Criminalizing free speech when it pertains to Israel's apartheid policies impacting the lives of Palestinians is not a new invention that has just emerged in the Israeli war of October-November 2023. For decades, the mass media has reflected official government and institutional anti-Muslim policy to the degree that Islamophobia became the norm both because the state used the pretext of 'war on terror', implying war on Islamic anti-Western rebels, as well as fear of Muslim migrants in Western countries on the hysterical assumption that to be a Muslim meant to embrace terrorism. Very influential Jewish lobbyists and pro-Israel organizations and large campaign business and private donors have been responsible for crushing dissent and paving the way for authoritarianism in Western countries in the name of preserving apartheid Israel.
In February 2016, the British government declare it was illegal for “local councils, public bodies, and even some university student unions … to refuse to buy goods and services from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products, or Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.” Powerful pro-Israel individuals were responsible for the legislation just as in the US pro-Israel organizations lobbied to criminalize any action or criticism of the apartheid state. The fear was that the global campaign of Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment, or BDS, emulating the 1980s campaign that brought down the Israel-allied apartheid regime in South Africa, would someday succeed, so it was important to criminalize it and any dissent before it became effective. The mass media with a very heavy pro-Israel, and anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim bias helped in the campaign to crush dissent which was in essence promoting authoritarianism all for the sake to protect Zionist policies.
Two years before the Israeli war on Gaza, 35 US states had enacted anti-BDS legislation or executive orders requiring government contractors not to engage in BDS, laws violating several Constitutional rights as both the ACLU and the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) argued in court. In one Anti-Boycott, citizens would be barred from requesting information about companies that conduct business with Israel, while prosecutors would be free to target protesters against Israeli apartheid policies. This legislation and others more egregious failed, but both Federal state action against BDS continued to gain momentum, considering that billionaires are not just donors to politicians to colleges and universities and they have a hold on the economy.
When the current war unfolded, there was an immediate effort by pro-Israel elements to silence the opposition to war. Even when the UN, ICC, Amnesty International, WHO, Human Rights Watch and most governments around the world protested the war crimes, genocide and collective punishment of Palestinians by Israel, the supporters which include mostly Western governments and corporations insisted on crushing dissent rather than addressing the war through diplomatic channels as the UN and most countries proposed.
The issue is larger than one of crushing dissent across the entire institutional structure on the pretext of national security. Besides its historical association of authoritarian regimes, crushing dissent for opposing war and proposing peaceful solutions; opposing apartheid and proposing pluralism; opposing mass murder of children and proposing cease fire to deliver humanitarian aid; opposing bombing of hospitals refugee camps, schools, UN and journalists’ quarters while proposing observing international law and human rights, are the sorts of things that any presumably democratic government would support. Rejecting them would not necessarily make them more like the Third Reich, but certainly leaning in that direction.
