Israel’s Gaza Genocide and Growing Prejudice: Islamophobia in 2024 America

The defining Islamophobic event of 2024 was Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The scale of destruction, violence, and mass killings—broadcast live on our phones throughout the year—has exposed the entrenched Islamophobia and anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism prevalent in the Western world. The persistent defense of Israel by the US and other Western powers and the failure to hold it accountable to any meaningful standards have shattered any pretense of respect for international humanitarian and human rights law. This crisis has starkly illustrated how racist and Islamophobic attitudes fuel the dehumanization of Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 46,000 as of November 2024, with the U.N. Human Rights Office reporting that nearly 70% of verified fatalities are women and children. Yet, there is no indication that Israel intends to halt the devastation.

The destruction in Gaza is apocalyptic. Since October 2023, Israel has pounded the tiny besieged strip with 18,000 tons of explosives—equivalent to 1.5 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. The vast majority of Palestinians are starving, famine looms, and northern Gaza is being annihilated. Meanwhile, Israeli politicians and Jewish settlers openly share their plans to colonize Gaza.

Any examination of Islamophobia in 2024 must begin with the systematic destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, an atrocity that Amnesty International and UN rights experts have labeled as genocide. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has had global repercussions, deeply resonating within the United States, where Israel’s violence against Palestinians emerged as a defining issue of 2024.

This is unsurprising, given the United States’ overwhelming financial and military support for Israel, including the arms used in the Gaza assault. A December 2024 Airwars report concluded that “By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st-century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”

From the US presidential elections to pro-Palestine demonstrations on university campuses, the events in Gaza dominated national discourse throughout the year. The violence in Gaza had significant repercussions in the United States, fueling a surge in hate crimes and discrimination against both Muslims and Jews. Within the American Muslim community, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reported 3,578 complaints in the last three months of 2023—a staggering 178% increase compared to the previous year. In 2023, CAIR recorded 8,061 complaints nationwide, the highest in its 30-year history. By mid-2024, the organization had already received 4,951 complaints, marking a 69% increase over the same period in 2023. Islamophobia permeated all sectors of society, with reports of discrimination in schools, /universities, and workplaces.

American universities became key battlegrounds in the debate over Israel’s actions in Gaza. Pro-Palestine and human rights supporters organized encampments, calling on administrations to divest from Israel, demanding  a ceasefire, and ending U.S. complicity in the violence. In response, many university officials took a heavy-handed approach, censoring protests, shutting down (often forcefully) encampments, and stifling debate. Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim students reported receiving little to no support from the administrations in the face of Islamophobic and racist attacks, creating hostile environments on campuses. In 2024, a wave of lawsuits emerged against universities, alleging they failed to protect students and fostered environments where Islamophobia, anti-Arab sentiment, and anti-Palestinian rhetoric flourished.

It started in late 2023 when the federal government opened civil rights investigations into multiple universities—including Cornell, Lafayette College, Columbia, and UPenn—over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia following the escalation of Israel’s war in Gaza. In 2024, the Department of Education expanded its investigations to institutions such as Harvard, Temple, Emory, and Northwestern, prompted by complaints from Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students about hostile campus environments and inadequate protection from threats and discrimination. The attack on the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University (CILRU) underscored the dangerous climate. On the day of the Islamic holiday of Eid-al-Fitr, Jacob Beacher broke into the center, damaging items including Quranic art, windows, televisions, and the Palestinian flag.” In October 2024, Beacher pled guilty to a federal hate crime.

Incidents of silencing Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab students and pro-Palestine supporters were widespread. At the University of Southern California (USC), the administration cancelled the 2024 valedictorian speech of Asna Tabassum, a hijab-wearing Muslim student, citing “security and safety” concerns. Tabassum responded, “I was hoping to use my commencement speech to inspire my classmates with a message of hope. By canceling my speech, USC is only caving to fear and rewarding hatred.” At Columbia University, where the pro-Palestine encampments began, there was uproar at the 2024 graduation ceremony as the speaker’s microphone appeared to turn off when she mentioned Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza.

Reports of harassment against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students were widespread, including doxxing, stalking, and even violent assaults. In November 2024, a CAIR survey of Muslim university students in California revealed that 49% had “experienced anti-Muslim acts by students, staff or administrators at school.” At Arizona State University, the administration placed Professor Jonathan Yudelman on leave after a video surfaced showing him physically intimidating and threatening a Muslim woman. One of the most violent incidents occurred on April 30, 2024 at the University of California (UCLA), when a mob of pro-Israel supporters attacked a pro-Palestine encampment. The attackers “sprayed protesters with chemical irritants, hit them with wooden boards, punched and kicked them and shot fireworks into the crowd of students and supporters huddled behind umbrellas and wooden planks.” A CNN piece reported that “law enforcement stood by for hours as counterprotesters attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment.”

It hasn’t just been students who have suffered in this environment, scholars across the country are facing disciplinary actions for supporting the pro-Palestine movement. A May 2024 Intercept piece revealed that academics had been “fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech.”

The escalating tensions led to congressional hearings in late 2023, where university presidents were questioned about campus discrimination. However, instead of addressing the surge in Islamophobic bigotry, many committee members smeared pro-Palestine student activism as antisemitic. There was little appetite for acknowledging the sharp increase in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, rather Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians and Palestinian supporters were mischaracterized as antisemitic mobs. Representative Elise Stefanik emerged as a vocal participant, branding herself as an advocate against antisemitism while using her platform to amplify anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian rhetoric. Her combative and biased questions gained viral online attention, and the fallout led to the resignations of high-profile university leaders, including those at Harvard and UPenn.

Observers likened the hearings and the campus climate to McCarthyism, where dissent against Israel’s actions in Gaza or support for Palestinians has been met with censorship, backlash, and punitive measures designed to suppress free speech.

This suppression was mirrored by a broader surge in Islamophobia, exceeding even the post-9/11 era in severity. In the final three months of 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) received 3,587 complaints of anti-Muslim hate—a 178% increase over the previous year. By the year’s end, CAIR documented over 8,000 complaints, the highest in its thirty-year history. In the first half of 2024 alone, attacks on Muslims and Palestinians increased by 70%. Among the crimes recorded were heinous incidents such as aa Georgia middle school teacher threatening to decapitate a student who objected to him flying the Israeli flag in his classroom, a  Texas woman attempting to drown a three-year-old Palestinian-American girl while saying that the child’s mother wasn’t really American, a driver who allegedly intentionally hit two Muslim women and a 5-month old infant in a stroller. Other incidents included a Kentucky man who threatened a Palestinian-American man with a loaded gun and a woman who pepper sprayed and violently attacked a 45-year-old Muslim Uber driver in New York City. Additionally, CAIR also received hundreds of complaints from professionals such as doctors and teachers who faced employer backlash for their support of Palestinians. The organization recorded that many individuals reported being “terminated” or “disciplined” for speaking in favor of Palestinians or sharing pro-Palestine content online.

It’s important to note that all of these events and the surge in anti-Muslim bigotry has taken place under the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden, highlighting that Islamophobia is not confined to the political right. The Biden administration, alongside a Democratic-majority Congress, provided unwavering support to Israel as it carried out its campaign in Gaza, further alienating Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities.

The genocide in Gaza also shaped voter behavior. After President Biden dropped out of his re-election bid, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee. However, she failed to distance herself from the administration’s policies. Her campaign not only ignored the voices of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim American communities, it actively silenced them. At the Democratic National Convention, the Harris campaign featured the parents of an Israeli hostage who is American but did not allow a single Palestinian speaker on stage and ignored the calls from the Uncommitted Movement to support a ceasefire and halt U.S. arms sales to Israel. There was even an incident of anti-Muslim violence as a Muslim woman was assaulted at the DNC and nothing was done to tackle it. Thai alienation culminated in a significant departure of Muslim American voters from the Democratic party. For the first time in decades, the community, traditionally aligned with Democrats, shifted its support. Religious and community leaders urged voters to support third-party candidates, signaling a monumental realignment.

Donald Trump won the election and became the first Republican to secure the popular vote since 2004. Just weeks before his inauguration, the Biden administration released the country’s first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia—a move rights organizations dismissed as “too little, too late.” What good could a policy do in the last weeks of an administration that is to be replaced with a President who previously instituted a Muslim Ban and appointed a plethora of individuals who built careers of peddling anti-Muslim bigotry? Trump himself has already declared that he will restore his Muslim Ban, as he told a crowd at the Israeli American Council’s annual conference: “I will ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip.” The policy failed to address structural issues like no-fly lists and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs, which disproportionately target Muslims. Its release underscored the administration’s failure to tackle its role in perpetuating Islamophobia and its complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

As 2024 draws to a close, the genocide in Gaza continues unabated. Omer Bartov, a Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, recently described Israel’s campaign as “a war of annihilation of the entire Gaza Strip.” Leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have declared that Israel is committing genocide. Central to this tragedy is the pervasive anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, which have so thoroughly dehumanized Palestinians that Israel has carried out Gaza’s devastation with the unconditional support of Western powers.

2024 has underscored the interconnectedness of global events—showing how crises in one region resonate profoundly across the world, and it has starkly illustrated the perilous consequences of prejudice and systemic bigotry.