Anti-Palestinian Racism During the Gaza War

The phrase "anti-Palestinian racism" was used during the war by public figures including Jordan's Queen Rania, while government and advocacy sources separately documented anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim hate after October 7, 2023.[1][2] The concept sits at the intersection of several overlapping categories — anti-Arab prejudice, anti-Muslim discrimination, and specifically ethnic animus toward Palestinians — and no single legal or institutional definition has been uniformly adopted.

Sources examining the phenomenon include U.S. government reports, congressional testimony, surveys by polling firms, reports by civil-liberties and advocacy organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), academic chapters published in the context of Jewish-Muslim relations research, and news reporting from Israeli, American, and European outlets. These sources differ in methodology, scope, and the categories they count, and their findings should not be aggregated into a single unduplicated total. Jordan's Queen Rania argued at a September 2024 conference in Italy that the unequal concern for Palestinian and Israeli security expressed in Western responses to the war was itself a form of racism, stating, "This devaluation of life must be called out for what it is: anti-Palestinian racism."[1] The cited report documents her characterization rather than presenting it as an independently established finding.

An ADL survey of 1,484 U.S. adults conducted October 31–November 1, 2023, found that 68 percent reported seeing at least one example of hateful content directed at Jews, Israelis, Muslims, Palestinians, or Arabs since October 7. Among all respondents, 48 percent reported exposure to anti-Palestinian content and 53 percent to anti-Israeli content.[3] The survey measured self-described exposure and did not supply a definition or item-by-item breakdown of what respondents classified as anti-Palestinian.

In a separate review published October 26, 2023, ADL researchers manually examined posts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X/Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit published between October 7 and October 18. They found dehumanizing or stereotyping language targeting Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, including content collectively blaming all Palestinians or all Muslims for Hamas's violence.[4] The review also identified accounts using the acronym "TPD" — standing for "Total Palestinian Death" — alongside similar acronyms, as shorthand for advocacy of genocidal violence against Palestinians.[4] ADL noted that hateful content appeared more frequently in images and videos than in text.[4]

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in February 2024 found that 70 percent of Muslim respondents said discrimination against Muslims had increased since the Israel-Hamas war began, compared with 89 percent of Jewish respondents who said discrimination against Jews had increased.[5] Pew noted that its survey did not separately analyze Arab Americans or Americans of Palestinian descent, meaning its results provide context about perceived religious discrimination but are not a direct measure of anti-Palestinian racism as a distinct category.[5]

One widely reported act of anti-Palestinian violence in the immediate aftermath of October 7 was the murder of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American, in Illinois on October 14, 2023. He was stabbed 26 times by his landlord; his mother, Hanaan Shahin, was seriously wounded in the same attack.[6] U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland stated that the Department of Justice had opened a federal hate-crimes investigation, describing the killings as capable of further raising fears of hate-fueled violence among Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities.[6] Authorities said they believed the attack was motivated by anti-Muslim hatred and the Israel-Hamas war, and that the suspect faced murder, hate-crime, and other charges.[7]

In November 2023, three college students of Palestinian descent — Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Tahseen Aliahmad — were shot in Burlington, Vermont; two were wearing keffiyehs.[7] The family of Hisham Awartani said the attack was unprovoked; a bullet lodged in his spine left him paralyzed from the waist down.[8] Senate testimony from Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, cited the Vermont shooting and the murder of Wadea Al-Fayoume alongside an unnamed 25-year-old man attacked with a baseball bat in Brooklyn as examples of post-October 7 anti-Palestinian violence.[9]

Also documented in ADL reporting: on October 12, 2023, men in Brooklyn were assaulted by attackers carrying Israeli flags and shouting anti-Palestinian remarks.[4] A former federal government employee was arrested and charged with multiple hate-crime counts after allegedly harassing a halal food cart vendor in New York and making statements referenced in the ADL reporting as celebrating Palestinian civilian casualties.[7] In a separate September 2024 case, federal prosecutors charged a Kentucky man with brandishing a gun and threatening a Palestinian American and Muslim man at a restaurant; the Department of Justice described the charge as part of its continuing prosecution of hate crimes.[10]

ADL's incident sampling also described harassment at Palestinian-owned businesses: on October 13, 2023, the owner and employees of Ayat, a Palestinian restaurant in Manhattan, were harassed by an individual who accused them of being terrorists; the restaurant also received threatening voicemails and a wave of negative online reviews.[7] On October 25, 2023, a Palestinian staff member at American University found a note in their office reading "GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM" and "DEATH TO ALL PALESTINIANS!"[7]

Maya Berry's Senate testimony drew on partial state-level data from 27 states and the District of Columbia, which showed recorded anti-Arab hate crimes rising from 104 in 2022 to 180 in 2023. Data available from 21 states and the District of Columbia showed approximately half of 2023's reported incidents occurring in the final three months of the year, representing what Berry described as a 54 percent increase for Arab Americans in that period.[9] She explicitly cautioned that these were state-level rather than federal figures and that hate crimes were substantially underreported.[9] The U.S. Department of Justice described its hate-crimes response after October 7 as addressing a rise in antisemitic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hate, though it did not provide a separate total specifically for anti-Palestinian incidents.[2]

CAIR reported receiving 3,578 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian discrimination and hate in the United States during the final three months of 2023, a 178 percent increase over the same period the previous year.[8] Those complaints included 662 reports of employment discrimination, 472 of hate crimes or incidents, and 448 of education discrimination.[8] These are complaints reported to an advocacy organization rather than incidents independently verified or adjudicated.

CAIR's 2024 annual data recorded 8,658 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints — the highest annual figure since the organization began publishing data in 1996, representing a 7.4 percent increase over 2023.[11] The largest complaint categories were employment discrimination (15.4 percent), immigration and asylum (14.8 percent), education discrimination (9.8 percent), and hate crimes (7.5 percent).[11] CAIR attributed the sustained increase to heightened Islamophobia associated with the Gaza war and campus protests; the figures combine anti-Muslim and anti-Arab categories and do not isolate Palestinians as a distinct group.[11]

Harvard University's parallel task-force reports on antisemitism and on anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias, released in April 2025, found that 56 percent of Muslim student respondents felt physically unsafe and 92 percent of Muslim students and faculty feared repercussions for voicing their opinions.[12] CTech reported that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman had heard from Muslim, Arab, and especially Palestinian colleagues in the technology industry that they felt uncomfortable discussing their experiences, often out of fear of retaliation or career damage.[13] CAIR separately told CTech that incidents motivated by Islamophobia or bias against Palestinians and Arabs rose 172 percent in the two months after the war began compared with the same period the previous year, though the article did not provide the underlying incident-count methodology.[13]

Following October 7, Israeli authorities initiated a significant increase in investigations and prosecutions for alleged speech offenses. A report to the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee recorded 394 investigations into alleged incitement to terrorism initiated since October 7, compared with 78 such investigations approved over the five years from 2018 to 2022.[14] After a November 8 amendment to the counterterrorism law, hundreds of Palestinians — including Arab and Palestinian citizens of Israel — were arrested for social-media posts.[15]

The Mossawa Center reported 350 criminal speech-related investigations after October 7, with most suspects described by authorities as supporters of terrorism; Adalah reported it was monitoring 251 arrest and detention cases outside the Jerusalem District as of November 7, linking 121 to social-media posts and 31 to arrests at demonstrations.[16] By March 27, 2024, Adalah reported that 401 people — most of them Arabs — had been detained for speech-related offenses that police described as incitement to terrorism, out of 667 suspects total, including 590 Arabs and 13 Jewish Israeli citizens.[17] Adalah said the crackdown had left Palestinian citizens unable to protest or freely express their views.[17]

As of February 19, 2024, Adalah reported that indictments for incitement exceeded 140 under the 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law.[14] Globes reported police figures from the first weeks of the war showing that authorities had examined 399 publications suspected of incitement, approved investigations in 160 cases, arrested approximately 100 suspects, and filed 34 indictments, with the reported offenses concerning support for or identification with a terrorist organization or calls for terrorist acts.[18]

The U.S. State Department's 2023 human-rights report said Arab civil-society leaders cited examples in which Israeli political leaders portrayed the Arab community as an enemy, and that the October 7 attacks heightened fear and mistrust between Jewish and Arab citizens in workplaces, on campuses, and on social media.[16] The Mossawa Center described Arab and Palestinian citizens' situation as a "multifaceted crisis" involving what it called systemic police neglect, selective enforcement, and disregard for civil liberties.[15] Human-rights groups criticized the speech-related arrests as suppressing free expression, with NGO allegations that counterterrorism laws were being used to silence opposition to the war and criticism of government policy, including cases where individuals were charged after expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians or posting Quranic verses.[15]

Among documented individual cases, police arrested singer and physician Dalal Abu Amneh on October 16 after she posted a Quranic verse — "wala ghaliba illa Allah" ("there is no victory but God") — accompanied by a Palestinian flag.[15] She was released without charges after two days; activists described the arrest as sending a chilling message to the Arab community, particularly because she was arrested after going to a police station to request protection.[15] After her release, demonstrations were held outside her home and her water supply was repeatedly interrupted.[15]

The Israel Police told the Jerusalem Post it upheld freedom of speech but also had to address incitement, threats, hate speech, and public-safety concerns.[14] Early reporting by Calcalist documented enforcement actions that authorities presented as responding to posts explicitly praising Hamas or the October 7 attack and to statements accompanying footage of killings, as well as a mosque sermon calling for jihad.[19]

The State Department report said Israeli authorities limited demonstrations by citizens expressing solidarity with Palestinian civilians in Gaza or calling for a ceasefire. Citing +972 Magazine, the report recorded that authorities prohibited all but one independently organized protest by Arab and Palestinian citizens of Israel between October 7 and the end of 2023.[16] Israel Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai stated on October 17 that police would have "zero tolerance" for Gaza-solidarity protests.[16] In a video posted to the police's Arabic-language TikTok channel, Shabtai also said, "Anyone who wants to identify with Gaza is welcome — I'll put them on buses that will send them there, I'll help them get there."[20] The remarks were reported shortly after police broke up a Haifa rally in support of Gaza and arrested six people.[20]

Israeli police also arrested hundreds under incitement and counter-terrorism charges; police spokesman Eli Levy said 63 people had been arrested in Israel since October 7 on suspicion of supporting or inciting terror in the initial weeks of the conflict.[20] Adalah separately reported post-October 7 expulsions or suspensions of students, job terminations or demotions, a police ban on solidarity protests with Gaza, suppression of speech by Arab and Palestinian lawyers, and incitement against Arab and Palestinian political representatives.[15]

On October 28, 2023, a mob of hundreds of Jewish extremists stormed Arab students' dormitories at the Academic College of Netanya, chanting "Death to Arabs"; some were armed and attempted to harm students inside the building.[16] Rioters accused Arab students of throwing eggs at nearby Jewish worshippers and playing loud Arabic music. The mayor asked the college administrator to evacuate the dormitories and identify those responsible for harassing worshippers; no arrests were made of either the alleged harassers or the rioters.[16] Arab students were reinstated after attorney Nayef Zidani and the Mossawa Center filed a lawsuit.[16]

As prewar context, the State Department report also described incidents at Jerusalem Day celebrations on May 18, 2023, when approximately 50,000 Israeli marchers entered the Old City through the Damascus Gate. Citing press reports, it said crowds chanted "death to Arabs" and "the nation of Israel lives, may your villages burn"; some marchers spat at Palestinians and journalists, beat on shop doors in Palestinian neighborhoods, or placed anti-Palestinian slogans on Palestinian property.[16] Police blocked surrounding streets and forcibly removed Palestinian protesters from the route, according to international observers and media reporters.[16]

A Calcalist feature reported that the Kayan Association's emergency hotline received more than 850 complaints since October 2023 concerning incitement, political persecution, and violence against Arabs in workplaces and academic institutions; before the war, the hotline had primarily handled reports of violence against women.[21] Arab citizens described facing increased suspicion and being labeled "terror supporters" for expressing grief over deaths in Gaza or criticizing the war.[21]

Disciplinary proceedings against Arab students and faculty at Israeli higher-education institutions rose sharply after October 7. Approximately 130 Arab students and lecturers at 33 higher-education institutions were summoned to disciplinary hearings, suspended, or expelled through processes that Mossawa characterized as expedited and improper.[16] The Mossawa Center estimated approximately 160 disciplinary proceedings at roughly 33 Israeli colleges and universities against Arab and left-wing Jewish students since the war began, covering expressions ranging from solidarity with Gaza residents to unrelated social-media posts.[14]

An Adalah review reported by Calcalist found that at least 124 Arab students at 36 academic institutions had been summoned to inquiries or hearings since October 2023, with 35 students acquitted, 11 receiving an "educational punishment," 23 suspended for up to a year, and 11 suspended for more than a year or permanently expelled.[21] Adalah reported that about 48 percent of 94 Arab Israeli students it represented at 34 institutions had been found innocent by disciplinary committees and returned to study.[14]

The Technion said it had investigated about 40 complaints and prosecuted five cases, which it characterized as involving active, explicit support for the October 7 attack rather than expressions of compassion for Gaza civilians.[14] One University of Haifa student told the Jerusalem Post that after posting a Palestinian flag and "I stand with Palestine" on Instagram, he received threats of physical violence, including threats to throw him from the student union roof or push him down stairs, though he was not referred to the university disciplinary committee for that post.[14]

Workplace cases reported by Calcalist included Noor Abu Naar, a nurse at Wolfson Hospital who was suspended and later dismissed after sharing an Instagram story showing five children from Gaza killed in an Israeli bombing, captioned "The Israeli target bank."[21] The Health Ministry's summons characterized the post as incitement and said it could deter people from seeking care; Abu Naar denied supporting terrorism and filed suit in the Tel Aviv Labor Court.[21] Social worker Nasreen Natasha was dismissed by the Jerusalem municipality after posting material expressing identification with Palestinian suffering; her dismissal letter, as quoted in Calcalist, said her publications identified with only one side and made her unfit for a management role.[21] Natasha said she had wanted to express compassion toward children, not support terrorism, and filed a claim in the Jerusalem Labor Court; the municipality said it would present its position in the ongoing proceedings.[21]

Academic researcher Adam Sutcliffe argues that the British political and campus environment has long been more attentive to concerns about Jewish students' possible experiences of antisemitism than to Muslim students' equivalent concerns.[22] Sutcliffe cites "substantial documented evidence" of British Muslim students experiencing surveillance, discrimination, exclusion, and silencing, although the chapter itself does not reproduce incident-level evidence or figures for those experiences.[22] The chapter does not use the specific phrase "anti-Palestinian racism"; its discussion concerns Muslim students' treatment, suspicion directed at Palestine solidarity, and unequal recognition of Palestinian concerns.[22]

Sutcliffe reports that criticism of protests against deaths in Gaza often focused on allegations of antisemitism, particularly directed at Palestine-solidarity student encampments. Then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman urged police chiefs to consider whether displaying a Palestinian flag or chanting Palestine-solidarity slogans might, in some circumstances, be antisemitic and prosecutable as racially aggravated offences. The chapter presents this as part of a political debate rather than as an established legal finding.[22] Sutcliffe also reports that successive Conservative education ministers heavily pressured universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, and argues that the definition casts suspicion over a broad and vaguely defined range of potential criticism of Israel.[22]

Protests and encampments at universities across the United Kingdom sought action from university leaders after Israel's military assault on Gaza. Sutcliffe says the protests reflected frustration, especially but not exclusively among British Muslims, with the responses of Labour and Conservative politicians to the killing and destruction in Gaza, and cites five independent candidates emphasizing Gaza winning traditionally Labour seats in the July 2024 UK general election as evidence of the depth of that frustration.[22]

A European Council on Foreign Relations report published in late September 2024 described new "xenophobic, anti-Muslim narratives and attitudes across the EU" in the context of the Gaza war, finding that many European Muslims felt "physically threatened" and "marginalized, alienated, and out of place."[23] Academic researcher Marcela Menachem Zoufalá writes that Muslims who closely identify with Palestinians may perceive that public concern for victims in Gaza is overshadowed by greater empathy for Jewish victims, intensifying their sense of exclusion.[23] The passage describes anti-Muslim experiences and perceptions; it does not establish that every such experience constituted anti-Palestinian racism specifically.

Zoufalá writes that in Europe, Muslims — whether individuals or organized groups — were frequently pressured to publicly condemn the October 7 massacre, and that in some countries failing to condemn it, or not doing so forcefully enough, led to threats of institutional or financial repercussions and to media campaigns.[23] She frames these examples as parallel silencing affecting Muslim and Jewish minorities, though her chapter does not quantify the incidents or identify the specific countries involved.[23]

In January 2025, reporting on Amnesty International's suspension of its Israeli branch described an internal dispute involving allegations of anti-Palestinian racism within the branch. Amnesty International's interim board chair said Palestinian board-member complaints had been followed by resignations in 2022, 2023, and 2024, and that the branch had failed to address findings of "endemic anti-Palestinian racism."[24] The local branch had rejected the parent organization's 2024 genocide finding about Gaza, saying it was not sufficiently substantiated while acknowledging possible widespread international-law violations, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.[24] Amnesty insiders disputed the racism allegations and questioned the suspension process; the allegations and their relationship to the branch's disagreement over the Gaza report were contested.[24]

A UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report said that after October 7, 2023, there was a "marked increase in hate speech and incitement to hatred and violence against Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel," and that no arrests for such hate speech were reported.[25] It cited documentation by the digital-rights organization 7amleh of 19,000 violent tweets in Hebrew on X in the period following October 7.[25]

The same UN report said Palestinian journalists and bloggers faced intimidation and arrest under broadly defined charges of "incitement" or "terrorism," with the risk increasing after October 7.[25] It described Israeli security forces arresting Palestinians following publication or consumption of social-media content related to October 7 and the Gaza conflict, and characterized the effect on Palestinians' freedom of expression and access to information as disproportionate and discriminatory, though the report did not give a total for arrests specifically connected to such content.[25]

In discussing post-October 7 rhetoric, the UN report said statements by people in authority on both sides had contributed to a "toxic atmosphere within which violence and discrimination have flourished."[25] It cited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reference to Amalek — "‘You must remember what Amalek has done to you,’ says our Holy Bible — and we do remember, and we are fighting" — in the context of senior Israeli political and military figures' use of dehumanizing language about Palestinians, and said the developments increased the risk of atrocity crimes.[25] The report placed this rhetoric within the broader context of the October 7 attacks, the war in Gaza, killings, hostage-taking, and other reported abuses by multiple parties.

A consistent challenge across the documentation of anti-Palestinian racism is definitional: sources variously describe incidents as anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, or anti-Muslim, and these categories overlap without being interchangeable. ADL explicitly noted that for some altercations involving pro-Palestinian protesters, it was unclear whether they were explicitly motivated by anti-Muslim bias.[7] The ADL survey measuring exposure to anti-Palestinian content did not supply a definition or item-by-item breakdown of that category.[3]

Hate-crime data presented at the Senate hearing rested on partial state-level figures rather than federal FBI totals, with the witness cautioning that incidents are substantially underreported.[9] CAIR's complaint totals combine anti-Muslim and anti-Arab categories without isolating Palestinians as a distinct group, and represent complaints submitted to an advocacy organization rather than independently verified or adjudicated incidents.[11] The counts reported by different organizations cover differing time periods and use differing definitions, and cannot be responsibly aggregated into a single unduplicated national or international total.

Sutcliffe's chapter does not use the specific term "anti-Palestinian racism," so applying the label to its discussions of Muslim students' treatment or suspicion of Palestine solidarity requires care.[22] Zoufalá's chapter similarly addresses anti-Muslim experiences and perceptions rather than anti-Palestinian racism as a legally or empirically defined category.[23] Meanwhile, Israeli authorities maintained that prosecutions concerned unlawful praise or support for terrorist violence rather than the suppression of Palestinian identity or political expression, and that police and universities distinguished explicit support for atrocities from expressions of compassion for civilian suffering.[14][19]