Every scholar who works in or on the Middle East and North Africa will benefit from this important book. For those of us who spend our professional lives trying to understand and explain what shapes life in this region (including all readers of this journal), a vague and disquieting sense that we are being stifled, our ideas muffled and our impact diminished, has become almost second nature. It is both deeply disheartening and at the same time oddly reassuring to be reminded that these circumstances are neither the natural order of things nor a consequence of individual delusions; they are, in fact, the artifact of a deliberately designed and manufactured constriction of the intellectual space in which we work. This book accomplishes that important task by careful accumulation of data, cases, and documentation and a tone of sober, analytical composure that makes its case even more damning.

The volume is divided into three parts, introduced and closed by excellent essays by each of the editors. The first part, “Civil Society in Palestine and Israel,” includes contributions by Nathan Brown on Palestinian civil society, Dana El Kurd on the contribution of the Oslo framework to Palestinian authoritarianism, Zaha Hassan and Layla Gantus on occupation and autocracy in community organizations, Dahlia Scheindlin on the changing fortunes of civil society in Israel, and Jessica Buxbaum and Katherine Wilkens on what they call “Neo-Kahanism” or violent Jewish supremacist movements.

This section conveys the impediments to open public debate about Israel and the circumstances of the Palestinians within and among Israelis and Palestinians themselves. As Brown shows, the dwindling of the realm of the “civil” has debilitated and distorted contestation. Whether as a feature of social life that is distinct from government and business – the NGOs, community centers, and youth associations – or as a mode of discourse – what the US Supreme Court described as “the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” (Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011)) – civil society and discourse have eroded, and with them, the capacity to engage in dissent, argument, and debate about the public good. As Kurd reminds us, the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) proved to be little more than a diversion, albeit an effective one, serving to both obscure and extend the increasingly oppressive rule under which Palestinians live, particularly in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. Hassan and Gantus describe the increasing harassment and intimidation as the PA became little more than the subcontractor for an occupation that imposed increasingly onerous restrictions on movement, tax burdens, and reporting requirements for virtually all civil society organizations. In Gaza, of course, Hamas too was unmoved by calls for uninhibited discussion. Within Israel, as Scheindlin shows, debate moved rightward as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu solidified control, turning political and national minorities into “an internal enemy,” a move exacerbated by Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s furious retaliation. Scheindlin is cautiously optimistic that pro-democracy protests against the Israeli government might produce a resurgence of civil society activism, but Buxbaum and Wilkens’s description of the move of right-wing Jewish supremacists into the mainstream – and into the government – does not bode well.

The second part of this excellent volume, on “Mechanisms to Repress Speech, Activism and Agency,” is comprised of essays by Nour Sourbani and Diala Shamas on the use of US counterterrorism laws to suppress Palestinian activism, Yael Berda on Israeli practices that restrict civic space, two contributions by Matt Mahmoudi and Marwa Fatafta on Palestine as a proving ground for the use of digital technologies to repression dissent, Lara Freidman on practices than discourage pro-Palestinian protest in the US, and Ashleigh Subramanian-Montgomery and Paul Carrol on the use of restrictions on financial services and banking to control NGOs.

Here we find a selection of the kinds of practices that autocratic governments routinely employ to repress political debate and contestation. As Sourbani and Shamas show, the development of US restrictions on “material support to terrorism” after 9/11 created enormous opportunities to limit and prevent not only direct funding to civil society organizations alleged to be associated with “terrorists,” but all sorts of training, advising, and collaborating with political organizations, including those advocating non-violent approaches to conflict resolution. Resort to the courts by private litigants with political agendas served to harass advocacy and humanitarian groups, as well as deplete their financial resources both within Israel and, as Friedman shows, in the United States. Indeed, the expansion of “terrorism” to cover virtually any opposition to government policy has served many governments as well; Berda catalogues a depressing array of legal and political mechanisms by which Palestinians and their allies, both within Israel and abroad, are brought to heel, while, as Subramanian-Montgomery and Carrol show, “money laundering” serves much the same purpose globally, restricting financial transfers and limiting access to the international financial system. Mahmoudi and Fatafta both provide unusually discerning examinations of the use of Israel’s much celebrated technological prowess to monitor, censor, and intimidate Palestinians by using digital technology to collect data, provide services in the urban areas of the Occupied Territories, and deploy advanced spyware in digital platforms.

The third section of the book widens the lens to examine transnational practices designed to inhibit and restrict the activities of Palestinian advocacy internationally. This section includes essays by Yousef Munayyer on Israeli networks of disinformation, Maya Berry on repression of Arab American voices, and Marwan Muasher and Rafiah Al Talei on the limits of advocacy and dissent in the Arab world.

Here, Munayyer documents the efforts of secret networks of Israeli government and formally non-governmental organizations to delegitimize international advocacy campaigns in support of Palestinian rights, from efforts to outlaw Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions advocacy to broadening the definition of antisemitism to include virtually all criticism of Israel. Berry illustrates the exacting pressures exerted on Americans of Arab descent, not least by the confusion wrought by how race, ethnicity, language, and religion are deployed in American identity politics. Muasher and Al Talei offer distinctive perspectives, from the political elite and civil society in turn, on the limits of debate within the Arab world itself, where most of civil society is, in fact, comprised of government-organized (and monitored) non-governmental organizations, or GONGOs.

Taken together, these accounts are often painful to read. But particularly as American universities are brought low by inept and often craven responses to efforts to suppress not just dissent but virtually any discussion of Palestine-Israel at all, they are urgently important. And those of us who believe that our work is somehow protected from these mechanisms of repression by distance in time and place – as we work on earlier eras or the further reaches of the region, perhaps – should not be complacent. The dynamics described here metastasize quickly; authoritarians learn from each other. The least that we, for whom academic freedom is vital, can do is learn from each other as well, and this book is a superb place to start.