By ERWIN FREED
On Oct. 15, the United States and Canadian governments designated the Palestinian prisoner solidarity organization Samidoun as giving “material support to terrorist organizations.” Simultaneously, the Netherlands banned Samidoun’s European coordinator, Mohammed Khatib, who is also facing having his asylum status revoked in Belgium. No government or anyone else has presented any evidence to substantiate these charges. In fact, a special dossier produced by the Israeli government alleging to make this case states only that “it is likely that donations made through the Samidoun website benefitted Barakat and the PFLP” (page 24).
As the Canadian socialist publication Spring Mag points out, “Though Samidoun has not been linked to any attacks, violence, or financial activity, … the reasoning given in the [Canadian] government’s press release largely revolves around its ties to the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine]. These ties seem to consist of sharing similar positions and having former and current members in common, with no evidence of financial or other more substantial forms of connection.”
The method of making vague accusations for “material support to terrorism” or “domestic terrorism” is used by the government to criminalize speech and organization by groups and individuals who politically oppose U.S. imperialism’s favored policies. Designating Samidoun as an organization that “supports terrorism” is an attempt to intimidate anyone standing in solidarity with Palestine into silence.
Samidoun’s targeting is only the latest case in a year of some of the most aggressive acts of repression carried out by the U.S. government in recent years. Three Palestinian defendants caught up in the government witch hunt against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF)—at the time, the largest Muslim charity organization in the United States—are still in prison, with 49 years remaining on their sentences. American Muslims for Palestine continues to face a lawsuit, based on the same bogus claims made against HLF, “connecting” them to Hamas. Dozens of people remain caught up in the Stop Cop City dragnet, charged with “domestic terrorism” for actions that the government has never offered any proof they committed.
At the same time, activists must understand the current moment as part of an escalating series of new laws, policies, and programs set up to surveil, disrupt, and politically disarm movements for social justice and against imperialism. Virtually identical measures and technologies are often developed and pointed at oppressed communities in the U.S., especially Black, Indigenous, and Latino peoples. And similar technologies, strategies, and even agencies are used on the Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. It is important to view domestic repression as part of the totality of political and military operations of U.S. imperialism.
Anti-Palestine solidarity dragnet
In Oct. 2023, Israel began the highest iteration of ethnic cleansing in Palestine since the 1948 Nakba. These attacks are fundamentally supported by the United States, including through political defense, weapons transfers, operational intelligence, and military guidance. Earlier this month, over 100 U.S. troops were sent to Israel as part of the U.S.-backed Israeli bombing of Iran, which began early morning local time on Oct. 26.
Solidarity with Palestinians against the U.S./Israeli genocide in Gaza exploded immediately, particularly on college campuses. The movement is an inspiration to all who believe in the possibility of a peaceful, just future. Public spotlight on the genocide and U.S./Israeli militarism in the Middle East exposed hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents to the reality of Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism. Massive demonstrations in Washington, D.C., alone brought hundreds of thousands into collective action. Virtually every state has seen mobilizations, from vigils and speak-outs to encampments on college campuses.
The forces of domestic “counterinsurgency” immediately got into motion. As early as Oct. 10, 2023, President Biden put out a statement on X, saying, “This is not some distant tragedy—the ties between Israel and the United States run deep. … In cities across the country, local and federal law enforcement partners are closely monitoring for any domestic threats in connection with the horrific terrorist attacks in Israel.”
In the same period, Muslim and Arab community members began reporting door knocks and baseless interrogations by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. An article by The Intercept explains that these investigations “included FBI officers visiting a Texas mosque to meet with leadership and ask about any ‘troublemakers’ in the community, and FBI agents seeking to question an individual who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement … for a green card issue.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray warned in a Nov. 15, 2023, statement to the House Committee on Homeland Security that since Oct. 7, “a rogues gallery of foreign terrorist groups has called for attacks against Americans and our allies.” He then listed a number of claims by disparate Islamist groups with no apparent connection to the United States or to each other.
In an attempt to stoke the flames of Islamophobia and to build faith in federal intelligence agencies, Wray pointed at specific actions that the FBI had taken between Oct. 7 and the committee meeting. He said, “Across the country, the FBI has been aggressively countering violence by extremists citing the ongoing conflict as inspiration. In Houston, we arrested a man who’d been studying bomb-making and posted about killing Jewish people. Outside Chicago, we’ve got a federal hate crime investigation into the killing of a six-year-old Muslim boy. At Cornell University, we arrested a man who threatened to kill members of that university’s Jewish community. And in Los Angeles, we arrested a man for threatening the CEO and other members of the Anti-Defamation League.”
All of these claims were hyperbolic attempts to politically justify counter-intelligence and mass surveillance operations against oppressed communities and the Palestine solidarity movement.
Briefly looking at the specific arrests mentioned by Wray helps to demystify the FBI’s so-called “counter-terrorist” strategy. The first example, in Houston, appears to have been Sohaib Abuayyash, a 20-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian asylum-seeker. The FBI used Abuayyash’s arrest on minor gun charges in October 2023 as a way to publicly slander him and create a narrative that a group of “radical” Arabs were making threats against Jews, despite this having nothing to do with the actual arrest.
After Wray’s statement to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the mainstream press ran wild, reporting that Abuayyash was arrested for making concrete plots against Jewish community organizations. The groundwork for this propaganda offensive was laid in a Nov. 2, 2023, CNN article. The headline read, “Jordanian arrested in Houston supported killing ‘individuals of particular faiths,’ judge’s order said.” The “judge’s order” that was referenced appears to be an order calling for Abuayyash’s pre-trial detention, filed on Oct. 24, 2023. The order does indeed include these quotations. However, all of the evidence presented by both the prosecution and defense remain sealed.
That article also includes a quote attributed to an anonymous “law enforcement source” that makes the specific claim that Abuayyash was actually plotting to kill Jews, a charge not presented in the actual court case. An article from the Jewish Chronicle, headlined “Jordanian man arrested for plan to ‘attack Jewish gathering,’” does the dirty work of the original CNN piece. Here the newspaper combined the unnamed “police source” with the judge’s order, doubling down on the unsubstantiated implications of the first article. Through a sleight of hand, irresponsible reporting became “fact.”
Of course, the Feds never substantiated any of the above claims, and Abuayyash was acquitted on the gun charges by a jury in February, although he was not freed but put into immigration detention. There is very little reporting on his acquittal, especially considering the hysteria whipped up by the media during his initial arrest and detention.
The incident in Cornell was that of Patrick Dai, who publicly posted threatening antisemitic statements on a student-oriented discussion board. The role of the FBI itself was limited to getting Dai’s information from the forum administrators and Charter Communications and interviewing Dai.
The Dai case is unfortunate and somewhat bizarre, but certainly does not rise to the level of an international terrorist conspiracy. Even prosecutors agree that Dai struggles with mental health issues. Further, Dai claims he was effectively playing the role of a provocateur. He later anonymously apologized on the same forum. According to Dai’s attorney, “He believed, wrongly, that the posts would prompt a ‘blowback’ against what he perceived as anti-Israel media coverage and pro-Hamas sentiment on campus.”
There is no readily apparent public information on the alleged arrest in L.A. of “a man … threatening the CEO and other members of the Anti-Defamation League.”
Lastly, the FBI had nothing to do with arresting Joseph Czuba, the Chicago landlord who murdered his six-year-old Palestinian tenant, Wadea Al Fayoume. Due to a 911 call, Czuba was arrested immediately after killing Fayoume and stabbing his mother.
Repression on university campuses
After the opening salvos from the FBI and other alphabet agencies, local police, politicians, and college administrators—coordinating with Zionist non-profits like the Alliance in Defense of Liberty (ADL)—took over the overt side of pacifying the Palestine solidarity movement. Over a year later, although no “terrorist plots” connected with the Palestine solidarity movement have been uncovered, the political repression has only deepened.
The big crackdowns began during the Spring 2024 encampment movement. As part of a playbook that was replicated by potentially hundreds of different police departments, university administrators called the cops on peaceful encampments, which were then brutally raided. Three thousand students were arrested between April and May alone, with many still waiting for either trials or negotiated “accelerated rehabilitation.”
Simultaneously, in May 2024, the U.S. ruling class made clear to university administrators that it is not messing around, putting them through humiliating public hearings in front of congressional committees. In some cases, these sorts of measures helped push administrators (who did not really need much of a “push”) to intensify the brutality of the campus crackdowns. Perhaps most egregious was the situation at Columbia University, where police utilized highly militarized tactics and even shot a gun inside a building during an operation to clear an occupation by student protesters.
The UAW has in many ways been at the forefront of union solidarity with Palestine. There is a strong push from the ranks, especially among UAW graduate-student members. Locals have taken bold stands against repression and for Palestine, including the historic strike by 48,000 Local 4811 members in the University of California system. In a brazen overstep of its stated aims, the federal monitor assigned to oversee UAW elections twice made statements condemning the union for taking pro-Palestine positions.
Over the summer, campus administrators worked with private organizations, local police, and federal intelligence agencies to develop a common strategy for repressing the Palestine solidarity movement at colleges and universities. One notable example is the joint Hillel/Secure Community Network (SCN) “Operation Secure Our Campuses.”
According to an August 2024 statement by Hillel, the effort “will leverage SCN’s national, regional, and local resources, along with the national network of security professionals, to deploy critical resources to protect Jewish students at colleges and universities, to include: full-time intelligence analysts dedicated to monitoring campus developments and providing intelligence support; assessments of Jewish facilities on campuses; direct consultations on physical security and emergency plans and procedures; and enhanced coordination with law enforcement and public safety officials and centers of Jewish life.”
Secure Community Network defines itself as “the official safety and security organization of the Jewish community in North America.” The group’s leadership is filled with former FBI, CIA, DHS, and urban police agents and officers. SCN has direct access to intelligence from at least the FBI and National Security Administration (NSA) through the Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The group also has its own, privately funded “National Jewish Security Operations Command Center” (JSOCC) in Chicago, which SCN claims runs “24/7/365” and “intakes and analyzes intelligence and information, providing timely, credible threat and incident information to both law enforcement and community partners.”
In announcing “Operation Secure Our Campuses,” Hillel acknowledged that “ahead of the new academic year, SCN co-hosted a campus safety roundtable discussion with the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which had participation of law enforcement and public safety officials from 92 universities across 24 states, including representatives from the FBI, law enforcement association leaders, and Jewish security professionals.”
Private organizations like SCN and the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) work with police and U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies while also maintaining lists of people expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment for potential blacklisting, blackmailing, and doxxing through initiatives like the Canary Project. These Zionist civilian-spy networks are prevalent on many campuses and existed long before this current upsurge.
Josh Nathan-Kazis, writing for the Jewish website Forward in 2018, points out: “The list of Jewish groups that do anti-BDS [Boycott, Divest, Sanction] work on campuses is bafflingly long. A partial tally includes StandWithUs, AEPi, CAMERA, the David Project, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Jerusalem U, AIPAC, Sheldon Adelson’s Maccabee Task Force and the Zionist Organization of America. The total amount of American Jewish and Israeli government funds flooding the anti-BDS effort is easily in the tens of millions of dollars each year.”
Nathan-Kazis goes on to explain the particular organizing role held by ICC, “The Israel on Campus Coalition, once a branch of Hillel and now an independent entity, plays air traffic control among anti-BDS groups. When a BDS resolution crops up, the ICC convenes conference calls, coordinates efforts and offers support to Hillel professionals.” The I.C.C. also maintains its own private, high-tech intelligence center worth millions of dollars and with a network of human informants.
The U.S./Israeli/Zionist private-public spying apparatus also carry out bizarre psychological warfare operations, such as in 2018 at George Washington University, where, in the lead-up to a student senate vote on a pro-Palestinian resolution, “Anonymous fliers, websites and social media campaigns appeared out of nowhere to attack the student activists. And, on the day of the vote, two adult men, dressed as canaries, showed up to do a weird dance in the lobby of the college building where the student government was set to vote” (https://forward.com/).
Perhaps more than anything else, these networks and organizations serve to give concrete strategic direction for the repression of pro-Palestine activists. The reality is that U.S. university and college administrators are broadly supportive of Zionist goals without any prodding. However, they rely on the joint efforts of groups like SCN to help develop operational plans and coordinate between campuses.
During a summer of meetings like the SCN-sponsored one described above, campus administrators rolled out new explicitly anti-speech, anti-assembly, and anti-Palestinian regulations. A Mother Jones report lists over 30 school systems, representing over 60 campuses, that enacted new protest policies between May and August 2024. This, as they acknowledge, is far from a complete list.
These new measures include bans on “camping,” mask bans (despite campus communities’ health concerns), mandated “registration” for protests (handing over activists’ information directly to the state or police and in many places effectively curtailing emergency demonstrations), limiting locations where protests are “allowed” (giving law enforcement a tactical edge as well as giving the university more tools in their arsenal to shut down demonstrations), banning “unapproved signage,” bans on “amplified sound,” and more.
Merging private “security” organizations, federal and local police, corporate interests, and intelligence agencies to target social movements are all important aspects of the post-9/11 security state. These trends are most obviously embodied by so-called Intelligence Fusion Centers, which are meant to combine intelligence from different agencies, private individuals and corporations, and police departments.
Fusion centers exist in every state and have been exposed multiple times for largely surveilling social movement groups and Black and Latino community members without any sort of probable cause. The centers are a product of post-9/11 surveillance expansion and have been used not only to police protest but also to charge Black and Latino people as “gang members” due to nothing other than liking posts on social media.
Notably, the Crime Prevention and Information Center (CPIC), a Chicago-based fusion center, dispatched a “counter-terrorism” team in May at the behest of the law firm Greenberg Traurig. There were no threats made against the firm, but representatives reached out to CPIC to coincide with a press release announcing a baseless lawsuit claiming that American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) “supports” Hamas.
Building a movement capable of standing up against “counterinsurgency”
In a hidden camera interview released as part of an exposé, CEO Jacob Baime of the Israel on Campus Coalition “described ICC as basically a clandestine Israeli military command. ‘It’s modeled on General Stanley McCrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. We’ve copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for us, actually’” (The Nation). We should take this self-identification seriously, but we also need a clear understanding of the political terrain in which this struggle is unfolding.
The military framing of pro-Palestine, environmental, and other social justice movements as “insurgencies” by the U.S. government and its allies is not an accident. However, the primary focus of these movements has nothing at all to do with “military” action but rather winning over and organizing the masses of people to political ideas —including a free Palestine, Black liberation, a livable earth, and so on.
“Counterinsurgency” theory has many different aspects and schools. An important component that is universal to all counterinsurgency strategies is identifying and isolating the “activist minority” in a given community. Therefore, it is important that movement organizations not allow our isolation by the state and various Zionist and reactionary forces in society.
The crackdowns and face-offs by the cops, and in some cases far-right Zionists, has produced a contradictory mentality of brazenness and fear in many Palestine organizing spaces. On the one hand, a core of activists feel that while the state is already pulling out all of the stops for repression, the genocide continues and Israel’s war on the Middle East expands, despite more than a year of mobilizations. On the other hand, there is a belief among some activists that protection from the repressive apparatus requires small, “vetted” groups of trusted individuals, often pulled from one’s own friend group.
These mentalities combine organizationally, for example, by student groups implementing their own internal measures to create environments of strict political homogeneity and external secrecy. In one particularly bad variant, activists see themselves as martyrs, willing to bear disciplinary and legal charges as a “sacrifice” for Palestine. In doing so, they often abandon their own political defense as a transactional cost of building “solidarity.” However, when we do not defend ourselves and others in the protest movement, we are unnecessarily allowing the state to disrupt movement organizing.
Activists need to be aware that repression against individuals and even groups is not solely or even primarily meant to deter those people from standing for Palestine. Instead, these attacks are a warning to the broader community that pro-Palestine activity, and even thought, can get you in trouble. They are part of constructing a narrative that organizers and organizations are “dangerous” and outside of the community, whatever that might be. When students, or anyone, is arrested in alleged connection with a social movement, there can be a chilling effect on the movement as a whole. We need to be in the best possible position to fight against not only arrests and other means of government subversion, but also against the fear this creates.
For starters, that means spaces should have clear, democratically elected and recallable leaderships; clear demands that open rather than close conversations with the 70% of people who support an end to the genocide; and put the responsibility directly on the state for any attempts at movement repression.
These goals can be accomplished through open, well-publicized organizing that brings together all organizations and individuals in basic agreement with the principles listed above. The “security” of our movement is determined in the first and last instance by the support it has within U.S. society as a whole and the working class in particular.
Activists have a rational fear of disruption by Zionist organizations, including Mossad, in collaboration with U.S. intelligence, local police, and campus administrators and agents of capital. However, the methods that are often taken to combat infiltration and disruption are the opposite of what can be really effective to creating a strong, defensible movement.
The situation mentioned above, in which an already existing group shifts toward becoming smaller, more self-contained, and increasingly “militant” in its rhetoric can fall directly into the counterinsurgency trap laid by the cops. Police and institutional leaders are handed an easy pretense to crack down on movement leaders, who have done the work of isolating themselves from the broader base by insisting on organizing conditions that are incomprehensible to people outside of the activist core.
Instead of depending excusively on already activated “cadres,” the movement needs to expand and use every attempt at repression to spread the message of ending U.S. aid to Israel, fighting the new McCarthyism, and for a free Palestine. Activists need to be aware of the surveillance and infiltration and organize in ways that allow for creating the broadest possible audience and participation for every action.
Concretely, this means two things: One is formulating demands in a way that is both principled, politically understandable, and actionable to the broadest layers of supporters. Right now, an example of this type of demand is, “End all U.S. funding to Israel.” Many people agree with this demand, and implementing it would effectively end the genocide. However, it is completely unacceptable to U.S. imperialism. The ruling class and its representatives up and down the line are unwilling to actually end U.S. funding to Israel, except in a modified, conditional way.
The second part is being prepared to politically defend ourselves and our civil liberties. Israel plays a central role in U.S. imperialist strategy, particularly in the Middle East. The reasons for this are substantial, ranging from Israel’s role as a middleman in controversial arms sales for the United States, the state of permanent war the IDF maintains with its neighbors, and the surveillance and policing testing-grounds that are the West Bank and Gaza. In short, Israel is fundamental to U.S. imperialism.
That simple fact means that no matter what our movement says, and how clearly it is that we are the ones for peace and stability, the domestic political police forces are mobilized against us. There is a long and heroic history of turning these attacks by the state into a rallying cry around which the movement builds strength.
Many touchstones of the United States left are political defense campaigns that took on a mass character. Free Huey! Free Angela! Free the Chicago Seven!
The general strategy is to organize a united-front defense committee on the largest scale possible, which can take the story into the community and build real support. A good example from 1962 is the Free the Bloomington Three campaign. Three students at Indiana University were arrested on charges of “sedition” under the 1951 Indiana Anti-Communism Act for organizing a demonstration calling for an end to the military blockade on Cuba and attending a talk by Black revolutionary socialist Leroy McRae titled, “The Black Revolt in America.”
The Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students (CABS) was co-chaired by two prominent professors, and day-to-day organizing was carried out by a team of activists, largely from the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance. That team grew immensely as the campaign began in earnest. Efforts included “fundraising, distribution of literature, the securing of a legal team, the attaining of prominent sponsors, and several national and regional tours of the three defendants were coordinated with local CABS. … By 1965, over 1300 faculty members on 95 college campuses became sponsors.”
CABS also took the opportunity to distribute tens of thousands of copies of “The Black Revolt in America,” sharing the piece well beyond the original audience. The attempt by the university and the police to silence the ideas of Black liberation and Marxism completely failed, and the exact opposite occurred. The massive support for the Bloomington Three led to not only the charges being dropped but also the repeal of the Indiana Anti-Communism Act itself.
These are the best methods we have to fight and win against political repression. Both capitalist parties are aggressively clamping down against the Palestine solidarity movement. We can fight and we can win, but it means taking every attack on our movement seriously and using them to spread the message of a Free Palestine as broadly as possible.
