February 2017 marked a turning point in the history of Palestinian activism within the UK. In this tumultuous month, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists were overwhelmed by an unprecedented flurry of event cancellations and attacks on their right to protest against the occupation. February 2017 also marked a turning point in my own involvement with Palestine and free speech. I had arrived in the UK in the summer of 2015 to begin teaching at the University of Bristol. My peripatetic academic career had carried me from Damascus to Berlin, and finally to Palestine and Israel. From 2010 to 2011, I commuted between Palestine and Israel several times a week. I lived in Bethlehem in the West Bank, across from the apartheid wall, along which I walked on my way to the Van Leer Institute where I was a postdoctoral fellow.

The Van Leer Institute is centrally located in the historic Talbia district of West Jerusalem. In another era, thirteen years before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian American critic Edward Said was born in this neighborhood. His cousin abandoned the family home in 1948, just after it fell to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah, cutting Said’s ties to his homeland forever. Now, many decades later, the Van Leer Institute has played a pivotal role in debates around definitions of antisemitism. In 2020, it served as the virtual and physical venue for the drafting of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) and hosted many events to support its dissemination.

Although the Van Leer Institute was located just a few kilometers from where I lived, the commute from Bethlehem took several hours. Every morning when I had to travel into Jerusalem, I waited in line with restless and sleep-deprived Palestinian workers at the infamous Checkpoint 300. While standing in line, I would often observe the preferential treatment that I, as a foreigner, experienced from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers guarding the checkpoint. The contrast between their treatment of me and natives of Palestine was impossible to ignore. Israeli soldiers allowed me and other foreign passport holders to pass quickly through the metal detectors behind which Palestinian workers often had to stand for hours on end, causing them to be late for work and to lose out on vital income.