Roy Alnashef walked into the crowd around Los Angeles City Hall clutching a poster in each hand.
“This is not a pro-Hamas protest,” said one of his homemade signs.
The other read: “Hey Jews. If you were here, you’d be safe. We don’t hate you.”
Alnashef, a software designer from Reseda, said he worries that much of the protest rhetoric undermines the Palestinian cause because it can leave the mistaken impression that the entire movement is aligned with Hamas, which routinely calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews.
Palestinian Americans said they were acutely aware of the perception that demonstrators support Hamas — which the U.S. government designates as a terrorist organization — and the ways that could hurt the cause.
Particularly damaging have been the
white supremacists who have shown up at various pro-Palestinian events and organized anti-Jewish demonstrations, including one in Walnut Creek, Calif., where neo-Nazis unfurled a sign over a bridge that said: “No more wars for I$rael.”
Extremists “would love to be utilizing the Palestinian liberation push to further their antisemitic ideologies,” said Sam Rasoul, a Palestinian American state legislator in Roanoke, Va. “We need to be cognizant of that and reject it.”
A 42-year-old Democrat whose parents emigrated from Ramallah, Rasoul led a recent rally in his southwestern Virginia city, where he shouted into a megaphone that “Tax dollars should not be used to kill innocent people on the other side of the world.”
A local blog, the Roanoke Star, said he was “parroting terrorist propaganda.”
“You have to be very careful in what you say and who you associate with,” said Iman Jodeh, a Palestinian American and state representative in Aurora, Colo.
When she began talking publicly in early October about the Hamas attack and Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, she condemned the militants and called for hostages to be released.
She also described Gaza — which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt — as an “open-air prison” and blamed President Biden’s “unconditional support” of Israel for a “genocide” of Palestinians.
The
Denver Gazette news website responded with an editorial that called her an “antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-American” legislator and accused her of defending Hamas.
Among the dozens of groups organizing in support of Palestinians, there have been recent attempts to avoid messaging that could damage their cause.
At a November rally held by Northwestern University students in Evanston, Ill., that drew 100 demonstrators, one hoisted a green Hamas flag with white Arabic text. Organizers kicked the man out.