The New McCarthyism: On Canary Mission’s Toxic Blacklisting of Pro-Palestinian Sentiment

In February 2015, a friend texted me the following message: Hey Omar, there’s a new site you need to see… it has your name and information on it.

Graduate school is hard for everyone, but I think it’s fair to assume that the majority of grad students don’t count being blacklisted among the list of anticipated struggles.

But I was not like the majority of students at UCLA.

I, along with many fellow UCLA students, graduate and undergraduate alike, was part of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, an organization dedicated to advancing freedom for the Palestinian people. Those disquieting words sent by a fellow SJP member were my introduction to the fact that I had been added to a new website called Canary Mission.

College campuses are not the only front for Palestine advocacy in the US. But Palestinian Civil Society’s global call for Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in 2005 inspired new waves of activism. This activism often included the passage of BDS resolutions on US campuses by student groups supporting Palestinian rights—and the Israel lobby has taken increasing note. “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech,” a breakthrough 2015 report co-authored by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights, found that of all of the requests Palestine Legal received for support, “89 percent in 2014 and 80 percent in the first half of 2015” concerned “students and scholars, a reaction to the increasingly central role universities play in the movement for Palestinian rights.” In November 2021, Palestine Legal affirmed that “Palestine is Still An Exception—Especially at Universities.”

In The Lobby, an important documentary about the influence of the Israel lobby on US electoral politics and college campuses, Al Jazeera uncovered how Israel lobby groups work in tandem with the Israeli state to undermine student activism through a variety of means, including reliance on sites such as Canary Mission. Released by The Electronic Intifada after Israel lobby pressure initially convinced Qatar to refuse to air it, the documentary reveals the lobby’s aggressive approach to be motivated by fear of the influence that exposure to Palestine advocacy can have on subsequent US policy. As Jacob Baime, Executive Director of the Israel on Campus Coalition remarks, “the one thing every member of Congress and President and ambassador and newspaper editor has in common is by and large they spent a little bit of time on a college campus, and probably those were formative years.”

I joined SJP in 2012. At the time, I was one year into a PhD program in Comparative Literature at UCLA and had been drawn to SJP after seeing its event about the passage of House Resolution 35, a non-binding state bill that conflated criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism and encouraged universities to censor student activism for Palestine accordingly.

The attempt by Israeli nationalist, or Zionist, institutions and individuals to “game” political discourse by criminalizing speech, activism, and academic research focusing on Palestine and the question of Palestinian liberation by falsely and automatically equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism remains a persistent challenge to this day. It constitutes a strategy parallel to that utilized by Canary Mission and similar sites: demonization and character assassination of an entire movement. It is a crude approach, but strategic nonetheless. If supporters of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid can successfully spread the message that advocates for Palestinian freedom are merely hate-filled bigots looking for a cover of legitimacy for their bile, then the question of Palestine no longer needs to be engaged on its merits.

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After three years of involvement with SJP, I was one of the earliest batches of Palestine organizers who found themselves on Canary Mission, the anonymously-run electronic dossier that called on potential employers to ensure that “today’s radicals do not become tomorrow’s employees.” To be sure, blacklisting as a strategy to silence support for Palestinian freedom did not begin with Canary Mission. As scholar Emmaia Gelman writes, in 1983 the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “circulated a blacklist of Arab American political groups, academics, and organizers (along with Jewish and a few Iranian groups) identifying them as ‘pro-Arab sympathizers’ and anti-Semites. The ADL’s complaint was simply that Arab Americans were changing other American’s minds about Israel.”

The ADL is a prominent Israel lobby group that weaponizes its nominal status as a civil rights organization to demonize anti-racist activism and further the false equation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. As a result, over one hundred social justice organizations came together in 2020 calling on progressive spaces to refuse to work with the ADL.

In 1986, Edward Said spoke about the experience of being added to various academic blacklists of “American Enemies of Israel.” In an interview for the film Exiles, Said noted the injustice of being decried as a “terrorist” for speaking up for Palestine as a Palestinian who continued to be denied the right to return from the homeland from which he and his family had been forcibly dispossessed. He described how blacklists often rely upon unknown informants, many of whom are paid by agencies to pose as students. In its April 18, 2018 statement, “Exposing Canary Mission,” the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association also describes several online predecessors to the blacklist site.

But even if blacklisting is a well-worn strategy of Zionist persecution, Canary Mission constitutes an escalation. As MESA’s CAF also notes in its statement, the site focuses on students as opposed to professors alone. Secondly, unlike many of the preceding examples of Palestine-focused blacklists, Canary Mission is anonymously run, making it difficult to know who is watching, or how, or by what means.

Over the years, as support for Palestine continues to grow across campuses nationwide, this strategy of Canary Mission, which remains active to this day, has negatively impacted the livelihoods and mental health of student organizers. Even as Canary Mission’s veil of anonymity has been steadily pierced, new information seems to have had little effect on the site’s operations.

Canary Mission utilizes a strategic virality, providing readily available, aggregate style content to better facilitate different permutations of repression and harassment. Academics and public figures frequently find themselves caught in the crosshairs. As Sumaya Awad and Bill Mullen write, “Canary Mission basically seeks to create a global ‘surveillance’ system based on smears and lies that follow activists everywhere.”

But Canary Mission is not just intended to intimidate or harass. It states its ultimate goal explicitly: to eliminate job prospects for supporters of Palestinian freedom and liberation. After graduating with my doctorate and continuing Palestine work by organizing with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and becoming a freelance contributor to Palestine-focused media outlets such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, I came to learn that what I had experienced during my graduate student days was the beginning of what was to be an ongoing strategy of Zionist harassment in the digital age.

Through my reporting, I would become familiar with yet another blacklist site, StopAntisemitism.org, which also works to imperil the employment and academic status of its targets. I interviewed students and professionals who were the victims of smear campaigns which coupled online defamation with relentless calls to university administration and employers demanding disciplinary action for “antisemitic” behavior that was in reality nothing more than intrepid advocacy for Palestinian freedom and liberation.

The development of newer blacklist sites clearly reflects a refinement of the use of internet and social media to criminalize support for Palestine. In addition to the webspace, blacklists like Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism.org also utilize social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to cross-post their content and exponentially amplify harassment. StopAntisemitism.org is a streamlining of what was first attempted by Canary Mission. In some ways, there is less contextual tape to cut through upon first glance: the viewer is confronted with a page called “StopAntisemitism,” immediately conveying that the material in question will constitute evidence of antisemitic incidents and sentiment.

And unlike Canary Mission, which still tries to maintain its anonymity, Stopantisemitism was openly founded by Liora Rez, a Jewish influencer who claims she founded the site to combat antisemitism online—though the site seems primarily concerned with stigmatizing criticism of Israel and Zionism. But like Canary Mission before it, and in keeping with the efforts of all individuals and agencies who act as apologists for Israeli colonialism and apartheid, StopAntisemitism.org relies upon a tendentious definition of antisemitism that renders criticism of Israeli state violence interchangeable with bigotry.

The degree to which sites like Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism can continue to negatively impact students’ and professionals’ well-being is reflective of the pervasiveness of institutional racism, under which the inherent violence and deficiency of people of color is taken for granted. As scholar Sherene Razack writes in her study of transnational anti-Muslim racism, racism is why “nothing has to make sense” when it comes to discrimination against and exclusion of racialized subjects. Orientalist narratives legitimized by imperial arrogance make it natural to presume that Palestinians and their allies are arch antisemites, barbaric savages motivated by subhuman hatred, than righteous resistors engaged in a brave and necessary struggle for anti-colonial liberation.

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In my younger years, I assumed—perhaps naively—that such harassment would be repudiated outright by academic institutions and employers. Yet ten years on, digital blacklisting seems to have become a “new normal” for Palestine advocates. Online anti-Palestinian accounts disguise a relentless and vicious campaign to intimidate people into silence by falsely portraying them as racists, and sanction them by proxy by pressuring employers for swift termination. Palestinians remain vulnerable to targeted harassment campaigns, particularly when employers unquestioningly accept their tendentious claims.

But rather than simply opposing them as racist, right-wing, or even, as has become increasingly familiar, McCarthyite, I believe it is important to view these sites as one form of what I refer to as digital settler colonialism, a phrase I use to refer to how digital technologies and platforms are utilized in such a way as to enable the ongoing Zionist colonization of Palestine. To name one important example: in addition to the aforementioned impacts of Canary Mission, there have been reports of the blacklist site being used by Israeli border agents to prevent Palestinians from visiting their families. Denial of the Palestinian right of return is a defining feature of Zionist colonization, which necessitates the unchallenged continuity of a demographic Jewish majority on ethnically cleansed Palestinian lands.

Just as the geographical Palestinian homeland must be seized by Zionist forces, all resistance quelled and all Indigenous Palestinians ultimately expelled and silenced forever, so too must any and all electronic trace of support for Palestinian freedom be expunged from the database. Digital settler colonialism renders digital terrain as an extension of physical spaces ripe for colonization, relying on imperial sanction to target anti-colonial subjects and their supporters as enemies that must be neutralized by any means necessary. Deletion, blockage, censorship, and, of course, targeted harassment are all primary strategies of digital settler colonialism, which can be both directly waged and reflexively reinforced.

What I mean by this is that even with Israel’s entrenchment in the tech world, it is important to understand that Silicon Valley giants may be moved to uphold Zionist colonial praxis on their platforms through a commitment to maximum profit at all costs (a stance that already puts them at odds with social justice) just as much, if not more so, than an ideological commitment to Israel or Zionism. Nevertheless, it is also important to understand that, whatever the reasons for doing so, upholding colonially-motivated dictates means supporting the colonial process. Fully reckoning with digital settler colonialism necessitates considering its various manifestations and the forces that sustain it—as well as—most importantly—examples of resistance.

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Excerpted from Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle by Omar Zahzah. Available from Seven Stories Press.