We’re back! – On Tuesday March 8th, Instagram took down WOL’s main account @wolpalestine after we put up a post highlighting revolutionary Palestinian women on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
Our account was kept offline for four days, but we were never really gone because we are not an Instagram page, we are a grassroots Palestinian-led community organization. Our online presence is secondary to base building in our communities.
While the restoration of our main account following a massive outpouring of support from our comrades and supporters around the world marks a victory, we know that Instagram continues to uphold anti–Palestinian racism and actively works directly with our oppressors to silence us.
When we post educational materials, news, history and culture about Palestine it gets reported by zionists, flagged, and can be censored or removed at any time. But when we report these accounts that continuously harass us and spread lies and misinformation about our organization, Instagram sits on their hands.
At this moment, zionists are becoming increasingly desperate as their hasbara campaigns continue to collapse in failure. We see this most recently in the case of Act.IL, an app that was funded by the israeli government and run by former intelligence officers in the occupation forces.
In 2020, Act.IL launched a racist smear campaign against our chair and founder @nerdeenk in an attempt to get her expelled from the CUNY School of Law. Despite thousands of automated emails getting sent to CUNY through the app’s rewards-based platform, the campaign failed as CUNY students, activists and legal organizations rallied behind Nerdeen under the banner #WeStandWithNerdeen. This past week, Act.IL was deactivated as an app.
Just as Act.IL was a failure, all of the attempts to censor our organization and our movement will also end in failure. No matter how hard they try and silence us, they cannot stop us from pouring into the streets by the thousands for Palestine on Land Day on Wednesday 3/30. Join us!
If you’re not doing so already, follow our backup: @wol.palestine