The indivisibility of justice requires that the Palestinian liberation movement support the Black liberation struggle with the same fierce determination as we do our own.
H.R. 2748 is the Israel Relations Normalization Act of 2021. It just passed the House of Representatives and the Senate last week. It expands the Abraham Accords, Trump-era weapons and business deals between apartheid Israel and other authoritarian regimes. These deals bribe Arab countries in the region to both ignore Israel’s settler colonialism and constant human rights violations. When we hear the phrases Normalizing and Israel, we should always read Normalizing Israel’s impunity and violence.
The conflict over Iron Dome funding in congress is undeniably a result of the Unity Intifada and the global solidarity it engendered with Palestinians. As we come to the end of 2021, it is important that we seize the opportunity to disrupt the business as usual of unbridled US military support for Israel.
Taher Herzallah and Kareem El-Hosseiny will come before Superior Court judge Marisa Demeo on Thursday, April 20th to hear potential motions regarding their disruption of David Friedman’s nomination hearing to become US ambassador to Israel. Nadya Raja Tannous interviews them on the eve of the hearing about their case, why they didn’t take a plea deal, and whether they would do it again. “While we are allowed traditional ways to state our views we still were not heard. Sometimes the only way to have a voice is by literally speaking out,” Herzallah explains.
Nadya Raja Tannous writes, “On my trip to Standing Rock, I saw a kind of overarching control, surveillance and government force that is horrifyingly similar to life in occupied Palestine. Because of Mondoweiss, what I saw on the ground in Standing Rock reached communities who could not witness it themselves. Please join me in donating to Mondoweiss to support their commitment to covering real news on pertinent issues that mainstream news outlets don’t cover.”
Nadya Raja Tannous drove from the Bay Area to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation near Bismarck, North Dakota to join hundreds of representatives of Indigenous Nations around the world who have come to support resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline: “I had spent most of the hours on the road to North Dakota contemplating the connections between the obstacles and oppressions facing those in Standing Rock and the obstacles and oppressions facing we Palestinians under occupation and apartheid. However, upon arriving at Standing Rock, I no longer just thought about the similarities, I felt them in my bones.”
Nadya Raja Tannous writes about the destruction of the Church of the Multiplication on the shores of the Sea of Galilee by Israeli settlers and the massacre of 9 people by a white supremacist in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.