Within Our Lifetime Palestine (WOL Palestine), a lynchpin of the Palestinian community in Bay Ridge, has led over 100 protests since Oct. 7 that unapologetically call for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In return its leaders have faced extreme hostility from a slew of Zionist and right-wing entities. 

One week ago, Meta banned the Instagram and Facebook accounts of both WOL Palestine and one of its founders and most visible spokespersons Nerdeen Kiswani. Both accounts had large followings and provided updates not only on protests but on what is happening on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank. Meta, the parent company that owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, also deleted the account of Decolonize This Place (DTP), an anti-imperialist organization with a large following from the Bronx that has organized in solidarity with WOL but acts independently of the Brooklyn group. 

Both WOL and DTP had previously been suspended from Instagram for publishing a map with locations of Israeli allies in Midtown Manhattan to protest and investigate. “We’re talking about banks like BNY Mellon who invests millions of dollars into Elbit Systems to massacre palestinians. Places like The New York Times and the New York Post, which have manufactured consent for the genocide in Palestine, Friends of the IDF — places that deserve to be protested,” said Daniel C. of WOL yesterday in an interview with Noura Erakat and Bassam Haddad on Jadaliyaa. “But the right-wing media and the Zionist media … took it as, we’re preparing for a pogrom or something like that.”

(A December Human Rights Watch report found that Meta is systematically censoring content about Palestine on their social networks.)

“This is just the latest iteration of the map,” added Kiswani. “We put one up in 2021 and it was never an issue.” Some years-old posts of hers or on WOL’s page “had never been an issue until the last three months where so many things have just been flagged out of nowhere like they’re combing through and just looking for any reason to suspend us,” she says, “and it’s always for ‘support of dangerous organizations or terrorist organizations.’”

“Instagram claimed that the account is permanently deleted and all data has been deleted as well,” says WOL organizer Abdullah Akl. “But we are still going to take every avenue that we can to try to bring back the accounts, as it was one of, if not the largest account that we’ve had across many platforms.” Kiswani’s account had 70–80,000 followers and WOL’s had just under 200,000.

“Ultimately it’s private property and we were kicked off of it. It’s a cautionary tale to all groups not to organize on private property, that we should be making own platforms — that our power is ultimately in the streets. We’re not an online organization. We’re based with the people,” said Kiswani. “When they’re attacking you like this, that means it’s working, and the best way to resist it is not to stop but to continue to fight back against it collectively.

“The goal of every repressive force we’ve been facing has been to scare us off the streets, to scare us away from speaking up, to scare students away from advocating for divestment resolutions, to scare journalists from exposing what’s going, and it’s not working,” said another WOL member during the Jadaliyya interview. 

WOL says they have seen no dip — and maybe a rise — in protest attendance since Instagram deleted their account on Feb. 9

This comes after targeted arrests of protest leaders, a move that indicating an NYPD crackdown on pro-Palestine protest in New York City. Kiswani and six other pro-Palestine protest organizers were arrested during an action on Jan. 26. While she ended up not being charged, Kiswani was apprehended for using a megaphone to amplify her voice,  something she does at every WOL demonstration. That was the first time Kiswani was arrested during the protests since Oct. 7 — and just the day prior WOL had released a report titled “The Crackdown on Palestine: Unveiling NYPD’s Repression Tactics.” 

Then, on Feb. 2, Kiswani was arrested again at a demonstration in front of Columbia university. Police used excessive force on nonviolent protesters and made at least 21 arrests, marking the second consecutive targeted arrest of Kiswani within two weeks.

WOL has faced censorship in the past, too. CUNY School of Law removed a video recording of Kiswani’s 2022 commencement speech from its archive. The next year, Fatima Mohamed, another one of WOL’s leaders, was likewise elected to give a commencement speech; she condemned the Israeli government and the NYPD. In the wake of the pro-Palestine speeches and ensuing backlash, CUNY Law has disallowed future student-elected commencement speakers.

And Kiswani also regularly faces threats of sexual harassment and assault, one of which occurred on The Indypendent’s Instagram page. 

Earlier this week we spoke on The Indy News Hour about all this and more with Abdullah Akl, another organizer at the forefront of WOL. He is a graduate student at Harvard University, where right-wing and Zionist groups are pushing for him to be sanctioned for his pro-Palestine advocacy. A large number of supporters have sent in emails to Harvard in support of Akl, actually choking the university email system in the past week. 

You can listen to this interview here.

The Indypendent: Abdullah, tell me more about what’s going on at Harvard.

Zionist donors, Zionist groups and even Zionist individuals are pressuring Harvard to potentially take administrative action to reprimand students that are a part of the pro-Palestinian movement and are championing some of those voices. And so what we’re seeing from the administration is that they are ready to follow through with some of those commands coming from some of those Zionist donors, especially someone like Ken Griffin, who has donated $200 million a year to Harvard, and who’s threatening to pull out that donation until he sees that Harvard is willing to take a stance on this. So right now we see that Harvard is in the middle zone, and we should be seeing a side that they shouldn’t be taking soon.

So you’re facing that. And then tell us more about what happened with the accounts of Within our Lifetime and Nerdeen Kiswani being banned by Meta and how they’ve previously faced represseion. How are you all responding to what happened?

Yeah, so we know that Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has repeatedly suspended the accounts of WOL Palestine and Nerdeen Kiswani, who is the chair of Within our Lifetime, for things that they want to say are going against their policies, when in reality, it is just pro-Palestinian activismm calls for liberation and actually just talking about the genocide that’s taking place in Gaza.

And so while they have suspended the accounts multiple times, this is the first time that they send a message saying that they have been permanently deleted, like how they have sent that message to other activists and those within the movement. 

Per Instagram, they claimed that it is permanently deleted, and all data has been deleted as well. But we are still going to take every avenue that we can to try to bring back the accounts, as it was one of or if not the largest account that we’ve had across many platforms. 

And we’re calling out Meta — being that are enabling these actions, that they are being very clear in choosing their side. When we are talking about justice versus genocide, they are choosing to pick the side of those that are enabling the genocide, of silencing the voices that are trying to talk about it. And so while this isn’t new to us, we are still going to make it very clear that Meta needs to be held accountable. But we are also making it clear for others, to join our telegram to follow us on Twitter, and to ensure that we’re still keeping this going.

What rule are they saying you violated? Did they point to specific posts?

Repeatedly, and even in this last time, they are always very vague with their reasonings. They don’t get into specifics; they don’t mention why they remove us, other than us going against their policies. And in this final removal, this permanent one, they are making it very clear that these accounts do not belong on Instagram just because the views they hold aren’t in alignment with the views of Meta. And that is the clearest statement that Meta can ever give us — if these accounts are standing against genocide, and Instagram does not like to host that, that means Instagram is telling the world that is watching that they are pro- the genocide that is taking place.

We’re here on WBAI radio, so we have a lot of veteran organizers listening, and we know that social media, for many reasons, is not the ideal place to organize — but talk to us about the positive aspects of your account, the community it created, how it activated, educated people and also probably made some people feel not so alone. It was one of the places where you could get reposts of what was going on on-the-ground in Gaza and the West Bank. 

100%, WOL from its founding always relied on this idea of community organizing, going door-to-door, business-to-business, putting out flyers. But then we also recognized the power that came through social media where we could use a platform to educate the masses but to also agitate them, to make them wake up and say, “I need to take action. And I need to see what is going on in Gaza, in Palestine and in other occupied places across the world.’” Because that is what’s needed in this current moment. And while we know that these platforms will try to censor us — it’s reminder that if they’re trying to censor us so hard, we must be doing something very good. And by recognizing that, we are able to awaken the masses even more to come out stronger than ever. 

And we’re seeing that after our page has been suspended, people now more than ever are taking it into their heads to continue to share about what’s going on in Palestine, what’s going on in Gaza, and even what’s going on in Rafah. That now more than ever, for the first time at least in my time with the organization, have I ever seen this many people post our flyer on their own personal pages, saying, “I might not be part of Within our Lifetime, I might not be a member — but since you took them down, I align with their values, and you can’t take all of us down.” And that is a clear message that we’re sending by using these platforms to the best of our ability to educate and agitate the masses.

Tell me what it’s like to persevere in the face of all of this. You all were censored on a Friday and immediately were out on the streets the next day for a Rafah emergency protest. How does it feel go continue going out out as you guys are continually attacked?

Yeah, at first it’s tough just because you realize that there are people, there are individuals, there are entities and even multibillion-dollar corporations actively trying to silence you. But at the same time there is this courage, this fire that’s burning inside of us, knowing that we are on the right side of history, knowing that even if they take away all of our accounts, even if we have no online presence, we will still fill the streets; we will still make our voices clear, and we will still shake the world, letting everyone know that what is happening in Gaza is still happening. And what is happening in Rafah is happening, even if a Super Bowl is happening, even if there are major events taking place at the same time. 

So we still have an opportunity and an obligation to continue the work that we do. And we think of it a lot like an obligation. Because if we just think of it as something that we do in our past time, then that is that we can stop whenever. But when we think of it as something that we take upon ourselves, which we do, that we will continue this work by any means necessary, this is something that hits home, not only for us, but for people that have been in this struggle for a very long time.

Let’s do talk for a moment about what is going on in Palestine. You know, there’s this potentially-imminent ground invasion of Rafah, where more than 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering in place, many of them refugees from all the other parts of Gaza. So right now we have around 22,000 people there per square kilometer and no major functioning hospital. You recently held an emergency protest for Rafah?

Yeah, so the reality is that the occupation told everyone that is in Gaza in their own home to leave the northern parts of Gaza, to evacuate to the south, and it was repeatedly — from Oct. 7 the south and specifically Rafah was labeled as a safe zone by the occupation. So, many fled their own homes and went out into Rafah to seek refuge, seek refuge in a land that is originally theirs. 

And so what we saw is that Rafah became a very densely-populated town Gaza. And what happened was the occupation released that it wishes create a military operation into Rafah, and it is telling people to leave. The biggest question is, where do people go? This is their lend; they followed what you told them to do, to leave from the north into the south, and now there’s nowhere to go. And when the bombings started, when hundreds were being injured and murdered, the occupation then came out with a statement saying this was a distraction to release two hostages. So we are making it very clear that in no world — even if what they are saying is correct — in no world will you take hundreds to be injured, to be murdered, as a distraction for two people to come out. 

And it is so hard to talk about. This is this is the reality of what is going on in Gaza, that hundreds are considered a distraction — whether they are alive, whether they are dead or whether they are injured, they are nothing more than a pawn piece that the occupation uses to get some of their own. And so we are seeing this time and time again. And we see that in Rafah, things are getting tougher and tougher as the occupation continues not to allow fuel, continues to not allow food and water to the border that they are near. So we know that the situation is dire, but we are going to continue to mobilize everyone to make it very clear that we stand with Rafah, we stand with Gaza and we stand with Palestine.

You can still follow Within Our Lifetime Palestine on Twitter and Telegram, Telegram for protests.

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