Pro-Palestine Muslim Americans are facing collective punishment at work and school

Adil Abbuthalha felt hopeless last November while watching thousands of Palestinians die from Israel’s military offensive on Gaza. The child of Yemeni and Sri Lankan Muslim immigrants, he wanted to do something to help the Palestinian cause for resistance.

A product and data science expert at the tech company Linktree, Abbuthalha taught himself to code and launched boycat—an app that helps people identify Israeli products to boycott by simply scanning merchandise barcodes. The app also provides options for more ethical consumption.

By April, the app exploded in popularity, partly fueled by news coverage in Al Jazeera. Abbuthalha estimates the app has diverted $50 million in purchases and reached 500,000 users. But with this success came the loss of his day job—and Abbuthalha says the two are linked.

The dangerous effects of supporting Palestine have reached dizzying heights across academic institutions, corporate America, health care, law, and politics. The genocide of Palestinians has also divided the American public and unleashed a new wave of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment in the U.S., which continues to fund and provide arms for Israel’s military offensive on Gaza. According to a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) report released in April, the number of anti-Muslim complaints filed with the organization in 2023 increased 56% from 2022—and nearly half of the complaints were reported in the final three months of 2023 when the genocide began.

Employment discrimination experienced by people like Abbuthalha ranked among the top complaints received by CAIR.

New levels of hostility 

Shortly after the Al Jazeera video about boycat was published in April, a colleague at Linktree messaged Abbuthalha to congratulate him on the success of his app, though Abbuthalha hadn’t told anyone at work about his side project because of the sensitivity of the topic. 

Soon after the exchange with his colleague, Abbuthalha’s manager began criticizing his work, something that had never previously happened during his 18 months at Linktree.

“I started getting weird complaints at work in terms of performance reviews,” Abbuthalha told Prism, detailing criticisms of his technical skills and lack of a “product growth mindset.” His manager also told him other employees complained about his work ethic and that his mistakes were “causing issues for other people.”  

Abbuthalha checked in with his team members, and their feedback was markedly different from what his manager conveyed to him. A project manager he worked with closely told him he trusted his work and data. Some colleagues claimed minor issues were blown out of proportion, while others said they did not complain at all. Nonetheless, Abbuthalha took it upon himself to provide status updates to his manager about how he was working to improve his job performance. 

On June 25, Linktree’s vice president of legal joined Abbuthalha’s meeting with his manager and fired him. 

“I had a minute or so to look on Slack to see if anyone else was fired. I found out one other Muslim guy I was working with was also fired,” Abbuthalha alleged.

Abbuthalha is currently considering taking legal action against his former employer because he believes that he was fired as a result of his app and his support for Palestine. 

Prism reached out to Linktree for comment, and the company did not respond by publication time.

“In general, we have seen two types of anti-Palestinian retaliation and intimidation taking place throughout corporate America today,” explained Salah Zalatimo, a founding member of We for P, a professional support community that formed as a response to the intense levels of workplace discrimination experienced by people advocating for Palestine.  

“One [example] is where an employee’s manager has made public statements sympathetic with Israel either at work or on social media, while the employee has made public statements sympathetic with Palestine,” Zalatimo said. “Followed by a noticeable change in attitude toward the employee and issues of performance arising for the first time. The other is where a third party has flagged employees’ social media posts that are sympathetic with Palestine as offensive or antisemitic. [Human resources then] opens a formal internal investigation.”

Examples of workplace discrimination for supporters of Palestine have littered the news in recent months. 

In April, Google fired 50 employees who protested the company’s cloud-computing deal with the Israeli government. In May, Hesen Jabr, a Palestinian-American nurse at New York University’s (NYU) Langone Health was terminated the day after the hospital awarded her for providing outstanding care to patients suffering perinatal loss. Jabr was employed by NYU Langone for nearly a decade when, in her acceptance speech, she referenced the “unimaginable losses” experienced by the women in her country due to “the current genocide in Gaza.” In June, Prism published reporting detailing the extensive discrimination experienced by Arab and Muslim media workers due to their coverage of Gaza.  

While Muslims in the workplace experience job loss and hostile work environments, students who protested across college campuses in the spring faced violent repercussions for demanding their academic institutions divest from Israel. 

According to The Appeal’s survey of local and student newspapers, police arrested more than 3,200 students and supporters on college campuses nationwide. These same students also faced expulsion, evictions, brutal police crackdowns, criminal prosecution, Zionist mob violence, and hospitalization. Harvard and the University of Chicago even withheld diplomas from graduating seniors who participated in encampments and other protests. 

Twenty-one-year-old Palestinian-American Bisan, who is using a pseudonym for security reasons, graduated this May and plans to go to law school. Throughout her time as an undergrad, Bisan participated in protests and called on her university to divest from Israel. However, after Oct. 7, 2023, she faced new levels of hostility from the administration of the small Catholic university she attended in New York City. 

During Bisan’s graduation ceremony, she held up a Palestinian flag with the words “Divest from death” across it. She was immediately attacked.

“I was cursed out by a member of the board of trustees,” Bisan said. “I was followed by one security guard that came from the right side of the stage, and another security guard who approached me from the left side tried to snatch away my flag before shoving me toward the stage—this was all before I could even put my hands on the diploma.” 

According to the graduate, academic institutions will use “any instrument necessary” to minimize student advocacy. 

“And that’s so ironic because earlier in the commencement ceremony, there were a lot of speeches that spoke about embracing differences in opinion,” Bisan said. 

Pakistani-American organizer Faran Sharif is disappointed by the silence of his college president when it comes to Palestine and other recent events facing Muslim students on campus.

Sharif graduated from New York City’s Baruch College in May, and this fall, he will attend the public college once again—this time as a graduate student. According to Sharif, college leadership has made no effort to reach out to the Muslim student body, in stark contrast to the support the college offered Jewish students after Oct. 7.

Shortly after the genocide began, Sharif said a student made a swastika on the floor of a campus bathroom, leading college President David Wu to issue a statement condemning the act—a move Sharif agreed with. However, prior to the antisemitic act, Sharif said a group of female Baruch students, most of whom were Muslim, experienced online sexual harassment and Islamophobia because of their religion and their support of Palestine. According to Sharif, the women asked the school’s public safety administration for support and received none. The students even recently went public about their experience on social media. Wu has said nothing regarding the incident. 

“Whether it is Islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-Asian, you name it, you have to release a statement that day. No response has come from Baruch College—not even a condemnation or an email or anything. I feel like this really reflects the biases of the system, because if it’s a certain group that faced it, they will immediately issue a statement,” Sharif said.

In a statement to Prism, Baruch College’s Director of Public Relations Suzanne Bronski said the university “does not tolerate acts of hate” and is dedicated to providing students with a safe environment that “fosters respect and inclusion.” 

“The College actively investigates all reported incidents of discrimination and takes appropriate disciplinary action as necessary. Due to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and other privacy considerations, we cannot disclose or publicly share details about incidents, updates, and resolutions involving students or personnel,” Bronski said. 

“More institutional power”

Graduating Muslim Americans who openly called for an end to the genocide or otherwise advocated for a ceasefire now face hurdles entering the job market.  

In one now infamous example, billionaire hedge fund founder Bill Ackman asked Harvard University to release the names of protesting students so that he and other CEOs wouldn’t hire them. In another example, the law firm Foley & Lardner revoked its job offer to recent law school graduate Jinan Chehade because of public statements she made in support of Palestine. 

According to CAIR, Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab students and employees are at increased risk of doxxing. One Zionist website published more than 17,000 posts listing employees of major corporations who posted in support of Palestine. Much of the information came from LinkedIn, which quickly issued a cease-and-desist letter to the site for violating company rules against using automated programs to “scrape” data from the site. 

Salma, who is using a pseudonym for fear of further retaliation, is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. The OB-GYN just completed her residency and told Prism that as a Palestinian American, her political views were never a secret. However, in the weeks following Oct. 7, Zionists were emboldened to go after people like her.

Toward the end of last year, the doctor said people began to regularly contact her employer to tell hospital administration Salma did not “support peace” and also complain that she characterized Israel as an “apartheid state.” The same information is included on a profile of Salma featured on the site Canary Mission that doxxes anti-Zionist students and professors.

“I had to show my administration that the things I talk about have never been harmful, racist, or antisemitic,” Salma explained. “As a physician, I believe it’s my duty to preserve human life and save mankind, so when I see people being killed, especially my own people, it’s hard to sit idly and not do anything.”

Muslim Americans come from families who are rooted in countries across the globe, but the desire to see Palestine liberated unites many of them. People like Abbuthalha, Bisan, and Salma told Prism they want to see Palestine free. In the meantime, they will continue to experience collective punishment for their stance. 

According to CAIR, this latest wave of Islamophobia has led to a significant increase in the number of complaints the organization has received—numbers that even surpass those received during the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban in 2017. 

But this time around, the Muslim-American community is better prepared with tools, resources, and political representation—especially those who came of age in the wake of 9/11, said Eman Abdelhadi, a writer, activist, and assistant professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago whose work focuses on Muslim-American communities. 

Abdelhadi explained that post-9/11, Muslim-American communities mobilized and organized in new and unprecedented ways. 

“People are reacting from a place of more institutional power than they had after 9/11,” Abdelhadi said. “We have organizations like CAIR that are much stronger than they were then. We have a lot more infrastructure and support.” 

And this power-building continues. This year, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) launched the Bureau of Academic Freedom to support young Muslim Americans by “providing comprehensive training, mentorship, and resources” intended to help future leaders with the tools needed to enter public service and advocate for change. 

But Muslim Americans are also fighting back against the discrimination they have experienced in academia since Oct. 7. Palestine Legal has filed eight federal civil rights complaints, resulting in federal investigations at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Emory University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Columbia University for anti-Palestinian discrimination in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. 

“The stakes couldn’t be higher—not just for Palestinians being killed by the tens of thousands in Gaza, and not just for the Palestine movement, but for all our justice movements,” said Palestine Legal Director Dima Khalidi in a statement. “Now is the time to step up and defend our collective rights to dissent and organize for justice, and to challenge the descent into fascism that this moment portends.”

We for P is also in the process of obtaining nonprofit status to better address ongoing discrimination against pro-Palestine workers. The group recently helped more than 15 employees navigate injustice in the workplace. 

“What we are doing here is similar to the ‘know your rights’ campaigns that many oppressed communities require,” Zalatimo said. “Many of these intimidation tactics are against companies’ own policies and sometimes against state or federal laws. So my advice to all professionals who support humanity and social justice is to read your company handbook, remember that HR is not your friend, and, most importantly, do not be afraid to stand your ground. Nobody should be afraid to say, ‘Stop killing children’ or ‘Ceasefire now.’” 

Zalatimo’s sentiments ring true for many young Muslim Americans like Salma, who want to work toward a future where their professional lives can be aligned with their values. 

“When I was interviewing with hospitals, I made an active effort to mention my advocacy and work for Palestine because I wanted to gauge the culture,” Salma explained. “The reaction during the interview usually lets me know if I’d be safe in that institution. I’ve turned down very generous offers because I couldn’t work at an institution that did not support my people’s right to exist.”