[News] Why Pro-Palestinian Student Protesters Wear Masks On Campus

[Anti-Imperialist News]

popularresistance.org
<https://popularresistance.org/why-pro-palestinian-student-protesters-are-wearing-masks-on-campus/>
Why Pro-Palestinian Student Protesters Wear Masks On Campus
By Nick Robins-Early, Portside.
May 2, 2024
------------------------------
[image: 202452-4.jpg]

Above photo: Pro-Palestinian students protest at an encampment on the
campus of the University of California, Los Angeles on Friday. Frederic J
Brown/AFP/Getty Images.
An intense and organized effort to bring down personal and professional
repercussions on participants is playing out online.

As demonstrations over the war in Gaza
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/gaza> have surged on campuses, around
cities and in offices across the US in recent weeks, a visible tension has
emerged between the desire for public protest and a fear of professional
reprisals.

On the Columbia University campus, where the latest spike in protests began
on 17 April, demonstrators have worn masks and used blankets
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/columbia-university-protest-shafik-israel-palestine-gaza-jewish-muslim-students.html>
to
block counter-protesters from filming students. Protesters at a tent
encampment at the University of Michigan handed out masks
<https://apnews.com/article/gaza-war-campus-protests-47f4f7f0916a6493b79eede3e4d0a55d>
upon
entry, and students there refused to give reporters their full names in
case the school took punitive action against them. At Harvard, the
Palestine Solidarity Committee told the Guardian it had suspended doing
press interviews out of regard for student safety.

Concerns over retaliation and harassment have permeated the protests, as an
intense and organized effort to bring down personal and professional
repercussions on demonstrators has played out online. Counter-protesters
and pro-Israel activist groups have attempted to post demonstrators’ faces
and personal information to intimidate them, an act known as doxing, and
demanded <https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1782397539901124894> that
pro-Palestinian protesters remove their masks at rallies. The professional
threat is not theoretical: employers have terminated workers over their
comments about the Israel-Gaza war
<https://www.thecut.com/2023/10/israel-hamas-war-job-loss-social-media.html>,
and CEOs have demanded universities name protesters
<https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-ackman-wants-harvard-name-104621975.html>
so
as to blacklist them.

The result is that the public face of a nationwide student movement is
often a covered one. Photos and videos from demonstrations show swaths of
students either wearing keffiyehs – headdresses that have become a symbol
of Palestinian solidarity – or medical masks that obscure their identity.
During Yale’s protests
<https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2024/04/22/live-police-begin-arresting-pro-divestment-protesters-on-beinecke-plaza/>,
a 21-person choir sang This Little Light of Mine with masks over their
faces.

Administrators have admonished students against wearing masks, in at least
one case citing anti-mask laws
<https://chapelboro.com/news/unc/unc-asks-pro-palestine-protesters-to-stop-wearing-masks-citing-1953-anti-kkk-law>
from
the 1950s originally intended to deter the Ku Klux Klan from holding
rallies. At the University of North Carolina, the campus chapter of
Students for Justice in Palestine said that it was alarmed to receive an
email from a university official citing campus policy and state law against
wearing masks. The university did not dispute the email, telling the
Guardian that an administrator was reminding an organization with a history
of wearing face coverings about the policy.

At the University of Austin, Texas, the dean of students sent a letter
canceling
<https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/ut-austin-police-protest-arrests-19422645.php>
a
campus demonstration and said that an organizer’s Instagram post telling
protesters to bring masks would be a violation of school policy against
obstructing law enforcement. The protest took place anyway, leading to
state and local police arresting dozens of people
<https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/ut-austin-protests-19422279.php>
for
trespassing, including a local Fox journalist
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/24/university-of-texas-austin-campus-protest>
who
was photographing the event.

Pro-Israel activists have similarly called for demonstrators to take off
their masks during heated counter-protests, while head of the
Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, recently called
<https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1782397539901124894> for some
coverings to be outlawed entirely.

“Masks that cover the entire face have no bearing on Covid or free speech
and should be banned on all college campuses effective immediately,”
Greenblatt tweeted.

While protesters are covering their faces to prevent harassment and
retaliation, they also cited Covid concerns as an additional reason to mask
up while attending mass gatherings. The ubiquity of masks, according to one
organizer, was representative of a general concern for everyone
demonstrating and the potential harm they face as a result.

“I don’t see it as coming top-down from organizations but more from within
protest communities about how to keep each other safe,” said Liv
Kunins-Berkowitz, a media coordinator for the activist group Jewish Voice
For Peace. “That includes keeping yourself safe from surveillance and from
having your photo posted all over the internet.”
Doxings, Firings And Harassment

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/israel-hamas-war> in October last year,
many pro-Palestinian demonstrators have had their personal information
posted online and faced firings, suspensions and harassment. While some
protesters have had their names, occupations and social media profiles
posted after being filmed expressing blatantly antisemitic rhetoric or
statements supporting Hamas, organized doxing efforts have also swept up
people who have peacefully attended rallies, signed letters calling for a
ceasefire or publicly criticized Israel.

As arrests at protests have surged and some lawmakers have called for
sending in the national guard against demonstrators, the amount of
surveillance at protests has also increased. The New York police department
has deployed drones
<https://nypost.com/2023/10/28/metro/nypd-used-drones-to-investigate-pro-palestine-protests-in-nyc/>
to
monitor demonstrations, track movements and capture video footage, with the
department saying it would use those recordings to help make arrests.

“At least in New York City, there’s a very big concern around police
surveillance,” said one protester, who asked not to be named out of fear of
personal and professional harm. They added that some organizers
specifically told demonstrators to cover their faces and handed out masks
at protests.

In the early weeks of protests against the war, the conservative group
Accuracy In Media launched a campaign
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/us/harvard-students-israel-hamas-doxxing.html>
at
Harvard that posted the names and faces of students who signed a
pro-Palestinian open letter on the side of a billboard truck and branded
them “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites”. It later expanded to other
universities and created individualized websites branding students as
antisemitic, leading to a lawsuit from one student
<https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/11/15/columbia-student-sues-conservative-group-over-doxing-truck>
and
Columbia forming a Doxing Resource Group. Several other pro-Israel
organizations, such as StopAntisemitism
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/16/stop-antisemitism-twitter-zionism-israel/>,
have similarly dedicated websites and social media accounts to posting the
personal information of protesters. People have described receiving death
threats, harassment and being fired from their work after being featured in
StopAntisemitism’s posts.

Another anonymously run site features hundreds of profiles of people who
have been critical of Israel’s actions or taken part in protests, posting
their social media profiles, occupations, home towns and photos of their
faces. The site has specific lists for students and faculty, accusing them
of antisemitism and supporting terrorism for signing open letters calling
for ceasefire, affiliation with pro-Palestinian groups or being in
attendance at anti-war rallies. These profiles now show up as top Google
results when searching for the names of many of the people listed on the
site, especially students with a smaller online presence.

Israeli authorities have also used information from that doxing website
when making decisions to bar political activists from entering the
country, Haaretz
reported
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220626182258/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-10-04/ty-article/.premium/official-documents-prove-israel-bans-young-americans-based-on-canary-mission-site/0000017f-e5c4-df2c-a1ff-ffd5b4150000>
.

Concealing identity while protesting has a long history in the United
States, and in recent decades has been a tactic commonly associated with
anticapitalist activists at government summits or antifascists
counter-protesting far-right rallies. Mask-wearing became enough of a
hallmark of leftist protests that, in 2018, Republicans attempted to pass a
vague anti-antifa bill
<https://www.huffpost.com/entry/house-republicans-unmasking-antifa-act_n_5b4527b1e4b0c523e263c2d5>
that
would have punished anyone protesting in a mask and acting in a threatening
manner with up to 15 years in prison.

Several major events in recent years have additionally changed the way that
people protest and their ability to remain anonymous. The emergence of the
Covid-19 pandemic vastly changed the ubiquity of masks, as well as provided
a loophole for many anti-mask policies and state laws around protesting
with a concealed identity. The January 6 Capitol riots and subsequent
search for perpetrators also highlighted how video footage and facial
recognition technology can be used to easily identify people online.
Self-appointed citizen investigators combed through videos for months after
the attack, coordinating online to identify rioters and refer them to law
enforcement officials.
Protesters Mask Up In The Office

The desire for anonymity has extended beyond college campuses to other
pro-Palestinian demonstrations. When Google employees held a sit-in to
protest against the company’s $1.2bn contract with the Israeli government
and its military, many covered their faces out of fear of online harassment.

“Doxing is the main reason that people chose to conceal their identity in
relation to this protest,” said a former Google worker who was fired for
taking part in the demonstration.

Pro-Palestinian protesters at Google had been concerned for some time about
other employees harassing them or leaking their personal information
online, two former workers told the Guardian. Google fired more than 50
people
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/27/google-project-nimbus-israel>
over
the course of several days for taking part in the protests against its
Project Nimbus program
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/01/google-intern-gaza-israel-military-contract-project-nimbus>
.

Several fired workers continued to obscure their identities during a press
conference in the days after the firing, out of worry that it would
threaten future job prospects.

Google said in a statement that some fired employees “took longer to
identify because their identity was partly concealed – like by wearing a
mask without their badge – while engaged in the disruption.”

*Nick Robins-Early* is a journalist based in New York. He reports on
extremism, disinformation, tech and world news.
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