Podcasts about international solidarity movement

Congressman Salud Carbajal speaks with KCBX's News Director Monica Lopez and KCBX reporter Gabriela Fernandez about the current administration's policies and actions and what resonated with him at the Town Hall meeting that he co-hosted with Senator Adam Schiff at Cuesta College on April 22nd. For Playing with Food, KCBX's Fr. Ian Delinger travels to Guadalupe to ask, "What's in a sausage?" He talks to Ernesto Valle, the owner of Lobo Butcher, to find out just how pure, local, and fresh sausages can be. Then, Rosie Bultman, from UC Santa Barbara's student-run radio station KCSB, interviews Alex, an activist who went to the West Bank as part of their work with the International Solidarity Movement. They did not disclose their last name for security reasons. They were bearing witness to Israeli settler violence when they were arrested and then deported from Israel. They have been banned from returning for 99 years. They talk about their experience living there and why the everyday act of existence is an act of resistance.

American Peace Activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli armored bulldozer on March 16th, 2003. She was protecting a Palestinian home from being demolished when she was killed. Today, we speak with another peace activist involved with peace activism in Palestine. Alex was bearing witness to Israeli settler violence as part of their work with the International Solidarity Movement, when they were arrested and kicked out of Israel for 99 years.

On today's #SumudPodcast episode, we are joined by Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American attorney, activist, former U.S. Congress candidate, and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement. Huwaida has spent her life advocating for justice, human rights, and the liberation of Palestine. Her extensive activism efforts include a leading role in the Free Gaza Movement and organizing the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. In this episode, Huwaida reflects on her family's journey from Palestine to the U.S., her experiences with international solidarity, and the important role of grassroots activism. She also delves into the challenges of balancing motherhood with activism and the mental and emotional impact of witnessing ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

This week Lara and Michael sit down with Huwaida Arraf, Palestinian activist, and lawyer who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement. We discuss her previous trips to sail into Gaza with humanitarian aid and journalists to break the Israeli siege on Gaza. We chat about the time they successfully docked in Gaza without zionist permission. We also cover the other attempts where Israel either commandeered their boats or murdered the humanitarian aid volunteers like with the Mavi Marmara. We also talk about her most recent effort to set sail from Turkey but how the government of Turkey will not let the ship sail. 

Today on Speaking Out of Place we are honored to speak with three international volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement. They are all involved in the effort to save the Masafer Yatta region in the Occupied West Bank.While it has been a common practice of psychological warfare for the IOF to place military firing ranges near villages, neighborhoods, outside Palestinian hospitals, and prisons as a persistent reminder of its power and the possibility of lethal force in every space, the case of Masafer Yatta is exceptional--people's actual homes are bulldozed, land confiscated, livestock stolen, and people often driven to live in caves.  Palestinians face physical attacks, including indiscriminate shootings, from Israeli settlers, military police, and the Israeli Occupation Force, who each act in collusion with each other, and enjoy near immunity.ISM volunteers work under Palestinians to do what is required of them, and have suffered increasing violence, and even murder during peaceful demonstrations. Our guests explain what has led them to leave their home countries and live and stand in solidarity in Palestine. Their eye-witness accounts of various aspects of Palestinian life under Occupation are both devastating and inspiring.

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with three international volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement. They are all involved in the effort to save the Masafer Yatta region in the Occupied West Bank.While it has been a common practice of psychological warfare for the IOF to place military firing ranges near villages, neighborhoods, outside Palestinian hospitals, and prisons as a persistent reminder of its power and the possibility of lethal force in every space, the case of Masafer Yatta is exceptional--people's actual homes are bulldozed, land confiscated, livestock stolen, and people often driven to live in caves. Palestinians face physical attacks, including indiscriminate shootings, from Israeli settlers, military police, and the Israeli Occupation Force, who each act in collusion with each other, and enjoy near immunity.ISM volunteers work under Palestinians to do what is required of them, and have suffered increasing violence, and even murder during peaceful demonstrations. Our guests explain what has led them to leave their home countries and live and stand in solidarity in Palestine. Their eye-witness accounts of various aspects of Palestinian life under Occupation are both devastating and inspiring.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comhttps://twitter.com/palumboliu?s=20www.instagram.com/speaking_out_of_place

This week on the final straw we're featuring a conversation with Tom and Miriam of the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led network of activists standing in solidarity with Palestinians on the ground in the occupied territories. For the hour we talk about the organization, its history, what got these folks involved, the recent and tragic murder of Ayşenur Eygi in Beita in the West Bank which Miriam witnessed, and how conditions have changed as the war by the Israeli settler state has expanded. To hear our prior conversation with Tom about the uprising in Bristol, check out this interview. . ... . .. Featured Track: Long Live Palestine pt1 by Lowekey from Long Live Palestine Parts 1 & 2 (single)

Ralph welcomes back Jack Dangermond, co-founder of Esri—Environmental Systems Research Institute, the leader in GIS mapping technology to open up his book, “The Power of Where: A Geographic Approach to the World's Greatest Challenges.” Then John R. McArthur, journalist, author and publisher of Harper's returns to discuss a recent study by neuroscientists that concluded that students absorb and retain information better on paper than they do on screens and what this means for the future of education and society as a whole.Jack Dangermond is President of Esri—Environmental Systems Research Institute—and is recognized as one of the most influential people in the field of geographic information system—GIS—technology. Jack, along with his wife Laura, founded Esri in 1969. He is the author of The Power of Where: A Geographic Approach to the World's Greatest Challenges.Geography is everything. It's what happens, when it happens, in some cases why it happens, but most importantly, where it happens.Jack DangermondI believe geography and maps—the language of geography—are a new kind of way to understand the complexity of our world. Our world is complex. All these relationships—the world is hard to fathom. And using these interactive mapping tools, people can learn a lot in a short amount of time. They can see context, as well as all the content that they're learning in their various disciplines.Jack DangermondYears ago, Jack called up and said—help us apply GIS to civic action, civic advocacy…We used GIS techniques, applied federal government data, and in a report we came out with in the 1990s—it was called “Racial Redlining: A Study Of Racial Discrimination By Banks And Mortgage Companies In The United States”—the map showed the worst-case lending pattern as prima facie evidence of unlawful discrimination against low-income areas in mortgage lending. And so, the applications for civic work still need a lot of attention. I don't think the potential has been reached anywhere near what it could be, especially as the field and the technology just explodes with innovation.Ralph NaderJohn R. MacArthur is the president of Harper's, a journalist, and the author of several books, including Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf WarCommon sense tells you just instinctively—well, if somebody's looking at a page in a book or in a newspaper, there's less distractions and there's more focus on what you're actually reading, whereas on a screen you have a tendency to get distracted and the lighting is not good and so on and so forth. But now the obvious has been proven. And I get the sense that they're almost ashamed. They just don't want to address it. Or they're in so deep with big tech.John R. MacArthurIn Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DeSantisNews 9/11/241. Zeteo reports “Israeli forces allegedly shot and killed US citizen Ayşenur Eygi…at a demonstration in the West Bank village of Beita…The 26-year-old was there alongside other Americans who have been demonstrating against illegal settlement activity and providing a nonviolent protective presence for Palestinians…Ayşenur…was shot at the same weekly demonstration where American teacher and volunteer Amado Sison was shot last month.” This piece also notes that Eygi was in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement, the same group that American activist Rachel Corrie was affiliated with when she was murdered by an IDF bulldozer in 2003. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken decried this incident as “unprovoked and unjustified,” saying “No one…should be shot and killed for attending a protest. No one should have to put their life at risk just for expressing their views,” per CNN. According to Yahoo News, President Biden has not talked to Eygi's family, and neither he nor Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have issued a statement on Eygi's death.2. Congressman Jamaal Bowman, who was recently primaried by an AIPAC-backed challenger after being outspent a by margin of seven-to-one (per CNN), has issued a statement in light of the revelations that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu sabotaged negotiations for a hostage and ceasefire deal in July. This statement reads “Netanyahu has continuously derailed negotiations and added new demands to stall for his own political benefit, with zero regard for the immense death toll and scale of human suffering…His goal is not to bring the hostages home or bring peace and safety to the region…Every life is precious and should be treated as such…My thoughts are with the families of the dead hostages, who have suffered an unimaginable loss, and with the people of Gaza, who are facing the horrors of genocide and being killed indiscriminately every day.”3. Variety reports a group of prominent Hollywood actors are leading a new initiative to pressure the Biden administration to end illegal arms transfers to Israel. This new push, growing out of the Artists4Ceasefire collective, is led by Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon, Mahershala Ali, and Ilana Glazer. Ruffalo writes “Our demand is simple — our elected leaders must enforce existing U.S. and international humanitarian laws that prohibit the use of military assistance to commit ‘grave human rights violations.'” Nixon adds “Words without action will not end the unbearable suffering…Enough is enough. The global call for a permanent ceasefire — supported domestically by an overwhelming majority of Americans — must be answered.” Despite overwhelming public support for peace, advocating for Palestinian rights has been a dangerous proposition in Hollywood since October 7th, with “A top movie agent, an Oscar winner, and the star of Scream VII [having] all been demoted or fired for calling out Israel's bombing of Gaza,” per Rolling Stone.4. In a chilling story from our Northern neighbor, the Ottawa Citizen reports “The Ukrainian Canadian Congress says it plans to go to court to stop the federal government from making public the names of alleged Nazi war criminals who fled to [Canada].” As this piece explains, “At issue are documents created by a 1986 federal government war-crimes commission…One of the documents is titled ‘Master List of alleged war criminals resident in Canada… [including] names of alleged war criminals as well as Nazi scientists and technicians” who fled to the country. The total number is around 900. These records have been requested under Canada's equivalent to the Freedom of Information Act. The government must now decide whether or not to disclose these names. According to this article, the Canadian government has consulted with leaders of Canada's Ukrainian community, but not with Holocaust survivors or scholars.5. In a major win for the Biden Treasury Department, the IRS announced last week that it has clawed back $1.3 billion from rich tax dodgers since last fall, per AP. Since 2023, the IRS has “launched a series of initiatives aimed at pursuing…taxpayers with more than $1 million in income and more than $250,000 in recognized tax debt.” According to officials, approximately 80% of the 1,600 tax delinquent millionaires have now made a payment.6. More positive news comes to us from the union front. The Orlando Weekly's McKenna Schueler reports “Florida's anti-union law, SB 256, has forced dozens of public sector unions to ask the state for recertification elections—and so far, they're all crushing it. Out of 26 elections with final results reported, workers in all but 1 have voted to keep their unions alive & intact.” Yet despite the unions' overwhelming victories in these re-certification elections, “more than 68,000 public employees in Florida have lost their union representation - NOT because they voted to get rid of their unions, but because their union had low membership and didn't petition for a recertification election.” 7. In more red-state union news, Washington Post Labor Reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley reports “Apple retail workers in Oklahoma City secured a tentative union contract, the 2nd store to do so at Apple.” This contract between Apple and the workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America, is said to include “pay increases of up to 11.5% over 3 years, severance & store closure protections [and] worker involvement in scheduling.”8. Yet not all is well on the union front. According to NJ.com a “civil war” is brewing between the United Autoworkers and the AFL-CIO at Atlantic City casinos over the UAW's demand to end indoor smoking. According to this piece, many of the dealers at these casinos, represented by the UAW, have contracted emphysema or even cancer despite not smoking themselves due to their constant exposure to secondhand smoke. Meanwhile the state AFL-CIO, led by Charlie Wowkanech, is standing with the casinos against a proposed ban. The UAW's Daniel Vicente is quoted saying “Dealing with Charlie was like dealing with some lame-ass mafia guy – it felt like a shakedown…We're planning to go to war with these other unions…We're coming straight at anyone who stands in the way of our people coming home safe.”9. Another story of betrayal comes from France. Al Jazeera reports “More than 100,000 left-wing demonstrators…have taken to the streets across France to protest President Emmanuel Macron's decision to appoint centre-right Michel Barnier as [Prime Minister], with left-wing parties accusing [Macron] of stealing legislative elections.” For the past two months, the French parliament has been hung due to legislative elections that left it divided into three blocs – the largest of which being the left-wing coalition. Yet despite a popular front alliance between Macron and the Left during the elections, Macron has now chosen to elevate a right-winger as PM in order to appease the far-right bloc led by Marine Le Pen. Al Jazeera notes that French pollster Elabe found that 74 percent of French people believed Macron had disregarded the results of the elections and 55 percent believe he has stolen them.10. Finally, the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was held on Tuesday. Shortly before the debate, Harris finally released some concrete policy proposals on her website. These include vague pledges to reduce the cost of healthcare, increase the minimum wage, and protect the civil liberties of marginalized communities. Harris more clearly articulated her more conservative policies, including beefing up border security, increasing funding for law enforcement, challenging China on the world stage, and keeping weapons flowing to Israel. This suite of policies seems designed to correspond with her courtship of anti-Trump Republican voters, which has included touting the endorsement of Liz and Dick Cheney.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Today on the show: Did Bebe create and leak forged Hamas documents to falsely shape public opinion in support of his endless genocide? Also in a new ABC Australia report “Israeli forces are accused of killing their own citizens under the ‘Hannibal Directive' during October 7 chaos. And we follow up on An American-Turkish woman–A member of the International Solidarity Movement– who was assassinated by the IDF in the occupied West bank last Friday during an anti-settler protest in Beita on the west bank The post Did Israel Forge Hamas Documents to Shape Public Opinion in Support of The Genocide in Gaza? appeared first on KPFA.

Voices for Palestine - Global solidarity Sept. 7, 2024 This 4 hour collective community broadcast weaves sounds from protests to support freedom in Palestine from all around the world. Including voices of artists and activists who are joining the frontlines of expressing their solidarity with the people of Gaza. In this broadcast we hear a set of interviews that I recorded with organizers of the People's Conference for Palestine in May 2024 in Detroit, Michigan, particularly with members of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). Also you will hear from Caoimhe Butterly, an organizer of the The Freedom Flotilla Coalition during the stop of Handala (حنظلة) in Lisbon, Portugal. For this broadcast I am also sharing interviews with long-time Palestine solidarity activists Adam Shapiro, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, in addition to a conversation with John Tarleton, the editor of The Indypendent in NY. Below is a full track listing from the broadcast, please tune-in and encourage your friends to listen. All the best, sending my love and solidarity. - Stefan Christoff. A full outline of the voices, works and music included including links to the voices and contributors can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-a9dGkf2_gx5jR5iVefH9IBdBIXTLMPTMD_9mjSg2O4/edit?usp=sharing 01. Badawi - The One (Zikr wave mix) 02. Roua Daas speaks on Penn State chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) 03. Reflections on the Wayne State University encampment visit, with Andrea from Oregon and Zein from New Mexico 04. Reem Said of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), Montréal 05. Yara Shoufani, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) organizer 06. Steve Bates @steve-bates - Destroy the palace 07. An interview with Adam Shapiro (co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement) 08. SUNKEN CAGES @rmomin - Chants of The Broken 09. Errance @errancerrancerrance - Surdité 10. Badawi - A Better Place (reprise) 11. ben grossman @ben_grossman - force of will 12. Evitceles @evitceles - Within A Haze 13. Midland @midland - Side Gurn 14. Æther Varia @aether_varia - Asphalt 15. Atletas - Samsona (via Municipal K7 in Brazil) 16. Claire Deak @claire_deak - Quarrel of the Senses (Serenata) 17. Interview with John Tarleton, editor of The Indypendent in NY 18. Michel Banabila @michel-banabila - Where Old Meets New 19. Ian Kamau - Fear 20. Errance - Timbres oblitérés 21. Caoimhe Butterly interview from the Freedom Flotilla coalition, recorded in Lisbon Portugal 22. Leo, a youth singing in Nahuatl an Indigenous language in the Mexico City region 23. Naila Keleta-Mae - Free 24. JESICA SARRAF @777sarraf + CADENA NACIONAL (live mix) 25. Alejandro Saravia - In praise of struggle 26. Grim Beverage - Open C 27. Fuzz Lewis - Opener Wave 28. Leon Louder - Feast 29. Cataratas del Niágara - Dúo (Antonio Gritón and Germán Bringas) 30. Frank Barat interviews Lauren Jauregui

It's terrible that the world (The Collective West) values some lives over others, but we are waging an Information War to end the violence in Palestine and must use what levers we can. At this time, the family of the activist has requested privacy as they mourn their loss. Their wish to grieve in peace should be respected by all, as they navigate this tragic and difficult situation. During the weekly demonstration in Beita, Palestine, on the morning of September 6th, 2024, the Israeli army intentionally shot and killed an international human rights activist with the International Solidarity Movement. The demonstration, which primarily involved men and children praying, was met with force from the Israeli army stationed on a hill. The volunteer died shortly after being transported to a local hospital in Nablus.

Today on the show: An American-Turkish woman–A member of the International  Solidarity Movement–was shot dead by illegal Israeli occupiers during an anti-settler protest in West Bank town of Beita: We speak to Zeaid Abbas, who grow up on the West Bank, about the Israeli murder of the activist: And the Election Crimes Bulletin returns with Greg Palast on the frontline-fight to protect your vote from a growing army of armed vote denyers willing to track you down at gunpoint The post Flashpoints – September 6, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

On today's episode we get a report from four Bay Area activists who just returned from the West Bank doing protective presence work with the International Solidarity Movement, an attempt to deter Israel's continued colonial land grabs in the area, where the zionist state has taken more Palestinian land in the past 9 months than in any similar time period since the early 1990s. The International Solidarity Movement, or ISM, brings in volunteers from around the world to offer what they call a protective presence, that is, to spend time in endangered Palestinian areas, with a hope that the international presence could prevent zionist attacks.  The ISM is building up its protective presence now in the West Bank, and a group of Bay Area activists have just returned from doing that work in the West Bank areas of Massafer Yatta, and in the Jordan Valley. That group joins us this morning, using pseudonyms or first names only, because being identified as ISM activists risks being prevented from continuing the work. Our guests are Bella, Ossa, Nina and Maria. Check out the International Solidarity Movement's website: https://palsolidarity.org/ Follow ISM on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ismpalestine/ — Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post Palestine Post: West Bank International Solidarity Movement Activists Return to Bay Area w/ Bella, Ossa, Nina and Maria appeared first on KPFA.

The International Solidarity Movement or ISM, which was an active protective presence in Palestine for many years in the earlier 2000s has returned. The perhaps-best known activist from that earlier round of International Solidarity Movement protective work was Rachel Corrie, a name many of our listeners are familiar with, because while putting her body in between an Israeli bulldozer at the home of a Palestinian family she was staying with in Rafah, the bulldozer drove over her, crushing her to death. Now, international activists are returning to provide a protective presence, with the same group – the International Solidarity Movement, now in the West Bank. A delegation from the Bay Area just returned from that protective presence work. We'll hear more from them later in the week, but today, we hear a brief reflection from one of those Bay Area activists who just returned, Maria Lewis.  —- Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post Preview: Bay Area Activists Return from Protective Work in the West Bank appeared first on KPFA.

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Maria comes on to talk to Inmn about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the state of aid going to Gaza, and the obstacles the powers that be have erected to prevent aid from arriving. Guest Info Maria Elle is a wing nut anarchist Jewish dyke extremist whore anti-Zionist psycho who writes poetry, conspires against the Empire, and organizes for collective liberation. You can find her on IG @Lchiam.Intifada or @bay2gaza Gaza Freedom Flotilla: freedomflotilla.org International Solidarity Movement: palsolidarity.org International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network: ijan.org Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Maria on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin. And today we're going to be talking about a kind of different lens of preparedness than we normally talk about...or no--well, I guess we always kind of talk about it. But we're...you know, we're not we're not going to be talking about a skill today as much as the importance for figuring out how to provide aid when the powers that be: governments and nations that we absolutely don't put our trust in but...are trapped by fail to do that or purposefully obstruct it. And today we're going to be talking about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and organizing efforts around that and trying to bring critical aid to Gaza. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on that network. [singing] Doo doo doo doo doo. **The Ex-Worker Podcast ** 01:24 The Border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on a map. It's a power structure. A system of control. The Border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world and the Border is tearing it apart. The Ex-Worker podcast presents No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration Across North America, a serialized audio book in 11 chapters released every Wednesday. Tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast. **Inmn ** 02:04 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know we had you on the Stranger's podcast recently for your poetry collection, which everyone should pause right now and go and listen to another hour long podcast episode first and then come back and listen to this...or don't. Or listen to it afterwards. Anyways, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a little bit about yourself and your involvement with the Freedom Flotilla? **Maria ** 02:44 Absolutely. Yes. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Maria. She/her pronouns. I am a Jewish, anti-Zionist, anarchist, I don't know, organizer, agitator--whatever you want to call it--from the Ohlone of xučyun (Huichin), aka Oakland, California. And I am.... I've been involved doing Palestine Solidarity work since I was a teenager. Originally, I came to awareness around what was happening in Palestine during the assault on Gaza in 2008 and got involved in the student movement and the student occupations that were happening back then. And then actually got kicked out of university as a result of that, which ended up being perfect because I got the opportunity to join the International Solidarity Movement doing work on the ground in Palestine, which is an amazing group that folks should look up. They were defunct for a little bit during COVID but have come back and are working again basically bringing comrades and activists from around the world to stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance on the ground in Palestine. So I had that opportunity and then I came home and got involved in organizing back here and was not.... So the flotilla, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has.... So, freedom flotillas have been sailing, trying to break the siege on Gaza since 2008. Basically, a flotilla--for those who don't know--is a group of boats. So it's a group of boats from.... Our flotillas or group of boats from all over the world. There's over 30 countries that are involved sending comrades and activists to break the siege on Gaza. And so these boats are filled--our current boat--is filled with 5000 tons of food and medical aid that we are attempting to bring directly to Gaza in defiance of Israel's illegal naval blockade. These.... Like I said, these missions have been happening since 2008, trying both to bring aid to Gaza and to bring awareness, international awareness, of Israel's blockade and kind of getting a lot of international notoriety 2010 When the Mavi Marmara, a Turkicsh ship that was part of the flotilla, was attacked. And nine people were murdered in that process. And it made headlines at the time and brought a lot of awareness to the ongoing siege on Gaza. And then since then there have been many attempts to break the siege. This year, of course, is a different context. And it's a little bit hard to know what to expect. As you know, as many of us already know, there has been a genocide happening in Palestine since 1948. But the particular intensified moment of genocide that we're in creates a different context that we don't totally know what to expect. But we are determined to sail. We are determined to break Israel's illegal siege on Gaza. And especially now more than ever, while there's been a humanitarian crisis in Gaza for a very long time, and this blockade has been happening for 18 years, the famine that is now gripping Gaza is unprecedented. And we are seeing mass death, especially in the north of Gaza, and that is spreading throughout Gaza. Now with the most recent attacks on Rafah, the situation just gets more and more dire every day. One of the goals of the Freedom Flotilla is to emphasize that this is not a natural disaster. You know, there's.... A lot of the way that this gets covered in US media and global media is as if this was a humanitarian--people use the word, "humanitarian crisis," and they use the word "famine." And both of those things are true. And they're also a little bit misleading because this famine is being intentionally created by Israel as a tool of genocide. Israel controls the flow of all aid moving into Gaza and is intentionally and carefully counting how many calories it is allowing into the Gaza Strip in order to intentionally keep the population on the verge of starvation in order to cripple the resistance. This needs to be highlighted. This isn't.... It isn't like they don't know how to get the aid in. It is not logistical obstacles. They try to make it seem like this is, "Oh, how can we possibly get aid in?" Israel has closed every barrier. Like, the fact that we even need to go by sea is insane. They could open the land crossings, which would be the most effective way, but they absolutely refuse. And the United States, our so-called government that has the power to do that and has the power to force the--probably the only government in the world--with the power to force Israel to open the land crossings--is instead building this pier, spending millions of dollars of wasted money that could be being used on aid or, you know, on stopping Israel. And this long drawn out project that now isn't even functioning due to like "climate" or "weather." I can't even remember what they said. There's some kind of structural damage. I mean, they put all this money into it and like still can't deliver aid somehow. And we're supposed to believe that that's a coincidence. Meanwhile, we have a plan to,within three days, effectively deliver all of this aid to Gaza by simply having a basic little fold-out pier that we have packed on the ship that could unfold, deliver the aid, and then we can leave again. It's actually really simple. It's not complicated. None of this has to be complicated. It's being intentionally made complicated as a tool of genocide and as a tool of hiding what Israel is intentionally doing. So that's really a big part of what the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is about. I would say that it's rooted, ultimately, in the principles of DIY and direct action, which are fundamentally anarchist principles to me, and to many of us, the basic idea that no one is going to do this but us. If we want something done, we have to do it ourselves. We cannot rely on these so-called governments who, many of whom around the world claim to support Palestine and give lots of lip service to the need for aid to get in and even for Palestinian Liberation. Other governments, such as our so-called government, have done nothing but contribute to and fund and exacerbate this genocide, still give lip service to "Oh, we need to get aid into Israel," but they're not going to do anything. At best, they don't care. At worst, they actively want this to happen. We cannot wait for them. We've been trying.... Like, you know, not that.... You know, fight by every means necessary. I really do believe in a diversity of tactics. And at the same time, we need to be honest with ourselves that there is no amount of pressure that we can really put on the Biden administration that is going to change the US' has strategic Imperial interest in propping up Israel, you know? And there's no amount of electoral or domestic pressure within the existing system that we can put in that will change the fact that Israel is a beacon of US imperialism in the Middle East. It is a central part of US imperialism's operation globally. And not only our military imperialism but our economic imperialism. So as many of you may already know, and many of you may not, a big part of the impetus for this genocide has to do with global trade and global shipping. So, after the Suez Canal crisis, we saw.... It became clearer than ever to the international community, how delicate the infrastructure of global shipping is. We saw with the simple breakdown of one ship in the Suez Canal, the global economy was brought to a halt. And it is unacceptable-- [Interrupted] **Maria ** 10:18 It's so fragile. And we saw its fragility even more with COVID and with the plague. And it has become clear to the West that having such an important chokehold located in Egypt is not strategic for them. And so Israel has a plan to build what they're calling the Ben Gurion Canal, which is going to be directly north of Gaza, within missile range of of Gaza to be clear, that would be an alternative to the Suez Canal and that would allow for Israel's, and therefore the United States', control over global shipping in a way that we do not currently have. So the depth of the economic investment in committing this genocide is deeper than even natural gas off the coast of Gaza, which a lot of us have also seen headlines about. And a lot of us already know Chevron's interest and BP's interest in colonizing Gaza and eliminating Hamas in order to secure access to that natural gas, but even beyond that, in order to facilitate the construction of the Ben Gurion Canal. With that much at stake, with both fossil fuels and global shipping at stake, there's a no amount of pressure that we can put up on the Biden administration to get them to like, hear truth, you know? If we want change, we have to make it ourselves. And no one is going to do this but us. And I think that the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the amount of aid that we can actually deliver it with one flotilla is a drop in the bucket. The principle that we are trying to communicate to the world, and that we've seen in many places, is that we can't wait. We have to...we have to show up. We have to be there for our Palestinian siblings. We have to be there for our siblings around the world. And we have to do it ourselves. You know, I think we saw a similar thing with the Great March of Return, and I'm extremely inspired by the Great March of Return of Palestinians coming from Lebanon and breaking through the border there. And we, you know, continue to be inspired by Palestinian resistance globally and to work in concert with that resistance in order to do whatever we can to stop this genocide, both in the immediate sense and in the ongoing sense of Israel's colonization of Palestine from the river to the sea. **Inmn ** 10:18 It's so fragile. **Inmn ** 12:35 Golly, thank you for that very--I will call it a little bit of a rant thing. That was incredible and very informative. And now I have like 100 questions. **Inmn ** 12:47 I have 100 more things to talk about but lay it on me. **Inmn ** 12:51 Um, I think like, or.... I don't even know where to start. Actually, there's this funny place that I want to start, which I'm maybe gonna feel funny about and is maybe like.... Whatever, I don't think it's me feeling nihilistic about it as much as like confused by imaging in..... So I, as a lot of us have been seeing a lot of news graphics, infographics. And I saw this one recently that was talking about "planned distraction." And it was like this thing that was like, "Israel's really counting on Americans being distracted by Memorial Day weekend to intensify the assault on Rafah." And I was just like, I don't think Israel's thinking about what random Americans are doing. Like, as you say, I don't think there's any amount of pressure that we can put on institutions like the Biden administration to change those things. **Maria ** 14:30 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know. I mean, nobody really knows. I do think that it's worth noting that the last major assaults on Rafah began during the Superbowl also. So I mean, it's...who knows, maybe they are thinking about it. And Israel is very much concerned with its public image. [half interrupts self] Well, it's complicated, right? They are very much concerned with their public image and they're also on a genocidal, psychotic rampage, which is causing all sorts of domestic tensions. And Israeli domestic politics are a whole nother can of worms. You know, there isn't one--like anywhere--there isn't one unified Israeli interest. Israel, like every other country, is a contestation of political forces with central goals but also pulling at each other and pulling itself apart. And we actually are seeing Israeli domestic-- [Interrupts self] I think it's also very worth noting that last summer before the assaults on Gaza, before the most recent assault on Gaza began, we saw the first ever domestic Israeli social movement, really since the creation of the state. There was an actual--I mean, you know, fairly tame but for Israel significant--uprising of Israelis against their government. And several months later, this genocide happens, right? And this is not a coincidence. We've seen this kind of pattern time and time again, where a state in order to secure domestic unity will declare war or genocide on a foreign enemy. I think it's also worth noting that the plans for this--while October 7th may have been the the spark--the plans for this were very much already in place. And it is very clear from how quickly and strategically and efficiently they have acted that they have just been waiting for this opportunity. So I think that's worth emphasizing. I think, and then I just also want to clarify, as far as like "no amount of domestic pressure," I think that there's...I want to be clear that, like I said, I believe deeply in a diversity of tactics. And I do think that we need to do everything. And I think that there is very--like, I'm not saying that we should all just go to Palestine. I think there's very important roles for us to play here in the United States in organizing. But we need to be realistic about how we're gauging our targets. So we're never going to be able to appeal to the moral or even political interests of--as far as like electoral political interests--of these things. We...I think...I personally think that our best hope is to challenge their economic function, right, and to make this cost so much that they cannot continue. And that's a lot. It has to cost a lot because they have a lot to gain. But you know, what? We have a lot to lose. We have everything to lose and everything to gain. And we need to make this cost more than they can imagine. **Inmn ** 17:28 Yeah. And yeah, maybe to be clear, the infographic that I was seeing, it was like, its suggestion was like, you know, "Get on the phone and call your congress people." And I was just like, you know, yeah, "by any means necessary," and whatever people can do, but I was like, I don't think the one thing stopping.... It framed it in this way--I am gonna get off this topic very quickly and spent too much time on this--but it framed it in this way of like, "Oh, if Americans just weren't so distracted by barbecuing over the weekend then genocide and then Gaza would have been over," and I was just like...that. Okay, whatever. Anyway, a real question. So I think maybe something that I've been curious, I guess, about is some of the like geopolitical--or like, specifically like geographical--forces at work where.... Like for the.... Can you tell me about waterways, waterways in and around Israel and Gaza? Like I guess like what is the proposed route? Or like, what are some of the.... Like, how get Flotilla? **Maria ** 18:48 How get Flotilla. **Inmn ** 18:49 How blockaded? **Maria ** 18:52 Through the Mediterranean. So we had originally, we had originally planned to sail from Turkey, from Istanbul, and I was actually in Istanbul with hundreds of other people. We were, our bags were packed, the boat was full, we were ready to sail, and the mission was bureaucratically sabotaged by Israel. This was several weeks ago. **Inmn ** 19:13 Is this the flag thing? **Maria ** 19:14 Yeah, so Israel has tried many different avenues to sabotage the Flotilla, including physical sabotage of the ship. But one--and this has happened for many years--but one tactic they have not tried before, and that we were not prepared for, was that they pressured.... So I don't know how much people know about shipping. But every ship that leaves a port has to pass to sail under a flag, a national flag. As far as I understand, any ship that doesn't sail under a flag is technically considered a pirate ship. [says incredulously, laughing] So if we wanted to leave and be allowed to leave by the Coast Guard, we would have to have a national flag. And usually those flags have nothing to do with the mission. You basically buy a flag to sail under. It's interesting. It's actually kind of like a side hustle for a lot of poorer countries, they sell their flags at a cheaper rate and with less bureaucracy. So I think most international shipping actually happens under the flag of the Philippines. But we were gonna sail under the flag of Guinea Bissau, which was a flag of convenience. And Israel put immense--Israel in the United States--put immense pressure on Guinea Bissau to withdraw the flag. And so the flag was withdrawn literally the day we were supposed to depart, like bags packed and ready to go. And, you know, we could have...like the captain could have, I suppose, made the choice to sail anyway, but then that would have forced a confrontation with the Turkish Coast Guard, rather than with the Israeli naval blockade, which people felt wasn't...wasn't worth it. You know, for better or worse. Whatever. The people thought it wasn't worth it. And that it was a better plan to just try to get another flag. So the flotilla is delayed as we are searching for another flag. That process is well underway. And I am hoping.... We'll have more information within the next week about where that is at and when and where we're planning to sail from. It's not sure that we'll be sailing from Turkey anymore at this point. Turkey would have been about a three day sail to Gaza. And at this point we might have to be looking at somewhere further out. TBD. **Inmn ** 21:27 Like somewhere further out to escape the influence of Israel putting pressure on those local areas? **Maria ** 21:36 Yeah, so there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure put on the Turkish Government. And Turkey, while it gives incredible lip service to supporting a free Palestine, is actually deeply economically dependent on Israel. And the domestic politics there is a whole can of worms. Anyway, I don't know where that's at. That's not part of the...that's not the team that I'm on. You know? I'm doing a lot of more of a social media and grassroots organizing here in the US. So I'm not one of those people figuring that part out. But, I mean, we can all see, we all basically know the general geopolitics of that region and how complicated it is for any country in the world to allow us to sail because of the possibility of antagonizing Israel, and what that can mean as a nuclear power and as a proxy of the United States in the region. But we will. We'll find a place that we will do it. Inshallah, very soon. And that is underway. I think as far as what's happened in the past, so what's happened in the past, most of the Flotillas have not--actually all of the Flotillas--have not actually made it to Gaza. They are pretty consistently stopped, often in international waters--which is illegal--before arriving. There are no ports in Gaza that one could land at. So like we said, we had this plan with a pier that can unfold. In the past Israel has stopped the flotilla with its naval blockade. In 2010 the ships were famously--one of the ships in particular--was famously attacked, and nine people were were murdered in that process. Since then, there have been no fatalities. No one has been matyred. But everyone pretty much has been arrested and deported. **Maria ** 21:37 From like international waters? [Said confused like it sounds sketchy] **Maria ** 23:40 I think they get brought into Ashdod, usually, and deported from there, like on an Israeli vessel or whatever. I don't know. I haven't been on any of the flotillas before. This will be my first journey. One of my aunts was really involved in them for many years, so I learned a lot about the process, and I've been following the process, since 2010. She's been very involved in--or she was--very involved in it. Gail Miller, may her name be for blessing. So I've been following it but this is my first actual mission joining. **Inmn ** 24:14 Cool. Um, yeah, it's...I don't know, it's.... Thinking about waterways has been something that's been really interesting with a lot of the goings on in and around the genocide in Gaza, like specifically with like...it was fun to see countries like Yemen be like, "Oh, we're gonna blockade Israel or we're gonna blockade shipping routes for Israel shit." And interesting to hear you talk about the connections to global shipping, because then that turned into this big global shipping catastrophe. And like the US and Israel were like "We're protecting global shipping lanes for like the good of Capitalism..." **Maria ** 25:14 One of the first honest things they've said. Yeah, absolutely. I think even with that, it's worth remembering too, just kind of going back to what I said, that the governments of the world are not acting. It wasn't the Yemeni government who took that action. You know, it was it was the Houthis. And overwhelmingly, we see that is not governments anywhere, but rather people working with conviction and solidarity who can actually stop the infrastructure of global trade, can actually stop...can actually have some real impact on this genocide, right? Like, that's one of the only meaningful...you know, people know that acronym BDS, It's boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which is...was a movement in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle that the Palestinian anti-apartheid struggle has adopted, and that has been a global call for some time now. And one of the only real meaningful BDS actions we've seen has been by the Houthis, in that way, you know, actually interfering with Israeli shipping. **Inmn ** 26:15 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's, interesting to hear. I feel like this is a topic that I've tried really hard to learn about on the internet and every time I do it's deeply confusing. And I get more confused because there's a lot of propaganda from the US and from Israel about, like, you know, who's enacting these blockades and whatever reasons that they make up. I saw...I was reading a little bit about the 2010 flotilla where, either like before or after it, Israel was making these wild accusations that the flotilla was working with Al Qaeda or had all these connections to groups they labeled as terroristic. And then the claims were withdrawn later because everyone was like, "Literally what the fuck are you talking about?" **Maria ** 27:15 Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, they're always going to do that, you know, and they're always going to try any possible means to antagonize and paint any kind of resistance is terrorism, which is also what we're seeing in Gaza, right? They will paint five-year old children as terrorists, you know? They have no shame and and they've gotten so far...they've spiraled so deep into their own narrative that they have really lost the plot. It's kind of wild. **Inmn ** 27:46 Yeah. Yeah. I think there's...it's like this thing that's been happening for quite some time, which seems like less obvious to people who have been paying attention, but like, I feel like a decade ago, or a decade and a half ago--wow, time happens--there, like you said, Israel has had these moments of being deeply concerned with their public image and then these moments of just the veil coming off and being like, which is happening there, it's happening here in the United States, it's happening everywhere, just fascistic forces becoming less concerned with what their public images are and just owning being terrible and fucked up. Being like, "Who's gonna stop us?" **Maria ** 28:39 Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, like I said, Israeli domestic politics are a total mess, but there is definitely a stronger and stronger faction that feels that way. And just thinking about it also, to bring it back to sort of the actual mission of the Flotilla, which is to deliver aid, and.... Well, it's twofold, right? It's to deliver aid and it's to break the siege and highlight the injustice--and not just injustice but absolute insanity--of the fox guarding the hen house here, so that all aid flowing...coming into Gaza has to be searched and is being monitored by Israel, and the sort of intentional, as I spoke to in the beginning, of the intentional famine that is being constructed there. And, you know, we saw in the news in March, that we were on the...we're at a tipping point of mass starvation. And that tipping point has been tipped. We are seeing unprecedented famine happening in Gaza. And I wanted to bring it back to that because I also want to just think a little bit about contextualizing what famine means. You know, I mentioned before that people often treat--like the media often treats this as a natural disaster or something or tries to paint it as a natural disaster-- **Inmn ** 29:53 Yeah, it "just happened" **Maria ** 29:54 --as an intentional act of war and genocide. And I think that we have to frame it that way and we have to both make sure that aid is getting in immediately, and to recognize that this is political, that no matter how much money we send to the Red Cross, if aid isn't being allowed to cross isn't helpful, which is not to say don't donate. Donate. And donate, specifically, to Palestinian mutual aid funds, which are the most grassroots opportunities, the most direct way to get funding, and you can find that...I can direct you, at the end, towards different places to donate The Middle East Children's Alliance has been able to get a lot of aid directly in. There's also a lot of, there's a group called Bay to Gaza Mutual Aid, which has collected a bunch of on the ground places to help people in Gaza. So just to be clear, I'm not saying not to donate. You definitely should. And we have to recognize that without an end to this, to the siege and to the bombardment, and the occupation, aid can only go so far. And I think it's important to contextualize that, to remember that this isn't...this phenomena also isn't unique to Palestine, right, this ideathat the global media treats famine as somehow a "natural phenomenon," when in reality, it's politically constructed. It's not just for Palestine, It's true all over the world. And we're seeing that especially in..... I think you can't actually talk about Gaza right now without also talking about Darfur and Sudan and what's happening there. And I think even more than in Gaza, famine--the politically constructed famine--that affects Africa, and specifically, that affects Black people in Africa, is often treated as "inevitable," and "natural," when it is very much politically constructed. And what we're seeing in Sudan, and the genocide that is taking place in Sudan right now, and the famine that is gripping Sudan right now, is every bit as politically constructed, is every bit as entwined with resource wars with the UAE and Saudis, race for controlling natural gas and resources, and for having a monopoly over those things. And this is this genocide is being directly funded by the UAE, which the United States will not challenge because of our strategic alliances there. And the people being targeted by this genocide are overwhelmingly African agriculturalists who have continued to keep that land fertile and producing food when it is more within the interest of the imperialist powers, and particularly the UAE, to have the land become arid so that it can become extraction sites for minerals and fossil fuels. So all that to say, a big part of the goal of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is to politicize famine itself, because it is political. **Inmn ** 32:53 Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's hard to actually think of a famine, like a historical famine, that is actually not a political tool, or like an act of genocide. It's like we...when we...when we think of it, even like the word that we have, it's like when we think of famine, we think of there being a lack of something, we think of there being some kind of disaster that is just like, "Oh, the conditions just made it so that food couldn't be produced." And it's...it's never that. And, at least in English, like we don't really have a word for enacted famine that I can think of that isn't just genocide or that isn't just like purposeful starvation. It's like this entire language lacks a word for this tool that is used. **Maria ** 33:51 Caloric warfare. **Inmn ** 33:54 Yeah, um, I guess like kind of change tack a little bit, I feel like I'm using you as my filter for trying to learn about things on the internet and like running into so many weird like blocks that I'm like, I have no idea what's going on because the global media apparatus is horrible. But what.... I guess like what's going on with world government efforts to like get like food and aid into Gaza? Like I know there's been like a lot of back and forth with what like the UN is doing to get in food and it seems like that's not happening anymore? **Inmn ** 34:40 Where was the pier being built? And, like, what, like there weren't other peirs? **Maria ** 34:40 Right. I mean, one of the most bizarre things that's been happening that has been a lot of the efforts right now is airdrops. So people are like, "There's no way to get aid into Gaza. We have to literally drop it from the air," which is not only unhelpful, but has actually been dangerous and had has caused injury and the destruction of the aid being delivered and has been, shockingly, both ineffective and unsafe. Meanwhile, you could just cross the border, right? We shouldn't even have to be going in through the sea. There's not even.... Like we're going through the flotilla because we feel like that is our best chance of getting in. But there are... like, Egypt shares a border with Gaza. The Rafah crossing a should be open, and people should be able to bring in aid by land. And there's some aid that is crossing there. But as we've seen, to the extent that Israel will let anything in there, which has been very limited, there are settler...civilian--so-called civilians--although, they're not civilian, because they're armed to the teeth with AK--well not AK-47s but M-16s--actively blocking and looting and destroying trucks that are delivering aid to Gaza. I'm just like, can you even imagine? Like, could you imagine? It's hard like.... Like, what goes through your mind? What lives in your heart to destroy food, going to starving children? You know, I.... Whatever. But like, that's actively happening, you know. And so yeah, the airdrops have been a lot of like, you know, this whole US pier that I think I spoke to earlier that they're trying to construct this peir, they constructed this peir. It was pseudo operational for a minute. Now, it's non-operational, again, spending millions of dollars for this basically theater, when the US could, in a heartbeat stop sending aid to Israel and end this whole thing. **Maria ** 36:45 Off the coast of Gaza. It's a floating pier. So yeah, it's whatever.... It's a floating pier off the coast of Gaza. No, it's...I mean, it's honestly, like it's a whole charade. To be honest. Like the United States could, tomorrow, stop this but they won't. **Inmn ** 37:08 Yeah. And it's like the excuses are always these like strange logistical, bureaucratic excuses. Of like, "Oh, I don't know, the pier, the pier didn't work out. Or like, if only we could secure the border crossings, then aid could flow freely through." [Said sarcastically] **Maria ** 37:29 Right, exactly. Which, you know, is a common thing that we see globally too. We see it in this country to some degree like the crisis at the US-Mexico border, which I believe you're at right now. Like, they treat it like..... They treat so much of the humanitarian crisis that's happening there as if it were an impossible problem to solve when it's a very similar situation. It's a intentionally constructed political crisis. **Inmn ** 37:55 Yeah. And it's like, you know, there's a kind of, I guess, famous zine--or maybe people haven't read that one in a while because it's been a long time. But there's a scene called Designed To Kill, which is exactly how the US-Mexico border works. It's like the way that you hear government talk about it, they talk about it as if like, "Oh, we just can't do literally a single thing about it. We have billions of dollars, but we just can't solve this problem." And it's like--this is gonna sound weird--but it's like when you hear Border Patrol talk about like, like, "If only we could figure out how to stop people from coming in," which is not anything that I would ever want, but is what the government talks about. And it's like, you're not trying to do that. If you were trying to do that, it would be quite easy to do that. Like you have designed a system to funnel people in, to exploit them through private prisons, to psychologically terrify, and kill people. **Maria ** 39:06 Absolutely. **Inmn ** 39:06 It is a sick and twisted thing. It is a disaster of your own creation that you then LARP as being the humanitarian actors for, for like public image. Like Border Patrol has a.... Border Patrol has a search and rescue unit. They have like a helicopter that they tote around. [Affirmative sounds from Maria] Fucking absurd. 39:32 I know. I know. Yeah. I mean, I think that you know, I believe you were involved with No More Deaths at the US-Mexico border for a long time, and I think that there's a very similar principle as with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, that the people who created this crisis are not going to be the ones to stop it. And if anyone's going to do something, it has to be us. We have to do something. Because, yeah, the colonizer isn't going to stop colonizing unless we do something about it. **Inmn ** 40:03 No. And it's like we can't count on.... It's like, we.... Like a lot of people, I think have this, like this myth or hope or whatever that like, "Oh, well, if things ever get really weird, like the UN will step in," or something. And it's like the UN has proceeded to literally fucking nothing. Or it's like the...like, what is it? The I forget the acronym for that court, the UN court, the world.... **Inmn ** 40:31 Yeah. Yeah, the ICJ making rulings towards Israel about, "We want you to stop the genocide." And they're like, "Well, we're not going to do it." And it's like the ICJ does literally fucking nothing. **Maria ** 40:31 The ICJ 40:47 I mean, I believe that ICJ is interesting. The ICJ did issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, which, as far as I can tell, only means that there's like, certain countries he maybe can't go to or like, if he loses this war, which inshallah, he will, that there could be potentially be consequences for him. But that really, like, you know, it's all about real politics. That really just depends on how the war itself goes, you know? Like the international arrest warrants issued in Nazi Germany only were meaningful because Germany lost the war. I just wanted to, I mentioned No More Deaths early and I realized that probably not all the listeners know what that is. So I just thought I'd say No More Deaths is mutual aid project at the US-Mexico border. Grassroots, mostly anarchist lead from what I understand, project. Once upon a time, at least. **Inmn ** 41:45 Let's say anarchistic. **Maria ** 41:48 There we go, there we go. That [NMD] provides mutual aid that both has like emergency medical care and food and also like hikes the desert searching for people who are lost and helping evacuate people who are in need and giving direct aid at the Border despite the Border Patrol's attempt to criminalize those efforts. Which I know a lot of our listeners have probably been involved in. I believe you were. I went out there for...a long time ago. I went out there to do that. But I do think that there's powerful mutual aid projects like that happening here in Turtle Island, too. So it's worth shouting them out. **Inmn ** 42:29 Yeah, and it's like there's a lot of really interesting parallels between all of these mutual aid projects, and also the systems that create the need for them. Where, I don't know, there's so many Israeli defense contractors that got hired to build the virtual--like Elbit Systems got hired to build the virtual wall in the Border and it's like, the similar systems that get used in Palestine. And there's.... It's freaky. There's this, in Arizona, there's this company trying to build like a water pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico to Scottsdale or something. And it's the same Israeli company that builds pipelines through...or like distillation centers in Palestine. 43:28 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we see similar collaborations with Cop City in Atlanta. It's all, it's a global war machine. And we see it functioning exactly the way it's intended to function. But you know, we also have a power to be a cog in that machine. And I am weirdly optimistic a lot. I actually have a lot of faith that we can, you know, this machine can't operate without us, especially us here in the heart of Empire. Like this is in so many ways the veins of empire where so much of it is plotted and executed right here on Turtle Island. And we're uniquely positioned in a lot of ways to clog those arteries. We just have to find the courage and the confidence and the organization to make it happen. And I have so much faith in our ability to do that. Yeah, before, before we run out of time--I don't know if we're coming up on time or not. But I wanted to just also make sure that there's--and I mentioned this, but I just want to give it enough space that this crisis did not start in October. And it also didn't start with the siege of Gaza 18 years ago. This has been a crisis that has been exhibiting in its current form since 1948, since the creation of the State of Israel and the Nakba, which is the genocide of the Palestinian people in order to create the State of Israel and really for longer than that, since Zionist immigration began in the 1880s. And this crisis didn't start now and it's not going to stop when the bombs stop falling on Gaza. This crisis will not end until the settler, ethnic national...the settler, nationalist ethno state of Israel is dismantled. And really until the whole global system of settler colonialism--and all of the national states--are dismantled. But to look specifically at Palestine, like there is no...this is not over until Zionism is over. Zionism needs to be ended, and that the settler ethno state of Israel needs to be ended. And that until all Palestinians have a right to return to their homelands, until all Palestinians have a right to move freely in their homelands, until all Palestinians have a right to autonomy and self governance within their homelands. And by self-governments, I don't just mean to have a State, but to be able to have agency over their own lives and their own decisions. And until that, the struggle isn't over, and it can't be. And, you know, I think I'm actually very hopeful about this moment, I think that there is...that there is an incredible not, just an outpouring of support for the Palestinians, but incredible recognition of the state of global colonialism in the 21st century and its relationship to resource extraction and what we can do to stop it and I know that the Palestinian.... Like part of the reason that people around the world have responded to what's happening in Palestine the way they do is because this really resonates with so many indigenous people's struggles everywhere. Indigenous people all over the world see their struggle in the struggle with Palestinians and are rising up all over the world and it is very much a global struggle and very much that to free Palestine is in so many ways to free the world. **Maria ** 43:28 Yeah, yeah. Um, I know that you're...you've been part of some...part of this larger project...movement...coalition? I don't know words. But are there...are there ways that people can plug into this? Like if someone's like, "Yo, I got a boat. I want to join the flotilla." Can they do that? 47:25 I don't know about a boat. Well, I mean, if you've got a big boat. These are big boats we're talking Yeah, these are these are big boats. But um, I would say in general, yes. So the website is freedomflotilla.org. You can also find it on all the social medias, but especially you can find it on you know, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. Also, specifically for those in the so-called San Francisco Bay area, we have our Bay to Gaza contingent that is...we are currently growing and expanding and getting ready to sail, so you can follow us on Instagram @Bay2Gaza. We're also on TikTok and Twitter, and you can reach out to us there if you're interested in supporting or getting involved. My Instagram is @lchaimIntifada. You can also message me there. I check that a little bit more. And, yeah, reach out. We're definitely still recruiting. We don't know exactly when we're going to sail yet. But we need all types of support. And especially, you know, in a lot of ways, this is a media project. This is about shedding light on a phenomenon. So especially folks who have skills in media are very much needed right now. Both legacy media but also social media. **Inmn ** 48:41 Yeah, yeah. Cool. Um, as we get...I guess, get to the end of time--our time, not the end of all time--are there any other things that you wanted to talk about? Any questions that I didn't ask you that you wanted to just touch on? I feel like I had 100 more questions that I will never remember until we stop the recording. And then I'll remember them. 49:11 Happy to keep talking after we stop the recording. But um, no. I mean, I think yeah, like I said, please, the best way to follow us is on social media. And please reach out if you are interested. And I would say other than that, taking the principle of the Flotilla, the principle that nobody is going to do this if we don't, and that we cannot depend on governments or higher powers to make change. We have to make it ourselves, and apply that to all of your organizing. Apply that to the ways, the strategic ways that you're thinking about challenging genocide and occupation and colonialism everywhere that you are, you know. I think that most of our organizing does need to be done at home where we live. And the message that I want people to take away, personally, from the Flotilla is that if we want change, we have to make it ourselves. And to use that framework, and I think...I think what that really is, is the framework of direct action, personally. I think that the word "direct action" has really lost its meaning. And a lot of activists spaces on Turtle Island in particular, people kind of think that direct action just means chaining yourself to something. And I am firmly of the belief that direct action means...it can mean three things. It can mean destroying something that needs to be destroyed, interfering with something that needs to be interfered with, and creating something that needs to be created. And you're doing it directly as opposed to protest, which is when you're asking power to do it for you. And I think there's a role for both. I think there's a role for protests and there's a role for direct action. But we should know what the difference is when we're framing our strategy, and encourage people to look to a framework of direct action and of destroying what needs to be destroyed, creating what needs to be created, and interfering with what needs to be interfered with. So I'd say that other than getting involved with the Flotilla, just holding those principles and all of our organizing, **Inmn ** 51:05 Yeah. And, can I add a little suggestion to that? **Maria ** 51:12 Please. **Inmn ** 51:13 Also in the realm of when thinking about taking direct action, when thinking about protesting, like whenever, it's like making sure that these things that we're doing are community driven and not relying on, I don't know, political parties, or even nonprofits to guide us through taking action. Like, the only ways that we're going to make it through this is if we do it and can't wait for people with more power to just hand it over. **Maria ** 51:55 Absolutely. And I think that's true on the micro sale scale of mutual aid, which is why we do mutual aid projects and it's also true on the macro scale of how this world will change. And, you know, to me, that's what anarchism is. So... **Inmn ** 52:07 Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on again. And yeah, listeners, if you want to hear more from Maria, then you can find her on social media or you can go and listen to the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast and you can listen to us talk--honestly, a lot...mostly more about Gaza and the fuckery that is Zionism but through poetry and Maria's beautiful poetry collection, Escape Plan, which you can go check out on the Strangers in a Tangle Wilderness podcast. 52:47 And more about the West Bank, which I didn't get to talk about in this interview. And I'm realizing that was something I missed. But I do talk about that in the other one. 52:53 Do you wanna talk about it now? **Maria ** 52:54 I don't want to add that as like a little side note, but I do just want to say that speaking of like distractions, while this genocide in Gaza has been taking place, Israel has been annexing land in the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, and that the violence, but also the land loss happening right now, is a crisis that needs to be confronted directly. I do talk about that more in the other podcast. **Inmn ** 53:16 Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll see you next time. And I hope that.... **Maria ** 53:26 Free Palestine! **Inmn ** 53:27 Great. Yes. Happen. Free Palestine. I got all the words. At least 10 of them. **Inmn ** 53:40 Thank you so much for listening to Live Like the World is Dying. If you enjoy this podcast, then go do mutual aid. Break the siege of Gaza by any means necessary. But also, if you enjoyed this podcast and you want us to continue to put it on and do other cool stuff, then you can support the podcast and the best way to support the podcast is by talking about it. Tell people about it. If the people that you want to learn more about the weird myths, political myths, constructed to keep us not doing things, then tell them about Like Like the World is Dying. You can also support the show by supporting it financially. And you can do that by supporting our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can go to our website, tangledwilderness.org and find cool things like books and games and other stuff that we sell and make there. Or you can find us on Patreon and at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And yeah, you can get all sorts of fun things--we're gonna call them fun things--through the Patreon. You can get a zine mailed to you every month, like Maria's poetry collection--well, I guess you missed out on getting that one mailed to you, but you can get other future ones mailed to you-and also you can get us to thank or acknowledge things on your behalf. And we would like to thank these wonderful people and organizations. Thank you Reese, Jason, aiden, alium, Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea. Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah. And a special shout out to one of our Patreon subscribers who told us that when they have more money, they're going to get the $20 a month tier so that they can get Hoss the dog another acknowledgement, we're just going to thank Hoss the dog like 20 times. Thank you, Hoss the dog. [Chanting] Hoss the Dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog times 20. Times a million. Thanks all of y'all. Maria, is there anyone you would like to thank in particular today? **Inmn ** 56:34 Oh, I wasn't ready for that question. I'm sorry. That's fine. The people of Palestine, the Palestinian resistance. **Inmn ** 56:44 Hell yeah. Thanks for all and we'll see you next time. freedomflotilla.org, palsolidarity.org, and ijan.org Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Summary This month on Strangers we have a collection of poetry by Maria Elle. Escape Plan is a collection of poetry that explores what it means to hold the dreams of the future while grappling with the persistent horrors of now, through the lens of love, war, Capitalist-driven climate devastation, anti-Zionist struggles, and the pursuit of a free Palestine. The word of the month is about being connected to the Earth. Follow along at tangledwilderness.org Guest Info Maria Elle is a wing nut anarchist Jewish dyke extremist whore anti-Zionist psycho who writes poetry, conspires against the Empire, and organizes for collective liberation. You can find her on IG @Lchiam.Intifada or @bay2gaza You can learn more about the Freedom Flotilla, the International Solidarity Movement, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network freedomflotilla.org, palsolidarity.org, and ijan.org Publisher This podcast is published by Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org or on Twitter @tangledwild. You can support this show by subscribing to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness Host The host is Inmn Neruin. You can find them on instagram @shadowtail.artificery Reader The Reader is Bea Flowers. If you would like to hear Bea narrate other things, or would like to get them to read things for you check them out at https://voicebea.wixsite.com/website Theme music The theme song was written and performed by Margaret Killjoy. You can find her at http://birdsbeforethestorm.net or on twitter @magpiekilljoy

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists.   A teach-in by Queer Crescent in collaboration with Palestinian Feminist Collective – Palestine is a Queer Issue: Resisting Pinkwashing Now and Until Liberation. Featuring guest speakers Rabab Abdulhadi from Palestinian Feminist Collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, Shivani Chanillo from Lavender Phoenix, poetry by Mx Yaffa from Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD). Moderator by Shenaaz Janmohamed of Queer Crescent. Important Links and Resources: Sign on to Queer Crescent's Ceasefire Campaign for LGBTQI+ organizations and leaders Queer Crescent's Pinkwashing Resources  Queer Crescent Website Palestinian Feminist Collective Website ASWAT Instagram (@aswatfreedoms) Lavender Phoenix Website Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) Website Purchase Blood Orange by Mx. Yaffa Transcript Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you all so much for being here today. Welcome to the “Resisting Pinkwashing Now Until Liberation” teach-in. Queer Crescent is honored to host this teach in in partnership with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Lavender Phoenix, The Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity or MASGD, Teaching Palestine, and Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies   Thank you all so much for joining us and for tuning in. My name is Shenaaz Janmohamed. I use she and they pronouns. I'm the executive director of Queer Crescent.  Queer Crescent is really thrilled to offer this Teach-in and to be in learning with you all for the next hour and a half on Pinkwashing in particular, as we hold grief and rage and mourn towards healing, towards resistance, towards a free Palestine. Joining the resounding people all across the world who have been calling for a permanent ceasefire. To not let the violence and the destruction of Gaza go without our clear and determined voice to say that this is not okay, that we, our tax dollars should not be paying for this, that we do not consent to genocide. And as queer people, as trans people, it is very much a queer issue to be in solidarity with Palestine. For the next hour and a half we will take time to learn from Palestinian organizers. in Palestine, in the U. S., around the ways in which this moment can be used to understand our relationship to pinkwashing in particular and to Palestinian solidarity in general. And so thank you again for being with us today. We're going to start our Teach in with poetry, because we deeply believe as a queer Muslim organization in the power of cultural work, cultural change, and imparting our shine as queer people into the culture. That is the way that our people have survived. That is the way that people share their histories their survivalship is through culture. And so, before I bring up Yaffa, who's a dear friend and comrade, and also the executive director of MASGD, the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, let me introduce Yaffa. Yaffa is a trans Muslim and displaced indigenous Palestinian. She is sharing poetry from her new book, Blood Orange, shout it out, please get a copy if you haven't already, which is an emotional, important, and timely poetry collection. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of Indigenous people. Join me in giving some shine, energetic shine to Yaffa, and I'll pass to you. Mx Yaffa: Hi everyone. It's so nice to be here with you all. So excited to share space with all of you, with all the incredible panelists, with the entire Queer Crescent team, y'all are just incredible. Right before this, me and one of the other panelists realized we could potentially be related. So that's the beauty of having spaces like this, where you connect with people that you've kind of been missing your entire life, but you didn't even know that they were missing. I'm excited to recite some poetry for you all from my new collection. Just a little bit about the collection before I recite some poetry.  This collection was written for the most part, on the weekend of October 13th to the 15th. Some of y'all might remember that there was an eclipse during that weekend. And I really wanted to find something that would really center queer and trans Palestinian experience in particular, and also would just support me in navigating my own processing of everything that's going on.  I have family both in Gaza and the West Bank still. I'm originally from Jaffa and Jenin, but I've kind of lived in nine different countries. So when I say I'm displaced, it's displacement from various different wars, various genocides, various everything. And the result of that was Blood Orange.  I tried to get it out as quickly as possible and here we are. The first poem that I'll read is called “Healthy”. And I'll talk a little bit about each of these poems after I read them. It's called “Healthy”. We are not meant to be okay, when genocide is our neighbor that is funded by our labor. We are meant to be a mess, our sleep tearing into reality, anxiety brewing, wondering what is hope. We are meant to tear at the seams of reality, realizing a reality built on oppression is bullshit. We are meant to realize and demand all we are worth. Self actualization, wholeness. Things systems built off of genocide can never. Our response labeled by western capitalism as wrong is healthy. We move to wholeness always, they move to pain attempting to drag us with them. So this was actually the very first poem that I wrote for this collection and it was in that first week of the genocide immediately following October 7th when so many people were really struggling with what do we do with all of this, right? We're witnessing an entire genocide right before our eyes. And what do we do? There was a lot of hopelessness going around and a lot of narratives, at least in what's known as the United States and the global north that's always told us that all of that is wrong. That we're not supposed to be overwhelmed by things. But for me, with all the practices that I have, it's actually healthy to be overwhelmed right now. We're not supposed to know how to let genocide live in our bodies with ease. We still show up, we still do the things, and yet at the same time, we honor it. That it is a large experience. This is not normal. This is not something that should be happening all the time or ever. And so really wanted to honor that of the world that we live in is not what we deserve. For us to be overwhelmed right now is actually healthy, is where we should be. So the second poem I will read kind of goes into the conversation of today around pinkwashing.  This one's called “At Odds”.  My transness and a colonized perception of Palestine are at odds. They think it's because of lack of modernity. I say I have only received death threats targeting my transness from white people, Zionists, and other various political affiliations. I say only white people around me have ever disowned their own. Yet I do not talk to sisters who choose to buy into imperialist transphobia, claiming it as their own. My parents do not understand how some of their children could hate anything any of their children could be, why anyone would hate what they do not know. I won't talk much about pinkwashing because I know we'll get to that today. But in particular, most queer and trans Palestinians over these last eight weeks have been receiving such immense violence from the broader LGBTQ community telling us that our people are the ones who are going to kill us. I've been receiving death threats my entire life in particular as an organizer since I was 19, and I have literally never received a death threat from anyone from our region from any Muslim person. It has always been white people who have sent me death threats specifically for my queerness and my transness. Let alone everything else. And so that, that poem just kind of honors that experience.  I'll read one more, and I'll say just a few words before I read this last one. For me, the arts are so important. Not just as a tool for resistance, but also as a tool for world building. Often we think of the world is what creates art, rather than art is what creates the world. If you look at literature, even with Zionism, Zionism was in literature 100 years before it was ever named. I think about that of what is the world that we are building, what is the world of tomorrow that we get to write about and paint about and do all different kinds of art forms about today. And so this last poem kind of brings a little bit of that into it. The collection goes into the topic of utopia as we're exploring all of these other things. and as we're experiencing this genocide. So this last poem is called “Land Back”. I do not know names wiped from time in Gaza Like I do not remember the names Of great uncles and aunts Who have been reclaimed by our land To say they were murdered Is to claim loss that our land will never feel For we are made of her And regardless of how many layers of phosphor fill the air We return to her in our deaths They may exacerbate the process of our return, but return we shall. Standing thousands of miles away, I know even here she will take me back for distance is a creation that is buried with bodies that were never ours. We are not the ones who take land back, it is land that takes us. There will come a day when the sun sets on a world and rises in another, when indigenous sovereignty is honored. Where queerness no longer exists, where transness is no longer an identity, where humanity means something genuine. So I wanted to end with that, on a note of everything that we're doing right now, all of the resistance is world building. We're building the world that we have always deserved. So I'll leave you all with just one final thing about the book, like I mentioned, the reason I wrote this book in the first place and published it is to raise awareness about queer and trans Palestinians in particular and our experiences, and also to fundraise for queer and trans Palestinians both on the grounds in Gaza and in the diaspora. So 100 percent of all the proceeds from Blood Orange go directly towards that.   As we're getting deeper and deeper into this, the needs of the queer and trans Palestinian community is getting so immense, both on the ground in the region and in the diaspora. Over just the last few days, I've received over $20,000 worth of requests from individuals because people are being doxed, people are receiving death threats, people are losing their jobs. In one case, people are losing their children. There's a lot happening. And so just wanted to leave with that. I want to invite you all to pay attention to those needs and honor them, especially as we go into next year and into the elections. Thank you again for having me. It was such a pleasure to be here. And I'm so excited for the rest of this. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Yaffa. It's so wonderful to have you here. And it feels so important to start our teaching with the ways in which poetry, culture, moves and inspires us. It opens our hearts in ways that feel both healing and necessary as part and parcel to our organizing and our deep learning. As my comrade and partner Saba says, to growing our empathy to be able to show up with more depth, more commitment, and more resolve towards these issues because we are deeply interconnected. So thank you again, Yaffa..  Before I turn to introduce our other panelists, I wanted to just ground us for a moment in why Queer Crescent, along with the many partners that I named at the beginning felt it was important to host this teach in. Back on November 3rd, Queer Crescent in collaboration with the Palestinian Feminist Collective drafted and released a letter calling upon LGBTQI organizations, leaders, and influencers to join Queer Crescent and Palestinians in calling for an immediate ceasefire. And in particularly to take up understanding and resisting pinkwashing as a queer issue. The frame ” Palestine is a queer issue” is very much an homage of Palestinian Feminist Collective who tirelessly make the links around gender justice, bodily autonomy, self determination, sovereignty to the project of Palestinian liberation. Seeing them as part and parcel of the same project of liberation, and we very much are inspired and in deep gratitude to PFC and all the tireless folks who make those links so clear and apparent to us. We are also in deep gratitude to organizations like Al-Qaws, based in Palestine, who have been telling us about pink- washing for a long, long time, and we are finally doing our part to answer the call as an organization as Queer Crescent. Since we shared this letter, over 350 individuals have signed on, over 65 organizations have joined us in a commitment to calling for permanent ceasefire. This teach in is part of our commitment to moving those who have signed, ourselves included, and the many others who have joined us today. To deepen our shared resolve to a free Palestine through learning about pink watching as a propaganda tool of Israel and settler colonial state violence, and to allow this moment to transform us so that the grief is not in vain, towards a more fierce committed and clear stance of solidarity with Palestinian liberation movement. As queer and trans people and within LGBTQI organizations, we have a distinct role to play to organize to undermine pinkwashing. Because pinkwashing works and functions on the backs of racist tropes of Palestinians, Arabs, SWANA, and Muslims more broadly. We cannot let our vulnerabilities as trans and queer people be exploited in the pursuit of colonial violence and the genocide against Palestinians and all indigenous people. It was not surprising that some of the first folks who signed on to our letter were trans led organizations like the Transgender Law Center, like El/La, and indigenous organizations. It's not surprising because I think for folks who are leading trans led organizations, Trans and indigenous organizations, the relationship of self determination of bodily autonomy and to state violence and colonization is clear, right? Because ultimately colonization uses gender injustice and creating these wedges within our communities as a way to dampen our resistance and to keep us apart. So, I don't want to say more because our amazing speakers will speak and illuminate so much more of these issues. But I wanted to just state why it was important for Queer Crescent to support advancing these conversations. So, our first speaker today is Ghadir Shafie ( she and her). She is a Palestinian queer activist and the co founder of ASWAT, Palestinian Feminist Queer Center for Sexual and Gender Freedoms. A passionate advocate for the intersectionality of the struggle of Palestinian queer women, fighting multiple forms of oppression as Palestinians in the context of Israel's system of apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism, as women in a militaristic and imperialistic male dominated society, and as queers in the context of pinkwashing and homophobia. Ghadir promotes active solidarity for Palestine through global feminism and with queers. Thank you, Ghadir. Pass it to you.  Ghadir Shafie: Thank you so much. Hello from Palestine. Thank you so much for organizing this teach-in on pinkwashing. I am grateful for your presence here with me, witnessing in this horrible, horrible time. I will speak today for about 15 minutes, and I want you to bear in mind that since October 7th, Israel has killed over 18, 000 Palestinians. That is one Palestinian every 15 minutes. Imagine how many queer people are being killed daily by Israel. The scenes from Gaza are beyond description. They defy comparison, even for Palestinians, jaded by decades of occupation and settler colonial violence. Devastated landscape filled with craters and the blackened ruins of what were once people's homes, dead bodies or pieces of them. Orphaned children screaming in terror and incomprehension. Desperate survivors crying for food and water. Doctors despairing at the ever growing influx of wounded people they know they cannot treat. As a queer Palestinian watching these images of horror, one stood out as particularly revolting in a rather different way. It shows an Israeli soldier in the middle of the rubble of one of the many residential neighborhoods in Gaza, flattened by the Israeli indiscriminate military strikes. In the distance, smoke from Israel's carpet bombings hang in the air. The soldier is surrounded by Israeli tanks and demolish everything in their way. It is a scene of death and destruction The soldier stands holding a bright new rainbow flag. and Described it as a message of hope.  What hope can there be for 2.3 million Palestinians trapped over 16 years in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Gaza has become a graveyard for Palestinians. They have no water. No food and no electricity as Israel has cut off what little it allowed in through its already suffocating siege. They seek shelter from Israeli bombings in hospital, UN schools, mosques, and churches, only to find these sites targeted by Israeli strikes. Those who can flee their homes along Israeli designated safe corridors only to have their vehicles shelved by the Israeli IDF soldiers. It seems incomprehensible that an Israeli soldier would pose a photo with a rainbow flag while participating in his army's mass slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of half of Gaza's homes. The truth is more sinister yet. This stunt, which was shared online by the Israeli state official social media accounts, is a textbook. example of obscene colonial pinkwashing. More than that, it is a pinkwashing on steroids. For years, Palestinian queers have denounced Israel's pinkwashing, a cynical strategy designed to use self proclaimed support for LGBTQIA plus rights as a pink smokescreen to conceal its 75 years regime of apartheid, which oppresses all Palestinians, no matter of our gender. or sexual orientation. All the while singling out queer Palestinians for persecution and blackmail. It is an attempt to falsely depict Israel as modern and a liberal country while diverting attention from its alignment with far right homophobic regimes and groups around the world and its current fundamentalist, racist, and homophobic government. In addition, Israel's pinkwashing agenda is a colonial tool that has the racist aim to misrepresent Palestinians as backwards, homophobic, and thus not deserving of human rights. It also tries to convince us, as queer and trans people, that we are somehow foreign in our society, and tries to turn us against our Palestinians brothers and sisters. I think there couldn't be any better example of Israeli pink washing than the photo that the Israeli soldier with the rainbow flag in the rubble. Israeli pink washing has always been dishonest and dangerous. It has always been racist and colonial. It has allowed Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing, besiege, imprisonment, and murder of Palestinians, queer and non queer alike, for decades. Now it's being used to cover up for genocide. In these dark times, Palestinians in besieged Gaza are bearing the brunt of Israel's full blown genocidal war and ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank, meanwhile, are also facing escalating waves of killing, torture by both Israeli military and illegal sectors. Apartheid, for Palestinians like myself inside Israel, is reaching new peaks as Israeli forces are targeting and suppressing any expression of sympathy with the oppressed. As hard as it is, we still maintain hope. We have no other choice. That hope comes from the grassroots mobilization that are forcing complicit governments and institutions to finally call for the bare minimum that is nevertheless the absolute priority: a ceasefire that will put a stop to Israel's carpet bombing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Queer groups have been extremely instrumental in our struggle for liberation. Queer groups have been an important part of the mobilizations. Nearly 40 LGBT, QA plus groups across Southwest Asia and North Africa called for the immediate ceasefire stating ” we stand with justice, equality, progress, and liberty.” Throughout my life as a queer activist, I have proudly held the rainbow flag high as a symbol of queer inclusion, queer struggle, queer liberation, queer equality, and queer joy. The Israeli soldier participating in Israel's genocidal war on my people in Gaza has desecrated the flag, has disgraced the flag, and made it a mockery for all it stands for. Queer and trans people and groups are increasingly seeing through the pink smokescreen and rejecting Israel's pinkwashing and its war crimes and crimes against humanity. We will not stand by as our flag and our identities are co opted and used to justify a genocide. I call upon queer allies around the globe to remember none of us is free until we are all free. What can we do right now in these terrible times? Since 2005, Palestinians have proposed to you, our friends around the world, an entirely nonviolent method of ending Israel's power over our lives. An academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This strategy is known as BDS, Boycott, Digestment and Sanctions. BDS means boycotting all Israeli state sponsored institutions. This is not aimed at individuals, but at institutions financed by the state and that serve as extensions of the government that occupies us and keeps us under siege. We ask academics, staff and students not to speak at Israeli state funding organizations, including universities. We ask artists and cultural workers not to perform in apartheid Israel. Make sure that your universities are divested from Israeli money. Do not take israeli money for your conferences or film festivals. Do not accept deceptively free propaganda trips to Israel. End complicity with the government of Israel by among other things, cancelling all joint projects activities that are complicit with Israeli universities. Right now, the main demand is to stop the genocide. Stop the genocide and ask for ceasefire now.  So how can queer groups and queer people support queer liberation in Palestine?. One effort that is happening right now around the world is Queer Cinema for Palestine. Queer cinema for Palestine is a vibrant event that happens globally, established in 2021 to support queer art and queer cinema around the world. Today, there are more than 270 filmmakers and artists who signed our pledge to boycott Israeli film festival, to boycott Israeli institutions, and support queer liberation in Palestine. Queer Cinema for Palestine is happening online in more than 15 locations around the world from the 2nd until the 10th of December. Under the title, There's No Pride in Genocide, we gather together as artists to support, Queer Cinema for Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There's not much to say. I think you've seen the image from Gaza. You've seen what is happening right now. This is not a regular panel on pinkwashing. It's happening during a genocide, where pinkwashing is also used to promote genocide. So, may I ask you as a Palestinian and as a queer Palestinian, please keep talking about Palestine. Palestine is a queer issue. Gaza is a queer issue, and there's no queer justice until we are all free. Thank you so much for organizing this and thank you so much for your work and activism on Palestine. You are saving lives right now. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Ghadir. Thank you so much for your passion, your commitment, reminding us that hope is an active choice that you're engaging in every day, despite all the odds, because that is the story of survival. Thank you for reminding and being so clear in the link to BDS boycott, divestment and sanction movement as tangible ways that we could be in solidarity with Palestine and to chip at the far reaching power of the Israeli state and settler colonial project. Thank you for showing the ways in which queer folks and queer organizations. use culture and art to tell different stories of survival with the Queer Cinema for Palestine. And thank you for showing up and being here with us. Thank you for all the ways that you hold communities, your fullness, and time to share and to lead us today. Wishing so much protection and safety to you and yours. Next we have Rabab Abdulhadi. Rabab Abdulhadi (she/her) is an internationally known scholar and distinguished professor and researcher. Her scholarship, pedagogy, and public activism focus on Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities and their diasporas, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director and Senior Scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies, and a Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies at the Historic College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. She is also a treasure, a beloved teacher, organizer here in the Bay. I feel really grateful that you're here with us today for all the work, all the times that you've taught me. It's really such an honor to be able to host you and invite you in, Rabab.  Rabab Abdulhadi: Thank you so much Shenaaz, and I begin by acknowledging that my own university, San Francisco State University, sits on stolen indigenous Ohlone people's land, and I'm now on the east coast of the United States, where I am also present on the Lenape people's land that has been stolen and people have been displaced, just like it is in Palestine. I also want to thank Queer Crescent for organizing this with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and actually joining with Palestinian Voices. I'm very happy that my colleague, my sister, my sibling, Ghadir, was able to join us and has actually taken a lot of the things that I was going to focus on, and thank you, Yaffa, for especially naming even the poetry, Blood Oranges, because we know what oranges mean and how they have been used. And many Palestinians can't even eat oranges because it reminds them of the orchards that they've lost back home. So I start, if you don't mind, just Putting the first slide on. Yeah. And this is a slide if people can see it. This is actually was done in 2013 and it was organized by a group of underground artists, called themselves cultural jammers, to remake all the campaign that was at the time by Pamela Geller and other Zionist groups doing all this smearing and buying sides on the buses and so on. And the reason I mentioned because there is a connection between the cultural jammers and also the whole naming of pink washing because pink washing, some people say, emerged in Palestine. Some people say it emerged in the U. S. Some people talk about the whole question of washing and then the question of pink and so on. And I think for me as a researcher, a scholar, it's very, very interesting because there are so many origins of every single way that we are having the struggles. And so the colonial boundaries and borders that the colonialists and settler colonists try to impose upon us don't really work because we cross these borders at least maybe imaginary, maybe in our networks and so on. But why is it that pinkwashing persists? Ghadir spoke a lot about it. I'm just going to just emphasize a couple of things. It is necessary, very important for Israel public relations. Public relations is a very important project for it. This is why Israel consistently demands of the Palestinians and the Arab countries and the world, not only to recognize Israel's right to exist, but to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, which in itself a very racist notion. And this is very much connected with the genocide that we're seeing now in Gaza, that also we have seen for 75 years of Nakba and for over 100 years of colonization of Palestine, because , the slogan by the Zionist movement was “a land without people, for a people without the land.” We can talk about “for people without the land” a little bit later, but let's talk about “a land without people”. In order to accomplish that and legitimize it, you have to arrest the people. You have to erase them. You have to erase their presence. You have to also discredit their discourse, their work, their culture, their interaction, their social relations, in order for you to present yourself as Israel does. And as Ghadir mentioned, as a modern state that is making the desert blue, which we know is not true, and by contrast, is the best friend of women and queer people, as a gay haven, as opposed to quote unquote the backward, savage. excessively homophobic, excessively misogynist, Arab world, Arab and Muslim world, and in which Arab men and Arab and Muslim and Palestinian men are presented as irrational, bloodthirsty, misogynist, haters of women and Queer people, and as women as being docile, as being only oppressed constantly, and need to be rescued by the colonists who will come in and basically realize what Gayatri Spivak spoke about I don't know, 30 years ago, the colonist project of trying to save brown people from brown communities and queer people from their own queer communities. And so in order for this to work, it has to be presented in all of these things that it is necessary. And it's very important for Israel to focus on its public relations. And this is something that has been actually very part and parcel of since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, a task that was assigned to the military, to the security of interior affairs to the Mossad, which is the CIA, outside intelligence, Shambit, the internal intelligence to everybody. And now we see more and more the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and other is, and the whole question of quote unquote branding, which I put it in parentheses because branding also refers to the ways in which people engage in slavery actually used to quote brand people whose lives they owned. So I put it in parentheses. I question it. But Israel is very big on that to brand Israel as a gay haven. Israel as a best liberator of women and so on.  This is also what we see today in the sense of Israel actually making a very public relation campaign and a very, very intensive campaign to claim that Palestinians have chopped off the head of children, which was even reiterated by the president of the United States without even thinking about it because he was quoting Israeli Officials who we know are not really known for telling the truth and then they had to retract it the second day but yesterday he repeated the same thing again and said there is the rape of women and so on which we do not have any evidence until now. We know that a lot of Israeli groups and Zionist groups like this group Bonat Alternativa and others are alleging, but we haven't seen any evidence of that. If there is any evidence of that, we will not stand for it. We condemn any kind of violations of gender and sexual, justice because we believe that gender and sexual justice is part and parcel with indivisibility of justice. So this is not something we are trying to cover, but this is very much part and parcel of the Israeli propaganda and it's churning machine, the Hasbara machine is everywhere and they keep changing their stories. And if we have time we can actually go over how each story has developed and moved from one place to the other. I'm also talking about the ways in which colonial feminisms or colonial quote unquote feminism, because feminism is supposed to be about the liberation of women as part of liberation of everybody, have been very much engaged in. But within that, there is also notion of blaming the victim. It is a very important aspect of it. So in order for the Israeli and the Zionist narrative to work, you have to blame people. And one of the very well known cases, for example, was the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the young Palestinian teenager who was kidnapped from in front of his house on July 2nd, 2014, right around the big, big 2014 war on Gaza we talked about, and kidnapped by Israeli settlers who took him to a forest in Jerusalem that was built on the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, where the massacre on April 8th, 1948 happened in order to facilitate the creation of the Israeli state. And they made him drink kerosene and set him on fire and burned him alive, which was a clear case of lynching. Now, what Israeli police tried to do was to actually say that Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by his own family to quote unquote salvage family honor. And they killed him because he was queer. And now if it wasn't for his father who had videotapes of the security cameras outside of the house and showed it– the Israeli police tried to confiscate it and basically destroy it– showed that these people came and kidnapped him. The relative would still be among colonists, among racists, among white supremacists, Zionists, that Palestinians are killing Palestinians and they are doing this all the time. So it's not only blaming the victim, but it also instilling and reinforcing the narrative of people, not only Palestinians, this happens with all indigenous and all colonized communities and all communities of color from time immemorial. You look at the history of the United States, this is something, this is a trope that keeps getting repeated again and again and again. And it's not an easy trope because It is not something that's only being said. It's not only a discursive issue. It's not a discursive issue that we need to deconstruct in the classroom because we know the history, including that. But recently, many people started learning more about the case of Emmett Till, the young Boy who was killed and the woman who actually accused him came out and said that she lied, but he was killed and he was lynched. And then his mom insisted on having open casket so everybody could see the crime. And there's so many more examples that we don't have time to get into all of them now, but this is part of the colonial narrative, the colonial strategy in order to discredit the people who are colonized and discredit their struggle.  And this is definitely a part in Gaza and it is, but the other thing is that it depends on the narrative of saying that our communities in particular as exceptionally sensitive and exceptionally traditional. And this is something that we saw in Abu Ghraib for example.  When they were talking about, we're not going to show the images of iraqi men are particularly insensitive. But we were raising the question, which men are okay with it, which women, which anybody, which non gender binary person, who would be okay with being subjected to sexual and gender violence; to being displaced like this and so on. Nobody will be. But the imaginary that it is trying to instill that's built on Orientalist, Islamophobic, anti Arab, anti Palestinian, anti Muslim racism as part and parcel of all kinds of racism basically makes it possible to do a little dog whistle in order for you to enforce all of this. We saw this also at the US Social Forum when Zionist groups stand with us, which now everybody knows what it is, tried to do a workshop around queer communities in the Middle East, and many of us objected to it. And the reason that it got through because the organizers thought that this would be something that would be actually really wonderful, bringing everybody together. They did not really investigate who this group was and what it was doing and did not coordinate with the many organizations that were at the U. S. Social Forum in 2010 in Detroit from our own community to see what is happening, what's going on, are you part of this unparceled hat? Even though the Palestinian queer organizations have existed for a very long time, and I think it was by then, if I'm not mistaken, Ghadir you can correct me that we organize a national tour and for all calls throughout the U S in order for people to speak and you all came and spoke in my own classroom. This is part of the stuff that keeps going back. And this is also the same thing that we hear around this group that I've mentioned now, and this propaganda that's happening, and also in terms of the ways when we passed the resolution on BDS in the National Women's Studies Association 2015, many Zionist groups came out and basically came with the whole question is there a place for Zionism and feminism? Many of the feminist groups have been targeted, including the International Women's Strike and so on. This is a continuous, systemic, persistent thing. This is not something that is out of random or accidental. And so what do we do about this? In addition to what Ghadir said, I think it's really, really important for us to say, how do we fight back? We fight back with multiple ways. One of the ways we do for example, organizing this in the classroom. So one of the things that we do in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies program ever since we were founded in 2007 is every single year we were partnering with the Pride Month at San Francisco State to organize sessions on the whole question of queer justice, and this is one of them. Even after San Francisco State stopped funding pride month, we continue doing it again and again. We believe that it's really important to connect the knowledge within the classroom with the knowledge outside and with the activism and advocacy. We do not separate what happens in the classroom, what happens in the academy from outside. So the academy is not producing knowledge that is divorced from reality. The people who are organizing are part and parcel of that. And so we've been doing this again and again. The other thing that is really, really important to think about is how do we work here, and I'm talking here in the diaspora, with groups on the ground, Palestinian queer groups who are working? So one of the examples that I would like to cite from our own experiences is when Al-Qaws was attacked by Palestinian police in Nablus trying to hold an event. My hometown Nablus. We were going to rush and say something, but we waited and we coordinated with Al Qaws and we asked, what should we do? And we did not do anything until Al Qaws came out because we were objecting to the whole question of saving queer people from queer communities, saving brown people from brown communities, the whole question of the colonial notion. And we were also taking leadership from the people on the ground who are day in and day out struggling. Once Al-Qaws came out with it, what we did is we published in one of the newspapers in the Bay Area, along with Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, which is a group that has been doing a lot of work for a very long time, and whose founder actually was chosen to be the Grand Marshall at Gay Pride Parade at San Francisco. And she turned down this honor and said, because I am here in Palestine struggling with the International Solidarity Movement at the time to oppose the apartheid world to oppose the repression by Israel and so on. So we organized together. And that's when we said we endorse. We support. This is really important sometimes to think about how do we take a back road and when is it we go public with things. At this point, we really need to go public and we need to defy all this propaganda that is happening.  This is part of what the solidarity mean. But this is not free. When we do something like this, there is punishment. And these are some of the flyers I'm showing from the Queer Liberation March that took place in 2019. This was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall, Uprising. The Queer Liberation March at that time actually decided to refuse any corporate funding, to refuse to allow the police to go march in their own uniforms and so on, rejected the policing, rejected the state apparatus that represses people, rejected the corporate money and so on. As a result, there was space for us to be there. So we were organizing, we organized a big contingent under the banner of QAIA, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and also Queers A gainst Islamophobia.  So we participated and I took this banner and I put it on my Facebook page. This led to the another Zionist attack, which is trying to silence Palestine and were trying to criminalize Palestine in the curriculum, and especially targeting us and our program in particular. And they took it and didn't say what was on the banner. They just said that I'm spreading hate, and thus I should be– they had 86 organizations, some of them fake organizations– sign it, send it to the university, to the chancellor of California State University to the president of San Francisco State, saying that I'm spreading hate. This for them is hate. Palestine is a queer issue. BDS Zionism is racism. Silence means death. For them, this was something that was very problematic, and it was something that is undermining the Zionist propaganda, and Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and eliminating the Palestinian people like the genocide that we are seeing here, and trying to continue pushing the pink washing without having it exposed.  As a result, our program has been attacked again and again. The Lawfare Project executive director got on the TV, on Fox and friends, and made a lying statement. They sued me. And they sued San Francisco State and they sued California State University. But we defeated them. It was thrown out of court. It was dismissed with prejudice. But she lied about that. And she said that I'm spreading hate; that I'm one of the leading anti Semitic– Horowitz every single year pushes out a formula about the top anti-Semitic scholars, and they always give me number one. And I think they do it in May because this is the fundraising season for them. As a result, I started receiving death threats. However, and including to my own university and the threat voicemails on my office mail that said Muslims will die, which is the same phrase that the guy who killed Wadiah Al-Fayyumi in Chicago, stabbing him 26 times. He said Muslims will die. The university does not believe that this is actually a viable threat. And so they protect the right wing speech, which is white supremacist and Zionist is a protected speech protected that they can do whatever they want, put up hateful posters, do whatever they want against us, but we are not allowed to say so. And the university is not investigating death threat letters that actually came to me through the University President's office to my own office. However we refuse to be silenced. We refuse to lie down. And so we continued organizing. And one of the main events that we organize, and we do it every year, is this panel Queer Open Classroom that everybody can attend and come in. Queer justice against pink washing, exposing it, bringing scholars and activists, Ghadir was one of the people who spoke at that, in order for us to support liberation for Palestine as part of liberation of all, and to support gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of the indivisibility of justice. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Oh, Rabab. I hope that you can feel all the tremendous. gratitude and love that you're getting in the chat. I think that there is such a clear longing to be hearing stories from elders, folks who have been in this fight for so long. Thank you for bringing in the long arc of queer Palestinian organizing. Thank you for bringing the long arc and history of queers being in solidarity for Palestine. It's so important that we understand that while this moment is so important for us to study, learn and act. It rests upon such a long arc and such a long history of organizing in solidarity with Palestine. Thank you for also speaking to Mohammed Abu Khdeir, thank you for speaking him into the space. Thank you for both of you reminding us to follow the lead of queer Palestinians. What we're trying to do with you all today with this teach-in is to really pull us together, circle around and invite us all to be following the lead of queer Palestinians so that we can take on this work as inextricably linked to our own liberation; to advance the work of undermining pinkwashing and Zionism as part and parcel to our queer liberation. So thank you so much, Rabab. Our last speaker, Shivani Chanillo with Lavender Phoenix. Shivani (they/them) is a trans non- binary second generation Indian American organizer. Shout out to the baddy Indian organizers out here, myself included. Their experience of active solidarity with Palestinian folks came in 2017 through exchanges they facilitated between their high school students in Baltimore, and students at Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. These powerful exchanges stoked Shivani's passion for developing young people as critical thinkers grounded in revolutionary values and politics. As a leadership development coordinator at Lavender Phoenix, an organization that Queer Crescent deeply loves and feels deeply supported by and in deep siblingship with. Shivani continues this work by facilitating opportunities for trans and queer Asians and Pacific Islanders to practice values based organizing and contribute to intersectional movements. In particular, I just want to really say that we were so excited to invite Shivani and Lavender Phoenix in to our teach in as the final speaker, because Lavender Phoenix is one organization that really models, going back to the initial motivation of this teach in with our letter calling for a permanent ceasefire, calling on LGBTQ organizations and leaders to sign on to understanding pink washing and to support Palestinian liberation. Lavender Phoenix is one such organization that has really demonstrated such values align solidarity with Palestinian liberation. And so I'm really excited to bring you in Shivani to close us out to talk about how queer people, queer organizations can really double down on our solidarity.  Shivani Chanillo: Thank you so much Shenaaz for that introduction and to Queer Crescent for organizing this event. I just want to take a moment and just, I feel so deeply moved by the sharing from Rabab and Ghadir in this workshop and just sitting with the lineage within all of us as we take up Palestine as a queer issue. We have generations of lessons and decades of work and such powerful leaders here in this space, but all across the world to follow, and I feel so grateful and so excited to be joining in on this work and sharing a little bit about what Lavender Phoenix is doing in this moment. If you haven't heard of Lavender Phoenix, we build trans non binary and queer Asian and Pacific Islander power here in the Bay Area. We are a base building organization training grassroots leaders to build intersectional movements. As we witness an escalation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine I can say that our base is firmly grounded in the understanding that Palestinian liberation is part of our struggle and our responsibility as trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander people. And so I want to start by sharing a little bit about what we're doing in this moment, before sharing about how our members arrived to this point. Since October 7th we have shifted our work accordingly. We have dedicated time to mobilize our members and our broader communities to action. We have educated each other to stay politically grounded. We have and will continue to support each other to process the grief of this moment and to remember hope, optimism, and commitment. In so many facets of our work, we are stepping into deeper leadership and responsibility to support our Palestinian comrades to win. And more tangibly across our six member led committees, this looks like offering healing support, coordinating our members who are trained in protest and digital security to support our comrades, coordinating contingents at in person and online actions, moving financial resources and funder attention to our Palestinian partners, and uplifting pro Palestinian messaging and calls to actions using our social media reach. Responding to Palestine and challenging pinkwashing is not a shift in our priorities, but it's actually a sharpening of our focus as an organization. We've organized our base over the years to recognize our interconnected struggles, and across our membership, we so deeply understand that the Palestinian struggle is our struggle. And Palestinian futures are our futures. All of the actions we are taking right now to support Palestine, to challenge pinkwashing are the result of so many tests, experiments, and trials that have helped us deepen our political purpose and grow our power. Many of these experiments and trials that we've conducted over the years really informed our current theory of change. And this is really critical to how we're organizing in this moment. Our emergent responses to sharpen contradictions in our world like we are witnessing with Palestine, are only possible because we organize within a consistent theory of change. A key part of our theory of change and a key part of my role as Leadership Development coordinator, is that we are committed to developing leaders who are rooted in our values, in our history, in emotional intelligence, and compassion, because we know that is how our movement will be sustained and will be effective. So we're not just developing members and masses who care about single issues, we're developing holistic, critical thinkers who care about solidarity with all oppressed people so that in moments like this, solidarity with Palestine is a natural choice in our larger fight for liberation. One of the really important ways we do this, and this workshop is a critical example, is we educate our base, our trans and queer API base, on our history. We dig into how systems of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy impact all of us across our identities in the past and in the present. Right now, the tools and tactics being wielded by fascist leaders to criminalize and punish trans people here in the U. S. are rooted in the same white supremacist, colonial, and imperialist ideologies used to justify the dehumanization and murder of Palestinians, particularly trans and queer Palestinians. As part of our theory of change, we've also spent intentional time educating our base about revolutionary politics like abolition and healing justice, and developing our skills for safety, for healing and resource mobilization that are applicable in moments all across our movement. We spent so much time since we implemented this theory of change in 2021 to build our base and grow our power so we can show up for our partners who are organizing for Palestinian liberation in this moment. We have spent so much time cultivating our skills and knowledges so we can support our movements beyond just trans liberation.  I want to end just by sharing a little bit of a story. A few weeks ago, our members participated in a direct action that asked many of them to step into higher risk than they had before. Prior to the action, we met to get grounded together. Folks shared their fears, but they also countered those fears with a really rooted sense of purpose. So many of our members talked about how they wanted to look back on this moment and know that they and we as an organization did everything in our power to support Palestinian liberation. And they spoke about the sacred responsibility and duty we have in this moment to show up in solidarity. I feel so moved, even now, just thinking back to that moment and feel so much gratitude to our members for taking new risks, to the generations of leaders in our organization and our movement who have led us to this point, and I feel immense admiration and gratitude to the long lineage of Palestinian queer and trans resistance, and current day organizers who are guiding us right now. For Lavender Phoenix, this moment is really helping us clarify our power, and for many of our members, this moment is helping them clarify their political purpose. The things all of our Palestinian siblings are fighting for, self determination, safety, healing, community, decolonization, these are the things that we as trans and queer API people here in the Bay Area so desire for ourselves as well. We refuse to let our transness and our queerness be co opted for violence and displacement and genocide, and we know that our struggles and our futures are united, and we're committed to fighting alongside our Palestinian comrades until we are all free. Thank you so much for letting me share. I'll pass it back to Shenaaz. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Shivani, thank you so much for bringing all of it. Lavender Phoenix, I just can't swoon on y'all enough. You model that clarity of purpose and power and grace. There's also such deep humility and grace to be in constant learning. As an emerging organization, an emerging queer organization, I just have to say Queer Crescent feels so deeply held by y'all and really inspired with the path that you are leading and inviting us all towards.  This piece around letting this moment sharpen the focus. It's not a pivot. I think I've even said, we're pivoting, we're in rapid response. Part of our political principles as an organization is understanding anti Zionism as part and parcel of the white supremacist project. And so this is not a pivot, it's not a rapid response, but to your point, it's a sharpening and it's a double down of our commitments, principles and priorities. So thank you for naming that.  Cheryl Truong: And that's the end of our show. Tonight's show was a broadcast of the Resisting Pinkwashing teach-in co-led by Queer Crescent and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. It was moderated by Shenaaz Janmohamed, executive director of Queer Crescent and featured poetry by Mx. Yaffa of MASGD, and guest speakers, Rabab Abdulhadie from the Palestinian feminist collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, and and Shivani Chanillo from AACRE Group Lavender Phoenix. Learn more about the incredible work of these incredible organizations and sign on to Queer Crescent's cease fire campaign through the links in our show notes.  Apex express is produced by Miko Lee, Paige Chung, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preeti Mangala Shekar. Shekar, Anuj Vaidya, Kiki Rivera, Swati Rayasam, Nate Tan, Hien Nguyen, Nikki Chan, and Cheryl Truong   Tonight's show was produced by me, cheryl. Thanks to the team at KPFA for all of their support. And thank you for listening! The post APEX Express – 05.30.24 – Resisting Pinkwashing appeared first on KPFA.

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla movement began with a 2006 email from a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement sent to other volunteers struggling with how to bring to the attention of the world that Israel, while attacking Lebanon, was imprisoning Gaza. The email proposed chartering a big boat to sail from New York to Gaza, to Break the Siege, while acknowledging their proposal was so big it might need a sanity check. Rising to the challenge, two years later in 2008 a boat sailed all the way into the Gaza harbor, greeted by thousands of enthusiastic Palestinians. The book Freedom Sailors, written and edited by the people who lived this first step, is a vivid description of amazing courage and fortitude. Since 2008 flotillas bound for Gaza have been blocked by Israel. In 2010 Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara, one ship of a 6-ship flotilla, while still in international waters, killing 9 of the crew. The crew was totally unarmed. Alex McDonald, author of How I Learned to Speak Israel, a guide for Americans wanting to better understand the Israel/Palestine situation, was on the Freedom Flotilla boat that sailed to northern ports this summer to raise the world's awareness of the flotilla movement. Another boat is due to sail to Gaza this spring. Video footage of the 2010 attack is shown in The Truth: Lost at Sea.

This week, we're featuring a conversation with Mohammad Hureini (twitter / instagram), a young activist from Masafer Yatta, an area in the hills south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank in Palestine. Mohammad is a member of a non-violent group called Youth of Sumud that struggles to hold on to the sites and lives of Palestinian villages despite displacement by the Israeli military occupation as well as the illegal zionist settlements (like the neighboring Havat Ma'on) and their routine violence and impunity. For the hour, Mohammad speaks about the work of Youth of Sumud, their recent report co-published with The Good Shepherd on increased settler violence entitled Indigenous Erasure: How the zionist movement is using state sanctioned violence to eliminate the Palestinian communities of the West Bank, the South African genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice and other topics. A transcript of this interview will be available soon, a podcast version of this is available at our website. Al-Addameer's recent publication on prisons and repression of Palestinians since October 7th, 2023: https://addameer.org/media/5262 Organizations Mohammad names doing on the ground support: Defund Racism (https://defundracism.org/): follows NGO connections to settler projects recently published a report on Regavim, a pro-settler organization that pulls funding from the US, Canada and elsewhere to displace Palestinians Operation Dove /Operazione Colomba from Italy (https://www.operazionecolomba.it/) International Solidarity Movement (https://palsolidarity.org/) Community Peacemaker Teams (https://cpt.org/) Recent interviews about the conflict in Palestine Yuval Dag, Israeli anarchist military refuser Joey Ayoub on the War in Gaza Jewish anti-zionist Anarchist in Israel Announcements B(A)D News #75 is out! Check out the January 2024 episode featuring updates on support for antifascists facing charges in Budapest from February 11, 2023; reflections from an Autonomist on the '80s-'90s journal "Radikal"; a portion of our interview with Israeli refuser Yuval Dag; and an interview from Solidarity Zones on the case of accused Russian war sabateur, Ruslan Siddiqui . ... . .. Featured Track: Building Steam with a Grain of Salt by DJ Shadow from Entroducing....

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists.   A teach-in by Queer Crescent in collaboration with Palestinian Feminist Collective – Palestine is a Queer Issue: Resisting Pinkwashing Now and Until Liberation. Featuring guest speakers Rabab Abdulhadi from Palestinian Feminist Collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, Shivani Chanillo from Lavender Phoenix, poetry by Mx Yaffa from Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD). Moderator by Shenaaz Janmohamed of Queer Crescent. Important Links and Resources: Sign on to Queer Crescent's Ceasefire Campaign for LGBTQI+ organizations and leaders Queer Crescent's Pinkwashing Resources  Queer Crescent Website Palestinian Feminist Collective Website ASWAT Instagram (@aswatfreedoms) Lavender Phoenix Website Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD) Website Purchase Blood Orange by Mx. Yaffa Transcript Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you all so much for being here today. Welcome to the “Resisting Pinkwashing Now Until Liberation” teach-in. Queer Crescent is honored to host this teach in in partnership with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Lavender Phoenix, The Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity or MASGD, Teaching Palestine, and Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies   Thank you all so much for joining us and for tuning in. My name is Shenaaz Janmohamed. I use she and they pronouns. I'm the executive director of Queer Crescent.  Queer Crescent is really thrilled to offer this Teach-in and to be in learning with you all for the next hour and a half on Pinkwashing in particular, as we hold grief and rage and mourn towards healing, towards resistance, towards a free Palestine. Joining the resounding people all across the world who have been calling for a permanent ceasefire. To not let the violence and the destruction of Gaza go without our clear and determined voice to say that this is not okay, that we, our tax dollars should not be paying for this, that we do not consent to genocide. And as queer people, as trans people, it is very much a queer issue to be in solidarity with Palestine. For the next hour and a half we will take time to learn from Palestinian organizers. in Palestine, in the U. S., around the ways in which this moment can be used to understand our relationship to pinkwashing in particular and to Palestinian solidarity in general. And so thank you again for being with us today. We're going to start our Teach in with poetry, because we deeply believe as a queer Muslim organization in the power of cultural work, cultural change, and imparting our shine as queer people into the culture. That is the way that our people have survived. That is the way that people share their histories their survivalship is through culture. And so, before I bring up Yaffa, who's a dear friend and comrade, and also the executive director of MASGD, the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity, let me introduce Yaffa. Yaffa is a trans Muslim and displaced indigenous Palestinian. She is sharing poetry from her new book, Blood Orange, shout it out, please get a copy if you haven't already, which is an emotional, important, and timely poetry collection. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of Indigenous people. Join me in giving some shine, energetic shine to Yaffa, and I'll pass to you. Mx Yaffa: Hi everyone. It's so nice to be here with you all. So excited to share space with all of you, with all the incredible panelists, with the entire Queer Crescent team, y'all are just incredible. Right before this, me and one of the other panelists realized we could potentially be related. So that's the beauty of having spaces like this, where you connect with people that you've kind of been missing your entire life, but you didn't even know that they were missing. I'm excited to recite some poetry for you all from my new collection. Just a little bit about the collection before I recite some poetry.  This collection was written for the most part, on the weekend of October 13th to the 15th. Some of y'all might remember that there was an eclipse during that weekend. And I really wanted to find something that would really center queer and trans Palestinian experience in particular, and also would just support me in navigating my own processing of everything that's going on.  I have family both in Gaza and the West Bank still. I'm originally from Jaffa and Jenin, but I've kind of lived in nine different countries. So when I say I'm displaced, it's displacement from various different wars, various genocides, various everything. And the result of that was Blood Orange.  I tried to get it out as quickly as possible and here we are. The first poem that I'll read is called “Healthy”. And I'll talk a little bit about each of these poems after I read them. It's called “Healthy”. We are not meant to be okay, when genocide is our neighbor that is funded by our labor. We are meant to be a mess, our sleep tearing into reality, anxiety brewing, wondering what is hope. We are meant to tear at the seams of reality, realizing a reality built on oppression is bullshit. We are meant to realize and demand all we are worth. Self actualization, wholeness. Things systems built off of genocide can never. Our response labeled by western capitalism as wrong is healthy. We move to wholeness always, they move to pain attempting to drag us with them. So this was actually the very first poem that I wrote for this collection and it was in that first week of the genocide immediately following October 7th when so many people were really struggling with what do we do with all of this, right? We're witnessing an entire genocide right before our eyes. And what do we do? There was a lot of hopelessness going around and a lot of narratives, at least in what's known as the United States and the global north that's always told us that all of that is wrong. That we're not supposed to be overwhelmed by things. But for me, with all the practices that I have, it's actually healthy to be overwhelmed right now. We're not supposed to know how to let genocide live in our bodies with ease. We still show up, we still do the things, and yet at the same time, we honor it. That it is a large experience. This is not normal. This is not something that should be happening all the time or ever. And so really wanted to honor that of the world that we live in is not what we deserve. For us to be overwhelmed right now is actually healthy, is where we should be. So the second poem I will read kind of goes into the conversation of today around pinkwashing.  This one's called “At Odds”.  My transness and a colonized perception of Palestine are at odds. They think it's because of lack of modernity. I say I have only received death threats targeting my transness from white people, Zionists, and other various political affiliations. I say only white people around me have ever disowned their own. Yet I do not talk to sisters who choose to buy into imperialist transphobia, claiming it as their own. My parents do not understand how some of their children could hate anything any of their children could be, why anyone would hate what they do not know. I won't talk much about pinkwashing because I know we'll get to that today. But in particular, most queer and trans Palestinians over these last eight weeks have been receiving such immense violence from the broader LGBTQ community telling us that our people are the ones who are going to kill us. I've been receiving death threats my entire life in particular as an organizer since I was 19, and I have literally never received a death threat from anyone from our region from any Muslim person. It has always been white people who have sent me death threats specifically for my queerness and my transness. Let alone everything else. And so that, that poem just kind of honors that experience.  I'll read one more, and I'll say just a few words before I read this last one. For me, the arts are so important. Not just as a tool for resistance, but also as a tool for world building. Often we think of the world is what creates art, rather than art is what creates the world. If you look at literature, even with Zionism, Zionism was in literature 100 years before it was ever named. I think about that of what is the world that we are building, what is the world of tomorrow that we get to write about and paint about and do all different kinds of art forms about today. And so this last poem kind of brings a little bit of that into it. The collection goes into the topic of utopia as we're exploring all of these other things. and as we're experiencing this genocide. So this last poem is called “Land Back”. I do not know names wiped from time in Gaza Like I do not remember the names Of great uncles and aunts Who have been reclaimed by our land To say they were murdered Is to claim loss that our land will never feel For we are made of her And regardless of how many layers of phosphor fill the air We return to her in our deaths They may exacerbate the process of our return, but return we shall. Standing thousands of miles away, I know even here she will take me back for distance is a creation that is buried with bodies that were never ours. We are not the ones who take land back, it is land that takes us. There will come a day when the sun sets on a world and rises in another, when indigenous sovereignty is honored. Where queerness no longer exists, where transness is no longer an identity, where humanity means something genuine. So I wanted to end with that, on a note of everything that we're doing right now, all of the resistance is world building. We're building the world that we have always deserved. So I'll leave you all with just one final thing about the book, like I mentioned, the reason I wrote this book in the first place and published it is to raise awareness about queer and trans Palestinians in particular and our experiences, and also to fundraise for queer and trans Palestinians both on the grounds in Gaza and in the diaspora. So 100 percent of all the proceeds from Blood Orange go directly towards that.   As we're getting deeper and deeper into this, the needs of the queer and trans Palestinian community is getting so immense, both on the ground in the region and in the diaspora. Over just the last few days, I've received over $20,000 worth of requests from individuals because people are being doxed, people are receiving death threats, people are losing their jobs. In one case, people are losing their children. There's a lot happening. And so just wanted to leave with that. I want to invite you all to pay attention to those needs and honor them, especially as we go into next year and into the elections. Thank you again for having me. It was such a pleasure to be here. And I'm so excited for the rest of this. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Yaffa. It's so wonderful to have you here. And it feels so important to start our teaching with the ways in which poetry, culture, moves and inspires us. It opens our hearts in ways that feel both healing and necessary as part and parcel to our organizing and our deep learning. As my comrade and partner Saba says, to growing our empathy to be able to show up with more depth, more commitment, and more resolve towards these issues because we are deeply interconnected. So thank you again, Yaffa..  Before I turn to introduce our other panelists, I wanted to just ground us for a moment in why Queer Crescent, along with the many partners that I named at the beginning felt it was important to host this teach in. Back on November 3rd, Queer Crescent in collaboration with the Palestinian Feminist Collective drafted and released a letter calling upon LGBTQI organizations, leaders, and influencers to join Queer Crescent and Palestinians in calling for an immediate ceasefire. And in particularly to take up understanding and resisting pinkwashing as a queer issue. The frame ” Palestine is a queer issue” is very much an homage of Palestinian Feminist Collective who tirelessly make the links around gender justice, bodily autonomy, self determination, sovereignty to the project of Palestinian liberation. Seeing them as part and parcel of the same project of liberation, and we very much are inspired and in deep gratitude to PFC and all the tireless folks who make those links so clear and apparent to us. We are also in deep gratitude to organizations like Al-Qaws, based in Palestine, who have been telling us about pink- washing for a long, long time, and we are finally doing our part to answer the call as an organization as Queer Crescent. Since we shared this letter, over 350 individuals have signed on, over 65 organizations have joined us in a commitment to calling for permanent ceasefire. This teach in is part of our commitment to moving those who have signed, ourselves included, and the many others who have joined us today. To deepen our shared resolve to a free Palestine through learning about pink watching as a propaganda tool of Israel and settler colonial state violence, and to allow this moment to transform us so that the grief is not in vain, towards a more fierce committed and clear stance of solidarity with Palestinian liberation movement. As queer and trans people and within LGBTQI organizations, we have a distinct role to play to organize to undermine pinkwashing. Because pinkwashing works and functions on the backs of racist tropes of Palestinians, Arabs, SWANA, and Muslims more broadly. We cannot let our vulnerabilities as trans and queer people be exploited in the pursuit of colonial violence and the genocide against Palestinians and all indigenous people. It was not surprising that some of the first folks who signed on to our letter were trans led organizations like the Transgender Law Center, like El/La, and indigenous organizations. It's not surprising because I think for folks who are leading trans led organizations, Trans and indigenous organizations, the relationship of self determination of bodily autonomy and to state violence and colonization is clear, right? Because ultimately colonization uses gender injustice and creating these wedges within our communities as a way to dampen our resistance and to keep us apart. So, I don't want to say more because our amazing speakers will speak and illuminate so much more of these issues. But I wanted to just state why it was important for Queer Crescent to support advancing these conversations. So, our first speaker today is Ghadir Shafie ( she and her). She is a Palestinian queer activist and the co founder of ASWAT, Palestinian Feminist Queer Center for Sexual and Gender Freedoms. A passionate advocate for the intersectionality of the struggle of Palestinian queer women, fighting multiple forms of oppression as Palestinians in the context of Israel's system of apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism, as women in a militaristic and imperialistic male dominated society, and as queers in the context of pinkwashing and homophobia. Ghadir promotes active solidarity for Palestine through global feminism and with queers. Thank you, Ghadir. Pass it to you.  Ghadir Shafie: Thank you so much. Hello from Palestine. Thank you so much for organizing this teach-in on pinkwashing. I am grateful for your presence here with me, witnessing in this horrible, horrible time. I will speak today for about 15 minutes, and I want you to bear in mind that since October 7th, Israel has killed over 18, 000 Palestinians. That is one Palestinian every 15 minutes. Imagine how many queer people are being killed daily by Israel. The scenes from Gaza are beyond description. They defy comparison, even for Palestinians, jaded by decades of occupation and settler colonial violence. Devastated landscape filled with craters and the blackened ruins of what were once people's homes, dead bodies or pieces of them. Orphaned children screaming in terror and incomprehension. Desperate survivors crying for food and water. Doctors despairing at the ever growing influx of wounded people they know they cannot treat. As a queer Palestinian watching these images of horror, one stood out as particularly revolting in a rather different way. It shows an Israeli soldier in the middle of the rubble of one of the many residential neighborhoods in Gaza, flattened by the Israeli indiscriminate military strikes. In the distance, smoke from Israel's carpet bombings hang in the air. The soldier is surrounded by Israeli tanks and demolish everything in their way. It is a scene of death and destruction The soldier stands holding a bright new rainbow flag. and Described it as a message of hope.  What hope can there be for 2.3 million Palestinians trapped over 16 years in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip. In the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Gaza has become a graveyard for Palestinians. They have no water. No food and no electricity as Israel has cut off what little it allowed in through its already suffocating siege. They seek shelter from Israeli bombings in hospital, UN schools, mosques, and churches, only to find these sites targeted by Israeli strikes. Those who can flee their homes along Israeli designated safe corridors only to have their vehicles shelved by the Israeli IDF soldiers. It seems incomprehensible that an Israeli soldier would pose a photo with a rainbow flag while participating in his army's mass slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of half of Gaza's homes. The truth is more sinister yet. This stunt, which was shared online by the Israeli state official social media accounts, is a textbook. example of obscene colonial pinkwashing. More than that, it is a pinkwashing on steroids. For years, Palestinian queers have denounced Israel's pinkwashing, a cynical strategy designed to use self proclaimed support for LGBTQIA plus rights as a pink smokescreen to conceal its 75 years regime of apartheid, which oppresses all Palestinians, no matter of our gender. or sexual orientation. All the while singling out queer Palestinians for persecution and blackmail. It is an attempt to falsely depict Israel as modern and a liberal country while diverting attention from its alignment with far right homophobic regimes and groups around the world and its current fundamentalist, racist, and homophobic government. In addition, Israel's pinkwashing agenda is a colonial tool that has the racist aim to misrepresent Palestinians as backwards, homophobic, and thus not deserving of human rights. It also tries to convince us, as queer and trans people, that we are somehow foreign in our society, and tries to turn us against our Palestinians brothers and sisters. I think there couldn't be any better example of Israeli pink washing than the photo that the Israeli soldier with the rainbow flag in the rubble. Israeli pink washing has always been dishonest and dangerous. It has always been racist and colonial. It has allowed Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing, besiege, imprisonment, and murder of Palestinians, queer and non queer alike, for decades. Now it's being used to cover up for genocide. In these dark times, Palestinians in besieged Gaza are bearing the brunt of Israel's full blown genocidal war and ethnic cleansing. Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of West Bank, meanwhile, are also facing escalating waves of killing, torture by both Israeli military and illegal sectors. Apartheid, for Palestinians like myself inside Israel, is reaching new peaks as Israeli forces are targeting and suppressing any expression of sympathy with the oppressed. As hard as it is, we still maintain hope. We have no other choice. That hope comes from the grassroots mobilization that are forcing complicit governments and institutions to finally call for the bare minimum that is nevertheless the absolute priority: a ceasefire that will put a stop to Israel's carpet bombing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Queer groups have been extremely instrumental in our struggle for liberation. Queer groups have been an important part of the mobilizations. Nearly 40 LGBT, QA plus groups across Southwest Asia and North Africa called for the immediate ceasefire stating ” we stand with justice, equality, progress, and liberty.” Throughout my life as a queer activist, I have proudly held the rainbow flag high as a symbol of queer inclusion, queer struggle, queer liberation, queer equality, and queer joy. The Israeli soldier participating in Israel's genocidal war on my people in Gaza has desecrated the flag, has disgraced the flag, and made it a mockery for all it stands for. Queer and trans people and groups are increasingly seeing through the pink smokescreen and rejecting Israel's pinkwashing and its war crimes and crimes against humanity. We will not stand by as our flag and our identities are co opted and used to justify a genocide. I call upon queer allies around the globe to remember none of us is free until we are all free. What can we do right now in these terrible times? Since 2005, Palestinians have proposed to you, our friends around the world, an entirely nonviolent method of ending Israel's power over our lives. An academic and cultural boycott of Israel. This strategy is known as BDS, Boycott, Digestment and Sanctions. BDS means boycotting all Israeli state sponsored institutions. This is not aimed at individuals, but at institutions financed by the state and that serve as extensions of the government that occupies us and keeps us under siege. We ask academics, staff and students not to speak at Israeli state funding organizations, including universities. We ask artists and cultural workers not to perform in apartheid Israel. Make sure that your universities are divested from Israeli money. Do not take israeli money for your conferences or film festivals. Do not accept deceptively free propaganda trips to Israel. End complicity with the government of Israel by among other things, cancelling all joint projects activities that are complicit with Israeli universities. Right now, the main demand is to stop the genocide. Stop the genocide and ask for ceasefire now.  So how can queer groups and queer people support queer liberation in Palestine?. One effort that is happening right now around the world is Queer Cinema for Palestine. Queer cinema for Palestine is a vibrant event that happens globally, established in 2021 to support queer art and queer cinema around the world. Today, there are more than 270 filmmakers and artists who signed our pledge to boycott Israeli film festival, to boycott Israeli institutions, and support queer liberation in Palestine. Queer Cinema for Palestine is happening online in more than 15 locations around the world from the 2nd until the 10th of December. Under the title, There's No Pride in Genocide, we gather together as artists to support, Queer Cinema for Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There's not much to say. I think you've seen the image from Gaza. You've seen what is happening right now. This is not a regular panel on pinkwashing. It's happening during a genocide, where pinkwashing is also used to promote genocide. So, may I ask you as a Palestinian and as a queer Palestinian, please keep talking about Palestine. Palestine is a queer issue. Gaza is a queer issue, and there's no queer justice until we are all free. Thank you so much for organizing this and thank you so much for your work and activism on Palestine. You are saving lives right now. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Thank you so much, Ghadir. Thank you so much for your passion, your commitment, reminding us that hope is an active choice that you're engaging in every day, despite all the odds, because that is the story of survival. Thank you for reminding and being so clear in the link to BDS boycott, divestment and sanction movement as tangible ways that we could be in solidarity with Palestine and to chip at the far reaching power of the Israeli state and settler colonial project. Thank you for showing the ways in which queer folks and queer organizations. use culture and art to tell different stories of survival with the Queer Cinema for Palestine. And thank you for showing up and being here with us. Thank you for all the ways that you hold communities, your fullness, and time to share and to lead us today. Wishing so much protection and safety to you and yours. Next we have Rabab Abdulhadi. Rabab Abdulhadi (she/her) is an internationally known scholar and distinguished professor and researcher. Her scholarship, pedagogy, and public activism focus on Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities and their diasporas, transnational feminisms, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director and Senior Scholar in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Studies, and a Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Race and Resistance Studies at the Historic College of Ethnic Studies, San Francisco State University. She is also a treasure, a beloved teacher, organizer here in the Bay. I feel really grateful that you're here with us today for all the work, all the times that you've taught me. It's really such an honor to be able to host you and invite you in, Rabab.  Rabab Abdulhadi: Thank you so much Shenaaz, and I begin by acknowledging that my own university, San Francisco State University, sits on stolen indigenous Ohlone people's land, and I'm now on the east coast of the United States, where I am also present on the Lenape people's land that has been stolen and people have been displaced, just like it is in Palestine. I also want to thank Queer Crescent for organizing this with the Palestinian Feminist Collective and actually joining with Palestinian Voices. I'm very happy that my colleague, my sister, my sibling, Ghadir, was able to join us and has actually taken a lot of the things that I was going to focus on, and thank you, Yaffa, for especially naming even the poetry, Blood Oranges, because we know what oranges mean and how they have been used. And many Palestinians can't even eat oranges because it reminds them of the orchards that they've lost back home. So I start, if you don't mind, just Putting the first slide on. Yeah. And this is a slide if people can see it. This is actually was done in 2013 and it was organized by a group of underground artists, called themselves cultural jammers, to remake all the campaign that was at the time by Pamela Geller and other Zionist groups doing all this smearing and buying sides on the buses and so on. And the reason I mentioned because there is a connection between the cultural jammers and also the whole naming of pink washing because pink washing, some people say, emerged in Palestine. Some people say it emerged in the U. S. Some people talk about the whole question of washing and then the question of pink and so on. And I think for me as a researcher, a scholar, it's very, very interesting because there are so many origins of every single way that we are having the struggles. And so the colonial boundaries and borders that the colonialists and settler colonists try to impose upon us don't really work because we cross these borders at least maybe imaginary, maybe in our networks and so on. But why is it that pinkwashing persists? Ghadir spoke a lot about it. I'm just going to just emphasize a couple of things. It is necessary, very important for Israel public relations. Public relations is a very important project for it. This is why Israel consistently demands of the Palestinians and the Arab countries and the world, not only to recognize Israel's right to exist, but to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, which in itself a very racist notion. And this is very much connected with the genocide that we're seeing now in Gaza, that also we have seen for 75 years of Nakba and for over 100 years of colonization of Palestine, because , the slogan by the Zionist movement was “a land without people, for a people without the land.” We can talk about “for people without the land” a little bit later, but let's talk about “a land without people”. In order to accomplish that and legitimize it, you have to arrest the people. You have to erase them. You have to erase their presence. You have to also discredit their discourse, their work, their culture, their interaction, their social relations, in order for you to present yourself as Israel does. And as Ghadir mentioned, as a modern state that is making the desert blue, which we know is not true, and by contrast, is the best friend of women and queer people, as a gay haven, as opposed to quote unquote the backward, savage. excessively homophobic, excessively misogynist, Arab world, Arab and Muslim world, and in which Arab men and Arab and Muslim and Palestinian men are presented as irrational, bloodthirsty, misogynist, haters of women and Queer people, and as women as being docile, as being only oppressed constantly, and need to be rescued by the colonists who will come in and basically realize what Gayatri Spivak spoke about I don't know, 30 years ago, the colonist project of trying to save brown people from brown communities and queer people from their own queer communities. And so in order for this to work, it has to be presented in all of these things that it is necessary. And it's very important for Israel to focus on its public relations. And this is something that has been actually very part and parcel of since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, a task that was assigned to the military, to the security of interior affairs to the Mossad, which is the CIA, outside intelligence, Shambit, the internal intelligence to everybody. And now we see more and more the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and other is, and the whole question of quote unquote branding, which I put it in parentheses because branding also refers to the ways in which people engage in slavery actually used to quote brand people whose lives they owned. So I put it in parentheses. I question it. But Israel is very big on that to brand Israel as a gay haven. Israel as a best liberator of women and so on.  This is also what we see today in the sense of Israel actually making a very public relation campaign and a very, very intensive campaign to claim that Palestinians have chopped off the head of children, which was even reiterated by the president of the United States without even thinking about it because he was quoting Israeli Officials who we know are not really known for telling the truth and then they had to retract it the second day but yesterday he repeated the same thing again and said there is the rape of women and so on which we do not have any evidence until now. We know that a lot of Israeli groups and Zionist groups like this group Bonat Alternativa and others are alleging, but we haven't seen any evidence of that. If there is any evidence of that, we will not stand for it. We condemn any kind of violations of gender and sexual, justice because we believe that gender and sexual justice is part and parcel with indivisibility of justice. So this is not something we are trying to cover, but this is very much part and parcel of the Israeli propaganda and it's churning machine, the Hasbara machine is everywhere and they keep changing their stories. And if we have time we can actually go over how each story has developed and moved from one place to the other. I'm also talking about the ways in which colonial feminisms or colonial quote unquote feminism, because feminism is supposed to be about the liberation of women as part of liberation of everybody, have been very much engaged in. But within that, there is also notion of blaming the victim. It is a very important aspect of it. So in order for the Israeli and the Zionist narrative to work, you have to blame people. And one of the very well known cases, for example, was the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the young Palestinian teenager who was kidnapped from in front of his house on July 2nd, 2014, right around the big, big 2014 war on Gaza we talked about, and kidnapped by Israeli settlers who took him to a forest in Jerusalem that was built on the ruins of the village of Deir Yassin, where the massacre on April 8th, 1948 happened in order to facilitate the creation of the Israeli state. And they made him drink kerosene and set him on fire and burned him alive, which was a clear case of lynching. Now, what Israeli police tried to do was to actually say that Mohammed Abu Khdeir was killed by his own family to quote unquote salvage family honor. And they killed him because he was queer. And now if it wasn't for his father who had videotapes of the security cameras outside of the house and showed it– the Israeli police tried to confiscate it and basically destroy it– showed that these people came and kidnapped him. The relative would still be among colonists, among racists, among white supremacists, Zionists, that Palestinians are killing Palestinians and they are doing this all the time. So it's not only blaming the victim, but it also instilling and reinforcing the narrative of people, not only Palestinians, this happens with all indigenous and all colonized communities and all communities of color from time immemorial. You look at the history of the United States, this is something, this is a trope that keeps getting repeated again and again and again. And it's not an easy trope because It is not something that's only being said. It's not only a discursive issue. It's not a discursive issue that we need to deconstruct in the classroom because we know the history, including that. But recently, many people started learning more about the case of Emmett Till, the young Boy who was killed and the woman who actually accused him came out and said that she lied, but he was killed and he was lynched. And then his mom insisted on having open casket so everybody could see the crime. And there's so many more examples that we don't have time to get into all of them now, but this is part of the colonial narrative, the colonial strategy in order to discredit the people who are colonized and discredit their struggle.  And this is definitely a part in Gaza and it is, but the other thing is that it depends on the narrative of saying that our communities in particular as exceptionally sensitive and exceptionally traditional. And this is something that we saw in Abu Ghraib for example.  When they were talking about, we're not going to show the images of iraqi men are particularly insensitive. But we were raising the question, which men are okay with it, which women, which anybody, which non gender binary person, who would be okay with being subjected to sexual and gender violence; to being displaced like this and so on. Nobody will be. But the imaginary that it is trying to instill that's built on Orientalist, Islamophobic, anti Arab, anti Palestinian, anti Muslim racism as part and parcel of all kinds of racism basically makes it possible to do a little dog whistle in order for you to enforce all of this. We saw this also at the US Social Forum when Zionist groups stand with us, which now everybody knows what it is, tried to do a workshop around queer communities in the Middle East, and many of us objected to it. And the reason that it got through because the organizers thought that this would be something that would be actually really wonderful, bringing everybody together. They did not really investigate who this group was and what it was doing and did not coordinate with the many organizations that were at the U. S. Social Forum in 2010 in Detroit from our own community to see what is happening, what's going on, are you part of this unparceled hat? Even though the Palestinian queer organizations have existed for a very long time, and I think it was by then, if I'm not mistaken, Ghadir you can correct me that we organize a national tour and for all calls throughout the U S in order for people to speak and you all came and spoke in my own classroom. This is part of the stuff that keeps going back. And this is also the same thing that we hear around this group that I've mentioned now, and this propaganda that's happening, and also in terms of the ways when we passed the resolution on BDS in the National Women's Studies Association 2015, many Zionist groups came out and basically came with the whole question is there a place for Zionism and feminism? Many of the feminist groups have been targeted, including the International Women's Strike and so on. This is a continuous, systemic, persistent thing. This is not something that is out of random or accidental. And so what do we do about this? In addition to what Ghadir said, I think it's really, really important for us to say, how do we fight back? We fight back with multiple ways. One of the ways we do for example, organizing this in the classroom. So one of the things that we do in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies program ever since we were founded in 2007 is every single year we were partnering with the Pride Month at San Francisco State to organize sessions on the whole question of queer justice, and this is one of them. Even after San Francisco State stopped funding pride month, we continue doing it again and again. We believe that it's really important to connect the knowledge within the classroom with the knowledge outside and with the activism and advocacy. We do not separate what happens in the classroom, what happens in the academy from outside. So the academy is not producing knowledge that is divorced from reality. The people who are organizing are part and parcel of that. And so we've been doing this again and again. The other thing that is really, really important to think about is how do we work here, and I'm talking here in the diaspora, with groups on the ground, Palestinian queer groups who are working? So one of the examples that I would like to cite from our own experiences is when Al-Qaws was attacked by Palestinian police in Nablus trying to hold an event. My hometown Nablus. We were going to rush and say something, but we waited and we coordinated with Al Qaws and we asked, what should we do? And we did not do anything until Al Qaws came out because we were objecting to the whole question of saving queer people from queer communities, saving brown people from brown communities, the whole question of the colonial notion. And we were also taking leadership from the people on the ground who are day in and day out struggling. Once Al-Qaws came out with it, what we did is we published in one of the newspapers in the Bay Area, along with Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, which is a group that has been doing a lot of work for a very long time, and whose founder actually was chosen to be the Grand Marshall at Gay Pride Parade at San Francisco. And she turned down this honor and said, because I am here in Palestine struggling with the International Solidarity Movement at the time to oppose the apartheid world to oppose the repression by Israel and so on. So we organized together. And that's when we said we endorse. We support. This is really important sometimes to think about how do we take a back road and when is it we go public with things. At this point, we really need to go public and we need to defy all this propaganda that is happening.  This is part of what the solidarity mean. But this is not free. When we do something like this, there is punishment. And these are some of the flyers I'm showing from the Queer Liberation March that took place in 2019. This was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall, Uprising. The Queer Liberation March at that time actually decided to refuse any corporate funding, to refuse to allow the police to go march in their own uniforms and so on, rejected the policing, rejected the state apparatus that represses people, rejected the corporate money and so on. As a result, there was space for us to be there. So we were organizing, we organized a big contingent under the banner of QAIA, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and also Queers A gainst Islamophobia.  So we participated and I took this banner and I put it on my Facebook page. This led to the another Zionist attack, which is trying to silence Palestine and were trying to criminalize Palestine in the curriculum, and especially targeting us and our program in particular. And they took it and didn't say what was on the banner. They just said that I'm spreading hate, and thus I should be– they had 86 organizations, some of them fake organizations– sign it, send it to the university, to the chancellor of California State University to the president of San Francisco State, saying that I'm spreading hate. This for them is hate. Palestine is a queer issue. BDS Zionism is racism. Silence means death. For them, this was something that was very problematic, and it was something that is undermining the Zionist propaganda, and Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and eliminating the Palestinian people like the genocide that we are seeing here, and trying to continue pushing the pink washing without having it exposed.  As a result, our program has been attacked again and again. The Lawfare Project executive director got on the TV, on Fox and friends, and made a lying statement. They sued me. And they sued San Francisco State and they sued California State University. But we defeated them. It was thrown out of court. It was dismissed with prejudice. But she lied about that. And she said that I'm spreading hate; that I'm one of the leading anti Semitic– Horowitz every single year pushes out a formula about the top anti-Semitic scholars, and they always give me number one. And I think they do it in May because this is the fundraising season for them. As a result, I started receiving death threats. However, and including to my own university and the threat voicemails on my office mail that said Muslims will die, which is the same phrase that the guy who killed Wadiah Al-Fayyumi in Chicago, stabbing him 26 times. He said Muslims will die. The university does not believe that this is actually a viable threat. And so they protect the right wing speech, which is white supremacist and Zionist is a protected speech protected that they can do whatever they want, put up hateful posters, do whatever they want against us, but we are not allowed to say so. And the university is not investigating death threat letters that actually came to me through the University President's office to my own office. However we refuse to be silenced. We refuse to lie down. And so we continued organizing. And one of the main events that we organize, and we do it every year, is this panel Queer Open Classroom that everybody can attend and come in. Queer justice against pink washing, exposing it, bringing scholars and activists, Ghadir was one of the people who spoke at that, in order for us to support liberation for Palestine as part of liberation of all, and to support gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of the indivisibility of justice. Thank you. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Oh, Rabab. I hope that you can feel all the tremendous. gratitude and love that you're getting in the chat. I think that there is such a clear longing to be hearing stories from elders, folks who have been in this fight for so long. Thank you for bringing in the long arc of queer Palestinian organizing. Thank you for bringing the long arc and history of queers being in solidarity for Palestine. It's so important that we understand that while this moment is so important for us to study, learn and act. It rests upon such a long arc and such a long history of organizing in solidarity with Palestine. Thank you for also speaking to Mohammed Abu Khdeir, thank you for speaking him into the space. Thank you for both of you reminding us to follow the lead of queer Palestinians. What we're trying to do with you all today with this teach-in is to really pull us together, circle around and invite us all to be following the lead of queer Palestinians so that we can take on this work as inextricably linked to our own liberation; to advance the work of undermining pinkwashing and Zionism as part and parcel to our queer liberation. So thank you so much, Rabab. Our last speaker, Shivani Chanillo with Lavender Phoenix. Shivani (they/them) is a trans non- binary second generation Indian American organizer. Shout out to the baddy Indian organizers out here, myself included. Their experience of active solidarity with Palestinian folks came in 2017 through exchanges they facilitated between their high school students in Baltimore, and students at Ramallah Friends School in the West Bank. These powerful exchanges stoked Shivani's passion for developing young people as critical thinkers grounded in revolutionary values and politics. As a leadership development coordinator at Lavender Phoenix, an organization that Queer Crescent deeply loves and feels deeply supported by and in deep siblingship with. Shivani continues this work by facilitating opportunities for trans and queer Asians and Pacific Islanders to practice values based organizing and contribute to intersectional movements. In particular, I just want to really say that we were so excited to invite Shivani and Lavender Phoenix in to our teach in as the final speaker, because Lavender Phoenix is one organization that really models, going back to the initial motivation of this teach in with our letter calling for a permanent ceasefire, calling on LGBTQ organizations and leaders to sign on to understanding pink washing and to support Palestinian liberation. Lavender Phoenix is one such organization that has really demonstrated such values align solidarity with Palestinian liberation. And so I'm really excited to bring you in Shivani to close us out to talk about how queer people, queer organizations can really double down on our solidarity.  Shivani Chanillo: Thank you so much Shenaaz for that introduction and to Queer Crescent for organizing this event. I just want to take a moment and just, I feel so deeply moved by the sharing from Rabab and Ghadir in this workshop and just sitting with the lineage within all of us as we take up Palestine as a queer issue. We have generations of lessons and decades of work and such powerful leaders here in this space, but all across the world to follow, and I feel so grateful and so excited to be joining in on this work and sharing a little bit about what Lavender Phoenix is doing in this moment. If you haven't heard of Lavender Phoenix, we build trans non binary and queer Asian and Pacific Islander power here in the Bay Area. We are a base building organization training grassroots leaders to build intersectional movements. As we witness an escalation of the ongoing genocide in Palestine I can say that our base is firmly grounded in the understanding that Palestinian liberation is part of our struggle and our responsibility as trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander people. And so I want to start by sharing a little bit about what we're doing in this moment, before sharing about how our members arrived to this point. Since October 7th we have shifted our work accordingly. We have dedicated time to mobilize our members and our broader communities to action. We have educated each other to stay politically grounded. We have and will continue to support each other to process the grief of this moment and to remember hope, optimism, and commitment. In so many facets of our work, we are stepping into deeper leadership and responsibility to support our Palestinian comrades to win. And more tangibly across our six member led committees, this looks like offering healing support, coordinating our members who are trained in protest and digital security to support our comrades, coordinating contingents at in person and online actions, moving financial resources and funder attention to our Palestinian partners, and uplifting pro Palestinian messaging and calls to actions using our social media reach. Responding to Palestine and challenging pinkwashing is not a shift in our priorities, but it's actually a sharpening of our focus as an organization. We've organized our base over the years to recognize our interconnected struggles, and across our membership, we so deeply understand that the Palestinian struggle is our struggle. And Palestinian futures are our futures. All of the actions we are taking right now to support Palestine, to challenge pinkwashing are the result of so many tests, experiments, and trials that have helped us deepen our political purpose and grow our power. Many of these experiments and trials that we've conducted over the years really informed our current theory of change. And this is really critical to how we're organizing in this moment. Our emergent responses to sharpen contradictions in our world like we are witnessing with Palestine, are only possible because we organize within a consistent theory of change. A key part of our theory of change and a key part of my role as Leadership Development coordinator, is that we are committed to developing leaders who are rooted in our values, in our history, in emotional intelligence, and compassion, because we know that is how our movement will be sustained and will be effective. So we're not just developing members and masses who care about single issues, we're developing holistic, critical thinkers who care about solidarity with all oppressed people so that in moments like this, solidarity with Palestine is a natural choice in our larger fight for liberation. One of the really important ways we do this, and this workshop is a critical example, is we educate our base, our trans and queer API base, on our history. We dig into how systems of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy impact all of us across our identities in the past and in the present. Right now, the tools and tactics being wielded by fascist leaders to criminalize and punish trans people here in the U. S. are rooted in the same white supremacist, colonial, and imperialist ideologies used to justify the dehumanization and murder of Palestinians, particularly trans and queer Palestinians. As part of our theory of change, we've also spent intentional time educating our base about revolutionary politics like abolition and healing justice, and developing our skills for safety, for healing and resource mobilization that are applicable in moments all across our movement. We spent so much time since we implemented this theory of change in 2021 to build our base and grow our power so we can show up for our partners who are organizing for Palestinian liberation in this moment. We have spent so much time cultivating our skills and knowledges so we can support our movements beyond just trans liberation.  I want to end just by sharing a little bit of a story. A few weeks ago, our members participated in a direct action that asked many of them to step into higher risk than they had before. Prior to the action, we met to get grounded together. Folks shared their fears, but they also countered those fears with a really rooted sense of purpose. So many of our members talked about how they wanted to look back on this moment and know that they and we as an organization did everything in our power to support Palestinian liberation. And they spoke about the sacred responsibility and duty we have in this moment to show up in solidarity. I feel so moved, even now, just thinking back to that moment and feel so much gratitude to our members for taking new risks, to the generations of leaders in our organization and our movement who have led us to this point, and I feel immense admiration and gratitude to the long lineage of Palestinian queer and trans resistance, and current day organizers who are guiding us right now. For Lavender Phoenix, this moment is really helping us clarify our power, and for many of our members, this moment is helping them clarify their political purpose. The things all of our Palestinian siblings are fighting for, self determination, safety, healing, community, decolonization, these are the things that we as trans and queer API people here in the Bay Area so desire for ourselves as well. We refuse to let our transness and our queerness be co opted for violence and displacement and genocide, and we know that our struggles and our futures are united, and we're committed to fighting alongside our Palestinian comrades until we are all free. Thank you so much for letting me share. I'll pass it back to Shenaaz. Shenaaz Janmohamed: Shivani, thank you so much for bringing all of it. Lavender Phoenix, I just can't swoon on y'all enough. You model that clarity of purpose and power and grace. There's also such deep humility and grace to be in constant learning. As an emerging organization, an emerging queer organization, I just have to say Queer Crescent feels so deeply held by y'all and really inspired with the path that you are leading and inviting us all towards.  This piece around letting this moment sharpen the focus. It's not a pivot. I think I've even said, we're pivoting, we're in rapid response. Part of our political principles as an organization is understanding anti Zionism as part and parcel of the white supremacist project. And so this is not a pivot, it's not a rapid response, but to your point, it's a sharpening and it's a double down of our commitments, principles and priorities. So thank you for naming that.  Cheryl Truong: And that's the end of our show. Tonight's show was a broadcast of the Resisting Pinkwashing teach-in co-led by Queer Crescent and the Palestinian Feminist Collective. It was moderated by Shenaaz Janmohamed, executive director of Queer Crescent and featured poetry by Mx. Yaffa of MASGD, and guest speakers, Rabab Abdulhadie from the Palestinian feminist collective, Ghadir Shafie of ASWAT, and and Shivani Chanillo from AACRE Group Lavender Phoenix. Learn more about the incredible work of these incredible organizations and sign on to Queer Crescent's cease fire campaign through the links in our show notes.  Apex express is produced by Miko Lee, Paige Chung, Jalena Keane-Lee, Preeti Mangala Shekar. Shekar, Anuj Vaidya, Kiki Rivera, Swati Rayasam, Nate Tan, Hien Nguyen, Nikki Chan, and Cheryl Truong   Tonight's show was produced by me, cheryl. Thanks to the team at KPFA for all of their support. And thank you for listening! The post APEX Express – 01.25.24 Resisting Pinkwashing Teach-In appeared first on KPFA.

From RachelCorrieFoundation.org, a reading of Rachel Corrie's emails to friends and family during her time volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement in Rafah. Rachel Corrie was an American college student and activist who spent winter quarter in Gaza sleeping next to water wells and protecting homes from IOF destruction. Her emails are witness to the policy of expulsion and dehumanization of the Israeli military. Rachel Corrie was killed in March 2003 when an Israeli Caterpillar D9R bulldozer ran over her while protecting the Nasrallah family's home from demolition. To date, no justice has been served to Corrie's family, neither Caterpillar nor Israel have been found liable for Corrie's death. This episode ends with Tom Dale's eyewitness account of the day of Corrie's death, and his comments regarding the court verdict against the Corrie family. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uftp/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uftp/support

On this edition of Parallax Views, in the first portion of the program I speak with Palestinian-American lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, to discuss the bombing of Gaza, the October 7th attack, and more. In the second half of the program Jeff Halper of the Israeli Commitee Against House Demolitions and the One Democratic State campaign joins the show to offer his thoughts and commentary on Israel/Palestine.

In this episode Gary Mansfield speaks to kennardphillipps (@kennardphillipps)kennardphillipps is a collaboration between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps working since 2002 to produce art in response to the invasion of Iraq. It has evolved to confront power and war across the globe.The work is made for the street, the gallery, the web, newspapers & magazines, and to lead workshops that develop peoples' skills and help them express their thoughts on what's happening in the world through visual means. The work is made as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change.kennardphillipps don't see the work as separate to social and political movements that are confronting established political and economic systems, they see it as part of those movements, the visual arm of protest.They want it to be used by people as a part of their own activism, not just as pictures on the wall to contemplate.To facilitate this, as well as selling their limited edition prints on the site enabling them to fund the making of the work, there is a free download page of images with a voluntary contribution to the International Solidarity Movement.For more information on the work of kennardphillipps go tohttps://www.kennardphillipps.comTo Support this podcast from as little as £3 per month: www.patreon/ministryofartsFor full line up of confirmed artists go to https://www.ministryofarts.orgEmail: ministryofartsorg@gmail.comSocial Media: @ministryofartsorg See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this edition of Parallax Views, April 10th, 2022 would've marked the 43rd birthday of American peace activist Rachel Corrie. In 2003 she went to the Palestinian city of Rafa in Gaza alongside other activists in the International Solidarity Movement. On March 16th of that year she stood in front of a Palestinian home that was to be demolished by an Israeli Defense Forces armored bulldozer. Corrie was crushed to death by said bulldozer. Her death led to an international uproar and her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, sought justice and a full investigation. It has been 19 years since Rachel's passing. In order to remember her, tell her story, and explain what she was fighting for in her support for the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories we're joined by her parents Cindy and Craig Corrie. Cindy and Craig relate Rachel's story and the events of March 16th, 2003.

On this edition of Parallax Views, long-time Palestinian-American human rights activist and attorney Huwaida Arraf joined me to discuss her political awakening, spending most of her adult life fighting for justice, and her run for Congress in Michigan's 10th Congressional District.  In 2001, Huwaida, her husband Adam Shapiro, Israeli activist Neta Golan, and Palestinian activist Ghassan Adoni founded the International Solidarity Movement that has sought to support the cause of Palestinian liberation. However, Huwaida says she isn't a single-issue candidate and has a broad list of priorities including making leaders accessible and accountable in an age where they've often become distant from their constituents. Armed with years of activism and experience as a practicing human rights attorney, hard-working mother, and energetic, community involved activist Huwaida believes she can represent the new 10th district of Michigan. She also explains how redistricting of the thumb region of Michigan a game-changer for her campaign may well be. Additionally, Huwaida talks about the need for visibility of Palestinian and Arab Americans in the U.S. today, the need for campaign finance reform, and the pivotal experience in her young life that began her political awakening. In the second segment of the show, Dr, Poua Alimagham, author of Contesting the Iranian Revolution: The Green Uprisings, joins us to discuss the continued attempts to reach a new nuclear deal with Iran over the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Donald Trump had the U.S. renege on the deal during his Presidency. Talks meant to bring about a new deal have commenced in the post-Trump era, but some forces in the U.S., specifically within the GOP, hope to see such efforts scuttled claiming that it will weaken America. Meanwhile, talks have continued amidst Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the crisis it has wrought. Dr. Alimagham and I discuss all of this as well as the ways in which the discourse around Iran and Iranian-Americans has been tinged by racism over the years.

Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian American lawyer, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, former Chair of the Free Gaza Movement and, until recently, the Palestine and Refugees correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali.

In episode 11, Justin Podur and I talk about Gaza, resistance and colonialism. Justin Podur is the author of Siegebreakers, a novel set in Gaza that he wrote after spending time with the International Solidarity Movement, which is part of the nonviolent resistance to colonialism in Gaza. Links to support people in Gaza:ActionAid: https://www.actionaid.org.uk/about-us...Islamic Relief: https://www.islamic-relief.org.za/abo... Physicians for Human Rights: https://www.phr.org.il/en/department/...Time Stamps:0:00 - Liberal terrorism0:45 - Intro2:36 - Justin's background11:10 - Chomsky, Marx and Marxism18:00 - Siegebreakers and Gaza23:45 - Latest developments in Gaza27:50 - The cycle of violence32:36 - Islamophobia and colonialism40:00 - Is the resistance working? 45:26 - Canada and international solidarity51:15 - How change happens54:17 - What can we do?56:39 - Possible futures

CODEPINK's Medea Benjamin and Marcy Winograd, and Hanieh Jodat-Barnes were joined by four special guests: Huwaida Arraf, co-founder, International Solidarity Movement; Omar Baddar, political analyst & former deputy director, Arab American Institute; Ariel Gold, co-director, CODEPINK; and Estee Chandler, board member, Jewish Voice for Peace. They discussed the International Criminal Court’s investigation of Israeli war crimes; the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement; the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of anti-Semitism and its threat to free speech; and the Biden administration’s complicity with Israeli apartheid.

Migration is a global phenomenon, and in industrialized countries, immigrants and refugees are often demonized, especially in times of crisis. We interviewed Natalie Gruber, co-founder of Josoor International Solidarity Movement (josoor.net) and discuss the painful and inhumane immigration policies in Europe, the United States and Latin America (specifically the recent deaths of Venezuelan refugees as they were trying to migrate to Trinidad & Tobago), deadly "pushback" measures that have taken countless lives in the Mediterranean & Caribbean Sea, the negative narratives and falsehoods about immigrants worldwide, and how it all ties back to capitalist exploitation and fearmongering. Natalie on Twitter: @NatalieSGruber Follow us @Contraelite1 on Twitter and Instagram http://anchor.fm/contraelite UPDATE on Frontex investigation: https://youtu.be/F7hRkK92pjM Our breaks music is "Draco" by Yung Kartz (https://www.yungkartzbeats.com/) Full clips on this episode, in order: 1. https://youtu.be/58eTnqJWFqY 2. https://youtu.be/1dv-XshaQ6Y 3. https://youtu.be/bNZ3xCFG-zc 4. https://youtu.be/EBRMBxq_DGU 5. https://youtu.be/J-JBHlZenoI

Last week, as Trump signed the U.S.-brokered agreement to normalize diplomatic relationships between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and between Israel and Bahrain — the so-called Middle East Peace Plan, demonstrators outside the White House protested the “Fake Peace Deal”. Huwaida Arraf, International Human Rights Attorney and founder of the International Solidarity Movement for […] The post A peace deal where there was no conflict provides a show for Nobel appeared first on WORT 89.9 FM.

Siamo a Rafah, nella striscia di Gaza. È il 16 Marzo 2003. L'esercito israeliano sta demolendo gli edifici e la vegetazione lungo il confine. Il fatto che gli edifici siano abitati è un dettaglio di una certa importanza, ma l'esercito israeliano non sente ragioni. Secondo loro quelle demolizioni servono a scoprire le bombe e a distruggere i tunnel dei contrabbandieri. Operazioni che secondo gli Israeliani in passato hanno avuto successo, perché hanno demolito le case degli attentatori suicidi e hanno così disincentivato le attività terroristiche. Da mesi le operazioni dell'esercito israeliano sono disturbate da un'organizzazione che si chiama ISM, acronimo di International Solidarity Movement. È un'associazione statunitense non violenta che si pone l'obiettivo di sostenere la causa palestinese nel conflitto tra Israele e Palestina. Tra gli attivisti dell'ISM c'è una ragazza che si chiama Rachel Corrie. Rachel era partita dagli Stati Uniti il 18 gennaio 2003. Arrivata nella Striscia di Gaza aveva frequentato per due giorni un corso di addestramento sulle filosofie e le tecniche di resistenza non violente, prima di cominciare a partecipare alle azioni dell'ISM. Rachel Corri nasce il 10 Aprile 1979 nella città di Olympia, la capitale dello stato di Washington. È la minore di tre fratelli, figlia di Craig e Cindy Corrie, una famiglia della middle class. Dopo il diploma alla Capital High School, Rachel si iscrive all'Evergreen State College, sempre a Olympia, dove segue diversi corsi di arte. Si prende un anno sabbatico per lavorare come volontaria nel Washington State Conservation Corps e con l'ISM lavora per tre anni come volontaria facendo visita a pazienti con malattie mentali. Roger Waters, The most beautiful girl“Potrebbe essere stata la più bella ragazza del mondo La sua vita si è spenta come un bulldozer che frantuma una perla” Ci salutiamo e ci risentiamo il prossimo Lunedì alla stessa ora. Se un ribelle spento passa il testimone, siamo pronti a prenderlo?

We launch this season with the amazing Eva Jasiewicz, who enthralled us with stories about travelling the Middle East putting her body on the line as part of the International Solidarity Movement in the fight against Fascism.

International Solidarity Movement: www.palsolidarity.org Follow Joe on Twitter: @jncatron Joe's articles in Electronic Intifada: http://electronicintifada.net/people/joe-catron You can support this podcast by subscribing to Katie's patreon, at http://patreon.com/katiemiranda or by visiting Katie's online jewelry and art store at http://www.katiemiranda.com . Palbox is a nonprofit subscription box supporting Palestinian farmers, artisans and the international solidarity movement. you can subscribe at http://www.palbox.org .

Palestine Remembered speaks with visiting Palestinian/American activist and civial rights advocate Huwaida Arraf.  She has been active on the ground in Palestine and around the world defending the rights of Palestinians and their advocates.  She was also the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement in 2001

This week, two activists for Palestine advocacy and education, Amal Wahdan of the Sheikh Hasan Foundation for Culture and Science in Ramallah and Paul Larudee of the International Solidarity Movement, join us to talk about life in occupied Palestine. Hosts Rosie, Orie and Violet discuss the ways that American influence and funding play a role in Israel and Palestine, and how things will change as the American embassy moves to Jerusalem.

Rachel Roberts is a DC-based attorney who has been a Jewish activist for Palestinian rights since 2003. She recently worked with the Education Team from IfNotNow DC to pilot a curriculum called "Occupation 101." In this interview, she talks about her own journey from "Israel, right-or-wrong" to Palestinian solidarity work, then explains some of the history and everyday realities of the West Bank under Israeli occupation. This episode of Unsettled is hosted by Max Freedman. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Recorded in Brooklyn, New York on June 13, 2017, and edited for length and clarity.   RACHEL ROBERTS is an attorney, an activist, and a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. She has been an activist for Palestinian human rights since 2003 and has worked with numerous organizations and groups, including the International Solidarity Movement, Jews Against the Occupation, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Rachel recently returned from occupied Palestine where she served as part of the Center for Jewish Non-Violence 2017 delegation. Rachel has also served for several years as a civil rights attorney for CAIR-California, where she provided legal and civil rights advocacy services to U.S. Muslim victims of discrimination. In law school, she was the co-editor in chief of the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law. Her opinion writing has been published in the Forward, the Baltimore Sun, the Oakland Tribune, the Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss. She holds degrees from Oberlin College, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the UCLA School of Law. REFERENCES IfNotNow International Solidarity Movement Birzeit University The Black Eyed by Betty Shamieh Brit Tzedek v’Shalom J Street Hillel International The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz (2003) Interactive Map of the West Bank (B’Tselem) Active Stills “Why the Palestinian Authority Should Be Shuttered” by Diana Buttu (The New York Times, 2017) “Israel and Pinkwashing” by Sarah Schulman (The New York Times, 2011) “Hasbara: Why does the world fail to understand us?” by Noam Sheizaf (+972, 2011) Interview with Omar Barghouti (The Intercept, 2016) That famous handshake Baruch Marzel: “The Extremist Who Could Bring Kahanism Back to the Knesset” by Raphael Ahren (The Times of Israel, 2015) “Accepting the apartheid label will normalise Israel” by Mark LeVine and Neve Gordon (Al Jazeera, 2017) “This Day in History // 1948: N.Y. Times Publishes Letter by Einstein, Other Jews Accusing Menachem Begin of Fascism” (Haaretz, 2014) “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel” (Congressional Research Service, 2016) RACHEL RECOMMENDS The Question of Palestine by Edward Said (1992) The Origins of the Palestine-Israel Conflict published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East (2001) A People Without a Land directed by Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon (2014) 500 Dunam on the Moon directed by Rachel Leah Jones (2002) Zochrot (an Israeli NGO working to promote acknowledgement of and accountability for the Nakba)  

Rachel Roberts is a DC-based attorney who has been a Jewish activist for Palestinian rights since 2003. She recently worked with the Education Team from IfNotNow DC to pilot a curriculum called "Occupation 101." In this interview, she talks about her own journey from "Israel, right-or-wrong" to Palestinian solidarity work, then explains some of the history and everyday realities of the West Bank under Israeli occupation. This episode of Unsettled is hosted by Max Freedman. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Recorded in Brooklyn, New York on June 13, 2017, and edited for length and clarity.   RACHEL ROBERTS is an attorney, an activist, and a writer who lives in Washington, D.C. She has been an activist for Palestinian human rights since 2003 and has worked with numerous organizations and groups, including the International Solidarity Movement, Jews Against the Occupation, and Jewish Voice for Peace. Rachel recently returned from occupied Palestine where she served as part of the Center for Jewish Non-Violence 2017 delegation. Rachel has also served for several years as a civil rights attorney for CAIR-California, where she provided legal and civil rights advocacy services to U.S. Muslim victims of discrimination. In law school, she was the co-editor in chief of the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law. Her opinion writing has been published in the Forward, the Baltimore Sun, the Oakland Tribune, the Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss. She holds degrees from Oberlin College, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the UCLA School of Law. REFERENCES IfNotNow International Solidarity Movement Birzeit University The Black Eyed by Betty Shamieh Brit Tzedek v’Shalom J Street Hillel International The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz (2003) Interactive Map of the West Bank (B’Tselem) Active Stills “Why the Palestinian Authority Should Be Shuttered” by Diana Buttu (The New York Times, 2017) “Israel and Pinkwashing” by Sarah Schulman (The New York Times, 2011) “Hasbara: Why does the world fail to understand us?” by Noam Sheizaf (+972, 2011) Interview with Omar Barghouti (The Intercept, 2016) That famous handshake Baruch Marzel: “The Extremist Who Could Bring Kahanism Back to the Knesset” by Raphael Ahren (The Times of Israel, 2015) “Accepting the apartheid label will normalise Israel” by Mark LeVine and Neve Gordon (Al Jazeera, 2017) “This Day in History // 1948: N.Y. Times Publishes Letter by Einstein, Other Jews Accusing Menachem Begin of Fascism” (Haaretz, 2014) “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel” (Congressional Research Service, 2016) RACHEL RECOMMENDS The Question of Palestine by Edward Said (1992) The Origins of the Palestine-Israel Conflict published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East (2001) A People Without a Land directed by Eliyahu Ungar-Sargon (2014) 500 Dunam on the Moon directed by Rachel Leah Jones (2002) Zochrot (an Israeli NGO working to promote acknowledgement of and accountability for the Nakba)  

Indymedia speaks to International Solidarity Movement activist Phoebe on the escalating violence in the West Bank over recent weeks.

The Palestine Podcast showcases a selection of lectures, talks and interviews featuring leading experts and social justice activists active on the Palestine-Israel issue. Brought to you by the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Click here to view all podcasts. Subscribe on your favourite platform! Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyStitcherAcastYouTubeDeezerTuneInPlayer.fmPocketCastsCastroRadio PublicBreakerBlubrryPodcast AddictPodbeanPodcast RepubliciHeartRadio jQuery(document).ready(function($) { 'use strict'; $('#podcast-subscribe-button-11212 .podcast-subscribe-button.modal-632417aed5b3e').on("click", function() { $("#secondline-psb-subs-modal.modal-632417aed5b3e.modal.secondline-modal-632417aed5b3e").modal({ fadeDuration: 250, closeText: '', }); return false; }); }); ===== PP#4 - Eva Barlett on 'The Illegal and Inhuman Israeli Siege of Gaza' [2014-03-29] - (Download here) INFO: Eva Bartlett is a Canadian activist and freelance journalist. Since November 2008 she has spent cumulatively 3 years in Gaza, volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting the various facets of life under siege. During this talk, which was organised by individuals in Dublin as part of a wider speaking tour,  Eva outlined the different Israeli policies on Palestinians in Gaza, including preventing farmers from farming and fishermen from fishing and enforcing this restriction through lethal means. She talked about the layered aspects of the blockade on Gaza, including: electricity outages, export restrictions, sanitation crises, water contamination, medicine shortage, educational obstacles, and manufactured poverty. She also discussed the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli attacks on Gaza. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this podcast reflect the opinions of the speaker(s) only and do not reflect the views of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign unless otherwise explicitly stated. Apple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyStitcherAcastYouTubeDeezerTuneInPlayer.fmPocketCastsCastroRadio PublicBreakerBlubrryPodcast AddictPodbeanPodcast RepubliciHeartRadio

In this interview I interview Palestinian activist and founder of the International Solidarity Movement Huwaida Arraf. This encore presentation identifies her work and the gencoide happening in Palestine.

The Rachel Corrie Foundation continues the work and witness of Rachel, killed at the age of 23. She was in Palestine as part of the International Solidarity Movement, serving as a "human shield", protecting Palestinians and their homes.

The International Solidarity Movement, present on college campuses in the US and Europe, is a perfect example...I have personal experience with the ISM...Listen to the story of Cousin Melissa...It's VERY scary...Also...An anti-Israel, anti-Jewish ad campaign due to begin in the Washington DC transit system...The US First Amendment right to free speech being turned against itself...How can this be happening?...And...Internet cafes and video stores exploding in Gaza...Free speech in action...This, while Mickey Mouse calls for his young friends to come to the aid of Islamic world domination...Plus...A four-year old suicide bomber in the making...All this and more on "The Marty Roberts Show"...