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WHY ARE PRO-PALESTINIAN US STUDENT PROTESTERS WEARING MASKS ON
CAMPUS?  
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Nick Robins-Early
April 30, 2024
The Guardian
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_ An intense and organized effort to bring down personal and
professional repercussions on participants is playing out online _

Pro-Palestinian students protest at an encampment on the campus of
the University of California, Los Angeles on Friday. , Photograph:
Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images

 

As demonstrations over the war in Gaza
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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
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block counter-protesters from filming students. Protesters at a tent
encampment at the University of Michigan handed out masks
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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
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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
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and CEOs have demanded universities name protesters
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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
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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
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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
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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
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trespassing, including a local Fox journalist
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Columbia forming a Doxing Resource Group. Several other pro-Israel
organizations, such as StopAntisemitism
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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
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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
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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
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the course of several days for taking part in the protests
against its Project Nimbus program
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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_

* Gaza protests
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* masks
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* doxing
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