Naming a Long-Standing Pattern
For decades,
Palestinians have described a particular kind of hostility
that doesn’t fit neatly into existing categories of
discrimination. It isn’t quite the same as Islamophobia,
since not all Palestinians are Muslim. It isn’t quite the
same as general anti-Arab racism, since it attaches
specifically to Palestinian identity, history, and political
claims. In 2022, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association gave
this pattern a name: Anti-Palestinian Racism, or APR. Their
working description frames it as a form of anti-Arab racism
that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or
dehumanises Palestinians or their narratives including the
denial of the Nakba, the refusal to recognise Palestinians
as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, and the
branding of Palestinians and their supporters as inherently
antisemitic or sympathetic to terrorism simply for asserting
Palestinian rights.
It’s worth noting that this
framework is contested. Groups such as the Centre for Israel
and Jewish Affairs and other critics argue that APR, as
defined by ACLA, is too broad that it can be used to
characterise ordinary political disagreement, or even the
assertion of Jewish indigeneity and self-determination, as
racism. That criticism is a live part of the public debate,
and readers encountering the term for the first time deserve
to know the argument exists on both sides. What follows
describes how APR is experienced and articulated by those
who use the term, while acknowledging that its scope and
application remain genuinely disputed.
How APR Shows
Up in Practice
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Those who document APR point to
patterns across media, employment, education, and public
institutions:
Media framing.
Palestinian deaths are often reported in the passive voice
people “die” rather than being killed while Israeli deaths
are more often attributed directly to a named actor.
Palestinian sources are treated with more scepticism than
official Israeli statements, even when both are
unverified.
Professional and institutional
consequences. Palestinians and their supporters
have lost jobs, had job offers rescinded, or faced
disciplinary action at universities and workplaces after
expressing ordinary political views wearing a keffiyeh,
posting about Gaza, or signing an open letter. The chilling
effect discourages people from speaking at
all.
Erasure in language. Referring
to Palestinian land only as “disputed territory,” describing
historic Palestinian towns solely by their post-1948 names,
or omitting Palestinians from discussions of the region’s
history are all cited as everyday examples of narrative
erasure.
Conflation with violence.
Perhaps the most cited manifestation is the assumption that
expressing Palestinian identity, grief, or political demands
is equivalent to endorsing violence an assumption rarely
applied in reverse.
Why It Doesn’t Stop at
Palestinians
One of the more striking aspects of how
APR is described by its proponents is that it isn’t confined
to people who are themselves Palestinian. Because the core
mechanism is the delegitimizing of a narrative rather than
simply prejudice against an ethnicity, anyone who visibly
aligns with that narrative can be swept into the same
treatment. Human rights workers, students, academics,
journalists, and even entirely unrelated ethnic and faith
communities have reported being labelled “terrorist
sympathisers” or “antisemitic” for advocacy that amounts to
supporting Palestinian human rights a slander ACLA’s own
definition explicitly names as one of the manifestations of
APR: defaming Palestinians and their allies with the
accusation that they are inherently antisemitic or a
terrorism threat, or opposed to democratic values.
In
practice, this has meant:
- Non-Palestinian
speakers and MCs being dropped from events after expressing
solidarity. - Solidarity encampments and vigils facing
disproportionate police response compared with other protest
movements. - Jewish anti-Zionist activists being told
they are “self-hating” or inauthentic, a tactic that uses
identity to police political dissent from within a community
as well as from outside it. - Community organisations
Muslim, Arab, and otherwise having funding, venue bookings,
or partnerships quietly withdrawn after co-signing
Palestine-related statements.
This is part of
why advocates increasingly describe APR not as a narrow
ethnic prejudice but as a broader mechanism for enforcing
which narratives are permissible in public life. The target
is the message as much as the messenger.
Why the
Distinction Matters
Recognising APR as its own
category rather than folding it entirely into Islamophobia
or antisemitism matters for two practical reasons. First, it
captures harms that neither of those frameworks fully
covers, such as Nakba denial or the automatic suspicion
attached to Palestinian narratives regardless of the
speaker’s religion. Second, it clarifies that criticism of a
state’s policies is analytically distinct from prejudice
against a people, a distinction both defenders and critics
of the APR framework say they want preserved, even as they
disagree sharply about where that line actually falls in
practice.
Where This Leaves Public Debate
APR
remains an evolving and disputed concept rather than a
settled legal standard. No government has formally adopted a
definition of it into anti-discrimination law, and
organisations across the political spectrum continue to
argue over both its content and its consequences for free
expression. What isn’t in serious dispute is that
Palestinians and increasingly those who publicly stand with
them describe a consistent, recognisable pattern of
exclusion, suspicion, and professional risk tied directly to
that identity and advocacy. Whether or not one accepts APR
as the right label for it, the underlying experiences being
described are real and worth taking seriously on their own
terms.
