An offering from Lina AlSharif, a Palestinian poet living in Qatar. Penned in 2019. Even more relevant in this moment.
A War Against Humanity Itself
Closing Statement for the People’s Conference for Palestine (May 24-26, 2024 in Detroit, MI). Watch all livestreams here.
| A few hours ago, in Rafah, the Zionist occupation bombed a camp of displaced Palestinians sheltering in a so-called humanitarian zone. We call it a camp, but in reality it is a space densely packed with over 1.4 million forcibly displaced people who are seeking refuge in makeshift tents. The Zionist entity has made the entirety of the Gaza Strip unliveable. It has made safe havens into zones of destruction. The Zionist occupation has reached new levels of barbarity and this is because the western criminal forces have given the Zionist entity the material, military, and ideological support necessary for them to continue waging this war with complete impunity. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is a genocidal war against a colonized people to stifle and break our spirit. This is a war against humanity itself. But brothers and sisters; do not let the occupation’s rage and blind destruction distract you from the absolute truth. The truth is that there are no bombs strong enough, no fires hot enough, no prison brutal enough to destroy the spirit of the Palestinian people. We are not a people that can ever be destroyed. The occupation does not know that for the Palestinian people, the dead becomes the martyr. The prisoner becomes the teacher. The besieged becomes the free. And the refugee becomes the key that will surely return to its rightful home. Victory is not an abstract concept or an unknown future. Victory is on the horizon. Victory is what we are here to organize for. Our message to the Occupiers, to the forces of death and destruction: You have murdered and maimed with total impunity; you think your bombs and technologies of war will break the spirit and will of the Palestinian people; you think that your repression of our movement will stop us. But every martyr and every prisoner only strengthens our resolve and conviction: as families are destroyed and men are imprisoned, as our people in Gaza continue to be displaced into refugee tents, continue to face famine, and endure this brutal genocide, the least we can do—the very least that we can do—is to refuse capitulation and demobilization. No amount of intimidation or repression will deter the masses who have been awakened and exposed to the racist and genocidal nature of Zionism. We will be here, in the streets, on our campuses, in our classrooms, in our workplaces, every day until Zionism is defeated and until the total liberation and return of our people. All of you here today, have been written into the history of the Palestinian struggle. We convened in Detroit, at the People’s Conference for Palestine, with over 3,500 people from across North America, and tens of thousands of people online. We have made our message clear: that we, the movement for Palestine in North America, and across the world, are here to fight until victory.The convening organizations assembled this conference amidst both genocide and revolution—because it is our duty to grow this movement, as one arm out of many in the ongoing national liberation struggle for Falasteen. Over the course of the last three days, we have taken lessons from our history and present in order to apply them to the future. We have heard from movement leaders their experiences of victory, challenges, and defeats. We have built connections and relationships that will drive our movement forward. We honored our martyrs and prisoners, and the families that continue to carry their legacy. They attempted to stop us; denying visas for speakers and harassing participants at the airports, and yet we were undeterred. Over the course of the last three days, we have consolidated around the immense contributions of the student movement and labor sector; explored the advancements in the cultural front; deepened our knowledge of how imperialism and imprisonment operate in Palestine; strategized around how to cut ties with Zionism in our workplaces; and aligned on campaign targets. At this conference, we fundraised over $200,000 to rebuild Gaza and to support our people in Gaza, who have paid and continue to pay the ultimate sacrifice for liberation – and we know this is only a drop in the ocean of what we can and should do. Friends, and comrades, brothers and sisters, we are up against an enemy that is highly organized. And so, we must be more organized. This is our commitment—the commitment to organization—that we leave here with. We know that it is the resistance on the ground that will determine the course of the battle for Palestine, and that the battle will be long, and the conditions impossible to predict. However, it is certain that we are one step closer to liberation, and that liberation is not only possible, it is visible, tangible, and demanded by the masses of the world. But in order to march closer to liberation we in the far diaspora must be ready and we must prepare. And so, before we conclude, we would like to highlight the ways all of you can continue to organize for Palestine. We have decided, as a steering committee, to build out infrastructure to better coordinate and respond to this moment. I want to leave you here with two important announcement.First, June 8th will mark 8 months of US-Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, and marks the 54th anniversary of the occupation of Gaza. A month ago, Biden said that the invasion of Rafah was a red line. But now, the invasion of Rafah has continued for weeks, has expanded to the entire Gaza Strip, and Biden’s red line is nowhere to be seen. Instead of following through and stopping military aid to Israel, Biden has authorized billions more in weapons shipments to be used to kill and massacre Palestinians. Biden can’t draw the line, but we can. On June 8th, we will come together from across the country and surround the White House. Wearing red, and raising our demands high, we will show the world that we are the red line. We demand an immediate ceasefire, an immediate end to the siege on Gaza, the freedom for all Palestinian prisoners, and an end to the occupation of Palestine.Finally, today, the Palestinian Youth Movement is launching a campaign to advance the demand for an arms embargo which will target the shipping and logistics company Maersk. This is the logistics company that has been responsible for transporting the most weapons and weapons components to Israel since the beginning of the genocide. This is the company that shipped 90% of the weapons that the US used in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the company that is responsible for shipping thousands of weapons that are being used to massacre our people in Gaza. We will not only go after one weapons company — we will go after ALL of them. For the past 8 months, people have been picketing and protesting individual weapons companies but now is the time for organized targeted campaigns. By going after Maersk, we are disrupting the literal flow and transportation of weapons of mass destruction. We will be hitting empire where it hurts most. So join our campaign, follow the Palestinian Youth movement to embark on an international campaign because we know that the power of the people can and will bring empire to its knees. And with this, we end with a quote by the late martyr and revolutionary, Ghassan Kanafani, “Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution.” No matter what, WE will be at the forefront, continuing to expose their crimes and complicity in orchestrating the genocide by generating a political, economic, and moral crisis for imperialism that they cannot ignore. Long live international solidarity, long live the Palestinian struggle! |
Boring Careerists
An excerpt from Molly Schumann’s piece “CBC Has Whitewashed Israel’s Crimes in Gaza.” Thank you Ghada Sasa for posting to social media.
I Got Issues
This is an excerpt from the beginning of Rev. Dr. Nick Peterson’s Pentecost Sunday sermon “I Got Issues” (preached to Mr. Carmel Christian Church in Indianapolis on May 19, 2024) on Luke 8:1-3, 42b-48. Watch the whole thing here (jump ahead to 58:53).
I got Issues, you got issues, they got issues, we all got issues.
I’m unsure when that phrase became popular, but its broad and continued use functions as a diagnostic. It is a confession that you have observed a problem. To confess that I have issues is to acknowledge that inside me, my head, my heart, and or my body, there is something askew, something that ain’t quite how it should be, that something is not in its ideal ordering, and the dis-order is mine to contend with. It is also the case that when we say you, or he, or she, got issues, we are again confessing that we have determined that somewhere in your corporeal schema, in your person or personality – something ain’t up to snuff, something is off kilter.
Whether its you or me, he, she, it, or they – to have issues is to confess that the math ain’t mathing, the sense ain’t sensing, the health ain’t healthing, and the mind ain’t minding. I got issues, you got issues, we all got issues. And while our issues are different, and our conditions particular to our life’s circumstances – it is a shared phenomenon to live knowing that we got problems – recognizing that there are some things in our lives that are not how they ought to be or how we want them to be and as issues they trouble us and flow out from us to the world around us.
Continue reading “I Got Issues”Listening
An excerpt from “How Much Discomfort is the Whole World Worth?” by Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes. Re-posted from Boston Review.
When people delve into activism, they often grapple with questions like, “Am I willing to get arrested?” when often the more pressing question for a new activist is, “Am I willing to listen, even when it’s hard?”
For organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore (photo above), it was her time in Alcoholics Anonymous that helped her transform her practice of listening. “The main thing that I learned,” Gilmore told us, “especially in the first couple years that I was going to meetings, was the beauty of the rule against crosstalk. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, that I couldn’t say shit to anybody. I had to listen, and I had to learn to listen.” The urge to interject or object ran deep for Gilmore. “I’ve always been a nerd, yet I’ve always been a know-it-all,” she told us, “so there’s this tension between my nerdiness that wants to know everything and my know-it-all-ness that wants everybody to know that I know it all already.”
At first, listening did not come easily—or feel particularly productive—to Gilmore. “I would sit in these meetings, and I listened to people talk, and listened to them, and listened to them, and at first I was like, ‘I don’t get this, I don’t get this.’ And so for me in the early days, it was just a performance of words. I mean, my main thing was, ‘I won’t drink when I leave this meeting. I won’t drink, and I won’t use.’”
Continue reading “Listening”Join the Movement.
An Update from the leadership team of Christians for a Free Palestine.
We are excited to join together as Christians for a Free Palestine on May 28 at 8 pm ET, 5 pm PT. We will gather together again to inspire and conspire. We will worship together, learn how Christians for a Free Palestine has supported activism across the country, and share more plans for our future!
Our leadership recently spent time together in person to plan the future of this movement. We are excited to share what we discussed with you, and specifically share more about our plans for Washington DC in July. Join us to learn more.
As we gear up to take action together in Washington DC to challenge Christians United for Israel, the largest pro-Israel organization in the country, we need to grow this movement, to make our voices as loud as possible.
Nakba
For those committed to the struggle for Palestinian liberation, today is Nakba Day, the commemoration of the violent settler-colonial catastrophe brought upon the people of Palestine in 1948. This is an excerpt from a long article written last month by Rashid Khalidi, the author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine.
For people everywhere, myself included, the awful images that have come out of Gaza and Israel since 7 October 2023 have been inescapable. This war hangs over us like a motionless black cloud that gets darker and more ominous with the passage of endless weeks of horror unspooling before our eyes. Having friends and family there makes this much harder to bear for many of us living far away.
Some have argued that these events represent a rupture, an upheaval, that this was “Israel’s 9/11” or that it is a new Nakba, an unprecedented genocide. Certainly, the scale of these events, the almost real-time footage of atrocities and unbearable devastation – much of it captured on phones and spread on social media – and the intensity of the global response, are unprecedented. We do seem to be in a new phase, where the execrable “Oslo process” is dead and buried, where occupation, colonisation and violence are intensifying, where international law is trampled on, and where long-fixed tectonic plates are slowly moving.
But while much has changed in the past six months, the horrors we witness can only be truly comprehended as a cataclysmic new phase in a war that has been going on for several generations. This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October.
Continue reading “Nakba”National Traumas
A message from Jonathan Kuttab, the executive director of Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), a Christian voice for Palestine
PTSD and Trauma are not only personal and individual in character but often afflict whole nations and peoples. Frequently historical in nature, trauma can be passed down intergenerationally.
One of the greatest examples of such trauma afflicting our region is that of the Holocaust, compounding the historical experience of centuries of persecution, hatred, and discrimination against Jewish people. This is a trauma that made it easy for many to succumb to the doctrines of Zionism, offering Jewish empowerment via Jewish supremacy in a Jewish-dominated state as the only cure for their ongoing suffering. It has made many easy prey for fascist doctrines, of belief in the value of violence and military overkill as the only path to survival. It has also made it difficult for many to take seriously any path towards peace and reconciliation that is not firmly rooted in their military power and supremacy. And while many cynically exploit the traumas of the Holocaust for political ends, there exists a genuine phenomenon of authentic fear that cries out for healing and needs to be addressed.
That rabbit hole of domination and “deterrence” will likely doom Israeli Jews to eternal strife and enmity with their neighbors, leading to ever increased militarization since in their traumatized state no amount of military power will ever be sufficient, and any attempt by Palestinians to resist that domination is only likely to reinforce the trauma. Similarly, all peace efforts will be viewed with deep suspicion and reticence, particularly if they require concessions that seem to reduce Israeli military domination or appear to make Israel weaker or more vulnerable to the risk of future attacks.
Continue reading “National Traumas”The Courageous Students
A message of solidarity with Gaza encampments on college campuses, from the National Council of Elders, a coalition of veteran Civil Rights and Peace Activists.
The National Council of Elders calls upon all people to embrace the courageous students demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli government, and the divestment of university funds that support weapons and War.
As veterans of the great liberation movements of the twentieth century, we understand that young people demanding justice and peace are critical to creating more compassionate, responsible societies. Their visions and values of the future are being practiced in encampments on campuses as they construct
communities to care for each other, to learn together, and to develop concrete processes for change.
The consciousness and sensibilities of today’s students has been shaped by actions stretching over the last decade. With Occupy Wall Street, climate justice actions, Me Too, and the Movement for Black lives, students have been demonstrating courage and tenacity in the face of ever escalating repression. Many are stepping forward for the first time and recognizing their power to create change.
Continue reading “The Courageous Students”So That People See It
Magda is about to compete in her first triathlon. Last week, the five-year-old brought her Palestine flag to training. Her dad suggested that she put it in her basket so she wouldn’t drop it. Magda told him, “I’m gonna carry it so that people see it.”
Radical Discipleship 