Ahmad Abuznaid - Black and Palestine Solidarity (2018)

Ahmad Abuznaid: Today we are joined by Palestinian attorney and activist Ahmed Abuzaid. As a co-founder of Dream Defenders, Abuzaid has a history of activism and has demonstrated his passion for social justice. Dream Defenders is an activist group formed in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida. Through Dream Defenders, he has focused on the issues of mass incarceration and police brutality, particularly against Black Americans. And in 2015, Ahmed led activist delegations from the Movement for Black Lives to Palestine in order to highlight the intersectionality between the Black Lives Matter movement in America and the Palestinian struggle. Currently, he works as the director of the National Network for Arab American Communities, which is a consortium of 26 independent Arab American community-based organizations with a mission to represent the needs of the Arab American community So, good evening. Thank you for joining us. You know, it's a Friday evening. You could be doing a lot of things. And I don't doubt that those things could be very important and valuable uses of your time. But I consider this to be also a valuable use of your time. How to start? Well, I want to show a video. It's a video that we put together. Thank you. After our first delegation, or actually while we were in Palestine, and then I'll begin the talk with a little bit about the historic connection between these liberation struggles. We are about to have a flash mob, and specifically calling for boycott, divestment, and sanction of the state of Israel. We who believe in freedom cannot rest. We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it's won. You ready? Yeah, we are. You ready? You ready? Okay. Can I eat my sundae? Yeah. Yeah. Um, can I get all— can I get everybody over here, please? Everybody over here. It's over there. Yeah. Oh, I guess it's okay. What is this, man? The bag. The book is mine. Yeah. Do you need the book? Yeah. Do you need that? Oh, we don't want it in it. No, this is an instrument. It's a yellow, yellow, yellow. That's real. That's real. Yellow. So can we actually move people's stuff over there? Okay. Can I request for all of our folks to come into a circle, please? Philip. Um. OK. OK, sounds good. OK, so let's— can we bring the circle out a little bit? Yeah. No, it's fine. We decided to go outside. We came here to Palestine to stand in love and revolutionary struggle with our brothers and sisters. We come to a land that has been stolen by greed and destroyed by hate. We come here and we learn laws that have been cosigned and inked but written in the blood of the innocent. And we stand next to people who continue to courageously struggle and resist the occupation. People continue to dream and fight for freedom. From Ferguson to Palestine, the struggle for freedom continues. Thank you. 1, 2, 3, 4. We who believe in freedom. We who believe in freedom cannot rest. We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it's won. We who believe in freedom cannot rest. We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it's won. We who believe in freedom cannot rest. We who believe in freedom cannot rest. Until it's won. We sit in a sea of settlements while the sound of suffering sails lost in the listening as the voices of heartache hail the power of presence. People as portals, passports to heaven. Here is a protest in the form of a prayer. God is in the holy water lining the lower lids of Ali's eyes, a tear, a river against a cheek. Waiting in Old Jerusalem, sitting on a leaning chair in the market, the lonely storyteller. God. God is a woman holding a crying baby in her arms at a checkpoint in Ramallah, waiting at the gates like cattle. God. God is in the rubble, gnarled hands rinsing in an open fire, a journey of dreamers singing through empty streets in Bethlehem. We survive in the telling. Unafraid, we survive in the telling. We survive. Watan badun shaab, wa shaab badun watan. We survive. What if occupation's a dream the Palestinians had? Krills underneath their teeth and they suddenly relapsed. Saw the ships at the bay of the West Bank shore. Woke up and the occupation existed no more. What if Zionism is the second coming of Christ? Destruction is the matrimony in sight, because If we are the Messiah, then God is not white. What if life is the afterlife and we already dead? The footage of the moment replayed in your head, looping over until you die for the second time. What if power influenced your intelligence and mine, and those with the lesser are really the oppressors, but you still steal this land under that pressure? Free Palestine. Palestine to Ferguson! End the occupation! Ferguson and Palestine, we fight to free our nations! Palestine and Ferguson, end the occupation! Ferguson and Palestine, we fight to save our nations! Palestine and Ferguson, end the occupation! Ferguson and Palestine— All right, let's give it up for the Dream Defenders. You all may recognize some of the folks in that video. A lot of them have been doing Yeah. Really pivotal work in the United States as far as the movement for Black lives is concerned. And, you know, the Women's March and, you know, Ferguson, you know, some of these folks have been very central to that, that work that's, I think, allowed for our culture to shift a bit in this country and the conversation to shift a bit in this country around certain topics. So, you know, this work couldn't be done without the Many contributions of so many important individuals, and not just individuals in this video and individuals over the last few years, but— It's really quite important to note that with this subject, you know, we're doing work that's a continuation of, you know, revolutionary struggles decades on end. And so, you know, when we begin to examine the connection between the Black liberation struggle and the Palestinian liberation struggle, we have to go You know, to the past. And the first example that I want to lift up for us to examine today is Malcolm X. And, you know, when we talk about intersectionality— I think I heard intersectionality mentioned earlier— you know, Malcolm was a leader at the intersections of Black liberation and Muslim liberation in this country, you know, fighting for the rights of both of those communities, and really was— Yeah. I think one of those characters that just continues to shift the way we think about our sacrifice, the way we think about our limits, and the way we think about the power that we can develop as a community. And so Malcolm X had a chance on his trip to the Middle East— and by the way, I don't like that term, the Middle East, either. It's just easier to utilize in this short-form talk. Malcolm X, upon visiting the Middle East, had a chance to go to Gaza, and he met a poet in Gaza that left an imprint on him. And it was during his time in Gaza that he began to make the connections between U.S. imperialism and Israeli imperialism, or the colonization of Palestine, as is the colonization of this land here. And so, always important to note that we are here on stolen land. Thank you. Malcolm began to see these parallels during his trip to Gaza and Egypt, and he wrote a piece in the Egyptian Gazette, September 17th, 1964, titled Zionist Logic. And it's a short essay, maybe a page and a half. I won't read it all to you. I do want to read an excerpt, and you can go back, you know, through Google on your way home, or not while driving, of course. And check out the full statement. But I do want to read a bit of an excerpt from it. And this was in 1964. So, you know, I'm going to talk about another shift in the conversation in 1967, but this was in 1964. And I quote, did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes, and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the religious claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only 1,000 years ago, the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and set up a new Moroccan nation where Spain— where Spain used to be, as the European Zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine? In short, the Zionist argument to justify Israel's present occupation of Arab Palestine has no intelligent or legal basis in history. Not even in their own religion, where is their Messiah? Now, I won't get into the religious debate on this subject. That's for other people to have. You know, I tend to examine this subject strictly from a human rights perspective. While I understand the religious nuance to it, you know, I think some things are clearer than we make them to be, and so I choose to look at them in that lens. So, why did Malcolm X take this stand? About that time, Malcolm X was beginning to shift from a Black nationalist stance to more of a Pan-Africanist stance. And at that time, he also was seeing the connections between Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and this relationship between Pan-Arabists and Pan-Africans. And it was important to him to lift up this subject, because even though today we see Palestine as a litmus test, it was viewed as such, you know, way back in the day by others. And so Malcolm lifted up this controversy. So that Black Americans and those of conscience in the United States can begin to look at Zionism within a different lens. Because previous to this, in 1948, you know, many in radical leftist and communist circles even were in support of the Israeli nation-state. They viewed it as essentially a fight against imperialism, because imperialism at that time was only maybe viewed for— through the arms or tentacles of the U.S., the U.K., The French, you know, some of those nations that, you know, traditionally had been involved in colonization, whereas Israel was a new form of colonization. And so, 1948, you know, many people didn't really fully absorb the subject of what was happening. The facts on the ground weren't made clear to people. The population demographics, the shifting in land, none of that was clear to people. And so, for many people, 1948, Zionists was a liberation movement. This began to be clarified for folks in 19— Yeah. You know, '67. And so, there was a shift after the 1967 war where Israel was essentially clarifying its colonial intentions and its colonial state for the world to see. And one such example about— of that shift is SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Many of you who have studied the U.S. civil rights movement have heard about SNCC, Freedom Summer, registering folks To vote in Black communities, risking their lives, and really yielding to a representation of liberation for all. And that's what led them to issue a statement on Palestine, when they were examining, you know, Third World struggles, as they put it, when they were examining internationalist struggles, as they put it. And so, they released a statement on Palestine in 1967. What's important to note is, you know, regarding SNCC, is that they faced significant backlash. Yeah. For this stance on Palestine. And that's not different than what we see today for organizations that are willing to take the stance for Palestinian liberation. In the June-July 1967 SNCC newsletter, shortly after the 1967 war, they wrote a piece titled Third World Roundup: The Palestine Problem, Test Your Knowledge, and it was written by Ethel Minor. Ethel Minor was one of the SNCC leaders most responsible for pursuing the issue of Palestine and educating folks around the issue of Palestine. She was communications director at the time, and her primary source was a pamphlet published by the Palestine Research Center called Do You Know? 20 Basic Facts About the Palestine Problem. And it basically went through, you know, some really key facts around the displacement of the Palestinian population, the subjugation of the Palestinian people, the massacres that were committed. So it made clear to folks from SNCC what the Palestinian problem really was, and, you know, the problem wasn't the Palestinians. So, after its release though, as I said, there was some controversy. John Williams, who was then administrator of SNCC's national office, called a press conference to announce that the article did not represent SNCC's official position, and soon thereafter staffers in Atlanta called for a press conference to announce the release of that statement. Another point of fallout is that Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael, in his many talks, he's referred to the essential evaporation or the dismantlement of SNCC based on their position on Palestine. And so, as he put it in one of his speeches, immediately after the statement, phone calls rang in and the checks stopped coming, and cars that were being utilized to get people registered to vote had to be returned back. And so funding was being pulled away immediately due to SNCC's stance on Palestine. Furthermore, SNCC released a more formal statement in response on August 15th, 1967, entitled The Middle East Crisis. It incorporated many of the points that were previously mentioned in the earlier piece, the unofficial piece, but within it, it also added context that acknowledged the horrors of the Holocaust, the suppression of American Jewish voices that protested Zionism, and the critical support given to Zionism by the United States. Of course, all these subjects are not to be ignored when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it showed that, you know, in order to present the subject, they had to take more of a politically correct, you know, even-handed approach to at least getting us to the subject. And I think we see many of that, many of those dynamics still present today. Another example I want to highlight is the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party never shied away from their politics. They were exclusively Marxist-Leninist. They were exclusively internationalist. And they never wavered on that. Now, their stance on Palestine was always strong. They did, however, at one point, you know, ask for Israel to respect the 1967 borders. And I think that was at the request of the PLO and Fatah. So they still maintained the consistency of being connected to the Palestinians that they were working with at the time. But the first Black Panther Party statement in 1970 proclaimed, we support the Palestinian struggle, just struggle for liberation, 100%. We will go on doing this, and we would like for all the progressive people of the world to join in our ranks in order to make a world in which all people can live. You know, once again, the Black Panther Party had a very internationalist lens of looking at these things, and they They viewed these struggles as part of a connection between working-class peoples, between Third World peoples, and those of us who lived within empire. And that can't be overstated. The Panthers made a point to mention that they were in daily contact with the PLO, provocatively, obviously. I mean, you know, it may be more acceptable these days to be in conversations with PLO, but in those days it certainly was not. They also had a deep relationship with the PLO Via their participation in the Algiers Conference. And there was an international section of the party, and so the Black Panther Party then decided to open up a branch in Algiers, in Algeria. The statement was made at a press conference in 1970, and it was republished in 1972 as a part of To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton. Kwame Ture, who I described earlier, was a member of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. He described Palestine as the tip of Africa. And I think, you know, this is something that for me became clear upon visiting the Afro-Palestinian community in East Jerusalem for the first time. Because if you go to the Old City of East Jerusalem, you'll see Ali Jadda usually sitting on the steps heading down into the Old City. Ali was referenced by Aj— by Ajja, excuse me, in the poem. He calls himself the Denzel Washington of Palestine. He is one of our national treasures for sure. Not Denzel, but Ali. But you know, you really, you notice that as soon as you enter the Afro-Palestinian community, there's a big image at the entrance which has Africa, and the northeast tip of Africa is Al-Aqsa Mosque, or the Dome of the Rock, I'm sorry. And so, I think, you know, Stokely's designation of Palestine as, you know, the tip of Africa, I think holds true for many. And we don't shy away from that connection. But Stokely once remarked that he had 2 dreams. I dream, number one, of having coffee with my wife in South Africa, and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine. And for those of you who've had mint tea before, it tastes better in Palestine. Thank you. Yeah. So, make sure you experience that one day. So, what does this solidarity look like now? You know, I'm thankful to say, and I'm proud to say, I'm happy to say that we have a bit of a rejuvenation of that movement in the last few years. It takes work. And, you know, as I said earlier, we acknowledge that we didn't come up with this stance of solidarity. We didn't create this connection between the Black and Palestinian struggle. We're merely continuing the work of those who you know, have led the way before us. But also important to note here that, you know, solidarity is not philanthropy. Solidarity is not missionary work. Solidarity is really driven by a realization within oneself that your struggle is connected to the struggle of another, that the system you're fighting against is connected to the system of oppression of another, and the realization that we need to abolish these systems in order for us to get free. Right. So, once again, solidarity is key, not only to liberation for Palestinians, for Black Americans here, for Native Americans here, for families being ripped away at the border. We have to have solidarity for all of these, and acknowledge that these systems have to fall. So, how did we get to this point of this latest iteration? The Dream Defenders was founded in 2012, after the murder of Trayvon Martin. How many people in this room have heard of Trayvon? Raise your hand. Wonderful. That's really great to know. Sometimes you'd be shocked that some people haven't heard the tragedy. So, the Dream Defenders was founded in 2012. We founded the organization by launching a march from Daytona Beach, from Bethune-Cookman College— Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college and university in Daytona Beach, Florida. And we marched 40 miles to Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon was murdered. Wow. This was the first founding event, the first organized event for the Dream Defenders. Previous to that, we had a couple of phone calls to essentially organize for this. And on that first march, I had a t-shirt that had Palestine on the front and a picture of the Dome of the Rock, and I had a keffiyeh, a red and white keffiyeh, the whole trip. So, I mean, you know, I wasn't intentionally trying to interject Palestine in an issue. What I was doing was representing— Right. You know, what brought me to this fight, what I was representing was what made social justice and human rights so important for me as a person. And it was a great conversation starter. So, in this 40-mile march, where you're marching for 3 days, you know, spending nights on church floors, spending nights on community floors, you have a lot of deep conversations. And in those conversations, we began to make a lot of connections between the struggle of The Palestinian community back in Palestine and the diaspora and the Black community. I was not shocked to find out that many of the folks on the march had already known. So this wasn't, again, new to many people. It was something that maybe folks needed a little bit more nuance and a little bit more education around, but they understood that something was going on there. And so, you know, that was the start of the Dream Defenders. But, you know, why would a Florida organization That was founded in the aftermath of a murder of a young Black male, that is committed to ending the zero tolerance policies in the state of Florida, why would an organization like that, you know, take a stance on Palestine and be so concerned with Palestine? Well, first and foremost, I'm one of the founders of the organization, so we were going to speak up on Palestine. We were not going to remain silent on an issue that, you know, for many of us is life and death. But beyond that, you know, beyond the theoretical connection or the The personal connection to the issue. We began to examine the issue within the United States of racial profiling, you know, policing in Black and brown communities, and, of course, mass incarceration. And we know that the United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world. We know that the United States profits off of the imprisonment of Black and brown bodies, mostly Black bodies in this country. And so, when we looked at that, we then found out that U.S. police forces were being trained in Israel. And it's not that U.S. police forces needed to be trained in Israel to learn how to be racist, or how to be anti-Black, or how to kill unarmed people, but they were able to collaborate, right, with another settler colonial state in its infringement on the rights of indigenous and minority communities. And so we should pay attention to this. What we also found out is many of the same actors that were involved in imprisoning Palestinians were also involved in imprisoning Americans here. And in fact, in Florida, one of the violators of these rights was G4S. G4S had been active in the Palestinian territories and actually, I think as of last year, had announced, due to pressure from BDS and this internationalist movement, had announced that it was pulling out of Israel. However— yes, absolutely, that's something to celebrate. However, they're not gone from Florida, and they're not gone from the United States. And in Florida, we had youth detention centers and youth detention facilities facilitated by G4S. At that point in 2013, 2014, about 85 to 90% of the juvenile prisons in Florida were privatized. So when we think about zero tolerance policies that Dream Defenders were fighting against, and we think about these private prison profiteers that Dream Defenders were fighting against, and we thought about the fact that police were being trained to enhance their skills to quell protests and to, you know, staunch any type of dissent in this country, you know, we had to make those connections. And so, beginning in 2014, we began to examine the possibility of a delegation. We started to think, you know, 2014, you know, Movement for Black Lives now had started to penetrate, you know, the country, had started to penetrate college campuses. So, we knew someone from Movement for Black Lives needed to be there, or several folks from Movement for Black Lives. There was the New York City Justice League that was ramping up in protest due to the death of Eric Garner, or the murder, I should say, of Eric Garner. Raise your hand if you've seen Eric Garner, you've heard of Eric Garner. I have. Absolutely. So, we knew there were connections that were existing across the country with freedom fighters that we wanted to be connected to the Palestinian struggle. And we planned for this delegation, and it was going to be in July of 2014. Can anyone remember what happened in July of 2014? War. The war, okay. So, the assault on Gaza, one of the latest assaults on Gaza. It was really a dark time for many Palestinians and those who You know, care about the Palestinian struggle, or for those who, you know, have warm blood flowing through their bodies. There was so many dead children at that point in 2014 that they had to store some of the children in ice cream freezers. There was no more room in the morgues. One of the, I guess, fallouts from this war for us, as Dream Defenders, was that we would no longer be able to have our delegation in that time. Actually, it was for August. I'm sorry. It was August. Yeah. It was scheduled to be August 10th, 2014, but with this war and this onslaught, and this death and destruction, we decided we had to hold off on our delegation. And, you know, it was the right decision. And although at that moment I felt really powerless, and I felt really weakened by what was going down, and also our inability to connect to it and do something about it, things work in mysterious ways, and sometimes they end up as they should. And so, what happened— Right. A couple of weeks later, in the beginning of August— could someone tell me what happened in the United States in August 2014? Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson. Another unarmed black male lost his life at the hands of those who were sworn and served— sworn to serve and protect him. And we began to see, you know, the community in Ferguson and St. Louis rise up. And it's wonderful to see folks from Ferguson in the building tonight, because I think You know, just like many of us draw inspiration from the Palestinian struggle and Palestinian resistance, we felt similarly with Ferguson. And so, in Ferguson, you had community beginning to rise up, and what you would notice after some time was that you would see the Palestinian flag being held down at some of the rallies and protests. And the reason that this happened is because while people in Ferguson were being You know, essentially in conflict with military, the U.S., you know, the U.S. police forces, which were becoming more militarized at that moment. They were being shot at with tear gas, and Palestinians were not only tweeting their support and essentially, you know, advocating for their resistance, but they were also tweeting about, you know, how to resist the tear gas and ways to essentially combat the tear gas. What are the things you should do with, you know, what should you wash your eyes out with? Which direction should you run in? Right. And so Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank were making these connections with folks in Ferguson. And so it was no shock that you began to see these Palestinian flags being waved in the streets of Ferguson by non-Palestinians, and sometimes by Palestinians, of course. So our trip got delayed, Mike Brown gets murdered, this resistance movement ends up developing in Ferguson, and since our trip was put off, we then were fortunate enough to be able to add folks from Ferguson. So you noticed— I'm from Ferguson. Tara Thompson and Tef Poe, 2 of the folks in that video, helped to, you know, found Hands Up United in Ferguson, where they do breakfast and book clubs, essentially, very similar to what the Black Panther Party did, you know, making sure to give nourishment to the people in addition to educational nourishment. And so, January 2015, we embark on this journey, and it was a really special moment. So, since then, Dream Defenders has done 2 more delegations. Thank you. And I've also led one for Interfaith Peacebuilders, also known as Eyewitness Palestine. But this will still be the most special delegation, you know, and I have no problem saying that, because I think just the timing, the organic nature of the relationships, and the connections between the people that were on this trip to this day were really special. So, I want to show another video now, and I'm not sure if this thing is— Messed up, it is? Cool. Thanks, Mohamed. So, you know, after the delegation, we began to work with several groups across the U.S., you know, to push this message of solidarity, to push the experience of the delegates. And we got a chance to work with Angela Davis, with Noura Harakat, with folks from the IMEU, several of the folks who really are leaders in this work. And they created this video, which we can't hear right now. Every 28 hours, a black life is stolen by police or vigilantes in the— When I see them, I see us. Every 28 hours, a Black life is stolen by police or vigilantes in the U.S. Every 2 hours, a Palestinian child was killed in Israel's attack on Gaza last summer. Eric Garner, 43 years old, father of 6, grandfather, friend. Ghalya al-Ghanam, 19 years old, a student at Howard University. 7 years old, killed when an Israeli missile struck her home. Hashem Abu Maria, 45 years old, father of 4, human rights worker. Ayana Jones, 7 years old, killed in her sleep by Detroit police. When I see them, I see us. Harassed, beaten, tortured, dehumanized. Stopped and frisked, searched at checkpoints. Administrative detention. Youth incarceration. When I see them, I see us. From Rikers Island to Ofer Prison. From Rafat to Chicago. Lives are being stolen. Remember them. We are not statistics. We are not collateral damage. We have names and faces. Sakia. Nadeem. Kimani. Jawahir. Renisha. Mohammad. They burned me alive in Jerusalem. They gunned me down in Chicago. They shot our water tanks in Hebron. They cut off our water in Detroit. They demolished our homes in the Nakba. They swallowed our homes in New Orleans. When I see them, I see us. They see our wombs as dangerous, label us demographic threats. They sterilize us without our knowledge, mark our children as criminal. We say no to all forms of oppression, in U.S. cities or on Palestine's streets. We respect the uniqueness of our struggles and our varied histories. When I see them, I see us. Resilient, steadfast, determined. I see who we were meant to be. Alive, free, liberated. Mapping out our destiny. I see hope. Strength. Love. A place where our children can dream. I see a road. A partner. A family. A world where we can rise and be seen. So, you know, I just have to shout out a couple more names that— Qualcomm invents the foundational technologies that the world relies on, for things like 4G, now 5G. That's why I tried to find a, you know, a private link to that. It feels so funny. So, a couple people that I noticed in the video that I just want to shout out, because they've been so important to this work, Christian Davis Bailey, who helped define Black— found Black for Palestine. Also, Aja Monet, who was on that first delegation. And again, stressing the importance of this first delegation, Aja went on to not only produce several pieces of poetry centered around Palestine, but in August 2017, she and I led a delegation together where we brought together artists and organizers to experience Palestine and develop projects together. So, I'm sure, you know, I missed a couple names. You all saw some of the individuals. Some of them need no introduction. But it's really powerful to see that, you know, what we've been imagining and dreaming of here, people have been receptive to. So, next up, I'd like to talk about, you know, as I said, Dream Defenders had done a couple more delegations, and Dream Defenders is one of the organizations within the Movement for Black Lives had a central position to this topic, this conversation, you know, to educating folks within the Movement for Black Lives around this subject and the nuances therein. And this came to a head in the summer of 2016 when the Movement for Black Lives released their Visionary Policy Platform. Anyone here read that document? Can you raise your hands if you did? Okay. Yes. So, really dynamic visionary document listing out demands and solutions for Black America Listing out demands and solutions that would help many of us as marginalized communities in the United States. And so, there was stuff around education, just really very nuanced document, but the part that got the most reaction and pushback was the one paragraph around Palestine. So, I want to read that to you all, because it's important in the context of the conversation around SNCC and their stance. Thank you. To understand what happened to the movement for Black lives after 2016. So the paragraph reads, the U.S. justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people. The U.S. requires Israel to use 75% of all the military aid it receives to buy U.S.-made arms. Consequently, every year billions of dollars are funneled from U.S. taxpayers to hundreds of arms corporations who then wage lobbying campaigns pushing for even more military aid. The results of this policy are twofold. It not only diverts much-needed funding from domestic education and social programs, but it makes U.S. citizens complicit in the abuses committed by the Israeli government. Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people. Palestinian homes and land are routinely bulldozed to make way for illegal Israeli settlements. Important to note in this moment that we've seen this same thing within the last few weeks and the introduction of the Israeli nation-state bill. So this issue is clearly not going away. Israeli soldiers also regularly arrest and detain Palestinians as young as 4 years old without due process. Every day, Palestinians are forced to walk through military checkpoints along the US-funded apartheid wall. Since that visionary statement, again, you know, Black folks were asking for things like reparations, and that did not get as much pushback as the paragraph around Palestine. It is important to recognize. The consequences were loss in networking opportunities for many of these organizations. They lost relationships, especially with funders, and actually lost funding. So many groups lost funding from different foundations in the U.S. because of their relationship to this platform. There were also lots of different opportunities and events that were canceled because of this stance. Because I have to wrap up soon, I will just go through one last quick example. So in 2017, Ajamu, who I was just speaking of, Was able to co-organize a delegation with me to take some folks from here to Palestine, and one of them was Vic Mensa, a recording artist with Roc Nation. If you went to the Jay-Z 444 tour, he was opening for Jay-Z. Really dynamic young individual. And I just have one excerpt from his piece, which was titled What Palestine Taught Me About American Racism. The parallels between the Black American experience and the Palestinian experience are overwhelming. Staring into the worm-infested water tank on top of a dilapidated house in Aida refugee camp, I can't help but think of Flint, Michigan, and the rust-colored, lead-poisoned water that flows through their faucets. As I gaze over the 25-foot, quote-unquote, separation wall, the economic disparity is acutely transparent. The Israeli side of the wall looks like the Capitol in The Hunger Games, while the Palestinian side reads like a snapshot from a war photographer. I'm sorry, I can't hear you. It's as if the South Side of Chicago's most forgotten and disenfranchised neighborhoods were separated from the luxury of downtown's Gold Coast by a simple concrete wall. The sight alone is emotional, and many people in the group cried on that roof. Rage cannot describe how I feel thinking of the insects swimming in that water tank, while just across the wall is an Israeli settlement with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. So, I just want to lift up again the work of Black for Palestine, the Dream Defenders, the folks at Standing Rock who have been in solidarity. Many other folks that are taking the stance with us in these days and trying times. And I want to, before I leave, just shout out the BDS movement, which is a way for us to nonviolently isolate Israel until it comes into compliance with human rights. As you can see, it's being— it's effective, because they're trying to make it illegal for you to involve yourself in a nonviolent action here. And so, I just want to lift up BDS as a model for us to take part in, for us to share at our local levels, and for us to— Thank you. So thank you very much. I'll take time for questions. How do we do questions? Do I just kind of handle it? Raise up your hands. So thanks for that wonderful presentation. I had a question about some of the challenges in the Black-Palestinian relationship. Mm-hmm. I do know there has been conversations about the way, for example, Ethiopian Jews in Israel and Palestine feel that the relationship has soured between them and Palestinians. And also, I know that— so I recently had a chance to go to Palestine with a delegation with the Center for Constitutional Rights and with Eyewitness Palestine. And we had a conversation With actually Jamil Dakwar, who was saying that it is true that there are some Palestinians who use the term slave as sort of a slang term when referring to Black people. So these are some of the challenges I wanted to just raise as well, and I wanted to hear your reaction and how people have tried to organize or respond to those types of challenges. Sure. So first I'll address the issue of anti-blackness via use of the word abeed or abid or any other of the treatments associated with anti-blackness from Palestinians. I think this is both born of historic relationship between Arabs involved in the slave trade. This is where obviously the term abid or abeed comes from, so that's important to note, you know, that we didn't learn to be anti-black from someone else. We had anti-blackness in our culture for centuries. And that is obviously still prevalent, and in some parts of the Arab world, still existent, right? And so, that's important to acknowledge. You know, but there's also a part of Western anti-Blackness that's at play here that gets exported out. And you find that not just with Arab communities, but with communities from the Caribbean, with communities in Africa. Many of us that are immigrants to this country are told, above all costs, stay away from the Black people. And it's because I think the U.S. has been very successful in exporting that image of Black Americans, to the point where, you know, I once had a cousin in Jordan, and I think I shared this story with you, who was asking me why my Black American friends didn't look more like Soulja Boy. And for those of you who don't know, he's not a very well-known rapper, but this is what they thought, you know, Black folks would look like. Wow. And at first, I was really shocked, because I was like, why didn't she ask me about Tupac instead of Soulja Boy? Like, how does she even know who Soulja Boy is? He's not that popular. But I guess at that point in time he was. And so, how are we responding to those challenges? Well, actually, there's also another nuance to that subject. When Arab Americans come here, a lot of times we open up stores in primarily Black neighborhoods, right? And the relationship sometimes between the Arabs who are owning these stores and the Black community is toxic, toxic because they come here with that mindset sometimes where it's anti-Black, and it doesn't allow for a relationship to develop. And so then they view Black Americans in these communities as vehicles for them to transform themselves financially, as opposed to people within a community they'd like to build with. So what are we doing to challenge that? Well, we're having conversations. And I think for many Arabs in the room and for Palestinians in the room, we know that that starts at our dinner room tables. It starts at our iftar dinners during Ramadan. Right. It starts on our trips back to Palestine, where our folks simply just do not understand the nuances of Black Americans in the U.S., and they also don't understand how hurtful that word Abid or Abed is to all of us. So that's, you know, one of the things we're doing is conversation, but also in promoting this solidarity, we're able to have a two-way road of education. And so when we go there, not only are we learning from Palestinians, but Palestinians are learning from Their Black counterparts and their Native counterparts and their Latino counterparts. So, you know, we have to do a better job of education both ways. To the point around the Ethiopian soldiers, you know, that's a very, I think, tense relationship, because similarly to how you come to this country and you have to make sure you're the furthest thing away from Black Americans in order to assimilate into white supremacy and into these power structures, in Israel, the easiest way you can gain power and stay stature and status within that society is to be anti-Palestinian. So for these Ethiopians, they have to serve in the military, and they have to be the most staunch supporters of this Zionism in order to gain their acceptance. And so there are, there have been conversations, I think, with Ethiopians, and I think what we're hoping for as Palestinians is to see more Ethiopians refuse military service, but also maybe within that conversation we need to figure out how we can better support And I know there have been protests in 1948 Palestine, or Israel, where Palestinians have joined in hand in protests with some of these Ethiopian Israelis. But that's a conversation we need to continue. And by the way, that rejection of military service is something that we're asking of Jews of all colors and races within Israel, and some of them are doing it and accomplishing it. So that's really inspiring. Thanks for that question. Are you aware of any studies that would show any link between when American police forces started training in Israel and when all of a sudden all these really horrible— I know that the police have been shooting unarmed people for a long time, but I don't know if this increase is just awareness in the news, or is there an actual increase where now they're shooting 21 bullets instead of 1, and it's And shooting people in the back, because I read that the Israelis were training even young American Jewish kids in camps that everybody is a terrorist, and if you don't shoot right away, then you're dead. So their method of teaching— and I watched a training documentary that said, you know, basically shoot first and ask questions later, which is antithetical to the way we used to do it. Yes. Yeah, so I would reference the Deadly Exchange program that Jewish Voice for Peace has put out on their website. It's a really good resource on understanding when that relationship, you know, where it's evolved from. I'm not sure if they have the exact dates of when it started, but I think like one, one, I guess, result of some of these exchanges is, for instance, in New York, a lot of times NYPD now ride with their lights, their siren lights on, You know, at all times. And this is an Israeli tactic. And, you know, the Israeli tactic, or the Israeli theory behind it, was essentially that people will know we're on high alert at all times, right, if these lights are continually cycling. So I don't know if there's any type of research to document the number of bullets or the causes of death or the multiplications of death or anything of that sort. But, you know, another thing was, in Ferguson, you know, people compared it to the occupation because you literally saw tanks. Yeah. Rolling down the streets. And so, you know, not only the weaponry, not only the excessive use of force, but streets down US— I mean, tanks down US streets. Next question. Hi, thank you, Ahmed, for the presentation. I would like to ask whether you have any technical problems, like, with the delegation entering Palestine, like, on the borders. And I would like to ask also about whether there are any plans to take Palestinians. And bring them to the United States and to meet with the African American communities? Thank you. Great questions. So, complications around travel inside Palestine. I'm a West Bank Palestinian, so I have a Hawiya, also known as a Palestinian ID, that essentially, technically, is supposed to allow me entrance into Ramallah, the West Bank, the occupied territories, while it does not allow for me to enter into Jerusalem in 1948 or Israel. With that being said, I was able to get a permit my first couple of times. I was not able to get a permit this last time. So it is a concern. As far as the delegates, what we do is we have a very secretive process where, you know, nothing is online, you know, nothing is announced. We go through an orientation process with our delegates so they understand how to answer the questions. A lot of times, those Israeli interrogators at the airport are looking for triggers. They're looking for words. Right. Looking to profile people. They do profile people. So if you're a minority, if you have tattoos, if you have dreadlocks, if you portray a certain image that for them they would connect with any kind of radical left or Palestinian solidarity or, you know, even any other type of revolutionary rhetoric, they may flag you. Also, if you're Arab or Muslim, you're going to be flagged and may be denied entry. So to this point, for me, it's been a concern to get into Jerusalem in 1948. I haven't yet— I've yet to be denied from Palestine entirely. But also, after the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, things changed. So I think now it's a little bit more dangerous. You've seen that Israel has codified in law its ability to reject folks who support BDS. Dream Defenders support BDS. Many of Dream Defenders members are on the Canary Mission website. I mean, I think, you know, You know, the stakes are high. We're going to continue to face that as a challenge, but we'll do our best to meet that challenge. As far as Palestinians here, there's been an effort. I lifted up the name of Christian Davis Bailey and Black for Palestine. There was an effort from Birzeit University a couple of years ago called the Right to Education Tour. So they did, I think, 2 tours where they brought Palestinians to tour around the U.S., talk about their struggle and learn. And then also they went to Ferguson. OK. So, at this point in time, there has been a development of such a program. I'm not involved in it. And I think, you know, we should continue those programs. I just know that, you know, for each of us, we have a role and a task. And this is the role that I've chosen to play. And anyone who's willing to bring Palestinians here, I'd love to coordinate efforts for them here to meet with folks and educate them and be educated. Thank you. Thank you for the, for the talk today. I think one question. So you had said that there was Afro-Palestinians. Is there like coordination between Afro-Palestinians and, I don't know, other African, like Ethiopian Jews that are trying to develop to try to like break away this notion of, you know, segregation keeping them thinking like this is— it's good to be where you're at, which is not? Yeah. Good question. I think it's a struggle. And, you know, I hope one day you can visit the Afro-Palestinian community in East Jerusalem and hear more directly from them on the subject. But, you know, according to my conversations with Ali Jadda and the Afro-Palestinian community, it's really heartbreaking for them to see, you know, Ethiopian soldiers and African soldiers within the Israeli army, because oftentimes they're in direct confrontation with them. So, you know, In the city of East Jerusalem, it's heavily overpoliced, heavily criminalized. And so, these folks are coming into daily contact with these soldiers and being abused. And so, I imagine it's a difficult conversation. I will say that, you know, on one of the delegations, I remember us being in the Old City of Hebron, going down Shuhada Street, which is a street that Palestinians are forbidden from walking down. And there was an Ethiopian soldier that some of our delegates then engaged in a conversation. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's important for Black communities to have those conversations, just like within Arab communities, we need to have the conversations around some of our problematic stances and nature. So, to be continued, but I'm hopeful, because the Afro-Palestinian community, along with other Afro-Palestinian communities across the rest of historic Palestine, has been instrumental in our resistance, and they've been involved from the very beginning. We have room for one more. Questions. So if anyone would like to, uh, to ask a question, that is— yeah. Okay. Oh yeah, actually, thank you. Um, thank you so much for this presentation. Um, just last week I learned about the Western Sahara conflict, and I'm just curious if there's been, you know, struggles or conversations to link other forms of occupations, um, and Not only solidarity, but efforts for resistance? Not with the— not to my knowledge with the Western Sahara. I don't doubt that those connections have been made, but not to my knowledge, and I don't want to misspeak. Those connections were made around Standing Rock. They were made, you know, around connections— I mean, Palestinian struggle is connected with South Africa, which is, you know, something that Nelson Mandela lifted up at all times. I think Western Sahara is something that gets talked about a lot. I'm not sure if Any nuanced projects on the subject? Yeah, just really quick, I just wanted to let folks know, Ahmed mentioned the Deadly Exchange and the sort of like US police training with Israeli soldiers. There is a campaign here in DC, I think a lot of folks probably know about it, to try to stop DC police from doing that. And there is an example of a similar campaign succeeding in Durham, North Carolina, so it can be done.