Gaza First Amendment Alert
With the ceasefire in Gaza, we hope desperately for peace. In the meantime, students continue to face disciplinary consequences, and a movement journalist stares down criminal charges.
As a tidal wave of repression hits pro-Palestine activism and advocacy, the Gaza First Amendment Alert keeps you up to date, with posts every other Wednesday.
We hope that the ceasefire holds, and that this newsletter becomes unnecessary. For the immediate future, we will continue the Gaza First Amendment Alert. In the happy event that this newsletter is no longer needed, we will continue to monitor attacks on pro-Palestine speech and expression.
A Ceasefire in Gaza?
As we were putting the finishing touches on this edition of the Gaza First Amendment Alert, news came in that a temporary ceasefire agreement has been reached. The deal will not go into effect until Sunday and Israel has already killed 81 Palestinians since the deal was announced. According to the United Nations Interfirm Force in Lebanon, Israel has repeatedly violated its truce in Lebanon, leading to fears it may collapse.
This is a great reason for caution, but we also feel optimism with the Palestinians of Gaza and people around the world that there will be a respite to the horror. While it is still too early to say if it will hold and what happens on the end date of the ceasefire, we are hoping that this is the end of Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza.
Attacks on the free expression rights of Palestinian rights supporters predate Israel’s current genocidal war in Gaza. And they will likely continue even after this war ends. For decades, we at Defending Rights & Dissent have been at the forefront of opposing attacks on Palestinian solidarity activists, as well as attacks on free expression rights, protests, and civil society broadly. Our work is not done, but in the hopeful event that Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza ends we would also hope the current crisis for free expression rights – the worst in decades – subsides. At which point, there would no longer be a need for this newsletter.
We are continuing on with the Gaza First Amendment Alert for the foreseeable future. In the hopeful event that this newsletter is put out of commission, we will inform you of future monitoring efforts concerning free expression and civil society rights.
For now, we hope for peace.
Israel Continues Attacks on Journalists
Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for journalists in recorded history. The record number of journalists killed is not only the result of Israel’s indiscriminate campaign of mass killing, but deliberate targeting and assassinations.
On December 27, 2024, Israel carried out a strike on a van clearly marked press, killing five journalists with Quds TV. Their names were Ibrahim Jamal Ibrahim Al-Sheikh Ali, Faisal Abdallah Muhammad Abu Qamsan, Mohammed Ayad Khamis al-Ladaa, Ayman Nihad Abd Alrahman Jadi, and Fadi Ihab Muhammad Ramadan Hassouna. Israel did not deny responsibility. Instead they boasted they killed “Islamic Jihad operatives posing as journalists.”
On January 13, 2025, Israeli forces killed Ahlam Al Nafed. Al Nafed had provided reporting to the US based Drop Site News.
On January 9, 2025 Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed gave a speech from Gaza that went viral describing both the conditions under which journalists in Gaza report on the genocide and condemning international media organizations for turning a blind eye to the killing of Palestinian journalists. “Maybe if we were Ukranians or of any other citizenship with blond hair and blue eyes the world would rage and rant for us. But because we are Palestinians we have only one right, which is to die,” he said.
Congress’s Top Priority, Shielding Netanyhu from the ICC
On January 3, 2025, the 119th Congress was sworn-in. On January 9, just six days into the new session, the House passed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which sanctions the International Criminal Court over arrest warrants issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. ICC prosecutors will have US property and property transactions blocked under the International Emergency Powers Act. They will also be denied visas to the US. The bill includes a provision allowing the President to waive sanctions on a case-by-case basis for periods of 90 days if doing so is “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Any individual engaging in transactions with the sanctioned ICC prosecutors could face up to 20 years in prison.
The Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act passed the House 243 to 140, with all no votes coming from the Democratic caucus. One Republican, the libertarian-minded Thomas Massie, voted present. Initially, the act was to be included in the House rules package. Massie objected on social media, stating “How did a bill to protect Netanyahu make it into the House rules package to be voted on immediately after the speaker vote? Where are our priorities?!”
The bill now heads to the Senate, where the new Republican Senate leader John Thune has already stated its passage is a priority.
“Movement Journalist” Faces Criminal Charges for Reporting
Journalist Alissa Azar is set to stand trial January 27, 2025, for trespassing. Azar was one of 30 people arrested during a May 2, 2024 Palestine solidarity protest at Portland State University. Azar was there to cover the protest and allegesthat an officer with the Portland Police Bureau singled her out for arrest.
Last year, Defending Rights & Dissent joined a number of press freedom groups calling on the District Attorney to drop the charges.
Student Protests Continue to Come Under Attack
Student protests have continued to come under attack. On January 8, 2025, the Chicago Police Department arrestedan undergraduate on two felony charges: aggravated battery of a peace officer and obstructing or resisting a peace officer. The arrest stems from an October 11, 2024 pro-Palestine protest. Police allege the individual physically intervened to prevent the arrest of a fellow protester.
New York University has responded to a peaceful sit-in against the war in Gaza by suspending its participants for one year. According to NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, those suspended were not only those who partook in a sit-in at an administration building, but also “those who simply sat in the lobby of the library in solidarity.”
Two members of the University of Colorado chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine are suing the school alleging violations of free speech and due process rights. In North Carolina, the district attorney has dismissed the remaining charges against student protesters stemming from a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of North Carolina.
Distinguished, Tenured Law Professor Forced out of Columbia University
Katherine Franke, the James L. Dohr Professor of Law, has been forced out of Columbia University, where the tenured professor taught for 25 years
Columbia University announced Prof. Franke has retired. Prof. Franke disputes that characterization, stating “While the university may call this change in my status ‘retirement’, it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms.”
Columbia University had been investigating Prof. Franke over remarks made on Democracy Now! Prof. Franke was discussing an assault by pro-Israel students on pro-Palestine students. Prof. Franke told Democracy Now!:
And what the students were able to do is examine video from that protest and identify, I think, three older students. We have a — Columbia has a program. It’s a graduate relationship with older students from other countries, including Israel. And it’s something that many of us were concerned about, because so many of those Israeli students, who then come to the Columbia campus, are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus. And it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past. But we’ve never seen anything like this. And the students were able to identify three of these exchange students, basically, from Israel, who had just come out of military service, who were spraying the pro-Palestinian students with this skunk water. And they were disguised in keffiyehs so that they could mix in with the students who were demanding that the university divest from companies that are supporting the occupation and the war, and were protesting and demanding a ceasefire. So we know who they were.
Prof. Franke’s remarks were latched onto by pro-Israel groups and members of Congress and she was accused of discrimination against Israeli students. In fact, the existence of the investigation against Prof. Fanke was made public by then Columbia University President Minouche Shafik last year during her infamous Congressional testimony.
Prof. Franke represented Defending Rights & Dissent in an amicus brief in Awad, et al. v. Fordham University. The brief sought to explain to the court the McCarthyite atmosphere supporters of Palestinian rights face on college campuses.