Grand Rapids, MI – The Palestine Solidarity Committee of Grand Rapids organized a sign-holding in conjunction with groups across the world recognizing the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, November 29. The event was part of a call to action put out by the US Palestinian Community Network.

Drivers were met with Palestine flags and chants of, “From the belly of the beast – no justice, no peace!” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho! The occupation’s got to go!” at the busy intersection. A few onlookers joined in on the call to “Free Palestine,” while others honked their horns in support.

“I would honk if I had a horn,” said a passing cyclist, raising his fist.

The event opened with chanting, followed by two speeches from Mike DeRuiter and Hannine Aqel. DeRuiter connected the struggles faced by working people in receiving basic healthcare to the annual $4 billion of aid sent to Israel for the slaughter of Palestinians.

DeRuiter stated, “Why can’t I afford basic necessities while so much money is going to Israel? In the West Bank, they just destroyed a school,” referring to the new Isfey al-Fauqa school demolished last week by occupation forces in Masafer Yatta. The school was attended by 22 students, aged six to eleven.

Hannine Aqel, a Palestinian living in Grand Rapids, gave a moving speech followed by a poem she had written. “Parts of our culture and our revolution have been completely erased or misconstrued,” said Aqel. “I see it in American media, where the same rules don’t apply to us. We are not‘freedom fighters or revolutionaries; we are ‘terrorists and extremists.’”

Aqel’s speech detailed her own identity struggles as a Palestinian woman, and her grappling with recognizing portions of her family still live under occupation.

“The guilt ate me alive because I knew my family in Palestine would never get to see what I’m seeing or experience what I’m experiencing,” said Aqel. “They say ‘Janna is enough’ or ‘Heaven is enough’. I know they are right, but has the world failed them so badly they can only dream of life after death?”

The speech ended with a beautiful poem she wrote, describing an embrace of her identity as a Palestinian.

“I am Palestine It’s as if God moved me from Her dirt As if my heart was built from the very stone thrown at armored vehicles Or as if my blood was created from the martyrs that came before me It’s as if my voice came from the screams of the voiceless As if my soul came from the breath of the Halhuli wind And my veins were created were created from the roots of an olive tree It’s as if my brain was formed from the collective Palestinian knowledge Or as if my tears come from the Dead Sea Who am I, you ask? I am Palestine.”

#GrandRapidsMI #Palestine #FreePalestine #USPalestinianCommunityNetworkUSPCN #MiddleEast

Palestine’s enemy today is not only Israel and its US backers, but also those who are rewarded for complying with Oslo: the Palestinian Authority, those who take money from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the diplomatic and lobby missions – like the Muslim Leadership Initiative – that reflect Zionist aspirations.

From the Jordanian monarchy and US-funded Egyptian leadership to the treachery of Gulf countries and big Arab capitalists, normalization in a post-Oslo world is a concept and practice rejected by Palestinian fighters, organizers and activists in the homeland and diaspora.

These different forces normalize the existence of Israel and the “two-state” concession plan as envisioned by Oslo. Those who cling to the futile “two-state solution,” and believe a Zionist, settler-colonial entity can reform and thus become some kind of “normal” partner of Palestinians and Arabs, must be isolated and defeated. These normalizers help silence, arrest, assassinate and surveil members of the Palestine liberation movement and our allies, per the Oslo security protocol drawn up by Zionists and the US.

The betrayal by Yasser Arafat and those around him at Oslo – keeping negotiators in Madrid in the dark over the secret talks – manifested into a public “peace” initiative that abandoned the Palestinian people after the sacrifices and steadfastness in Lebanon in the 1970s and early ‘80s, and the first intifada of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the fight for liberation, from the river to the sea, continues despite the Oslo-born PA.

The constants

Palestinians and Arabs have the right to resist military occupation and settler-colonialism, including by armed resistance. The Palestine liberation struggle is committed to the thawabet (“constants”), which truly unifies the movement and are today maintained by the coordinated resistance in Palestine and support from the entirety of the diaspora. These thawabet are:

1) Self-determination and independence for the Palestinian people from the river to the sea, with Jerusalem as our indivisible capital;

2) The non-negotiable Right of Return (including restitution and reparations) for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants to the homes and lands they were exiled from since the beginning of Zionist colonization, in 1947-1948, and again in 1967;

3) The right of resistance in all its forms to end the colonization and occupation of all Palestinian and Arab lands.

Palestinian martyrs, prisoners and refugees bear the brunt of sell-out Oslo policies, which laid the groundwork for the especially shameless “security coordination” between Israel and the PA. This coordination targets our own people, including Bassel al-Araj, who openly decried the PA’s treachery and was assassinated by the Israelis in 2017.

PA thugs did the deed themselves when Nizar Banat, a prominent and popular leader who amplified anti-corruption and anti-normalization demands, was killed last year.

Hundreds of Palestinians in the homeland rallied for justice for Banat and were met with batons and other violence by the PA police and “security forces.” The US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) is currently one of a number of US-based organizations that are in the leadership of an international campaign to ensure accountability for Nizar’s murder.

When Al Jazeera journalist and US citizen Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by the Israelis in Jenin in May of this year, all of the contradictions of Oslo came to the fore once again.

Security collusion

Except under exceptional circumstances, the agreement bans Israel from entering “Area A,” (which constitutes approximately 18 percent of the land of the West Bank) and is ostensibly under full civilian and security control of the PA). But Israel ignores this and attacks Palestinians whenever and wherever it wants.

Israel has brazenly ignored its responsibilities within the agreement for decades, but the PA continues to function as if Oslo is binding. The PA did not and could not protect Abu Akleh. And the fight for justice and accountability in the international arena and in the US Congress is being fought mostly by her family and advocates.

The PA’s security apparatus, in collusion with Israel and the US, also targets student organizers. Students in Hebron, Birzeit, Nablus and other places have been abducted and imprisoned by PA police, and it is clearly Oslo and security coordination that is the source of the repression.

The PA sometimes even delivers Palestinian revolutionaries to Israel, as we have seen over many years in, among many examples, from the prominent case of Ahmad Saadat, to, just recently in September, when two Palestinians – one of whom is high on Israel’s “wanted list” – were arrested by the PA in Nablus. Palestinians there responded to this arrest by confronting the PA police, which shot and killed a protester.

The security coordination between Israel and the PA feeds into Israel’s colonial political prisoner system, where any Palestinian can be jailed without charge and tried before a military court, a tool used regularly to target influential organizers, create fear and trauma, and fracture the grassroots resistance movement.

A number of institutions in the US have initiated and supported campaigns to advocate for the release of abducted political prisoners like Khalida Jarrar, Khitam Saafin, Ata Khattab, and Ubai Aboudi, and children like Ahmad Manasra, while also championing hunger strikers like Khalil Awawdeh and Hisham Abu Hawash.

Some of these prisoners are leaders of grassroots institutions – such as the six recently designated as “terrorist organizations” by Israel – that organize to create a reality independent of Zionism and corrupt PA influence.

Oslo also created conditions for economic partnerships between Israel and the PA. These settler-colonial investments favor a class of Palestinians that operates to control and exploit the working class masses. Oslo left the PA almost entirely financially reliant on international donors and Israeli tax collections, and thus vulnerable to donor sentiment and Israel’s good graces. Not surprisingly, this has caused anything from food insecurity and monopolizing capital to exposing Palestinian villages like Birzeit to toxic waste and hazardous working conditions.

Rejecting the PA

PA agents for Oslo have been active in the US for years, but many organizations have rejected PA attempts to engage them in dialogue.

Last year, USPCN publicly called out a coalition effort that was ostensibly formed to unite Palestinians in the US, but ultimately exposed as a front for the PA. Also last year, a PA initiative to revive the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) was rejected by Palestinian students in the US, who exposed it as an attempt to detract from their already-successful organizing outside of the PA’s influence. (For the sake of clarity, there is a GUPS at San Francisco State University that has been active for decades, and has absolutely no connection to the PA.)

In addition, institutions across the diaspora stood firmly alongside forces inside Palestine that rejected the most recent Palestine National Council meeting in April. This was not out of a lack of support for the PNC, but because Palestinians in the US were clearly handpicked by the PA to attend and help elect a new Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee that is, unfortunately, no longer representative – as it was in its heyday – of all Palestinians in the homeland and diaspora.

To reject Oslo is to reject normalization, all two-state solutions, and US and other imperialist funding. And despite living here as immigrants, refugees and citizens, Palestinians and Arabs in the US are still part and parcel of the Arab world and the indivisible nation of Palestine. In the US, our communities recognize that the tactic of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) is also a rejection of normalization, and an effective tool to place economic pressure on Israel.

One of the major lessons of Oslo is that Palestinians are not in any kind of state-building stage, as the PA has tried to argue for decades. We are still in the national liberation stage of our movement, and accordingly, we must unite across political lines, ideological persuasions and social sectors to defeat the colonizers. Palestinian political unity around the thawabet (constants) and unity within the resistance itself are prime examples of what our people want and the trajectory of the liberation movement.

Today’s PLO is used duplicitously to consolidate power in the hands of the PA, which is still led by a stream within Fatah. This does not mean that the PLO should be abandoned or liquidated. On the contrary. To uphold the thawabet, the PLO must be rebuilt and reformed to again become the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinian social sectors, political forces, resistance organizations and geographical regions across Palestine and further afield, including those that were not part of the original body. The PLO must again lead our unified national liberation movement.

The vast majority of Palestinians worldwide are anti-Oslo, anti-normalization, anti-PA and pro-resistance. When it was clear that the deal was a “peace for capital” arrangement and not a path to liberation, Oslo was ultimately rejected by the Palestinian people. It could never, and will never, silence our unbreakable will on the road to liberation.

Kareem Youssef is a long-time organizer with USPCN’s Southern California chapter and a PhD student in Materials Science at UCLA. Mishlin Mekleh is an organizer with USPCN’s Southern California chapter and serves the greater Arab community of the Southland with mental health support and healing.

This article first appeared November 10 in The Electronic Intifada.

#UnitedStates #Palestine #Oslo #FreePalestine #USPalestinianCommunityNetworkUSPCN #MiddleEast

Chicago, IL – The Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine led a crowd of close to 1000 people, mostly youth from the Palestinian community in the Chicago area, to protest the attacks on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, April 18. The Coalition includes the American Muslims for Palestine, United States Palestinian Community Network (UCPSN), Students for Justice in Palestine- Chicago (SJP), Al-Nahda, Palestinian American Community Center, and Palestinian American Council.

Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam, and repeatedly since Friday, April 15, Israeli soldiers and police have attacked it. They chose a Friday, the night when the largest number of people are there praying. The attack also took place during Ramadan, the most sacred month of the year for Muslims.

“This is unacceptable, Jerusalem’s our capital,” chanted the crowd. The Zionist state has declared Jerusalem as its capital, but it was the center of Palestinian society before the European settles began to arrive in the late 19th century.

The protesters listened to speeches for about an hour, then marched through the Loop, Chicago’s business district, for another hour.

One chant expressed the Palestinian movement’s rejection of the failed two state solution, “There is only one solution, Intifada Revolution.”

Since April 1, which marked the beginning of Ramadan, Israel’s occupation forces went on a rampage, killing 18 Palestinians and injuring several hundred. The occupation army did the same last year during Ramadan.

In addition to Palestinian speakers, a statement was read from Rev. Dr. Waltrina Middleton, executive director of the Community Renewal Society. She wrote, “I must condemn the violent and fatal use of force upon worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque during Jumu’ah [Friday] prayers,” and “The inequitable use of force against unarmed worshippers and Palestinians at-large are crimes against humanity, and there must be outrage and denouncement by global leaders, faith communities and all who believe in justice and peace for all.”

She went on, pointing out the hypocrisy of the U.S. government’s calls for solidarity with Ukraine while demonizing those who rally in solidarity with Palestine:

“How do we enforce justice and freeze financial assets to stop Russia from imposing war on Ukraine, but underwrite billions in aid to support Israel’s illegal occupation and imposition of war on Palestine?”

“How do we impose blockades and freeze assets in Russia, while U.S. senators – including Ben Cardin of Maryland and Sherrod Brown of Ohio – rally in support of criminalizing and penalizing anyone who supports BDS [Boycotting, Divesting and Sanctions] against Israeli’s illegal occupation of Palestine?”

#ChicagoIL #Palestine #StudentsForJusticeInPalestineSJP #USPalestinianCommunityNetworkUSPCN #MiddleEast

Chicago, IL – The U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) commemorated the Nakba, “Catastrophe” in English, which marks the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, and the massacre of thousands more, by Zionist militia groups in 1948, in the wake of the establishment of the settler colonial state of Israel. Palestinians and their supporters all around the world remember the Nakba every year on or around May 15.

On May 14, USPCN-New York member Suzanne Adely moderated a webinar with George Khoury, a Nakba survivor and longtime Detroit-based organizer, and Rasmea Odeh, the famous former Palestinian political prisoner who, after a politically-charged prosecution that was an attack on her organizing and the Palestine national movement as a whole, was deported from the U.S. in 2017.

After George Khoury told his powerful Nakba story, Rasmea Odeh provided a historical analysis and talked about Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism. Both emphasized the need to continue organizing for justice and liberation, especially in the U.S., which provides Israel over $5 billion of military and other aid per year. The U.S. under Trump has taken even more extreme steps to support the racist state, like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, accepting Israel’s declaration of full sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is stolen Syrian land, and proposing the “Deal of the Century,” a sham peace plan that ignores all Palestinian rights.

“The Nakba taught me that whatever is taken by force, it must be taken back by force, and thus we need to organize and tell our people: Your history was denied, your future was denied. The only way to get liberation is to organize,” stated Khoury at the end of his speech.

Odeh added to Khoury’s statement: “We will accept nothing less than our right of return, and to create a democratic state on our land.”

The next day, USPCNs Chicago chapter organized a Palestinian Car Caravan, in which 75 cars and over 100 community members and allies participated.

The caravan started in Chicago’s southwest suburbs, home to one of the largest communities of Palestinians and Arabs in the U.S., and drove to the Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago, where U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth have offices.

Simultaneously, USPCN organized a Twitter storm, asking supporters to call their Representatives in the U.S. Congress and demand that they support the No Way to Treat a Child bill (HR 2407), which calls for Israel to stop the detention of children, and take action to end the blockade on Gaza now.

One Palestinian from Chicagoland, who is a descendant of refugees barred from returning to their homes that were stolen in 1948, declared, “The Right of Return to our homes is a must! We will never forget. We will keep on organizing and fighting until we are able to return home.”

#ChicagoIL #InJusticeSystem #OppressedNationalities #Palestine #SpecialCoverage #MiddleEast #PeoplesStruggles #alNakba #Antiracism #PoliticalRepression #RasmeaOdeh #USPalestinianCommunityNetworkUSPCN

Three war criminals – Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli politician Benny Gantz – have met in DC this week, and today unveiled the announcement of Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s self-proclaimed “deal of the century.”

As Palestinians and Arabs living and organizing in the U.S., we join the voices of our people in besieged Gaza and all across Palestine and the Arab World in fully rejecting this sham peace process created by the apartheid, settler-colonial state of Israel and its U.S. imperialist patron – and by declaring it “dead on arrival”!

Details of the plan suggest that Trump is creating another roadmap for Israel to expand its illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian land – a continuation of three years of anti-Palestinian policy that includes declaring unilaterally that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, cutting U.S. funding for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides support and services for Palestinian refugees), claiming Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and shutting down the only U.S. Consulate (in Jerusalem) that serves Palestinians.

The plan will allow Israel to annex all of Jerusalem, as well as 30-40 percent of Area C, which makes up 60 percent of the West Bank and is already under full Israeli military and administrative control from the days of the Oslo Accords. This territory includes the Jordan Valley, giving the Israelis permanent control of Palestine’s eastern border.

Israel will also be given the green light to annex all but 15 of the 121 settlements in the West Bank. These settlements have been built exclusively for Israelis over many decades on already-stolen Palestinian land; and even though the U.S. does not acknowledge it under Trump, are illegal under international law.

In addition, Israel will maintain uncontested military control over all the territory of historic Palestine, and the Palestinian Authority would have to disarm resistance organizations and demilitarize the Gaza Strip.

The plan asks for no concessions from Israel except for a temporary halt of new settlements.

This “deal” is an attempt at a panacea for many. It will be announced while Trump faces impeachment in Congress, while Netanyahu faces corruption charges of his own in Israel, and while the unipolar world defined by U.S. dominance is diminishing by the day – partially because of the economic strength and sustainability of socialist China, but mostly because of the U.S.’ consistent political and military failures in the Middle East and the world, costing taxpayers like us trillions of dollars.

This “deal” is also a favorite of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which want to thwart the recent advances of the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Yemen, Hezbollah, and Syria) by supporting this expansionist U.S. / Zionist project.

USPCN wants to remind all of the failed Oslo Accords, which some in our national liberation movement at the time thought would lead to real peace. But it – and every “peace agreement” that followed – only led to Palestinian concessions and Israeli expansion, because it did not address our thawabet, the “constants”: our rights to Return, to self-determination, to resist occupation and colonization, and to liberation in an independent state on all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital.

Our people ultimately rejected Oslo and have already rejected Trump’s ridiculous “deal of the century.” It makes no difference what Trump, Kushner, Netanyahu, Gantz, or Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen (who continues his “security coordination” with the Israelis) say or do, because the Palestinian people will continue to resist, by any and all means necessary, U.S. / Zionist plans for the liquidation of our rights. And the international community will continue to organize BDS campaigns across the world and isolate Israel as the criminal, apartheid state that it is.

Peace and justice for Palestinians and everyone else who lives in the Arab World and Middle East cannot be achieved without defeating Zionism and upholding the full rights of the Palestinian people. We call on all forces of progress to reject Trump and his reactionary policies in the U.S., in Palestine, and across the world.

#Palestine #AntiwarMovement #US #MiddleEast #PeoplesStruggles #DonaldTrump #USPalestinianCommunityNetworkUSPCN