She is a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal and has done groundbreaking legal work on free speech, censorship, and the right to boycott.
Radhika Sainath has seen an exponential increase in requests for legal assistance since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Over 400 calls have been received by Palestine Legal, an advocacy organization where she is a senior staff attorney, from lawyers, doctors, journalists, professors, teachers, students, and other workers in nonprofits, government, and the corporate world. These individuals have been “fired, doxxed, canceled, censored, and physically threatened for speaking out for Palestinian freedom, criticizing Israel, or failing to march in lockstep behind Israel’s action,” an Indian American activist attorney wrote in the Boston Review.
In 2012, Palestine Legal, an organization that protects the constitutional and civil rights of people in the United States who advocate for Palestinian freedom, was founded. Sainath joined a year later. The native of Newport Beach, California, works in the group’s New York City office. According to the organization’s website, she is in charge of “groundbreaking legal work on free speech, censorship, and the right to boycott.” She and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a landmark lawsuit against Fordham University in August 2019 after it refused to grant Students for Justice in Palestine club status.
After the Gaza war began, Sainath spoke with The New York Times about the letter sent by the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. The Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law wrote to nearly 200 college presidents, urging them to “investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for potential violations of federal and state laws against providing material support to terrorism.” According to her, “the mass violation of students’ rights,” called by the ADL is “reminiscent of the post 9/11 environment, but with a more intensely Palestinian twist.”
Despite the fact that the Palestinian activists “pose no threat and have done nothing but engage in speech protected by the First Amendment,” Sainath told The Times that “if federal and state governments follow through on the ADL’s demands, Palestinian activists will face increased surveillance, infiltration, and investigation.”
Sainath mentions in the Boston Review article that the organization’s clients “range for targets,” including Starbucks employees, Harvard students, MSNBC reporters, Pulitzer Prize winners, science journal editors, and others. “This is a McCarthyite backlash,” she continues. “The climate of censorship, suppression, and intimidation resembles the aftermath of 9/11; it is the “Palestine exception to free speech”—the “real cancel culture,” or whatever you want to call it—in action, as the CCR and we at Palestine Legal have called it.” She emphasizes the critical importance of understanding that “the underlying erasure of Palestinian suffering that underpins all of this is a form of anti-Palestinian racism.”
Sainath laments the lack of discussion on the subject and wonders if an “open and informed debate” would result in policy change in the United States. “Would our elected officials support Israeli airstrikes?” Could we stop the killing and avert a mass tragedy? Free expression in support of Palestinian rights has never been more important than now.”
“If you are a Palestinian in the U.S. speaking out for Palestinian rights, you can expect to be censored and slandered. This isn’t just an affront to free speech — it’s often a manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism.”
In a November 1 article for The Jacobian, she discusses how censorship of Palestinian rights advocacy is often a manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism. “If you are a Palestinian in the U.S. speaking out for Palestinian rights, you can expect to be censored and slandered. This is not only a violation of free speech; it is frequently a manifestation of anti-Palestinian racism.”
Sainath has spent many years working on international human rights issues. Her parents are Indian immigrants, and her “motivation to work for social justice” is influenced by her identity and “India’s history of nonviolent resistance,” she told Andrew Cohen in a Berkley Review interview on May 4, 2008. At the time, she was a student at the UC Berkeley School of Law. During her time at Berkley Law, she worked on national security, war crimes, free speech, and immigrant rights cases at the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund.
Her social justice endeavors have taken her to various parts of the world, and she is not afraid of difficult human rights conflicts. She has been tear-gassed, arrested, interrogated, and jailed. While working with a human rights organization in Bahrain in 2012, she was arrested and deported. She was part of an eight-member National Lawyers Guild delegation that visited Pakistan in January 2008, just days after Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007.
Sainath told the Los Angeles Times that she went to Bahrain with Witness Bahrain, a group of observers who support Bahrain’s opposition. “Tweeting updates from the sidelines of a peaceful march toward Pearl Roundabout, when tear gas canisters began whizzing by,” she explained.
When the gas cleared, she “found herself surrounded by police,” she told the Los Angeles Times. They took her to the police station and questioned her for several hours, asking who had invited her to the protests. According to the Associated Press, officials accused her and another American activist of violating tourist visa rules by participating in the protests ‘to report on them’ for websites and social media.
According to the Berkley Law website, Sainath and the group “examined how Musharraf’s declaration of state of emergency on Nov. 3—when he suspended the constitution and unilaterally removed more than 60 high court judges—affected Pakistan’s developing democracy.” According to the article, they visited “four cities and interviewed more than 50 jurists, lawyers, civil servants, journalists, political party representatives, elected officials, students, activists, and others.”
Sainath worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led, nonviolent resistance movement, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip before joining Palestine Legal. She has organized union textile workers in East Coast factories and the Los Angeles garment district, and she has monitored human-rights violations against indigenous villagers during the Elections elections; and spent a year volunteering for the International Solidarity Movement in the West Bank.
Sainath attended the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and the University of California, San Diego. Radhika worked for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (now UNITE-HERE) before attending law school. With UNITE HERE!, she organized factory workers across the country.
Her work has appeared in several publications, and she co-edited “Peace Under Fire,” a book about the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). She is also working on her first novel, which is set during the Second Intifada in Palestine.
