ASA was sued again in DC local court.

And the professors are represented by a whole bunch of different counsel.

One professor, Stephen Saleda, is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

He's a Palestinian professor who was not even on the board of the ASA at the time the resolution was passed.

But they singled him out.

And our brief basically said, you know, this is a strategic lawsuit against public participation.

Court, you need to throw this out.

And here is why.

And let us tell you in their own words why they're doing this.

And so that's what the brief was about.

And eventually, you know, it got thrown out of court finally after nine years.

And it's a huge relief because, you know, if you have any professors, you know, listening to this show, you know how hard it is to, you know, teach your classes, try to get your papers published, your books published, to try to, you know, get tenure and then to have to deal with the immense discovery, the questions, the litigation, going through years of emails and redactions.

And it is just so exhausting.

And not to mention the hate and the harassment these professors faced.

Again, just for trying to show solidarity with Palestinians is just horrific.

And so I think it's a huge relief that the lawsuit is over.

Yeah, congratulations.

That's a welcome dismissal.

Dylan, maybe you can talk about this one in In another case, which happened just in January, and I think this highlights not just the multifaceted kind of multi-strategy aspects of your work, but also the multifaceted ways Palestinian solidarity and speech is suppressed.

So a graduate student worker at NYU was investigated by the administration at NYU for allegedly quote-unquote vandalizing an Israeli mail services bag.

This is literally like the Israeli post office bag of mail at NYU.

My understanding is that the student wrote the word fuck on the outside of the bag so that it read, fuck Israel.

Gets an administrative investigation started.

Yeah, tell us what happened there and about Palestine legal role.

Absolutely.

And thank you for setting that up.

It's even more ridiculous than

that.

So this student who is Lebanese American is a Palestine organizer with the Palestinian youth movement, is a student worker at one of the campus libraries at NYU as a grad student.

So she works in a role as,

or she worked in a role doing work on Arabic language texts within this particular library.

So one day she was at work in the mail room of the library, so the back room, not in any kind of public space, doing her normal workplace duties.

And she noticed that in the recycling, so actually sitting already disposed of in the recycling

was a bag from the Israel Postal Service.

There was some kind of book exchange that happens with Israel where books get sent over.

They had been sent over.

The bag was already disposed of.

She noticed after several days in a row, you know, she's a Palestine organizer, you know, obviously is Lebanese herself, was just annoyed.

Like, why do I have to come into my workplace and see this big Israel thing, you know, every day?

And so she, you know, had, you know, didn't even think anything of it, right?

Just had it, had a marker, was doing her normal duties.

And yeah, in a moment of just like being annoyed that she had to see this, wrote fuck over the word Israel and wrote Free Palestine somewhere else on the back, right?

Yeah.

Doesn't think anything of it and nothing happens.

You know, it sits there for a while.

Eventually it's taken out.

But some time later, she gets sent an email that was sent out to workers at the library about an alleged anti-Israel incident that is going to be investigated in the library.

Some time goes by, another email is sent out.

All of a sudden, it's no longer an anti-Israel incident.

Now there's discussions of anti-Semitism.

So now that there's a potential investigation for anti-Semitism, she's contacted then and asked to come in for a student conduct process.

Now, this is where things get interesting.

She has a union.

So she's a grad student worker and is represented by a grad student union.

Now, this incident took place while she was on the job outside of public space of the library.

She was in her capacity as a graduate student worker at the library.

Now, for folks less familiar with labor law, a huge component of U.S.

labor laws is a concept called Weingarten rights, which means that if you are a union member, you're entitled to union representation in any workplace disciplinary process.

So what happened is that the university wanted to say, This is not a workplace issue.

We're actually investigating you for anti-Semitism under our student conduct code.

So that she wouldn't get representation.

That's what what they tried to do.

Right.

But she came to us at some point, you know, after receiving of these emails and when she's like kind of being contacted about this potential student conduct investigation.

So she retained us, but she's also got a union.

And so what the union did was say, hey, this is a workplace issue.

This is a disciplinary proceeding.

You can't proceed without us there.

And so they filed a grievance and said the university is not letting us, you know, represent our member in this process.

And so they filed a grievance with the National Labor Relations Board.

This point, the university got a little shook, and they said, okay, we're going to pause this whole student conduct thing.

And now we're going to investigate you for vandalism.

So now what they said, new charge, now this is within the disciplinary process of the library, and they permitted her to have unit representation here.

But they said that piece of recycling over there, that was actually university property, and you vandalized it, you know, by writing, you know, fuck, basically, or Free Palestine on the allegation being equivalent to like spray painting the outside of a dorm or something like that, right?

Exactly.

And it was bogus.

I mean, the HR administrator in the hearing itself even admitted that this would not have been an issue if it didn't involve Israel.

So what's clear from the outset, right, is that this is a university intervening.

because of the political content of this person's expression, right?

It's being framed as vandalism.

It's being framed as a violation of the student code.

This is political repression.

This is someone who's making a political statement in their workplace and they're being targeted for it.

And the message, right, for all activists is you cannot say this message.

You cannot be critical of Israel because we're going to throw the book at you.

We're going to repress your expression and everyone else better get the message.

But fortunately, we were able to intervene and ended up with a good outcome in large part because she had a union, which is amazing, right?

It makes our job a lot easier when we can leverage that whole set of protections.

So what ended up happening is when all of this was unfolding, after that second email and the initiation of the HR process where she was accused of vandalism, the university actually fired her from her job.

Oh my God.

They said, actually, they didn't technically fire her, but they said, all three of you who are working as Arabic language workers are not going to be rehired in the next semester.

This was in the last moment.

So this is.

And not just her, the other two.

The other two, the other two Arabic language workers, but it gets worse.

So the three of them get this email.

Hey, sorry, I know it's last minute.

You're not being rehired next semester.

Good luck finding other work, basically.

Then the two other Arabic language workers complained and said, what do you mean?

Normally, like these jobs get turned over.

It's very reasonable to expect that you're going to be rehired in this position.

That's what happens.

Right.

And university administrator gave back the job to the other two and not our client.

Wow.

So our client was then the only one left without a job.

Her former coworkers were rehired into a different department.

And these processes haven't even been resolved.

Long story short, the way that this gets resolved, the university has agreed after we made some noise and after the union filed their grievances, the university relented.

They dropped the anti-Semitism charge.

The vandalism charge does not appear to be going anywhere.

And the university has offered to rehire our client back to her position.

So the moral of the story is, in a vacuum, university administrators are going to be responding to pressure from outside organizations to stamp out Palestine, pro-Palestine expression.

But when we can come together,

when we can make some noise and say, hey, we're going to embarrass you, we're going to go to the media and talk about the repression that you're engaged in.

And when workers can organize collectively and assert their labor rights, these are forces that can fight back against this kind of repression.

Right.

That's amazing.

And kind of brings me to my next question.

You talk about sort of Palestine solidarity and labor, right?

Working in tandem.

So how do you see your legal work in the U.S.

supporting or connecting with the movement for Palestinian liberation, of course, but what about other left legal causes, right?

Environmental work, domestic civil rights, shrinking the prison industrial complex.

How do you think about those connections?

Yeah, I think it's a really key question and really cuts to the core of how we think about movement work.

Yes.

Right.

So oftentimes when we are representing, advocating, advising people in support of Palestinian liberation, people in the movement, we're in a legally disadvantaged position, right?

As we all know, in the United States, the law is not set up to promote social justice causes.

It's not set up

to question

U.S.

foreign policy

or like the imperial interests of the U.S.

or to threaten the hold that police have on our social order or the carceral system.

So we often have to use unorthodox tactics to advance our political objectives and achieve the kind of legal outcomes that we wanna achieve.

A lot of times what that means is telling our story in a way that's compelling.

Yes.

Going to the media and saying, look, it may be that if we try to litigate this, we don't have the hook to make you stop what you're doing.

But we will use whatever tools.

are available to us in order to do that.

And one of the key tools that we have is the power of solidarity.

One of the key tools that we have is we can see connections in the way that Palestinians are oppressed in the United States and repressed in Palestine with the way that black people are oppressed in the United States.

We can see actually similar tactics of counterinsurgency and repression to break the bonds of solidarity in the black community and in the Palestinian community, to police expression, to police organizing, and to try and stamp it out.

So, a tool, a major tool that we have is to actually point out that solidarity and build cross-movement work.

So this like ordeal that happened at Berkeley Law made some headlines, which is a group of Palestine organizers at Berkeley Law campus started this campaign where they organized anti-racist groups together.

So different affinity groups and different left political spaces organized together to say, we're going to agree as groups not to host speakers that promote Zionism, that promote apartheid and the dispossession of Palestinians.

That was hugely controversial.

So from the perspective of university administrators, from the perspective of Zionist organizations, seeing black students, women, Asian students come together with Palestinians to oppose Zionism collectively was very triggering and like freaked people out.

And they started this massive media disinformation campaign, right?

We were able to combat that in the media by explaining what these students were doing, explaining how it was actually protected by their free association rights, their free speech rights under the First Amendment, and how the university actually couldn't do anything about it.

That's the power of boycotts.

Yes.

That this is actually a protected activity.

This is like an act of political expression.

Right.

But so encouraging that kind of cross-movement solidarity is important.

And also speaking out when we see similar kinds of repression happening to other groups of organizers, other people fighting for justice.

The police repression of the force defenders happening right now in Atlanta, where we're seeing the perversion of domestic terrorism statutes used to chill organizing and to scare people away from opposing the construction of Cop City, you know, of this new, you know, militarized police facility in Atlanta that will involve ecological destruction.

Right.

We're seeing the same types of tactics, the criminalization of dissent.

And so building bonds of solidarity between Palestine movement for ecological sustainability and environmental justice, for racial justice, is a key threat to systems of power and a key avenue for us to build our own power.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll state explicitly also the movement for queer liberation,

absolutely interconnected in terms of state violence, state repression, targeted police action, et cetera, et cetera,

all the way down the line.

And I would just add to that that, you know, I think that's where the strength of the movement for Palestinian rights sort of lays.

It's diverse.

It's intersectional.

You're not going to find anyone who's active with SJP that is only active with SJP.

That's right.

Right.

They're active in so many different other movements as well.

And for any of your listeners that are like, yeah, but, you know, I'm busy.

Maybe why should I care about Palestine?

I want to just add that like Palestine is very much the canary in the coal mine often when it comes to repression.

Some of the anti-boycott legislation that we talked about earlier on this program.

The American Legislative Exchange Council is now using this as cookie-cutter model legislation aimed at eliminating all political boycotts.

And we see that in the past year or so, lawmakers have proposed and enacted legislation modeled on anti-boycott measures to target other movements for justice, including anti-boycott bills targeting environmental justice and gun safety efforts, trying to make it illegal for companies to boycott energy companies or oil and gas or firearms, for example.

So I think it's something that people really need to pay attention to, separate from the issue of just it's important to stay in solidarity with Palestinians.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're talking already about this a little bit.

What do you think people should know about this work if they want to get involved?

What's the path?

What are the risks that you assume?

What are the rewards for doing it?

I think it's important to get involved with it because, you know, if you're a leftist, you need to speak out for Palestine.

But it's not just an issue that's limited to the left wing or to radicals, for example.

Even liberals should care about basic human rights and should stand up against apartheid, right?

I think it's really important for everyone to speak out.

Yeah, you know, this has been a conversation very focused on suppression.

And I think a lot of times people are very scared.

But I just want to say, you know, I've been speaking up for Palestine for over 20 years now.

I went to law school.

I got a job.

All of this was on the internet.

So, you know, people do speak out and do just fine.

And so I do want to just encourage your listeners to really get involved and to do what they can to support the movement for Palestinian rights.

Yeah.

Throughout our conversation, you've highlighted this, but I just want to emphasize that movements for social change are effectuating change, achieving change through people power.

It is through your direct involvement in these movements that we make change at all.

It is not a single lawsuit.

It is not a lawyer-led movement

to change the law.

It is about people's involvement and people's demands across social justice issues, across oppressive systems, let's say, that achieves social justice.

Listeners ask about this a lot, so I just wanted to make that clear.

But Dylan, very interested in

your thoughts also.

There's a million reasons to get involved in Palestine Solidarity organizing, but in terms of like the moral burden, right?

All of this is being done as Americans in our name.

So it may be geographically far away, but in terms of the financial and political and social ties that the U.S.

has with Israel, it's actually very close.

Israel is the number one recipient of foreign military assistance to the tune of like over $3 billion a year.

Those are our tax paying.

dollars.

Absolutely.

And decades of

U.S.

foreign policy has been aimed at bolstering Israel's position and Israel's ability to continue to dominate the Palestinians and dispossess Palestinians.

So this is being done with our tax dollars, in our name, by and through our institutions, right?

It's not just the blob in D.C.

That's allying the United States with Israel.

It's through communal institutions.

It's through universities having academic exchanges with Israel, Israeli academics.

legitimizing the occupation, legitimizing the ethno-nationalist character of Israel.

It's It's financial ties between states and Israel, business ties, church ties.

Law enforcement ties.

American police going to Israel to get training from Israeli occupation forces.

Absolutely.

So there's no way that as an American, you can just close your eyes to what's happening because this is as much the product of your government as an American as it is the Israeli government itself.

That's right.

Yeah.

So I think I have one more question for us before we maybe wrap up.

And this question is just about connecting to sort of campus debate, campus free speech issues that are certainly on people's minds right now.

So just yesterday, there was a huge online reaction to a Fifth Circuit judge being shouted down at Stanford Law.

Can you talk about like similarities here?

Do you have to confront the same arguments about maintaining decorum, right?

Prioritizing the free exchange of ideas in academia, the importance of of civility, right?

As well as the idea that you are somehow undermining the free speech of others by being in solidarity with Palestine.

You know, I just think listeners certainly know of this kind of other realm of free speech debate, shall we call it?

But where do you see the connections in your work?

How do you counter those arguments?

A few years ago, we saw this come up a lot where the right would say, you know, students were just in Palestine, you know, they need to be more civil.

There's a lack of civility.

And of of course, you know, the First Amendment protects the right to be uncivil, right?

That goes to the heart of the First Amendment.

And I think a lot of these complaints about SJPs, you know, occasionally shouting down a speaker, which is just a small part of what maybe some SJPs do, are really disingenuous and don't notice the power differential, right?

There is something very different with.

a couple of 19-year-olds, you know, maybe interrupting an Israeli general who just bombed Palestinian civilians with some chance, and a university canceling a talk or firing a professor, a tenure professor, this actually happened with Stephen Zalita, because they criticize Israel.

So you can't compare the two.

And I'll just add that students do engage in civil disobedience, and that's their right.

And at Palestine Legal, we support their right to do that.

If that's what they want to do, they come to us.

You know, we advise them.

And so they can go into these things with eyes wide open.

But to compare, you know, a major institution or the police censoring or punishing students, making it really hard for them to get jobs with a couple of teenagers clapping or talking too loud is really problematic.

Yeah.

I saw somebody point out yesterday with the Fifth Circuit judge.

These are like, oh, you're de-platforming somebody.

It's a Fifth Circuit judge.

The man has a platform

for life.

That's incredible.

All right.

Is there anything else you want people to know?

Is there anything, do you want to direct people to reading, to the website?

Are there any other ideas that we didn't talk about that you want to talk about?

Yeah, check out our website, palestinelegal.org and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, all the places.

And for law students and attorneys, we are always looking for people to join our attorney network.

We field calls from all 50 states.

We are not in all 50 states.

And people come to us needing expertise in all areas of the law.

And we don't often have that.

So we're really always looking forward to people who have a few hours to spare to help us out.

And also, last thing I'll say is that hopefully, we've done our job and inspired you to start organizing wherever you are in your workplace, in your university, in your community organization.

And if you're facing any repression for any organizing that you're doing, any pushback or you want legal advice, definitely feel free to reach out to us through our website or through info at palestinelegal.org.

Thank you both so much.

This was incredible.

It was an honor.

And I am just, I feel so privileged.

And I'm really, really excited for listeners to hear this.

Thank you so much for making the time.

Thanks for having us.

Free Palestine.

5-4 is presented by Prolog Projects.

Rachel Ward is our producer.

Leon Nafok and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support.

Our production manager is Percia Verlin.

Peter Murphy designed our website, 54pod.com.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.