PayPal is blocking payments for Queer Cinema for Palestine Film Festival

The morning after The Inquirer published a story about this weekend’s Queer Cinema for Palestine Film Festival, PayPal began blocking attempted ticket purchases for the event.

The Inquirer found more than a dozen instances of Eventbrite ticket purchases made via PayPal being denied by the company. In each instance, purchasers received the exact same email explanation from PayPal:

“PayPal suspended this payment for review to ensure it complies with the established User Agreement and our global regulatory obligations. During our review, we identified a risk that prevents us from completing this payment. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

But on two separate calls with customer service representatives, The Inquirer and the organizer for the event were told the payments were blocked because the event had the word Palestine in its title.

“I’m going to stop you right there, that’s what the issue is: Palestine,” a customer relations expert told Nour Qutyan after they gave the name of the event, on a recorded customer service call obtained by The Inquirer.

“Anything that has to do with the Middle East right now is very, um, touchy, so PayPal does not support anything that has to do with the Middle East right now,” the representative continued.

When pressed by Qutyan that the event is happening in the U.S., not in the Middle East, the representative said that it doesn’t matter because “it has the word Palestine.”

“Anything that has the word Palestine, anything that has the word ISIS, anything that has the word killers, anything like that, it is a regulation that we cannot support, so we do not involve ourselves with it at all,” the representative said. “It is an extensive review because we have to make sure it’s not part of a terrorist organization.”

“I was actually grateful for her just saying it rather than skirting around it — but it was still shocking.”

“I was actually grateful for her just saying it rather than skirting around it — but it was still shocking,” said Qutyan. “These are the stereotypes that surround Arab people. It’s absolutely messed up that when this person I was talking to thinks about Palestine, immediately these are the things that follow: ISIS, terrorism, killers.”

On a separate call with PayPal’s customer service, a representative also told The Inquirer it’s possible the attempted ticket purchase was blocked because of the event’s affiliation with the Middle East.

“From time to time, people need to take a little longer to review transactions to ensure that the transaction is compliant,” the representative said after The Inquirer reporter identified herself. “Which means, there’s no violent information, they’re not selling anything illegal, anything like that.”

When asked whether the transaction could have been flagged because the event had the word Palestine in it, the customer service representative said, “It’s possible, yes.”

Numerous Inquirer staffers attempted to purchase tickets via their PayPal accounts and received the same denial email. Qutyan said Eventbrite notified them that six other attempted ticket purchases were blocked by PayPal. When trying to purchase tickets with credit or debit cards, there were no issues with the sale going through.

“We are working quickly to resolve the matter and apologize for the inconvenience,” a PayPal spokesperson said in an email. They added that some customer transactions may trigger regulatory flags resulting in additional screenings, citing their adherence to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) economic and trade sanctions.

This would not be the first time that payment service companies have blocked transactions related to Palestine.

In May 2021, Venmo — which is owned by PayPal — came under fire for restricting donations for Palestinian causes. Multiple users’ transactions to support nonprofit organizations that aid Palestinians, such as the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), were blocked by Venmo and flagged for security reviews. A Business Insider article said that some users accused Venmo of blocking specific keywords, particularly because when they put PCRF in the description rather than the full organization name, the transactions went through seamlessly.

At the time, Venmo said it blocked the transactions in order to review compliance with OFAC regulations.

“Venmo, like other U.S. financial institutions, screens payment activity and flags any payments that may violate U.S. economic sanctions administered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC),” Venmo leadership has written on its website. “This includes screening payment notes for references to certain sanctioned countries, individuals, and organizations included on OFAC’s list of Specially Designated Nationals.”

PCRF is not listed as a sanctioned organization on OFAC’s website. The film festival is a fund-raising event with proceeds going to Al Qaws, a Palestinian LGBT+ civil society organization fighting against pinkwashing and advocating for queer Palestinians, and Playgrounds for Palestine, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit working on rebuilding destroyed playgrounds for Palestinian children. Neither nonprofit organization is listed as a sanctioned organization on OFAC’s website.

PayPal has also been scrutinized for providing access to its service in Israel, but not Palestinian areas. In a shareholder report, PayPal cites “regulatory requirements” as the reason for the discrepancy.

Qutyan said they were disappointed to have to deal with this issue the day before the event when they need to be using their energy and time to prepare for the festival instead.

“Here I am organizing a community-led event about cinema, a film festival meant to celebrate queer Arabs and Arab culture. There’s such orientalist, racist ideas about who Arabs are in the media, and we want to have events like this to pull people away from that,” Qutyan said.

“I think it’s messed up that we’re trying to do these good things by fund-raising,” they said, and we’re trying to show our solidarity … and having these institutions like PayPal punish us and blacklist, it shows what their true values are.”

Staff writer Ryan Briggs contributed to this article.