New Yorkers took to the streets on Friday, 31 May as part of the international Al-Quds Day events calling for justice in Palestine. Over 100 people joined the Times Square protest on the last Friday of Ramadan, including activists from Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Within Our Lifetime, International Action Center, Decolonize This Place, Struggle/La Lucha, Al-Awda: Palestine Right to Return Coalition, People’s Power Assembly, International League of Peoples’ Struggle and others.
Joe Catron, the US Coordinator of Samidoun, delivered the following speech as part of the afternoon’s program of powerful chants and presentations demanding justice and liberation:
Today, in the 101st year of the Palestinian national movement, we gather at a moment of unprecedented clarity for both it and its enemies. Over the past year, two new developments – the Trump administration’s “Deal of the Century,” and the Great March of Return by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – have drawn the existing lines of division more starkly than ever before.
On one side, we see Palestine’s historic enemies – not only the Israeli state, the Zionist movement, and the imperialist powers, but also Arab reaction, led by the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – colluding more publicly than ever before to foist surrender onto the Palestinian people.
On the other, the looming threat of Trump’s “Deal” has inspired a new wave of Palestinian popular unity and struggle, exemplified most spectacularly in Gaza’s Great March of Return.
In 2003, the Irish writer Kevin Toolis, comparing his country’s struggle for liberation with Palestine’s, reflected: “You can’t make a deal with the dead.”
Indeed, the Palestinian national movement’s “red lines” – its unanimous demands for return and self-determination throughout the whole of historic Palestine – have always been drawn in the blood of its martyrs, forming barriers no political figure or faction would ever dare to cross.
Since March 30, 2018 – Palestinian Land Day, and the beginning of the Great March of Return – its hundreds of martyrs have demonstrated not only the strength of this Palestinian national consensus.
Their resistance, along with that of other Palestinians, has also shown where Palestine’s leadership lies: in its brigades, its prisoners, and its popular classes of workers and farmers, whose daughters and sons continue to fill the front lines of the Great March.
Finally, I would like to share a few words from one of these leaders, our comrade Ahmad Sa’adat, general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, written earlier this month from his cell in Israel’s Ramon Prison:
In order for us to accomplish our goals, to achieve our liberation, we must build an international popular front confronting imperialism. This is, was and always will be a task for all revolutionaries around the world. We stand together in one camp confronting common enemies: capitalism, imperialism, Zionism, racism and reaction.
From the battles against repressive forces and isolation here in Ramon prison to the fight to defend indigenous land and popular movements in Brazil to the movement for peasant and worker justice in the Philippines, we are labeled “terrorists” because we work to protect our land and our people; in reality, we face the same forces of terror and domination that extract our wealth and resources and exploit our people in the most brutal of circumstances…
The goal of every struggling revolutionary prisoner, whether in the prisons of the U.S., the Philippines, Turkey or the Zionist jails in Palestine, is to obtain freedom, not a momentary amelioration of torture. We are not simply seeking to moderate or reform the social and economic conditions of our people. We must be clear: we are struggling for socialism, for an alternative world – and in order to achieve victory, we must struggle together.
Event marking 71 years of the Nakba, the day of the occupation of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinian people. The keynote speaker will be Archbishop Atallah Hanna, a living legend of Palestinian resistance.
While our comrade Georges Abdallah has beguns since last October his 35th year of detention, the voices and forces that mobilize to demand his release continue to grow. This mobilization is growing on the national and international level.
Join us for this fantastic opportunity to hear from Rasmea Odeh, one of the leading lights in the Palestinian liberation struggle and a former political prisoner both in Israel and the United States, and Suzanne Adely, a revolutionary organizer and movement lawyer.
Join the NYC-DSA Anti-War Working Group as we canvas in support of H.R. 2407, the “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation” Act.
On first of June, 2019, Edmonton will host its ninth annual Al-Quds Day rally. Al-Quds Day is commemorated all over the planet and we are doing our part in Edmonton. We will honor the Palestinian resistance for justice. With the current series of injustice, we cannot afford to remain silent. Please spread the word! Remember, you don’t need to be Palestinian to care, you simply have to be human.
#QudsDay #FreeAlQuds #AlQudsDay
Set Them Free!!