New Report Details How Pro-Palestinian Protests Are Suppressed in Democratic Countries

A new report tracking the health of civic freedoms around the world identifies a notable trend: Crackdowns on Palestinian solidarity protests in every kind of society, from the most open to the least. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“Both the conflict itself and its impact on civic space … is one of the main takeaways of the year for us,” says Tara Petrović, an author of the report by CIVICUS Monitor, a global alliance of civil society groups, headquartered in Johannesburg. “We’ve seen expressions of solidarity and we’ve seen repression of these expressions of solidarity at pretty much every corner of the globe.”

Read More: In Europe, Free Speech Is Under Threat for Pro-Palestine Protesters

Most protests are over issues close to home—food prices, national politics. The throngs that gathered outside South Korea’s parliament on Tuesday were chanting against the President’s abrupt imposition of martial law, which outlawed just such expressions. Had the decree survived the day, the space for civil society in South Korea might have dropped from its current assessment, “narrowed,” to “obstructed” in the next annual CIVICUS report, titled People Power Under Attack. The group assays civic space in 198 countries, from “open” to “repressed,” and in its newly released report found that nearly one-tenth of the protests suppressed by authorities involved Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, or solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The deadly Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the devastating retaliatory war that answered it, sparked protests around the world, many demanding an end to a war that has claimed the lives of at least 1,200 Israelis and 44,000 Palestinians. But not all such demonstrations have been welcomed. In several countries, including those where civic freedoms are considered by CIVICUS to be “narrowed,” such as the Netherlands (whose standing was downgraded from “open” this year), Australia, and Italy, pro-Palestinian protesters were met with what the organization deems excessive force, arrests, and detention. Some, such as France, banned protests outright on the grounds that they posed a security risk.

Germany stands out, according to Petrović. In addition to cracking down on protests, German authorities have cancelled pro-Palestinian events, conducted raids on the homes of pro-Palestinian activists, and even enforced Schengen-wide bans on pro-Palestinian speakers, such as the British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, trying to visit the country. (That ban, which applied to the 29 European nations that eliminated passport controls for travel between them, was subsequently overturned.) Most recently, the German government introduced new rules mandating that those applying for naturalization in the country affirm Israel’s right to exist. Germany’s ranking on the CIVICUS Monitor was downgraded from “open” to “narrowed” in 2023—a relegation that Petrović says was widely attributed to the state’s actions against climate activists, with tactics not dissimilar to those now being used against Palestinian-solidarity campaigners.

In the U.S., whose CIVICUS ranking has stood at “narrowed” since 2022, college campuses remain the fulcrum of debate over pro-Palestinian demonstrations, with more than 3,100 people arrested or detained at protests that often included encampments, the vast majority of which were peaceful. The controversies cost the leaders of several Ivy League universities their jobs, and resulted in many universities changing their rules around permissible campus activity and introducing new disciplinary measures in an apparent bid to prevent further such protests from taking place. Last month, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would enable the government to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accuses of supporting terrorist entities—a power that opponents of the bill says could be weaponized to target certain organizations, including Palestinian rights groups.

“Engaging in activism or public debate concerning Israel and the situation of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation has become an incredibly fraught endeavor,” Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes in Suppressing Dissent: Shrinking Civic Space, Transnational Repression and Palestine-Israel, which is due to be published on Dec. 5. “This is true even outside of academic settings, whether one lives in Israel, in the occupied Palestinian territories, in a liberal democracy such as the United States, or under autocratic rule in the Arab Middle East. That American classrooms and college campuses—so often idealized as safe spaces for ideas to be debated—have become deeply contested terrain is no accident.”

So long as the war in Gaza persists, the protests opposed to it are expected to continue—as are the efforts to suppress them. But Petrović notes that the movements have already had a demonstrable impact on policy: several countries have withheld weapons sales to Israel, as well as restored funding to UNRWA, suspended when Israel reported a handful of Palestinians involved in the Oct. 7 attack also worked for the the U.N. agency that provides health, education, and food aid to Palestinians. Visibility, however, is the main accomplishment.

“What we’ve seen this year was this incredible global mobilization of people for the same cause,” she says, “and more specifically in solidarity with the people of Palestine and what they’re facing.”