For Palestinians across the U.S. and beyond, the past few years have felt like an unrelenting suffocation: voices silenced, futures erased, belonging revoked — all without explanation or recourse, just the quiet cruelty of doors slamming shut. The message has been unmistakable: speak about Palestine, about occupation, about your own humanity, and you risk disappearing from professional life.

Since October 7, 2023, advocacy groups have documented hundreds of such cases across the United States. Palestine Legal reported receiving over 1,200 complaints of workplace discrimination related to Palestine solidarity in late 2023 alone, including 383 employment concerns and 124 terminations in just the first months. CAIR documented a surge in employment discrimination complaints — 1,201 in 2023 overall, rising to 1,329 in 2024 (the highest category in the organization’s 30-year history), with many tied to pro-Palestinian expression or identity.

But on January 26, 2026, something shifted in a Chicago federal courtroom. U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman denied Foley & Lardner’s motion for summary judgment in the discrimination lawsuit filed by Jinan Chehade, a Palestinian-American Muslim lawyer.

The firm’s decision to retract Chehade’s offer was all the more consequential given the trajectory she had already established: as a recent Georgetown Law graduate who had completed a summer associate internship at Foley’s Chicago office, she had been professionally vetted, evaluated, and integrated into the firm’s recruitment pipeline.

The case will now proceed to trial, where a jury — not the firm’s leadership, not fleeting headlines — will weigh whether rescinding Chehade’s job offer because of her public support for Palestinians amounted to discrimination based on her ethnicity and religion.

Credit for this outcome belongs in no small part to Chehade’s lead veteran counsel Paul Vickery and co-counsel Rima Kapitan of Kapitan Gomaa Law, whose evidence-driven opposition brief dismantled Foley’s “core values” defense point by point — highlighting comparator disparities, policy vagueness, and stereotyping in the record. That work created the genuine disputes of material fact the court found “rife” throughout the case, forcing summary judgment denial and opening the door to a jury trial.

As Judge Coleman wrote in her 16-page memorandum opinion, “if the factual disputes described… are resolved in favor of Chehade, a jury could reasonably conclude that Chehade’s membership in a protected class caused her employment offer to be rescinded.” In other words: the case presents genuine, triable questions for a jury to decide.

The record shows evidence of disparate treatment — pro‑Israel, non‑Arab, non‑Muslim attorneys posting inflammatory views without consequence, while Chehade faced interrogation about her heritage, her father’s mosque ties, and her student activism. It shows the absence of any clear, consistently applied “core values” policy. And it raises serious questions about whether stereotypes about Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians as inherently violent or threatening shaped the firm’s decision‑making.

For Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them, the denial of summary judgment in Jinan Chehade v. Foley & Lardner is a rare moment of visibility.

No one is claiming victory is assured. Juries are human and unpredictable. Powerful institutions — here, a major corporate law firm embedded in elite legal, corporate, and political networks — have deep resources, skilled counsel, and a structural advantage in controlling narrative framing: they can present discriminatory decisions as neutral, ethical, and policy‑driven, while marginalized individuals must prove prejudice through evidence rather than authority. Chehade may not win. But the public record — the court’s 2026 memorandum opinion, depositions, internal emails, and comparator evidence — lays out a compelling case of discrimination that a reasonable jury would be required to confront.

A jury could find Foley & Lardner LLP legally liable for employment discrimination under Title VII and the Illinois Human Rights Act based on the following evidence:

1. Comparator Disparity as Evidence of Pretext

Foley insists it rescinded Chehade’s offer because her statements “condoned” Hamas’s October 7 actions and demonstrated “poor judgment” misaligned with the firm’s “core values.” Yet the record shows pro‑Israel, non‑Arab, non‑Muslim attorneys making far more inflammatory, anti‑Palestinian statements without consequence.

Partner Max Chester posted that those who carried out the October 7 attacks — framed broadly as Palestinians and Hamas supporters — “must be liquidated as enemies of humankind” and their “evil vile ideology… eradicated.” Partner Dovi Alderstein wrote that Palestinians elected Hamas, must be “held accountable as a people,” and that concern for Gaza civilians is irrelevant — “in every war… innocent people die.” These posts were removed, but no reprimand, no rescission, no interrogation followed. An associate (“MJ”), posting pro-Palestinian content under a non-Muslim identifier, was merely counseled on social media policy.

Chehade, by contrast, faced rescission the evening before her start date — after posting statements that were later characterized by the firm as “condoning” violence, including language referring to Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and framing events in Gaza within the context of “75 years of dispossession, siege, and occupation.” She later clarified that she condemned terrorism and Hamas and was referring only to Palestinians’ legal right to resist occupation under international law.