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Combahee River Collective - How We Get Free

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Combahee River Collective - How We Get Free

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G26TaUQFBMrunS9ujChWyDMBXadANl3_/view?usp=sharing

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This zine is written and illustrated to make accessible the theories of Black Marxist and prison abolitionist scholars including Cedric Robi... See More

This zine is written and illustrated to make accessible the theories of Black Marxist and prison abolitionist scholars including Cedric Robi... See More

Connecting content to people.

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Racial Capitalism & Prison Abolition Zine

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This zine is written and illustrated to make accessible the theories of Black Marxist and prison abolitionist scholars including Cedric Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis and others. We invite you to share this zine widely.

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Something I've been delving into deeply and plan to go through this summer is this Revolutionary Study Guide! Its free and also curated by @bountay_ on instagram!

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How To Effectively Read and Engage with Radical Literature

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How To Effectively Read and Engage with Radical Literature

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Before you start reading anything, this can provide some good tips. I found this posted on someone's story on twitter and decided to turn it into a PDF because I think it is incredibly important and effective! Follow the person who made this on Instagram @bountay_ They are TRULY wonderful

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Active reading is a process or technique of actively engaging with the text we are reading. Often, we read passively-that is, we take in the information we read without questioning its validity and without making personal connections with the text. When we passively read, we do not gain as much from our reading as when we actively read.

Why Actively Read?

In "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr claims deep reading is tied to deep thinking. If this claim is true, then moving beyond surface level readings in a way that truly engages with the text can help us develop our abilities to think more clearly and more intelligently about a topic and about the world in which we live. Additionally, active reading, as opposed to the passive reading we do when skimming items or reading for pleasure, can help us

Save time because we pay more attention to what we read the first time and do not waste time rereading.

Prepare us for exams because we gain a more in-depth knowledge of the material.

Stay informed about a subject that interests us.

Develop exposure to new ideas or have familiar concepts reinforced.

Create a deeper understanding of life's complexities.

Achieve intellectual growth.

Goals of Active Reading

When we read actively, we try to understand the text thoroughly by reading slowly and carefully, pausing to question a main idea or to reexamine a passage that confuses us, and interpreting the larger meanings and implications of the text we're reading. We try to keep our minds actively thinking about what the text means. In general, active reading allows us to

Capture main ideas, key concepts, and details of reading.

Target, reduce, and distill the needed information from the text.

Engage with the text by making connections with our own knowledge and lives.

Ask questions that help us think deeper about the content.

Strategies for Active Reading

Many techniques can help us read more actively. Here are a few of the main ones:

1. Start by previewing the text.

1. Scan the title, subtitle, footnotes, pictures, and headings in the text. What do these tell you about the topic being discussed in the reading?

2. Think about what you know about the topic. You already know a great deal about many topics. What preconceived notions might you bring to the reading?

3. Look for information about the author. What does the author's other works tell you about his or her stance?

4. Think about the rhetorical situation. What is the author's purpose? Who is the author's intended audience?

2. Read the text carefully and write ideas about the text in the margins, on your own paper, or on sticky notes placed in the text.

1. Circle and look up the definitions to words you do not know or cultural references that you are not familiar with.

2. Underline the thesis or main idea.

3. Ask questions about the text. Questions may consider topics such as the author's purpose or goal in writing, his or her use of evidence to support claims, or his or her use of language. Pause to think of questions you have about the topic at various points in the reading.

4. Make connections between your own life experiences or knowledge and the text. Does the argument agree with your prior experiences? Have you read other texts with similar arguments? Do you think most people would agree with the evidence presented in the text? Has your own life confirmed or denied any of the arguments in the text?

5. Find patterns within the text. Does the writer use repetition to get a point across?

6. Identify assumptions the author makes in presenting the argument. Are the assumptions valid? Do the author's assumptions challenge your own? In what ways?

7. Interpret key passages to find the underlying meaning. Are there parts of the texts that can be interpreted in multiple ways? How do you interpret key passages? What does the text really mean?

3. Reread the text.

1. Review passages that are difficult. Now that you've read the text, can you more easily identify the meaning of difficult passages? What can you look up that might help you dissect the text's meaning?

2. Find shifts in points of view or in voice and identify any language that might cue you into the underlying meanings in the text.

3. Paraphrase difficult passages by restating the passage in your own words.

4. Create a summary of the text's main argument in your own words.

5. Try to describe the text to someone who has not read it.

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Active reading is a process or technique of actively engaging with the text we are reading. Often, we read passively-that is, we take in the information we read without questioning its validity and without making personal connections with the text. When we passively read, we do not gain as much from our reading as when we actively read.

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This is a bit of a controversial book for a number of reasons, but I think it's something for us to consider.

This article provides a bit of context

Want to know more about Saul Alinsky?

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Note: You need a pdf reader to access this document.

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adrienne maree brown - Emergent Strategy_ Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017, AK Press) - libgen.lc

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Preview: https://books.google.com/books?id=JBwwDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

First 20 pages:

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excerpts from Emergent Strategy - Brown, Adrienne Maree(1) (1)

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The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

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The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

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If you like to listen: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLTpLv5a69exoz74C0D8Zt-yU4XO4lcK-

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Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots

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Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots

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By Dave Beckwith, with Cristina Lopez, Center for Community Change

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When clicking on this post, try choosing the "open in a different window" for a quick loading time.

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This Bridge Called My Back - Writings by Radical Women of Color

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This Bridge Called My Back - Writings by Radical Women of Color

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When clicking on this post, try choosing the "open in a different window" for a quick loading time.

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

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if you like to listen: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCTCcp07wftxG7WzVtLAQT8BTHQ8pESH-

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We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy.

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We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. By using our website and our services, you agree to our use of cookies as described in our Cookie Policy.

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Here's an interesting article to preface this statement. It details some history on the Collective and also discusses the 2016 election. https://monthlyreview.org/2019/01/01/black-feminism-and-the-combahee-river-collective/

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Explore our interactive map to discover the many different but related identities and expressions that make up the idea of “gender.”

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When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence.

Hulton Archive / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Updated at 1:37 p.m. ET on July 20, 2020.
We called 911 for almost everything except snitching.

Nosebleeds, gunshot wounds, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. Police accompanied the paramedics.

Our neighborhood made us sick. A Praxair industrial gas-storage facility was at one end of my block. A junkyard with exposed military airplane and helicopter parts was at the other. The fish-seasoning plant in our backyard did not smell as bad as the yeast from the Budweiser factory nearby. Car honks and fumes from Interstate 64 crept through my childhood bedroom window, where, if I stood on my toes, I could see the St. Louis arch.*

Environmental toxins degraded our health, and often conspired with other violence that pervaded our neighborhood. Employment opportunities were rare, and my friends and I turned to making money under the table. I was scared of selling drugs, so I gambled. Brown-skinned boys I liked aged out of recreational activities, and, without alternatives, into blue bandanas. Their territorial disputes led to violence and 911 calls. Grown-ups fought too, stressed from working hard yet never having enough bill money or gas money or food money or day-care money. Call 911.

Recommended Reading

When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence.

The first shooting I witnessed was by a uniformed security guard. I was 13. I remember that the guard was angry that his cousin skipped a sign-in sheet at my neighborhood recreation center; the victim told police it had started as an argument over "something stupid." I was teaching my sister how to shoot free throws when the guard stormed in alongside the court, drew his weapon, and shot the boy in the arm. My sister and I hid in the locker room for hours afterward. The guard was back at work the following week.**

Like the boy at the rec center who was shot by the guard, most victims of police violence survive. No hashtags or protests or fires for the wounded, assaulted, and intimidated. I often wonder, What if Derek Chauvin had kneeled on George Floyd's neck for seven minutes and 46 seconds instead of eight? Maybe Floyd would have lived to be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit $20 bill. Is that justice? This, for me, is why we need police abolition. Police manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete.
Annie Lowrey: Defund the police
"Police abolition" initially repulsed me. The idea seemed white and utopic. I'd seen too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in St. Louis, let alone the nation. But in reality, the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, as the legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, and something feels like everything when your other option is nothing.

Police couldn't do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. We were afraid every time we called. When the cops arrived, I was silenced, threatened with detention, or removed from my home. Fifteen years later, my old neighborhood still lacks quality food, employment, schools, health care, and air-all of which increases the risk of violence and the reliance on police. Yet I feared letting go; I thought we needed them.

Until the Ferguson, Missouri, cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Brown had a funeral. Wilson had a wedding. Most police officers just continue to live their lives after filling the streets with blood and bone.

I drove from Ferguson to law-school orientation two weeks after Brown's death. I met, studied, and struggled alongside students and movement lawyers who explained the power and the purpose of the prison-industrial complex through an abolitionist framework. Black abolitionists have condemned the role of prisons and police for centuries, even before W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction. They imagined and built responses to harm rooted in community and accountability. In recent decades, abolitionists have developed alternatives to 911, created support systems for victims of domestic violence, prevented new jail construction, reduced police budgets, and shielded undocumented immigrants from deportation. Abolition, I learned, was a bigger idea than firing cops and closing prisons; it included eliminating the reasons people think they need cops and prisons in the first place.

We never should have had police. Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, tailored in America to suppress slave revolts, catch runaways, and repress labor organizing. After slavery, police imprisoned Black people and immigrants under a convict-leasing system for plantation and business owners. During the Jim Crow era, cops enforced segregation and joined lynch mobs that grew strange fruit from southern trees. During the civil-rights movement, police beat the hell out of Black preachers, activists, and students who marched for equality wearing their Sunday best. Cops were the foot soldiers for Richard Nixon's War on Drugs and Joe Biden's 1994 crime bill. Police departments pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters without provocation and indiscriminately teargassed Black Lives Matter activists for years-including me, twice. Black people I know trust police; they trust them to be exactly what they always have been.

After each video of a police killing goes viral, popular reforms go on tour: banning choke holds, investing in community policing, diversifying departments-none of which would have saved Floyd or most other police victims. The Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa wrote to me in an email:

At best, these reforms discourage certain techniques of killing, but they don't condemn the fact of police killing. "Ban the chokehold!" But allow murder with guns and tasers and police vans? The analogy here is to death-penalty reformers who improved the noose with the electric chair, and then improved the electric chair with chemical cocktails.

But the technique of murder doesn't comfort the dead. It comforts the executioners-and all their supportive onlookers. Like so much reform to address racism, all this legal fine print is meant to salve the conscience of moderates who want salvation on the cheap, without any real change to the material life-and-death realities for Black people.

When Donald Trump was elected president, many liberals feared the end of consent decrees, legal agreements between the Department of Justice and police departments, intended to spur real change. After law school, I worked for the Advancement Project, which supported community organizers in Ferguson on the decree that was negotiated in the aftermath of Brown's death. Millions of dollars went toward an investigation, publicity, and a lawsuit to rid the Ferguson Police Department of "bad apples" and transform its culture. After a year of militaristic ambush on the community, the consent decree provided members of the police department with mental-health services to cope with the unrest, but no treatment or restitution for the residents who were teargassed, shot with rubber bullets, and traumatized by the tanks at the edge of their driveways. The Obama administration's DOJ objected to dismissing thousands of old cases that were the result of unconstitutional policing, and protected the police department from criticisms that community organizers shared with the judge in court.

Tracey L. Meares and Tom R. Tyler: The first step is figuring out what police are for

Constitutional policing is a problem too. As the legal scholar Paul Butler explains, the overwhelming majority of police violence is constitutional. Reforms cannot fix a policing system that is not broken.

Still, many Americans believe that most police officers do the right thing. Perhaps there are bad apples.But even the best apples surveil, arrest, and detain millions of people every year whose primary "crime" is that they are poor or homeless, or have a disability. Cops escalate violence disproportionately against people with disabilities and in mental-health crises, even the ones who call 911 for help. The police officers who are doing the "right thing" maintain the systems of inequality and ableism in black communities. The right thing is wrong.

Policing cannot even fix the harms of our nightmares. People often ask me, "What will we do with murderers and rapists?" Which ones? The police kill more than a thousand people every year, and assault hundreds of thousands more. After excessive force, sexual misconduct is the second-most-common complaint against cops. Many people are afraid to call the police when they suffer these harms, because they fear that the police will hurt them. Thousands of rape survivors refuse to call the police, worried about not being believed or about being re-assaulted, or concerned that their rape kit would sit unexamined for years. In three major cities, less than 4 percent of calls to the police are for "violent crimes." Currently, police departments are getting worse at solving murders and frequently arrest and force confessions out of the wrong people.

So if we abolish the police, what's the alternative? Who do we call? As someone who grew up calling 911, I also shared this concern. I learned this: Just because I did not know an answer didn't mean that one did not exist. I had to study and join an organization, not just ask questions on social media. I read Rachel Herzing, a co-director of the Center for Political Education, who explains that creating small networks of support for different types of emergencies can make us safer than we are now, and reduce our reliance on police. The Oakland Power Projects trains residents to build alternatives to police by helping residents prevent and respond to harm. San Francisco Mayor London Breed just announced that trained, unarmed professionals will respond to many emergency calls, and Los Angeles city-council members are demand ing a similar model. This is the right idea. Rather than thinking of abolition as just getting rid of police, I think about it as an invitation to create and support lots of different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most exciting, as an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

Derek Thompson: Unbundle the police

Defunding the police is one step on a broad stairway toward abolition. Cities can reduce the size and scope of police and thus limit their opportunities to come into contact with civilians. There should be as much support for the anti-criminalization organizer Mariame Kaba's call to cut law enforcement by half as there has been to cut the prison population by half. Communities can demand hiring and budget freezes, budget cuts, and participatory budgeting opportunities to ensure that police will not be refunded in the future. States should stop the construction of new prisons and begin closing remaining ones by freeing the people inside. No new police academies should be established. These are only a few suggestions from a broader set of abolitionist demands.

More important, society must spend money and time reducing the root causes of violence. If we want to reduce sexual violence immediately, we should expand restorative and transformative processes for accountability. If we are committed to eliminating this harm long-term, then society must offer quality housing, food, day care, transit, employment, debt cancellation, and free college so that people will not be stuck in unhealthy relationships because they need food, money, health insurance, or a place to live.

If we care about reducing neighborhood killings, we must invest in street-violence interruption models such as the one that the feminist organization Taller Salud uses, which minimizes violence through community development and peace programs. These likely would have reduced killings and retaliation in my neighborhood without police. I wouldn't have hid in the locker room for hours because of a shooting, and maybe my sister would have a better jump shot. We can reduce and eliminate shootings long-term if we provide the most dispossessed communities with opportunities to thrive, and choose comprehensive gun reform over police occupation of our schools, places of worship, and neighborhoods.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Black family in the age of mass incarceration
Slavery abolition required resistance, risk, and experimentation. Black people rebelled, ran away, and built an underground railroad. Abolitionists wrote and orated against the "peculiar institution." Allies funded campaigns, passed legislation, and changed the Constitution. Of course, people then felt a range of anxieties about abolition. Slave owners worried about their plantations and the profits that the labor camps wrought. White overseers feared joblessness. Both feared the loss of superiority. Some Black people had reservations about how they'd sustain themselves without the steady, yet violent, protection of their owners. Police abolition triggers similar anxieties today-moral, economic, and otherwise.

But if abolitionists waited to convince every single person that liberation was worth the pursuit, Black people might still be on plantations. Slavery's violence and repression was riskier than Black people's plans, imagination, and will to be free. So they held the uncertainty in their bellies and started running.

Rather than waiting for comforting answers to every potential harm ahead of us, let's run. And continue to organize, imagine, and transform this country toward freedom and justice without police and violence. Let's run.

And never look back.
* An earlier version of this article misidentified the interstate as I-70. ** An earlier version of this article described the shooter as "a cop." In fact, he was an armed, uniformed security guard working at the municipal recreation center, employed by a security company under contract with the city of St. Louis. In addition, the author was 13, not 12, at the time of the incident.

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purpose of the prison-industrial complex

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When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence. Updated at 1:37 p.m. ET on July 20, 2020. We called 911 for almost everything except snitching. Nosebleeds, gunshot wounds, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. Police accompanied the paramedics.

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in case you like listening: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMp5zI6NyMrgW4iVkpyF4HY6bqUMJS7K2

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A wonderful podcast discussing abolition and how you can take action!

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A podcast about taking political action guided by the concepts of direct action, solidarity, autonomy and mutual aid.

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For resources on Community Accountability, Transformative Justice, Restorative Justice, Healing Justice, Abolition, and Carceral Feminisms

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TransformHarm.org | A Resource Hub For Ending Violence

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TransformHarm.org is a resource hub for ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. You can use what is here, and submit recommendations.

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Decade of Palestinian Resistance in the US

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Decade of Palestinian Resistance in the US

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The last 10 years of marked tremendous victories for the Palestinian national liberation movement in the United States.

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Within Our Lifetime | United for Palestine

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A wrap-up of the decade highlighting turning points in the Palestinian struggle and the movement here, that led to where and who we are as an organization today.

The first ever event/action held by SJP at CSI was centering the Palestinian right of return. Students wore all black holding up signs representing 1,531 villages that were depopulated during the Nakba, signifying the commemoration of the Palestinian catastrophe, and the right to return to our homelands.

"That's me in the back, in the green shirt. I am being patted down by the Public safety of CUNY just to get into a Students for Justice in Palestine event at Brooklyn College. Nope, they don't just customarily do this for all students or all clubs. Pretty ironic how to get into an event about Palestinian rights, we get our own rights invaded.
On top of going through a full metal detector, and being inspected by a wand scanner, having my coat and bag searched, I was still subjected to physical contact in which my entire body was patted down in front of a bunch of strangers. The only reason i was searched is the fact that I was going to a pro-Palestinian event.
This situation was very reminiscent of the checkpoints I had to go through during my visit to Palestine. Their only "suspicion" of me was based solely on my identity. My Palestinian identity which caused the same exact thing to occur in my hometown Brooklyn. It comes as no surprise to know that the NYPD and the IDF actually train together. The memories caused such a painful sudden onslaught of anger that I felt while being subjected to this. In my home, my country, my Palestine, I am forced to be checked and humiliated just for being who I am. And the same occurs to me in Brooklyn, the place I was raised in my whole life. Then where am I to feel safe? What place do i get to call a home when I am treated like a threat no matter where I go?
"

- Nerdeen, WOL Founder. November 2013

Earlier in the year, in February 2014 Members of SJP joined forces with Muslims Giving Back to provide free food for the hungry in NYC. (SJP + MGB collaboration for project Need2Feed)

Israeli Apartheid Week at the College of Staten Island and Brooklyn College March 2014

Students for Justice in Palestine at Hunter college stood in solidarity with the 43 missing students of the revolutionary rural teachers college of Ayotzinapa, Mexico. On September 26th, 2014, the students were on their way to protest and demand resources to keep the school running for another academic year when they were kidnapped and later disappeared by Mexican police in collaboration with drug cartels. The disappearances sparked an international solidarity movement with the poor and dispossessed peoples of Mexico, and parallels were drawn with the violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

Also in 2014, Palestinian leader in Chicago, Rasmea Odeh, who was affiliated with the Arab American Action Network, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and targeted after for repression and deportation as a result of her activism. Federal prosecutors accused her of falsifying information on her application for citizenship many years prior, using a confession which was extracted through torture by israeli officials as evidence. SJP chapters in NYC among other groups mobilized in defense of Rasmea and the larger attack on Palestinian organizations and organizers.

The rise of Black Lives Matter movement was crucial to the development of the politics of NYC SJP and the Palestine movement at large. In 2014, some of the most pertinent work of SJP chapters in NYC was support of Black Lives Matter protests, paralleling the supportgiven to Ferguson protestors by activists in Gaza. Participating in these mobilizations situated ourselves as participants not only in the fight for a free Palestine, but as fighters in a world-wide struggle against imperialism everywhere.

After attending the NSJP conference, we were reinvigorated to build up local organizing in NYC even further, and organized the first ever city-wide convergence of SJP chapters, which was held at John Jay in December. SJP members from almost all chapters in New York attended including New York University, Pace University, Columbia University, and multiple CUNY SJP chapters including Brooklyn, Hunter, CSI, and John Jay. During the convergence we held important conversations on building the movement outside of our campuses and built the foundation for what would later become New York City Students for Justice in Palestine.

We continued to develop connections with the struggles of oppressed people all over the city. We understood it was our duty to fight for these issues on our campuses, especially as the student movement amped up. Students were rising all over the country, as the Million Student March took hold nationwide. We worked with student groups on campus organizing for student issues and building support for Palestine. One group that would consistently support Palestine, and would also be at all of the BLM rallies was Anakbayan- NY, a revolutionary Filipino youth and student organization fighting for National democracy in the Philippines. From them we learned an important lesson in People power over student power.

in 2015 NYC SJP members launched a campaign to educate community members in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to boycott israeli dates, consumed largely in the month of Ramadan. This campaign, educating shop owners and the general public about BDS, was SJPs first true movement from campus back into the community as a political organization. Our regular presence in the Bay Ridge community allowed us to make new deep connections with community members, as Arab & Palestinian members of the organization that came from Bay Ridge reconnected politically with their friends and neighbors. Ultimately, through several years, this campaign was able to largely decrease the sale of israeli dates in Bay Ridge and create a renewed consciousness about Palestine in our neighborhood.

"SJP is primarily a student movement, but it cannot be divorced from a larger, off-campus movement that organizes for the progressive demands of the people, regardless if those demands are related to the university. Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, when framed as a tactic in a strategy to serve the people, is not only fighting to drop israeli investments, but is fighting to change the content of the Zionist, imperialist education itself, by engaging in a struggle to liberate the university and democratically administer it to serve the oppressed communities from New York City to Palestine. Solidarity with Palestine must go beyond symbolic divestment, which appeals primarily to the people and institutions that facilitate exploitation all over the world. If we do not continuously question and revise our overall strategy with guiding principles that go beyond the BDS demands, we risk becoming an NGO masquerading as an anti-imperialist solidarity organization."

- New York City Students for Justice in Palestine

In November, NYC SJP, with a coalition of other student organizations throughout the CUNY system, organized the Million Students March at Hunter College. We demanded not only the cancellation of upcoming tuition hikes, but the complete and total abolition of tuition period. We demanded, and still demand, a return to the open admissions policy, the cancellation of student debt, the divestment of CUNY investments from companies that facilitate the colonization of Palestine as well as private prisons and a livable wage for workers throughout the CUNY campuses. Beyond that, we fought for the abolition of the Board of Trustees, who is staffed by the likes of investment bankers, corporate lawyers and washed up politicians.

To understand our long-standing perspective on the university that many of our core membership came from, it's necessary to understand the general history of the City University of New York. For the vast majority of its life since 1847 CUNY was tuition-free. The tuition free policy survived a civil war, two world wars, and the great depression. It was only with the induction of the first majority non-white freshman class in 1976that tuition was imposed on this new generation of CUNY students.

Shortly after, we hosted Palestinian students from Birzeit university as part of the Right to Education tour, in our local Palestinian neighborhood Bay ridge, Brooklyn. The students helped NYCSJP outreach about israeli dates in the community, talking to local business owners about supporting the BDS movement. We also set up a meeting with the students and the International League of People's Struggle, an internationalist organization we joined while we were in the Philippines.

In November, we teamed up with Decolonize this place to release a zine highlighting the right to resist campaign.

We started off 2017 with a winter school as well as a Bay ridge resistance series. The winter school built upon what we learned in the summer school, and the winter series was a series of workshops for the community in response to increased anxiety with the election of Trump.

As part of our campaign, we stood firmly in support of all the heroic Palestinians participating in the mass hunger strike in May 2017 from inside the zionist prison walls and in support of their families, comrades, and communities fighting for them on the outside. We recognize and reaffirm their #RightToResistmass incarceration, political imprisonment and settler colonial occupation by any means necessary. Our Right to resist culminated into a rally we held in October 2017 along with the International League of People's Struggle.

In August, the U.S. and Canada chapters of the International League of People's Struggle held the Solidarity & Fight Back conference in Toronto, Canada. During the conference, the League launched its Resist U.S.-led War Movement to coordinate anti-war actions and campaigns across the North American continent. Legendary freedom-fighter Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine served as the keynote speaker of the conference. Within Our Lifetime took part in the ILPS US Northeast delegation to the conference, and was honored to be mentioned by panelist Rania Masri as an inspirational component of the Palestinian freedom struggle.

After 16-year old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was abducted and imprisoned in December 2017, we started off 2018 escalating our organizing efforts to demand her release. On January 5 we held a protest in the heart of Grand Central terminal to "Free Ahed Tamimi and All Palestinian Prisoners," shining a light on Ahed's struggle and the struggle of all Palestinian political prisoners in one of the busiest transit hubs in NYC.

Later that month, WOL's chair Nerdeen Kiswani was in NowThis Politics in a video highlighting Palestinian activists fighting for Ahed's freedom. "Ahed faces up to 10 years in prison as a result of her courage standing up to imperialist thugs threatening her family and her peoples' sovereignty. Her case is symbolic of what Palestinians face everyday under israeli occupation....Mass incarceration of indigenous peoples is a consistent strategy in the toolbox of colonizers, practiced to neutralize effective political actors and normalize the abduction and torture of sisters, mothers, brothers, fathers, children and comrades. However, history has shown that Palestinians and oppressed nationalities have resisted this formula and created their own: one that demands resistance in all its forms in the face of repression.In the words of Bassem, "We have no choice but to resist. But because we resist, we pay the price."

"As a Mexican organizer in a Palestinian led organization, I began connecting the struggles of Palestinians living in Lebanon to the struggles of Mexicans living in the United States. Both struggles are most strongly linked in questions of citizenship, super-exploitation as surplus labor forces, and scapegoating by the right wing ruling classes. This also applies to both diasporas in many countries and it's shared with many other third world nationalities forced to flee due to settler-colonialism or the modern neoliberal world where commodities can move freely across borders but people are stuck in hoods, barrios or refugee camps in the many urban centers across the world. One of the most important similarities despite the very different socio-political situation we are in, is that we continue forward en la lucha. - Ray, member of WOL

Black 4 Palestine delegation also visited the Baddawi Refugee camp in Tripoli and Burj el Barajneh Refugee Camp in Beirut to talk to youth and cultural workers who continue the steadfast of struggling against all odds to return to Palestine. The Lebanese government officially bans Palestinians from working in more than 70 different fields including medicine, law and engineering.

March 30, 2018: GREAT RETURN MARCH BEGINS

The next day, on March 31, we participated in a Day of Mourning honoring the 16 Palestinians martyred in Gaza the day before on the first day of the Great Return March, putting up posters of the martyrs on 5th Avenue in Bay Ridge.

May 2018 marked a historic first for the Palestine movement in the US. On May 12 we hosted the 1st Annual Palestine Lives Conference with Existence Is Resistance at Hunter College, in the lead up to the 70th anniversary of the Nakba. The goal of the conference was to bring together Palestinians from across historic Palestine and the diaspora to honor and uplift the revolutionary legacy of Palestinian history, art, culture, and resistance and strategize for the liberation of Palestine. Featured speakers included Marc Lamont Hill, Rosa Clemente, Sekou Odinga, Pam Africa, Susan Abulhawa, Norman Finkelstein, to name a few, and panels included "The Role Of Art & Culture In The Liberation Of Palestine, "The Untold Survivor Stories Of The Nakba," "From Palestine To The Philippines: Stop The Us War Machine," and "Black In The Holy Land.

On May 14, we mobilized in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the largest Palestinian community in NYC and home to many of our members, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nakba under the banner "Rally and March For 70 Years of Resistance." After rallying in front of An-Noor Social Center, we marched down 5th Ave through the heart of the neighborhood with over 500 supporters, inviting community members to join us as we took to the streets drowning out the sky with Palestinian flags, chanting slogans in support of our struggle for liberation and return. The rally and march was a powerful display of the strength of our community and the unity of our struggle. Days later on May 18, we took to the streets in Times Square to bring our message to the heart of NYC and to uplift the Nakba and the Great Return March.

On June 3rd, ILPS US member organizations BAYAN USA and Within our Lifetime * United for Palestine took part in two simultaneous blackout protests at the Philippine Independence Day Celebration and Celebrate Israel parades in New York. The protests condemned the state sanctioned killings of thousands of Filipinos and Palestinians at the hands of two US-backed regimes-the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and Israel. Because the protests were happening at the same exact time, BAYAN and Within Our Lifetime could not attend each other's protest. However, both organizations stand firmly in solidarity with the other, recognizing that each national liberation struggle is intimately bound to the other. DEATH TO US IMPERIALISM! LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY!

Upon her release she declared,
"The world should not be shocked or taken aback by a Palestinian slapping an Israeli soldier. We should all be slapping soldiers, not just me. We should always be slapping soldiers, wherever they may be, regardless of whether they did anything or not. Ultimately, these are occupying soldiers. They occupied our land, and they shoot at little children and target homes and people. So this is a natural reaction to the presence of the occupation, to the presence of soldiers on my land. Everybody should be slapping soldiers ... The previous generation fought, died as martyrs, were wounded and imprisoned, for the sake of the two-state solution. They placed their trust in the world and in the international institutions, but they did not reach this solution. We will not repeat this. We, as a generation, will fight for the liberation of Palestine in its entirety."

On August 9, israeli occupation forces bombed the Said Al-Mishal Cultural Center in Gaza City, leveling it in a series of targeted air strikes. The center was home to numerous youth art programs, music groups and cultural associations that utilized the center as an office space, a rehearsal studio and a performance venue. Hanin al-Holy, a 23-year old Palestinian poet who performed at the center on multiple occasions, reflected "Al-Mishal Center was a symbol of culture, something that reinforced our Palestinian identity. They targeted it because art is, too, a form of resistance." Though we are thousands of miles away from Palestine - we have felt the rippling effects of Gaza's resilience following the bombing of the Al-Mishal Center. In Bay Ridge, we were inspired to launch our Palestinian Cultural Resistance program in the heart of the largest Palestinian and Arab community in NYC in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Through dabke lessons, educational workshops, rallies and more, we started building a new collective space for youth and students from the community to become immersed in the revolutionary history of Palestine as we build the movement for Palestinian liberation and return.

November 17 Emergency Action for Gaza in Bay Ridge.

November 2018: Within Our Lifetime joins IMA in Mexico

In January, we started the year off with a Palestine contingent at the MLK Day march against Racism in Bay Ridge.

Featured in our pop up art exhibit were four pieces by Kyle Goen (@kyledidthis). Shown in the four unique prints are Palestinian freedom fighters martyred during the Second Intifada. The photographs, taken in Gaza in 2001, are re-imagined in Kyle's work through the materials used: gold leaf, acrylic and screen print paper. In Palestine there is a much stronger culture of honoring our martyrs, as they are the vanguard of our struggle. We must do the same here, because their sacrifices are what keep our struggle moving forward, and make us proud to be Palestinian.

We set out several demands for our rally.
1. We call on all people of conscience to support and uplift the courageous Great March of Return in Gaza
2.We strongly condemn and demand an immediate end to the recent Israeli military aggression and escalation in Gaza
3. The Golan Heights is Arab land; Trump and the United States do not have the authority or legitimacy to recognize its' illegal annexation by israel.
4. In light of NYC Council member Kalman Yeger's racist anti-Palestinian attacks, we demand that he be publicly condemned by the NYC Council and removed from the New York City Council Immigration Committee immediately and publicly apologize to the Palestinian community.
5. We demand an immediate end to the $3.8 billion a year in U.S. military aid to the state of Israel.

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Decade Wrap Up - Within Our Lifetime | United for Palestine

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A wrap-up of the decade highlighting turning points in the Palestinian struggle and the movement here, that led to where and who we are as an organization today. The first ever event/action held by SJP at CSI was centering the Palestinian right of return.