By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
You’ve
probably never heard the expression “anti‑Palestinianism.” It is a term that has become synonymous with
the more commonly used term “anti-Palestinian racism” or its acronym “APR.” Anti-Palestinianism is defined as the
systematic erasure, silencing, defamation, and punishment of Palestinians and
those who stand with them, and it has become one of the most pervasive and
least acknowledged forms of racism and hate in the Western world. It is not
merely a matter of interpersonal prejudice, but rather a structural system that
operates across governments, news media, universities, policing, and public
discourse.
In
Canada, the most detailed data available about this racism shows a dramatic
escalation of APR or anti-Palestinianism since October 7, 2023. A national
report documented a 600% increase of this type of hate in the eight months
following October 2023, far above the 506 incidents recorded in 2022. These
incidents include defamation, harassment, employment retaliation, censorship,
and political vilification. The overwhelming majority—77%—involved defamatory
slander portraying Palestinians or their supporters as “terrorist sympathizers”
or inherently antisemitic. This was in addition to a reported 1800%
increase in incidents of Islamophobia in the year following October 7th, as
reported by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM).
These are
not accidental spikes. They are the visible surface of a deeper structure that
mirrors, in its logic and effects, the long history of antisemitism in Europe
and Western nations.
The Arab
Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) defines
anti‑Palestinian racism as a form of racism that silences, excludes,
erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives,
including by denying the
Nakba (ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine), justifying violence against
Palestinians, erasing their human rights, and defaming them and their allies as
inherently antisemitic or terrorist. This definition is not abstract. It is
borne out in the way governments, police, universities, corporations, and news media
in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia have responded to
Palestinian life, Palestinian grief, and resistance to Israeli oppression and occupation
—not just since October 2023, but for almost eight decades since indigenous
Palestinians were pushed off their land in historic Palestine.
The
parallels between antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism become unmistakable when
we examine how each system constructs a racialized “other.” Antisemitism
historically cast Jews as conspiratorial, disloyal, and inherently dangerous,
and anti‑Palestinianism reproduces this same logic today by depicting
Palestinians as violent, irrational, or terroristic regardless of their actual
actions or political views. This pattern is starkly reflected in the 2023
Anti‑Palestinian Racism report by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the
Middle East (CJPME), which found that 585 documented incidents—nearly 60
percent of the total—involved slander portraying Palestinians as “terrorist
sympathizers,” a trope relentlessly circulated in Canadian media and political
discourse. Right‑wing
news outlets in Canada, the United States, and Europe amplified this
narrative by branding peaceful, multifaith, pro‑ceasefire demonstrations as
“pro‑Hamas rallies” or “terrorist‑supporting mobs,” even when the protests were
explicitly framed around human rights and opposition to genocide. In doing so,
these media ecosystems played a central role in dehumanizing Palestinians and
their supporters, recasting anti‑genocide campaigns as threats to national
security and democratic stability rather than legitimate expressions of
conscience.
This
racialization is not confined to Canada. Analyses of anti‑Palestinian racism in
the US shows how Palestinians and their supporters are routinely framed
as extremists or potential terrorists in American media and political
rhetoric, especially when they criticize Israeli policy or use language of
decolonization. In Europe, similar patterns appear when governments
and media describe large pro‑Palestinian marches in London, Paris, or
Berlin as “hate marches” or “pro‑terror” gatherings, despite the overwhelmingly
peaceful character of these demonstrations. The effect is to mark Palestinian
identity and solidarity as inherently suspect, just as antisemitic discourse
once marked Jewish identity as inherently dangerous.
Suppression
of Palestinian identity and history is another core feature of anti‑Palestinianism.
It amplifies anti‑Palestinian bias and prejudice by denying the Nakba, erasing Palestinian
indigeneity, and suppressing acknowledgment of decades of occupation, ethnic
cleansing, brutalization, and Israeli state violence. The ACLA description,
summarized in multiple Canadian and international reports, explicitly
identifies “denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians” and
“failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective
identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine”
as core manifestations of APR.
In Canadian public discourse, 1948 is still overwhelmingly narrated as the year
Israel came into being, with little or no acknowledgment of the mass expulsion
and dispossession of Palestinians, and the erasure of more than 500 Palestinian
towns and villages, bulldozed or having forests planted where they once
existed. This erasure extends into education and media. School
curricula often omit the Nakba entirely, and mainstream
media coverage of Gaza and the West Bank frequently strips events of
historical context, presenting Israeli violence as isolated “responses” rather
than part of a long continuum of occupation and settlement.
Criminalization
of Palestinian political expression is another defining feature of anti‑Palestinianism.
A national
study of protest policing in Canada between 2021 and 2025 found that pro‑Palestinian
protests accounted for only 10.1 percent of all demonstrations, yet they made
up 37 percent of all police interventions. The CJPME study found that in 2024,
nearly two‑thirds of all protest policing in Canada targeted pro‑Palestinian
activity, despite the fact that more than 96% of these events were entirely
peaceful. The report describes a coordinated architecture involving federal
intelligence bodies and local police, treating a human‑rights movement as a
security threat and using surveillance, bail conditions, intimidation and legal
overreach to suppress speech. In several Canadian cities, police deployed riot
squads and made mass arrests at peaceful sit‑ins and marches calling for a
ceasefire, and imposed restrictive bail conditions that barred activists from
attending future protests or using social media to express pro‑Palestinian views.
Across
the Atlantic, European governments have gone even further. France
issued blanket bans on pro‑Palestinian demonstrations, with the Interior
Minister ordering police to disperse any such gatherings and arrest organizers.
Germany
banned or severely restricted many pro‑Palestinian protests in Berlin and
other cities, often on the grounds of preventing “antisemitic incitement,” and
has moved to outlaw organizations such as Samidoun—a
Palestinian prisoner support network—under counter‑extremism laws. In the
United Kingdom, senior officials described large pro‑Palestinian marches in
London as “hate marches,” and then–Home
Secretary Suella Braverman publicly labeled the slogan “From the river to
the sea, Palestine will be free” a “hate slogan,” encouraging police to treat
its use as potential criminality. In the United
States, campus encampments and city‑center protests have been met with
aggressive policing. At Columbia University and other campuses in spring 2024,
police in riot gear dismantled pro‑Palestinian encampments, arresting hundreds
of students and faculty on charges such as trespassing and disorderly conduct,
even when the protests were nonviolent.
Punishment
of allies is another hallmark of anti‑Palestinianism. Antisemitism historically
targeted non‑Jews who stood with Jewish communities against persecution. Anti‑Palestinianism
similarly punishes Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular supporters of
Palestinian rights, branding them “antisemitic,” “extremist,” or terrorist‑adjacent
for advocating equality. The “Palestine
exception” documented by the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University
shows how institutions that celebrate diversity and human rights routinely
suspend those commitments when Palestine is involved, targeting not only
Palestinians but also their allies. In Canada, the Palestine Exception report
and related surveys document numerous cases in which students, academics, and
professionals faced retaliation for supporting Palestinian rights. Jewish and
non‑Jewish signatories to ceasefire letters have been subjected to internal
investigations, contract cancellations, and public smearing. Some university
instructors have even had their courses scrutinized or their professional appointments
delayed after they spoke out against Israeli apartheid or about the Nakba,
while student groups have faced official derecognition or funding cuts for
organizing Palestine solidarity events.
This
pattern is visible across the Western world. In the United States, high‑profile
“doxxing
trucks” have driven around elite campuses displaying the names and photos
of students—many of them Jewish—who signed statements supporting Palestinian
rights, labelling them “antisemites” or “terrorist supporters” and inviting employers
to blacklist them. Journalists
have been fired or pushed out of newsrooms for using terms like
“Palestine,” “occupation,” or “genocide” in their reporting or social media
posts. Clergy
and lay leaders in European Christian churches who have spoken out for
Palestinian rights have been denounced as antisemitic and, in some cases,
removed from positions or had their events cancelled. These are not random
overreactions; they are the enforcement mechanisms of anti‑Palestinianism as a
system that seeks to isolate Palestinians by making solidarity socially and
professionally dangerous.
Anti‑Palestinianism
is also inseparable from the material system of domination under which
Palestinians live. In the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Palestinians
endure military occupation, siege, settlement expansion, home demolitions, and
mass incarceration. Repeated large‑scale assaults on Gaza—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and the ongoing Gaza genocide
since 2023—have killed tens of thousands of civilians, including children,
journalists, medics, and elders, with two independent studies estimating the
cumulative death toll at 377,000 and
more than 680,000.
Yet anti‑Palestinian discourse routinely inverts this reality, portraying
Palestinians as the primary source of violence while erasing or rationalizing
the structural violence imposed on them by Israel. As the systemic APR study
notes, justifying violence against Palestinians and denying them equal dignity
and worth are defining features of anti‑Palestinianism. In Canadian media and
politics, this manifests in the reflexive framing of Israeli military actions
as “self‑defence,” while Palestinian resistance—whether armed, unarmed, or
purely symbolic—is cast as terrorism. This dynamic is reinforced by the stark
imbalance in political and media access, where pro‑Palestinian advocates are
granted far less face time with elected officials and far less airtime or
column space in mainstream news than pro‑Israel or Zionist voices, further
entrenching a narrative that marginalizes Palestinian humanity and
perspectives.
These
dynamics become even more stark when viewed through the lens of the Mark Carney
government’s posture toward the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Even as
international courts, UN agencies, genocide and Holocaust scholars, and prominent
human rights organizations have declared that genocidal crimes are taking place
as defined under the Genocide Convention, the Carney
government has refused to use the word at all, choosing instead a
vocabulary of euphemisms—“crisis,” “conflict,” “tragedy”—that obscures the
deliberate, systematic destruction of an entire people. This refusal is not
semantic, it is political. To name genocide would be to acknowledge legal
obligations under the Genocide Convention, including the duty to prevent, the
duty to punish, and the duty to cease all forms of complicity. By declining to
name the crime, the Carney shields himself and his government from these
obligations and reinforces the broader architecture of anti‑Palestinianism that
treats Palestinian life as less grievable, less visible, and less worthy of
protection.
The Canadian
government’s decision to continue
authorizing weapons exports to Israel even as the official death toll in
Gaza approached 80,000, even as entire neighborhoods were flattened, even as UN
experts warned of famine engineered through the deliberate obstruction of
humanitarian aid, reflects the same logic. The government’s insistence that
these exports were “non‑lethal” or “not directly linked” to the assault mirrors
the logic of anti‑Palestinianism—a logic that minimizes Palestinian suffering,
abstracts Palestinian death into technicalities, and treats Palestinian bodies
as collateral rather than as human beings entitled to the full protection of
international law. The government’s refusal to sanction Israeli political and
military leaders—despite their explicit calls for the destruction of Gaza,
despite their public statements advocating the genocide of Palestinians,
despite their command responsibility for mass killing—reveals a deeper moral
failure. When Israeli leaders openly invoke the biblical
language of extermination, when they describe Palestinians as “human
animals,” when they call for Gaza to be destroyed
or completely “erased,”
these are not ambiguous statements. They are incitement to genocide. Yet the
Canadian government has declined to impose sanctions, declined to restrict
diplomatic engagement, and declined to hold any Israeli official accountable.
When
antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism are placed side by side, the parallels
between them come sharply into focus. Both operate by constructing an entire
people as inherently dangerous or undeserving of rights, and both depend on
erasing or denying the group’s history, trauma, and claims to justice. Each
system suppresses political expression, punishes those who stand in solidarity,
and provides ideological cover for state violence. However, one difference is
that Western societies have come to terms with their historic treatment of Jews
and made amends, while anti-Palestinianism is embedded within institutions that
profess universal human‑rights commitments while simultaneously carving out
exceptions when the victims are Palestinians. It is within this broader
architecture that the Carney government’s refusal to recognize the genocide in
Gaza, its continued authorization of weapons exports to Israel, and its
unwillingness to sanction Israeli leaders must be understood. These are not
isolated policy missteps or bureaucratic oversights; they are manifestations of
a deeper, systemic prejudice that devalues Palestinian life and shields those
responsible for Palestinian suffering from accountability.
Recognizing
anti‑Palestinianism as a form of racism equal in gravity to antisemitism does
not diminish the specificity of Jewish historical trauma, nor does it collapse
distinct experiences into a single narrative. Instead, it insists that the
tools we have developed to understand and combat antisemitism—attention to
dehumanizing stereotypes, to structural exclusion, to the criminalization of
identity, and to the role of state power—must also be applied to the treatment
of Palestinians and those who stand with them. The CJPME reports and the ACLA
study make clear that anti‑Palestinian racism is systemic in Canada, operating
across media, politics, education, and law. Analyses from scholars and
journalists show that similar dynamics are at work in the United States and
Europe, where Palestinians and their supporters face erasure, defamation, repression
and persecution.
If
antisemitism is rightly understood as a profound moral and political danger
that corrodes democratic life and paves the way for atrocity, then anti‑Palestinianism
must be understood in the same register. It is a system that devalues
Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian
resistance, and punishes those who refuse to look away. It is also a system
that enables governments like Carney’s to continue supplying weapons to a state
accused of genocide, to refuse to name the crime unfolding before the world,
and to ignore the deliberate starvation of an entire population through the
blocking of humanitarian aid. To confront anti‑Palestinianism is not to
undermine the struggle against antisemitism; it is to extend the same ethical
standard to another people whose humanity has been systematically denied. It is
to insist that the universal principles invoked in defense of Jewish life must
also be invoked in defense of Palestinian life. And it is to recognize that a
government that refuses to name genocide, refuses to halt its material support
for it, and refuses to hold its perpetrators accountable is not neutral—it is
complicit.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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