Palestine and the global fight against oppression

As this is written, people across America and the world are demanding that Israel stop its brutal oppression of the Palestinians.

In a recent article in Truthout, Lea Kayali, a Palestinian community activist and writer, noted that the dispossession of Palestinians that began in 1947 and 1948 (the Nakba) when Zionist militias violently drove three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their homes (including her grandparents), is still continuing today. She also pointed out that the “U.S. finances the Israeli military with a colossal $3.8 billion annually,” and that American police departments “waste public resources sending officers to Israel to learn strategies for increasing the discrimination, surveillance and harassment already faced by our communities.”

Kayali said, “The average American pays about as much to Israel’s murder machine as they do toward the public library system. All of this money should be going into our communities instead.” Americans “should decry the ongoing catastrophe wrought against Palestinians not only because we are funding it, but also because opposing this violence is the right thing to do,” she wrote. She urged readers to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and to encourage their congressional representatives to halt all aid to Israel.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian-American, spoke on the House floor May 13. These are excerpts: “If we are to make good on our promises to support equal human rights for all it is our duty to end the apartheid system that for decades has subjected Palestinians to inhumane treatment and racism, reducing Palestinians to live in utter fear and terror of losing a child, being indefinitely detained or killed. . . .As Palestinians talk about our history, know that many of my Black neighbors and Indigenous communities may not know what we mean by Nakba [Catastrophe], but they do understand what it means to be killed, expelled from your home, your land, made homeless and stripped of your human rights. . . .

“We all deserve freedom, liberty, peace, and justice, and it should never be denied because of our faith or ethnic background. No child, Palestinian or Israeli, whoever they are, should ever have to worry that death will rain from the sky. . . . Meanwhile, Palestinians’ rights to non-violent resistance have been curtailed and even criminalized. Our party leaders have spoken forcefully against BDS, calling its proponents anti-Semitic, despite the same tactics being critical to ending the South African apartheid mere decades ago. What we are telling Palestinians fighting apartheid is the same thing being told to my Black neighbors and Americans throughout that are fighting against police brutality here: ‘there is no form of acceptable resistance to state violence’. . . .

“I stand before you not only as a Congresswoman for the beautiful 13th district, but also as a proud daughter of Palestinian immigrants and the granddaughter of a loving Palestinian grandmother, living in the occupied Palestine. You take that and you combine it with the fact that I was raised in one of the most beautiful, blackest cities in America, a city where movements for civil rights and social justice are birthed, the city of Detroit. So I can’t stand silent when injustice exists, where the truth is obscured. If there’s one thing Detroit instilled in this Palestinian girl from Southwest it’s that you always speak truth to power, even if your voice shakes. The freedom of Palestinians is connected to the fight against oppression all over the world.”