By Don Bryant & Jenelle Vincent
Last month, the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community joined organizers from across North America for the second annual People’s Conference for Palestine. We spent three days in Detroit learning from leaders in the Palestine movement and networking with other people and organizations in the struggle. The Cleveland contingent of over 250 people joined a crowd of 4,500 to strategize and unify our movement. Some of our own organizers provided security, facilitated check-ins, and even planned the children’s programming.
The theme for this year’s conference was “Gaza is the Compass.” Gaza is the measure of our humanity and the guide for our morality. Multiple powerful presenters spoke on this topic during the keynote address:
ABU BAKER ABED was turned back at the border by the US. He spoke remotely to the conference participants. Abed began by saying that the sadistic Israeli regime has disobeyed every human rights law. Regarding the approximately 245 journalists assassinated by the Zionist regime, Abed said, “[W]ith the magnitude of Israel’s war crimes, it is not called journalism; it is documenting a genocide.” He lost many family members, friends, and neighbors. He left Gaza four months ago. As documenter of genocide his life was threatened many times. Abed finished by saying, “the western world never cared about Palestine. Their talk of human rights and dignity is a facade. Resistance is in all Palestinians.
HATEM BAZIAN, a University of California Ethnic Studies Professor expressed his appreciation for all the students who have led campaigns for the free speech movement, ending the Vietnam war, apartheid South African rule, and for Central America solidarity. The students expressing their free speech have always been marginalized, arrested and fired upon. The students are the ones that are remembered in history in murals and poems, not the administrators or cops that put them down. Bazian continued saying that In the 1970s and 80s, students wrote Soweto and South Africa as the address for the central focal point of resistance. The students demonstrating against the genocide have written the Gaza address on the worlds’ consciousness. He said, “don’t let anyone tell you that it makes them uncomfortable to talk about Gaza. Genocide should make you uncomfortable.” Bezian’s final messages to the students was to ground their studies in the moment, in the genocide. He proposed Palestinian Studies for every university. He ended “Don’t be silenced. Liberate the universities. There’s a new world vision; go after it.”
MOHAMMED MUSTAFA prefaced his remarks with an acknowledgement that he is “not a public speaker,” but a medical doctor and that we all are becoming what we must be to stop this genocide. Expressing the severity of the genocidal regime’s using “milk as a weapon,” he reiterated that hunger has reached an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification 5, the highest level of starvation when damage to the body is irreversible. Gaza is our compass because it measures more than politics – it measures our humanity.
Dr. Mustafa told us about the nine-year-old girl who brought her two-year-old brother to the hospital after digging him out of the rubble, carrying him at night, barefoot, with drones overhead and buildings exploding around her. The amount of her suffering didn’t matter to her because she wanted to save her brother’s life. With courage like hers, we have no excuse to abandon Gaza.
MOHAMMED KHALIL: “We get our hope and our resistance from the People of Gaza.“ Khalil told us that while he was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, he realized that he had two choices: wait for the system to vindicate him, or, at huge personal risk, while under a microscope, remain vocal, never be silent, while his People are facing genocide, and until Palestinians are free.
Khalil asks, “When the genocide ends, will apartheid Israel get away with it?” Will they and their contributors and supporters face retribution for their crimes? We must ensure that they do.
Khalil says because he was targeted as a student at Columbia University – we are winning. If the powers must sink to such levels to silence our Movement, then we are winning and must keep up the pressure. Our Movement threatens the status quo. We are exposing the pariah state and challenging any normalization of its narrative and its actions.
HUWAIDA ARRAF arrived from Palestine’s West Bank where Palestinians have been inspired by the Movement, especially the Palestinian Youth Movement. The genocidal powers try to say our Movement does not matter. We know better. We have reached a moment of clarity. There can be no neutral position on the genocide; if one is not actively against it, then they are for it. Gaza is a litmus test for humanity. Palestinians do not want charity or pity; they want freedom. One naivety of the Movement is that we expected more out of the people and the governments. We thought that if we amplified the injustices and the horrors that Palestinians have experienced, especially for the last two years, that humanity would stop it. “We were naïve,” says Arraf.
The Flotilla Movement began in 2008, when the ship that Arraf crewed actually docked on the Gaza shore. From a few kilometers away, Arraf reported seeing what looked like stones of many colors. As they approached the shore, she realized that it was thousands of People – Palestinians that came to welcome the ship that broke the siege. The world has never given Palestinians that respect. Gaza is showing the world how to be human.
The goal of the Flotilla Movement is not primarily to bring supplies but to Break the Siege. Apartheid Israel is controlling the aid of the People that they want to annihilate. Apartheid Israel has turned Gaza into an extermination camp. All the walls must come down.
Arraf finished with this vision: “Our Movement is to free all the oppressed People of the world – Atlanta, Congo, Central America, and Sudan – from every river to every sea, all People must be free.”
LAMEESS MEHANNA representing the Palestinian Youth Movement highlighted PYM’s founding in 2009 in the shock, pain, and rage of apartheid Israel’s 21-day invasion of Gaza killing 1400, mostly women, children, and other noncombatants.
Mehanna outlined her argument for the ultimate Movement goal – a major transformation is needed. To develop her argument, she first discussed how the world stands with Gaza, that apartheid Israel’s propaganda is no longer believed by many millions around the world and that 80% of U.S. Americans want an end to the genocide. She asks why, then does the genocide continue? Why do the empire’s mouthpieces tell us not to believe our own eyes, our own intellect, deny hospitals and patients? International bodies and human rights groups describe “in excruciating detail” the horrors of genocide. Why is the United Nations intervention spineless? Why do corporations continue to facilitate the genocide? Why can’t the International Criminal Court prosecute Netanyahu? Why aren’t the nations of the world sanctioning apartheid Israel? Mehanna says it’s not for our lack of determination and commitment that strengthens after two years of devastating news on the ground in Palestine. Mahanna proclaimed that the inhumanity in Gaza has exposed the ugliness of Zionism and its supporters and benefactors. She asserts that it is part of the global system in which survival depends on consumption and plunder. The roles of the states and corporations to sustain it are conflicting and oppressing the masses of the world. They are the obstacle to not only ending the genocide, but to bring humanity and self determination to the masses of the world who have been left out.
We left the conference feeling inspired, motivated, and with a renewed energy to organize for Palestine. We learned from the experiences of speakers who have taken on different campaigns to stand against Israel and shared ideas with organizers throughout North America. Now it’s time to put these lessons and motivation into action, and we hope you join us in the struggle.
Many of the presentations can be viewed through BreakThrough News on YouTube.