No matter whose side you’re on — Israeli or Palestinian — these sites are gonna dox you

Mob mentality is strong. Image by Mira Fox

By Mira Fox May 19, 2025

Over the weekend, Haim — a rock band composed of Jewish sisters Este, Danielle and Alana Haim — got canceled for being, supposedly, Zionist.

A screenshot began to circulate on X (formerly Twitter) explaining that the bandmates’ Israeli-born father, Moti, “is a Zionist settler who was in the Israel Occupation Forces” and that the trio had “vacationed in occupied Palestine several times and told the media they dream of playing a show for the Zionist entity.” (Haim has in fact already played a show in Israel, in Tel Aviv in 2017.)

One might argue that it’s not particularly startling that the Jewish band members are related to someone Israeli or have been to Israel; this is true of many, many Jews, including anti-Zionist ones. It means little about Haim’s politics relating to the current war. But this information was presented as though it was a major affront by a website called Reverse Canary Mission.

The site, which takes its name from the pro-Israel group Canary Mission, is run by anonymous volunteers and devotes its posts to naming and shaming various figures, public or otherwise. Offenders are organized into categories that include industries such as TV, journalism and publishing, in addition to “everyday people,” for any support of Israel. Their offenses are documented with screenshots of social media posts and links to videos or articles, along with the offenders’ jobs and social media handles.

Reverse Canary Mission’s stated goal is, “Holding Zionists accountable for their support of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.” But the evidence for said support is often weak. Pop star Billie Eilish is criticized, despite the fact that she wore a ceasefire pin publicly on multiple red carpets; the site accused her of not being outspoken enough. Several people have committed the sin of visiting Israeli relatives. Other profiles detail gossip and track social media likes to draw conclusions that are, fundamentally, guesswork.

Creating lists of Jews and Jew-sympathizers sounds eerily like Nazi or McCarthy-era persecution. But Reverse Canary Mission is just following Canary Mission’s tactic of doxing people involved in Israeli-Palestinian activism.

Since 2014, the also anonymously-run organization Canary Mission — after the adage about canaries in the coal mine, but for antisemitism — has identified anyone whose face is visible in videos of pro-Palestinian protests or social media clips of people tearing down hostage photos. The organization publicly posts a screenshot and explanation of each person’s offense alongside their name, their job and links to their social media profiles. It has categories for pro-Palestinian professors, students, medical workers and “professionals,” and aims to expose people who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.”

Each person that the original Canary Mission has decided is an antisemite has a profile of bulleted information detailing their purported crimes, which can include simply signing a petition for a ceasefire, a stance they call “pro-terror” and “pro-Hamas,” or posting criticism of Israel online. Doctors who participated in aid trips to Gaza are listed alongside students who wore a kaffiyeh to their graduation.

The wide net with which both Canary Mission and Reverse Canary Mission apply their metrics to determine antisemitic or anti-Palestinian hatred ends up including plenty of people who fall far short of a reasonable metric on hatred.

“Our site highlights individuals who advocate, either directly or indirectly, for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people,” Reverse Canary Mission’s site reads. But how exactly do they determine when someone is advocating “indirectly” for genocide? Silence, comparing Palestinians to vermin and buying Starbucks coffee are listed as apparently equal offenses.

Similarly, Canary Mission seems to equate advancing blatant conspiracy theories about global Jewish control alongside penning political analysis about the impact of Israel’s controversial judicial reforms or signing a petition about academic freedom. Jews have long complained about the organization, including Zionists who say they were targeted by the site anyway.

It would be inaccurate to say the sites are equals, or have a similar effect. Canary Mission is much larger — it has nearly 77,000 X followers, whereas Reverse Canary Mission has under 2,000 — and receives funding from major Jewish donors. And with Trump’s foray into deportation of perceived antisemites, it can have a tangible effect; the site received new attention when several of the pro-Palestinian activists it listed were picked up by ICE. (At least one has since been released.) Reverse Canary Mission, meanwhile, focuses largely on celebrities and public figures — though not entirely — so at least they’re punching up. And their impact has been limited thus far to social media discourse.

The real question is what either site is accomplishing, in the big picture. Both organizations are part of the cancel culture tactics that grew most popular in the #MeToo era. The theory is that social stigma can build coalitions to achieve political or ideological aims — solidarity by threat, more or less. But internet shame has become more and more common. Today, sifting through outrage against someone or other is an almost fundamental part of the experience of being online. And ultimately, it diminishes the impact of any given campaign.

By now, every tiny ideological group has its own tenets of what deserves cancellation, and its own army of people who will lose their minds over a given set of affronts. But the minutiae of what’s cancel-worthy is so impenetrable that it can become unintentionally hilarious to outsiders.

Take, for example, the armies of Americans who see any support for queer people as deserving of cancellation. (Remember when Bud Light was canceled for working with a trans influencer?) In those circles it’s common to “transvestigate” — analyze someone’s physical and facial features for evidence of a different gender. It’s impenetrable and unconvincing to anyone who is not already aligned with the belief that a certain cheekbone structure correlates with a specific ideology. When these investigations get attention from the wider world, it’s usually because people are mocking them.

Canary Mission and the Reverse are not quite so far out, of course; most people are aware of the war in Gaza and the basic framework of the activism around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But fewer are likely to understand why, for example, drinking Starbucks coffee merits an exposé. In fact, canceling someone for buying coffee is enough for someone outside the myopic world of Israeli-Palestinian activism to dismiss the entire issue as too crazy to deal with.

Instead, what results is a great doxing stand-off. If nearly everyone gets canceled by someone, it stops meaning anything. (And standing up for either side becomes a losing proposition.) Maybe Haim loses a few anti-Zionist followers, but gains a few Zionist ones. Perhaps the opposite happens to a professor listed on Canary Mission.

But the main impact is that the people who aren’t already looking for people to hate or boycott look at the entire drama and shake their heads. If this is what it looks like to care about Israel or Palestine, they’d rather not bother.