Despite talk of a “ceasefire” in Gaza, Israel continues its deadly work against the Palestinian people, with continued support from its Western allies. Since the casefire went into effect last month, the Gaza Health Ministry reports at least 300 deaths and hundreds more injuries at the hands of Israeli forces. Alongside the continued killing of Palestinians, Israel’s allies continue their campaign of intimidation and repression against advocates for Palestinian human rights around the world. The latest target is Richard Falk, a 95-year-old professor emeritus of international law who has spent decades documenting violations against the Palestinian people.
Falk, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, was detained by Canadian border authorities this month under the vague category of “national security grounds.” The idea that a 95-year-old scholar—one of the world’s most respected experts on humanitarian law—constitutes a threat to Canada’s national security is absurd on its face. But Falk’s real “offense” is clear enough: He has spent much of his career holding Israel to account under international law.
Falk and his wife, legal scholar Hilal Elver (herself a former UN Special Rapporteur), were traveling to Ottawa to participate in the “Gaza Tribunal for Canadian Responsibility,” a civil society forum bringing together international experts to assess Canada’s role in the Gaza genocide. The tribunal aimed to examine Canada’s political, diplomatic, and material support for Israel’s two-year assault on Gaza and to trace how those policies contributed to civilian suffering and mass destruction.
According to Al-Jazeera and other credible outlets, the couple was detained and questioned for more than four hours. At no point were they asked questions related to Canada’s national security. Instead, the interrogation focused almost entirely on their work on Palestine. Falk later described the experience as part of a continuing effort by Israel’s allies to intimidate, punish, and silence those who speak out against Israeli war crimes.
This is not an isolated incident, nor is it a leftover curiosity from the height of the war.
There was another high-profile example just last year, when Israeli historian Ilan Pappé—one of the most internationally recognized chroniclers of the Nakba—was detained and interrogated by U.S. Homeland Security officials upon entering the United States. Pappé, now 71, has written extensively about the planned ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias during Israel’s founding. His books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, have become foundational texts for understanding the origins of the Palestinian dispossession.
In June 2024, U.S. officials held Pappé for hours, questioned him about his political views, and reportedly copied the contents of his phone. This was not about immigration procedure or border security. It was political—and deliberately so. The message was unmistakable: Even an Israeli Jewish scholar who documents Israel’s atrocities is not safe from political harassment in the United States if his research threatens the narratives necessary to maintain U.S. support for Israel.
Since the beginning of the Gaza war in 2023, Western states have deployed a vast array of tools to suppress dissent: police raids, anti-terror laws, university disciplinary measures, immigration detentions, sanctions on human rights experts, and the criminalization of protest movements.
The Canadian government’s treatment of Falk shows that the repression against Palestine solidarity and criticism of Israel has not ended with the “ceasefire.” Israel’s allies are still focused on protecting their imperialist ally and shielding its apartheid regime from accountability.
None of these detentions for “national security” protect anyone. What they protect is a political relationship: the deep military and intelligence alignment between Israel and its Western partners, especially the United States. They protect billions in arms sales, intelligence sharing agreements, and diplomatic shields at the United Nations. They protect the ability of Western officials to claim they are defending “democracy” while enabling genocide abroad.
And they protect the narrative that Israel is a besieged democracy rather than a settler-colonial state dependent on ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, and permanent apartheid rule.
Richard Falk’s detention is outrageous not only because he is a respected elder in the international law community, or because interrogating a 95-year-old scholar is both cruel and absurd. It is outrageous because it exposes the ongoing, coordinated nature of this repression. The genocide in Gaza did not end with the so-called ceasefire. Just as Palestinians continue to be killed in Gaza and dispossessed of their lands and basic safety in the West Bank, critics of Israel continue to face intimidation and harassment as they work to expose the truth.
If the international movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people is to continue building momentum, it’s important to understand these attacks on scholars, activists, and human rights workers as part of the same system that produced the destruction of Gaza itself. The repression of dissent is not collateral damage—it is an essential part of how imperial power sustains injustice.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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