On Friday, 14 March, Zoom prevented the Masar Badil from holding our webinar, “The Flood of Return.” As the webinar was to begin, participants suddenly received a message that “the host” had ended the webinar, even though they had not; meanwhile, people joining the webinar received a message that the webinar was inaccessible from their country, with identical messages except for the country, identified by IP address. After we created the webinar a second time and sent emails to all registrants, people once again received these messages and our account was shut down, apparently in response to Zionist demands that the webinar be cancelled by Zoom. Once again — as on multiple past occasions — Zoom is acting to silence voices for justice in Palestine amid an ongoing US-Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people, the Arab people and the region as a whole.

However, Zionism is not satisfied with carrying out a genocide in Palestine. Through its embassies and intelligence services, as well as Zionist lobby groups online, with the complicity of allied imperalist governments and followers of the U.S. Empire, they pursue all forms of repression — from assassinations and deportations and bans, to social media deplatforming and shutting down webinars — against all those who dare, like us, to denounce the massacres and Zionist crimes, those who dare to confront the practices of the Israeli occupation forces and the settlers openly, and to uphold and defend the resistance of the Palestinian people against those massacres.

Social networks are known to play a central role in spreading information. Therefore, these measures that attempt to silence our voices are not surprising but remain an outrageous affront to public knowledge and expression. We affirm that just as the Palestinian people will not surrender despite the genocide, we in the Masar Badil will not submit to intimidation and will not be silent and will not abandon the struggle to liberate Palestine from the river to the sea.

We will announce the new date for the webinar at the earliest possible opportunity and encourage all to attend and participate and make clear that collectively, we will not be silenced.