Jewish and Muslim Americans in cities all around the country are worried that escalating tensions between Israel and Palestine, which some are calling \u201cisolating and scary\u201d, will exacerbate hate crimes and harassment in the United States.
For many Arab Americans in New York City, Bay Ridge was always a place of safety. The south Brooklyn neighborhood is 3 sq miles of Arabic bodega signs, halal grocers and a growing community of Palestinian, Yemeni, Syrian and Egyptian families.
On Wednesday, that sense of safety was punctured by reports of a hate crime.
Police said \u201cthree alleged assailants in three cars were waving Israeli flags\u201d and yelled \u201canti-Palestinian remarks at three men walking on 86th Street\u201d, according to a statement this week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). \u201cThe group got out of their car and assaulted the three men.\u201d
ABC7 reported that two men walked up to two people holding Palestinian flags, grabbed a flag and hit one person over the head. In Gravesend \u2013 also in Brooklyn \u2013 two juvenile boys pointed what turned out to be fake guns at the local B\u2019nai Yosef synagogue, police said. The boys were given criminal court summonses.
Earlier this year, FBI data revealed that the number of US hate crimes increased again in 2021, continuing an alarming rise.
\u201cBut this moment is different,\u201d said Corey Saylor, the research and advocacy director at CAIR. \u201cRight now there is an unusually vicious targeting of students that support Palestine, and the volume and intensity is something I haven\u2019t witnessed before.\u201d
Saylor said CAIR is particularly concerned about the young people on US university campuses who have faced fierce harassment and threats for expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine.
Harvard\u2019s Palestine Solidarity Committee last week issued a letter in which the signatories stated they \u201chold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence\u201d. The events, they said, \u201cdid not occur in a vacuum\u201d. An affirmation of the letter from other student groups lamented \u201cthe devastating and rising civilian toll\u201d of the violence, noting that the Israeli government\u2019s treatment of Palestine created \u201cconditions of violence\u201d.
After the statement was released, backlash ensued because many Jewish students took issue with their peers blaming only Israel for the violence and felt the letter supported Hamas by not being critical of the attacks or sympathizing with Hamas\u2019s innocent victims.
On Wednesday, a billboard truck drove near the Harvard University campus, displaying the names and faces of students who had signed the committee\u2019s letter.
\u201cThey\u2019re not targeting longtime activists who are used to harassment,\u201d Saylor said. \u201cYou\u2019re going after the people whose careers are just starting, who have barely entered the adult world, who probably aren\u2019t full-time activists right now.\u201d
He called the truck an act of \u201cpolitical intimidation\u201d.
\u201cThis is the most tense campus has ever been by far,\u201d Hejir Rashidzadeh, a Harvard law student, told ABC News.
On Twitter, the billionaire hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman asked Harvard University to release the names of students who signed the letter \u201cto insure none of us inadvertently hire any of their members\u201d.
As Arab and Muslim student activists steeled themselves against harassment and doxxing, many Jewish Americans feared rising violence on Friday after a former Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, called for a global day of \u201canger\u201d to send a \u201cmessage of rage to Zionists and to America\u201d.
Major US cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC have even stepped up security for residents ahead of expected protests.
The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group that battles antisemitism, said in a statement on Friday that it \u201chas reviewed this information in close coordination with our partners in law enforcement and Jewish security organizations\u201d.
\u201cAt this time, the Center on Extremism is not aware of any credible threats to Jewish communities in the United States,\u201d the statement said.
Still, Jewish Americans are worried for their safety. The Southern Poverty Law Center\u2019s Intelligence Project, which tracks incidents of bigotry and prejudice in the United States, has spent the past few years tracking a troubling spike in antisemitic sentiment, fueled by the country\u2019s growing white nationalist movement.
\u201cUnfortunately, we\u2019re seeing an alarming amount of antisemitic activity across the US in recent years, both explicitly in neo-Nazi organizing and in more coded conspiracies and Holocaust revisionism,\u201d Rachel Carroll Rivas, the deputy director of research, reporting and analysis at SPLC\u2019s Intelligence Project, told the Guardian. \u201cThis has made the country ripe for manipulation during the Israel-Hamas conflict.\u201d
Earlier this week, Twitter users in Irvine, California, posted images of a man carrying a Nazi flag. In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel, a protester at a pro-Palestine event in New York City\u2002held up a phone with an image of a swastika on it.
\u201cThis moment is profoundly isolating and scary for our people,\u201d said Audrey Sasson, the executive director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice.
Sasson said many members of her progressive Jewish organization are still trying to locate loved ones in Israel.
\u201cWe are close to this pain,\u201d said Sasson, who herself has friends and family currently in Israel. \u201cWe can worry and mourn for the Israeli people we\u2019ve lost while also holding compassion for the people of Gaza who are currently under siege.\u201d
Israel\u2019s military has ordered the population of northern Gaza, numbering more than 1 million people, to evacuate before an expected ground invasion, a task the United Nations has said would be \u201cimpossible without devastating humanitarian consequences\u201d.
The destruction of Gaza, which has been widely shared by the Israeli government\u2019s owned social media accounts, is alarming to Jewish Americans like Sasson.
\u201cI think we as American Jews can and should be allowed to mourn for our loved ones in Israel, while also turning to the Israeli government to say, not in my name should you be starving and bombing an entire civilian population in Gaza,\u201d she said. \u201cI wish that was not a controversial thing to say.\u201d
Many Palestinian Americans worry that violence and threats against their community will skyrocket without more voices like Sasson\u2019s.
\u201cIt\u2019s as if the Hamas attacks were the beginning of the conflict, and everything before that never happened,\u201d said Ussama Makdisi, a professor of history at University of California at Berkeley.
Makdisi noted \u201chow quickly and strongly\u201d US corporate, university and political leaders expressed sympathy for victims of violence in Israel.
\u201cBut they have not expressed any kind of empathy for Palestinian victims of violence,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is dehumanizing. The silence in the face of genocidal violence devalues Palestinian life, and it sends a message to Palestinian Americans: you\u2019re on your own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n