How I got fired from my job for pro-Palestine activism

On living a double life in a time when conformity is the only acceptable behaviour.

On the last day of February (Thursday), I was taken aside from my desk for an informal chat by the highest authority at my workplace (let’s call them Q). As we casually walked through the office corridor towards a table, I was told that there were complaints against me without going into the details. In response I said that my reporting manager had conveyed the same message to me just a couple of days ago, but also in an informal chat and also without elaboration. I mentioned that the same manager informed me about an email thread that includes individuals above me in the hierarchy and HR staff, who are talking about my alleged infractions without my knowledge. Q then told me that there will be a meeting the following Monday (March 4) with all the stakeholders in which the case against me will be laid out. I mildly protested that I wasn’t being given a fair shake as multiple stakeholders had already registered their views, conspiratorially talked about me behind my back, and I hadn’t heard anything officially yet to respond. “You will know the details on Monday,” Q said and wished me well for an impending company trip that weekend as we parted company.

Between that Friday and Sunday, the entire office was on a three-day company trip. To my surprise, the CEO (who sat at another office location) visited my only social media profile twice in those three days. I knew it spelled nothing but doom.

Four days later, on Monday, I was hit by a swarm that I didn’t see coming in my wildest dreams. In a small meeting room with three others — including the person who took me aside for the chat four days earlier (Q), my reporting manager, and an HR representative — in physical attendance, and the fourth person — the highest authority in my vertical (let’s call them Z) — over a Zoom call, all sorts of allegations were flung at me. From nonsensical allegations like taking too many leaves (I never took any more than what I was entitled to) to accusations that require no evidence, such as not taking responsibility at work, not being proactive enough, and not meeting expectations, were put forth. To that last accusation, I protested that my quarterly ratings painted an entirely different picture. The allegations then took another course. The person on the Zoom call (Z) told me that I didn’t deliver the previous project in good shape. To which I retorted that it was a task in an entirely new domain, requiring expertise that I didn’t have and wasn’t hired for. But despite all that handicap I still readily took up the task to help out the team at a crunch time. Further, I told the gathering that I was supposed to be a support cast in that task with two other protagonists who took the centre stage. I had no say in how they performed. Unable to counter, they changed the topic again.

After about 30 minutes of these exchanges, the highest authority in my office (Q) bid the other three goodbye to begin a one-on-one conversation with me. The moment we were the only two people in the room, Q turned their laptop in my direction and posed the question, “What is this?” Q’s screen had the timeline of my social media account, which the CEO had visited twice over the previous weekend. The timeline was full of reposted and liked videos and photos from the ongoing genocide in Gaza — just shares and likes; I never posted any of my own thoughts or even links to my pro-Palestine writings, such as articles from this newsletter. Q visibly squirmed looking at some of the videos of dead children, open wounds, and prevalent misery. Q didn’t squirm at the fact that such inhuman treatment was being meted out to innocents trapped in a cage, but that I had the audacity to share posts about them from my account while being employed by their company.

I told Q that there was no reference to the company on my social media profile. No one could possibly link me to the company, I reasoned. She seemed to have taken note of it already, but it didn’t matter.

(My biggest fear at that time was that they had found this newsletter. In my mind I was just waiting for Q to bring it up, but they never did. The newsletter’s anonymity helped me keep it out of their sacrilegious eyes.)

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“Why are you doing this?” Q asked.

“Because I can’t help myself,” I replied.

“There are people in this office with immediate family members there. They don’t share stuff like this, why do you?” Q shot back.

“I can’t speak for others, but I can’t see this stuff and not try to make others aware of it, if I can,” I retorted.

“What’s happening with you?” Q asked, as if highlighting the crime of genocide is an abnormal, inhuman act and not the genocide itself.

“I am perfectly fine,” I replied, “I cannot see injustice and remain silent.”

“If you want me to take it all down, I will do it,” I added in the hope of cooling things down.

“Of course. Do it,” Q replied.

Q then changed course: “Is this why your work is being affected?”

I stuck to my guns from 30 minutes ago and argued that my work was completely fine. I had the quarterly appraisal scores to back my claim as well as several recent projects that were delivered to the stakeholders’ satisfaction. As Q kept repeating the same accusations and tried to probe further, I remained firm in my protestations. I have done no wrong, you have no case against me, I kept repeating.

I was soon excused, but just before I exited the room, Q said something to the effect of, “I will call you back again. We will go through the activity on your laptop in the meantime. This is not over.”

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I was called back within 30 minutes. When I knocked on the meeting room door, Q asked me to wait for a bit in another room before being called in for the meeting. In the meantime I scrubbed off everything from my offending social media account.

I was finally called in.

This time the room had the highest authority in my office (Q) and a high-ranking IT security official. He had a bunch of printouts of my laptop activity in front of him. The only incriminating stuff they could find were PDF copies of books by Talal Asad,

David Miller

, Ilan Pappe, John Mearsheimer, Edward Said, Aijaz Ahmad, and Laurent Guyénot, among several others. Q quizzed me, “Why are you reading books on Ireland?” Q was referring to Rethinking Northern Ireland: Colonialism, Power and Ideology, Miller’s book which was found on my laptop. I argued that I read widely and that I even kept books on football and Indian politics, among sundry other topics. “Is there a problem with books on Ireland?” I asked. Q didn’t respond.

Later, Q insinuated antisemitism. I retorted that none of those books were antisemitic. Most of them were relatively unknown and not in wide circulation, but calling them antisemitic would be a stretch too far even if they were on such topics as Jewish history and influence. I added that a good number of those books were written by Jewish authors.

Finally, the big reveal. Q put their phone in front of my face and shot, “What’s this?” Q had the front page of a Talal Asad book open. The title read: On Suicide Bombing. One of the books on my laptop, it was meant to be some sort of a gotcha from Q. I simply stated that it’s a book by a renowned anthropologist who teaches at top American universities and talks about political violence.

Nothing could have prepared me for Q’s next question: “What are you thinking?”

Q’s astounding insinuation was that I was planning a suicide bombing mission! My jaw dropped to the floor, but somehow I gathered myself and replied, “This is not a how-to manual on suicide bombing. This is literally a lecture delivered at UC Irvine and subsequently published as a book by Columbia University Press! Do you think they teach suicide bombers at the Ivy League?” Unbelievably, Q insisted that I come clean and at one point even threatened to report me to the authorities. At that point all I could say was that I had committed no crime — unless reading academic books was a crime — so I had nothing to be afraid of.

(A couple of months after this encounter, during the Columbia University student encampments, an NYPD official brandished a book titled Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction by British historian Charles Townshend, and told the media that he found “a book on terrorism!” I shared the news of this NYPD tomfoolery with a friend, who was privy to my troubles, and we laughed heartily wondering if this official and Q were related.)

I further argued that if these books were antisemitic and manuals on terrorism, as Q was insinuating, why was Amazon selling these books in this rabidly pro-Zionist country? I started typing one of the titles in the Amazon app just to prove my point, at which point the IT security official, who until then was largely a silent observer to the discussion between Q and me, gestured me to stop and said, “That’s okay,” tacitly conceding that there was nothing antisemitic or criminal about the material on the laptop.

“The problem is that these books are on the company laptop,” said the IT security official. I conceded his point that I probably should never read non-work related literature on the company’s computer before adding that I didn’t have a laptop of my own (since the last one I owned was nearly dead after nine years of use and would take an age to boot-up) so had resorted to reading those texts on the company laptop. (The employee handbook said nothing about downloading or accessing e-books. On the contrary, it encouraged learning; presumably, just not the kind I was interested in.) Furthermore, I challenged the duo to find in their logs evidence that I accessed any of those reading materials during my working hours. He replied that that’s fine, but even reading them at home on the company laptop wasn’t appropriate. I conceded his point again, apologised for my infraction, and told them that I will delete all the PDFs.

I informed Q that my offending social media feed was now clean. Q went to my social media page and said that they could still see the posts. The IT security guy cleared the cache on Q’s laptop, refreshed the page, and, poof, it was all gone. Q didn’t betray any emotions.

At one point Q said, “We had some visitors from Israel last week, what if they saw this stuff?” I had a lot to say about the potential hurt sentiments of the Israelis, but I kept mum. I had a job to protect.

I was made to sign a letter — naming some of the “problematic” 20-odd books on the laptop — stating that I had kept them on a company computer.

I was told that I could no longer carry the laptop home. Then Q went one step further, ordering me to leave the laptop right there on their desk and go home. “You can go home,” Q said. “When you come tomorrow, you can take the laptop from my office.”

I still had about three hours to complete the day’s shift.

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While walking back to my desk the feeling dawned on me that this was my last day at work. There’s no coming back to work tomorrow. I will most likely get a call in a few hours or tomorrow morning stating my termination. This was it. I went back to my desk, packed all my books — I usually kept “non-political” books on my desk. At the time I had Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, a company-approved book on marketing, and a few others on my desk. Apart from books, I kept coffee sachets and a thin prayer rug in a pedestal. I packed them all, trying to avert the gaze of some of the colleagues still there — it was late in the evening so most of them were already gone and I had a corner seat so that also helped in evading attention. If someone noticed, they didn’t ask.

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There was no call in the evening or in the morning. It was almost a sleepless night. I had a torturous, nearly 2-hour bus ride to work during which I played back and forth all the possibilities that could transpire in the office.

I tried to prepare myself for the worst, which at the time looked like the most plausible outcome.

I was finally at Q’s office door, knocked on it and stepped inside. Q was in their chair with the IT security guy sitting to their left. I was told to wait outside for 10 minutes. “I will call you in,” Q told me.

When I was finally called in, the hand-written letter from the previous day (listing some of my books on the laptop) was now typed and printed out. I was made to sign it along with a warning letter, listing sundry accusations from the previous day about the lack of proactiveness, not doing the necessary hours (despite the fact that I was clocking over two hours extra each week due to my commuting arrangements), etc. Interestingly, the warning letter didn’t say anything about my social media activity or the books on my laptop — the two biggest issues raised by Q the previous day.

After signing the warning letter, I was officially on notice for the next 30 days with the explicit guideline to improve performance or else face termination at the end of the warning period. I was barred from taking any leaves during that period and also from taking the laptop home.

More than anything, I was relieved at having kept the job.

My firm belief in mu’jizāt (miracles) was solidified further that day.

The very fact that they let me off with a warning was sufficient proof that none of their allegations held any merit. Had I really kept antisemitic or pro-terrorism material on the laptop it surely would have meant instant termination, for there was the risk of the company incriminating itself by keeping someone problematic on its payroll.

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I finally settled on my desk four floors up from Q’s office. However, the laptop wouldn’t allow me to log in that morning. I headed towards the IT department to get it fixed. On my way there I ran into the senior IT security guy in the lift who went: “Oh hey, I was coming to your desk,” before handing me new credentials and asking me to see the IT team if there were still issues.

There were issues still, prompting me to reach out to the IT department. One of the IT guys ran some code and I could read on his screen that all access to the various official apps had been disabled for my account at some point between the previous evening and this morning. They were enabled minutes earlier. The IT guy ran some fixes and I had full access again.

Back at my desk the first thing I saw after accessing the laptop were a bunch of direct messages on the official communication tool from the high-ranking IT security guy. He had messaged me that my social media accounts will be under strict surveillance from there on and any infraction would spell doom. The polite white man that he was, he expressed his wish to see me at work the next time he visited this office. (He was based at another location.)

I stopped posting completely from my only social media account and ultimately deactivated it.

As I ran the events of the previous day and this morning in my head, I realised that at some point they had fired me (the disabled accounts were a smoking gun), but for some inexplicable reason decided to reinstate my employment. For the next several months, I thought about many scenarios that could have transpired but never figured out why they changed their minds.

A friend suggested that their decision was guided by the fact that firing someone for pro-Palestine advocacy in a company that had many Muslims could cause a mass exodus. I asked him, how would the employees know the reason for my firing? “You could write about it,” he replied. While it’s a theory, it isn’t strong enough.

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Now under a 30-day notice, my work ethic didn’t change — as there wasn’t a problem with it to begin with — but now I was loaded with a lot more tasks with “urgent” deadlines. Further, I was asked to maintain an Excel sheet that listed all the tasks that I undertook and their statuses.

At the end of the 30-day period, the highest authority in my vertical (Z) who was on that sham first meeting over Zoom, was gushing about the quality of my work and how they had always “loved” my output and “my natural flair”, and how they were glad that now we could put the unsavoury recent past behind us and keep producing more great work together. The happiness on Z’s face was palpable. I could see the elation on their pale white face even from the non-intimate setting of a Zoom call.

I was relieved more than anything else at the prospect of keeping the job in this foreign country with no savings for some more time.

Another mu’jizah (miracle), I thought.

With a festival approaching, I asked Z if I was permitted to take some of my entitled leaves now that the warning period was over. I told Z that I wanted to go home for a bit and hopefully come back in a better frame of my mind. Z said that it shouldn’t be a problem and that I should apply for leaves for as many days as I wanted. Z added that they would formally ask Q for approval, and confirm. Shortly after, Z informed me that the leaves had been approved.

The fact that they kept me beyond the warning period was yet more proof that none of the accusations against me warranted sacking.

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I returned to work about three weeks later, safe in the knowledge that things would go back to normal (minus my book-reading habit on the company laptop even during non-working hours).

I was mistaken.

A few days after my return, the results of a quarterly appraisal were due. I was given a shockingly bad rating by my reporting manager despite being given the exact opposite of her assessment by the highest authority in my vertical (Z) just before I went on leave. (I later found out from someone present in the meeting that Z had indirectly told my reporting manager to revise my rating out of the danger zone, but she didn’t budge.) This rating automatically pushed me in the performance improvement plan (PIP) territory at best and an instant firing at worst. Unable to justify my bad rating on the basis of performance, the management was forced to go with the PIP option. My position in the team became untenable.

A manager from another team, a middle-aged woman (let’s call her A) with an unparalleled work ethic under whom I previously worked (before an internal shuffle) and shared cordial relations with, came as a saviour. She batted against my witch-hunt and advised the management to move me to another team. From what I learned later, her fierce defence was the only reason I kept the job after the poor rating, albeit now in another team. But still under a three-month PIP, which entailed bi-weekly “performance check-ups.”

I didn’t like the work I did with this new team, but kept performing well enough to never be in the firing zone. The “performance check-ups” were going fine — or so I assumed — as my new reporting manager never rang any alarm bells about my performance and kept telling me that I was on the right track and getting to grips with the relatively new work I was doing.

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In early August, however, a week before the official completion of the three-month PIP (which had been extended to accommodate about three weeks of annual leaves I took to go home for another major festival), I was called into a meeting. Apart from me, this meeting had my new reporting manager (who was based in another office location) and the HR head (who was in another office in the same city) on a Zoom call, and the HR official — who kept track of my “performance check-ups” — in attendance. The HR head didn’t beat around the bush and told me that I would be let go.

They said that my hours were still not in order, providing no proof for it, and that I was still not performing up to the required standard, contrary to the evidence of the “performance check-ups” documents that were filled in and signed by my new reporting manager and attested by the HR every two weeks, and to which I had access.

I could see that this was it and that there was no point in arguing my case any further. My fate had been sealed long before I walked into this meeting. The deed was done.

I realised that the extra three months I got in the new team after the expiration of my 30-day warning period was only because of the vehement defence of me put up by A, a veteran in the office and a favourite of the management, including the CEO.

They never intended to keep me and were just looking for a solid enough reason to get rid of me. They probably thought three months under the cosh and intense pressure would be enough for me to slip-up once, allowing them a reason to pull the plug on my employment. With nothing going their way, they went for the jugular anyway.

I signed some documents, submitted the company assets, and prepared to leave one final time.

The message was loud and clear. Defenceless children, women, and men may burn, get raped, tortured, dismembered, decapitated, crushed under bulldozers, and buried alive, but you must never stop scribbling dross on your 4K screens, filling colour-coded Excel sheets, selling junk to the gullible folk, loathing it all, questioning your existence, and dying inside. To alleviate the hollowness you can always go meet your friends over the weekend, gossip about colleagues, drink, dance, and repeat next week. God forbid you raise your voice to draw attention to the vast ocean of suffering of the millions being killed in the most depraved ways live on your phone.

Perhaps even more importantly, my predicament solidified my belief in the Zionist hold on the global majority’s imagination. My punishment was preemptive, based on imagined crimes, based on a belief about hurt Israeli sentiments. “What if they [the Israeli visitors] saw this stuff?” Yeah, what? They can commit a literal genocide and I can’t even share the publicly available evidence of their crimes on social media? If they are so scared of the literature and the audio-visual evidence of their depravities why don’t they stop committing those depravities? Or should I also accept, as you have done, that the feelings of genocidal Israelis trump mountains of Palestinian corpses?

The company is privately held. I have no idea how many Zionists sit on its pseudo board. I don’t even know if the owner is a Zionist himself. Nevertheless, even the prospect of hurt Israeli sentiments prevailed over my nearly insignificant advocacy for the shredded Palestinian children and their raped and brutalised parents. If that’s not control I don’t know what control is.

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My five months of intense mental torment were finally over.

After I took home my belongings the first time, I never bothered to bring the books back to my desk — I knew I was on borrowed time for as long as they kept me on the brink, and didn’t want to carry the heavy load again. I kept stuff only enough to carry in my bag.

This time I only had my coffee sachets and the prayer rug to pack.

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I need your help…

I have had to start a fundraiser on my Ko-fi page: https://ko-fi.com/palestinewillbefree. We are just over 1/4th of the way there. It would be amazing if you could lend a helping hand and push me to the finish line. Your paid subscriptions also go a long way. Thank you for reading and your support.

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