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Pro-Palestinian Group Is Relentless in Its Criticism of Israel, and It Isn’t Backing Down

Within Our Lifetime, a group formed by New York students, has galvanized pro-Palestinian activists who are calling for the end of Israel — and facing accusations of antisemitism.

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A group of protesters hold signs and a large Palestinian flag at an intersection in Harlem.

Protesters at a rally organized by the pro-Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime outside a campaign event for Kamala Harris in Harlem in August.Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

Sharon Otterman

By Sharon Otterman

Oct. 5, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

Without even entering Grand Central Terminal’s soaring main hall on one Thursday evening in July, Nerdeen Kiswani and her pro-Palestinian protest group, Within Our Lifetime, managed to shut it down.

All it took was a flier, posted online, calling on her followers to meet by the iconic clock in the New York train station at 5:30 p.m. The police got there first, barricading the entire space to commuters and tourists. Three helicopters and a drone circled in the sky.

Ms. Kiswani, a 30-year-old Palestinian American with a law degree, moved the protest outside. Wearing a tan hijab partly secured with a pair of oversize sunglasses, she stood on a bench and surveyed the disruption she and the other demonstrators had sparked — honking traffic, rows of police officers in riot gear, a group of pro-Israel counterprotesters setting off air horns to interrupt her.

“I guess they accomplished our goal for us,” she shouted to the protesters, who echoed back her words to amplify them. “Because our goal was to raise awareness about the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza.”

After her speech, the crowd began chanting along with her: “Judaism, yes, Zionism no! The state of Israel has got to go!”

New Yorkers have become familiar with the tactics of Ms. Kiswani and Within Our Lifetime, the group she co-founded in 2015, even if they don’t know her by name. Their marches have shut down the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and snarled Midtown traffic. Their chants of “Long live the Intifada!” outside an exhibition memorializing victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, drew condemnation from as high as the White House. Protesters in her orbit sometimes burn Israeli flags and fly the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah.

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In a portrait, Nerdeen Kiswani smiles slightly. She wears a tan hijab partially covering her hair and has a kaffiyeh wrapped around her shoulders.

Nerdeen Kiswani is a child of Palestinian refugees from Beit Iksa, a village in the West Bank. She helped found Within Our Lifetime while in college. Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Ms. Kiswani says that she supports the liberation of the Palestinian people “by any means necessary,” including armed resistance. This has made her a reviled target for Jewish and Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League and Canary Mission, and a familiar figure to the N.Y.P.D.

“If you’re going to fight against essentially a killing machine, you can’t just do it with love and vibes and peace slogans alone,” Ms. Kiswani said in a recent interview. “People need to be able to defend themselves.”

Officially, the group has a few dozen members, and its demonstrations can attract a few hundred people. But some marches, often held together with other anti-Zionist groups, have attracted thousands of people and led to dozens of arrests.

As a sign of its reach, Within Our Lifetime’s Instagram account had some 180,000 followers before Meta shut it down in February. A Meta spokeswoman said the account was suspended for violating guidelines that bar the glorification or support of “dangerous organizations or individuals,” which includes U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.

Some say Within Our Lifetime has discredited the pro-Palestinian movement with hateful, violent messages. Ms. Kiswani has escalated its rhetoric, said Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL Center on Extremism, “so that it’s no longer strange or fringe to see blatant terrorist group flags and symbols at events.”

On its social media channels, Within Our Lifetime has mourned figures like Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief assassinated by Israel last month, and called them martyrs.

But as the war in Gaza grinds on, it has brought new attention to Ms. Kiswani, led some to replicate her efforts around the country and forced political leaders to contend with raw anger on the streets.

A New Generation

Ms. Kiswani bills herself as part of a bolder, new generation of Palestinian American activists who are calling for what she says earlier generations also wanted, but feared to say in public: the replacement of the state of Israel with a state called Palestine, covering all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

“We may look more moderate, or whatever, if we talk about a two-state solution,” she said. “But that’s been dead on arrival for years now. It’s already a one-state solution. It’s a state that’s controlled by Israel in every sense.”

There was no point in softening her message, she said. “People from our community who tried to appease politicians, they were still marginalized. They were still called terrorists,” she added. “So if we’re going to receive that backlash regardless of what we say or do, then we might as well make the full demands of what we want for our people, which is complete and total liberation.”

Ms. Kiswani and the groups that protest with her helped inspire last spring’s campus protests that bedeviled and led to the departure of multiple university leaders. (Ms. Kiswani showed up to the Columbia University encampment on her wedding day in April, still wearing her traditional red and white dress.)

They have also become a concern for Democrats who fear divisions over the war in Gaza might chip away at voters during a presidential election with tight margins.

“They tell us voting for the lesser of two evils is the right thing to do,” Ms. Kiswani told a crowd in August, standing atop a stack of police crowd-control barricades outside a campaign event for Vice President Kamala Harris in Harlem. “So we divest from this system.”

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Nerdeen Kiswani, wearing a tan hijab and striped shirt, holds her hand up, and her mouth is open wide in a shout. Behind her is an anti-Israel sign.

Ms. Kiswani has attracted a growing group of followers to her protests and has participated in demonstrations on college campuses.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

Ms. Kiswani insists she is not antisemitic. Instead, she says she opposes Zionists, those who believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state in its ancient homeland. But Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League say that distinction is a smoke screen, because Zionism is a core part of the identity of most Jews.

Within Our Lifetime’s anti-Zionism is so vitriolic that it has alienated some prominent critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat. As protesters waved Hamas flags outside of a Nova Music Festival commemoration in June, Ms. Kiswani called the festival, where hundreds were killed on Oct. 7, “the place where Zionists decided to rave next to a concentration camp.”

The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the protest was “atrocious antisemitism — plain and simple.”

But Ms. Kiswani also has an increasing number of people willing to protest behind her.

“The world is not doing anything to stop the slaughter of all these thousands and thousands of children,” said Carolyn Antonucci, 64, who came from Connecticut to march at a Within Our Lifetime event on Labor Day with a crowd of thousands that stretched for blocks on Park Avenue. “So I mean, who am I to say what the right thing to do is?”

Sarah Schulman, a playwright who is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization, has known Ms. Kiswani for years and said her point of view makes sense given her experiences.

“I think that the thing people really need to ask themselves when they look at her is, if this was me, and this was my family that was being brutalized and murdered, would I be doing this?” Ms. Schulman said.

In Exile With ‘Nothing to Lose Anymore’

Ms. Kiswani is a daughter of Palestinian refugees from Beit Iksa, a village in the West Bank. Born in Jordan and raised in Brooklyn, where her family opened a restaurant, she attended an Islamic private school for most of her childhood.

She switched to a public high school and then went to the College of Staten Island, a school under the City University of New York system, where she studied human rights and international relations with a focus on the Middle East. There, she co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. At Hunter College, where she took many of her classes, she continued her activism.

In 2015, Ms. Kiswani said, she was blocked by Israel from visiting her relatives in the West Bank, though she had visited before. The security officers, holding her for 16 hours at the border, cited her work organizing in college.

“I felt like I had nothing to lose anymore,” she said.

Not long after, she and other activists formed NYC Students for Justice in Palestine, a coalition across CUNY schools. In 2018, they renamed the group Within Our Lifetime, to better reflect the urgency of their push to “revitalize the revolutionary spirit of Palestinians living in exile.” Their marches, featuring incendiary chants, sparked intense criticism from pro-Israel groups.

After she enrolled at CUNY Law School, Ms. Kiswani was named “Antisemite of the Year” in 2020 by a group called Stopantisemitism.org. Despite that, she was elected as class graduation speaker in 2022. Her fiery speech, critical of both Israel and what she described as American imperialism, got national attention.

Ms. Kiswani said she runs Within Our Lifetime as a volunteer while studying for the bar exam. The group is not registered as a nonprofit, and has no paid staff. It was fund-raising through the WESPAC Foundation, a nonprofit based in White Plains, N.Y., that helps pro-Palestinian groups. But the arrangement was disrupted by litigation, including a lawsuit accusing Within Our Lifetime of creating a hostile environment for Jewish students, Ms. Kiswani said. Nada Khader, the foundation’s executive director, declined to comment.

Within Our Lifetime does not release a formal membership list because of the dangers of harassment and doxxing. But individuals who have identified themselves as organizers include Fatima Mohammed, who called for a revolution against “capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism” in her 2023 CUNY Law graduation speech, and Abdullah Akl, who in March led a chant in Arabic calling for strikes on Tel Aviv.

One internal N.Y.P.D. document detailing notable arrests during the campus protests last spring listed several who had participated in Within Our Lifetime actions. It included James Carlson, a 40-year-old lawyer described by the police as a “longtime figure in the anarchist world” who was indicted in September on charges of burning another person’s Israeli flag at a protest outside Columbia. Ms. Kiswani said she hadn’t heard of him.

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Protesters wearing kaffiyehs crowd near a gated storefront behind a group of police officers in fluorescent shirts.

The police made arrests after demonstrators stormed into a restaurant tied to a campaign event for Kamala Harris. Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times

The group’s marches tend to follow a playbook: First, lesser-known leaders warm up the crowd, then Ms. Kiswani steps up and speaks. She’s tall, which helps make her recognizable. “I’m 5-11, so I think I just stand out,” she said.

At her signal, protesters take off at a rapid clip through the city, leaving police officers rushing to keep up. She is occasionally arrested, but reappears at the next demonstration, in her distinctive hijabs and bright lipstick.

She often seems to leave before confrontations with the police escalate. After a rally outside of a Harris campaign event in Harlem, for example, Ms. Kiswani told protesters about an after-party at a restaurant about 10 blocks north. There, the scene devolved into chaos.

Chanting “Harris, Harris you’re a liar! You set Palestine on fire!” a crowd of demonstrators stormed into the restaurant as diners cowered. Police officers descended to restore order. Fourteen people were arrested.

By that point, Ms. Kiswani was nowhere to be found.

Vandalism and Fears of Violence

Ms. Kiswani's chants are broadly protected by the First Amendment. Her protests don’t use amplified sound, so in New York City, they don’t require permits. But Mr. Segal of the Anti-Defamation League argued that her words could incite violent or destructive action.

“The more that you normalize activities that seek to isolate, marginalize and demonize a certain group of people, the more likely it is that people on the fringes of the movement that you are leading are going to take it to the next level,” he said.

Sometimes, there were physical clashes with counterprotesters supporting Israel. Outside Columbia’s gates in February, Noah Lederman, a Jewish student, was pushed against a wall when several protesters at a Within Our Lifetime march spotted his T-shirt with the Israeli flag, he said. After he broke free and started to run away, a protester yelled a threat.

Ms. Kiswani was defiant when a protester from a Within Our Lifetime rally in June boarded a city subway and shouted for Zionists to raise their hand and leave the train, in an episode that led the city police to file misdemeanor charges.

“We don’t want Zionists in Palestine, NYC, our schools, on the train, ANYWHERE,” Ms. Kiswani wrote on X in response to the uproar. “This is free speech, it is saying we don’t want racists here.” Later, in an interview, she said the protester had been joking.

About two weeks after a Within Our Lifetime march targeted the Brooklyn Museum in May, arguing it was complicit in Palestinian genocide, the homes of the museum’s Jewish director and board members were splashed with red paint and hateful slogans. An anonymous group claimed responsibility — Within Our Lifetime marches attract a variety of leftist revolutionary activists — and the police later arrested two people. Neither was part of Within Our Lifetime, Ms. Kiswani said.

Ms. Kiswani has studied revolutionary movements and says that armed resistance has always been a part of them. (Her use of “by any means necessary” is an echo of Malcolm X, she said.)

She said she was freed, in a way, by growing up in a post-Sept. 11 New York City, where Muslims “were used to being called terrorists at school.” If she would be thought of as a terrorist no matter what, she said, why worry about it?

“That kind of propaganda doesn’t work on our generation anymore,” she said.

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