Solidarity Fest, organized by Theater Workers for a Ceasefire (TW4C): a one-day festival on January 3, 2026 at JACK in Brooklyn, connected Palestine to an array of social justice issues of today, galvanizing artists and cultural workers to play a central role in bringing about change in their respective creative domains, localities, and workplaces. In the form of panels, workshops, performances and more, it drew together cultural organizers from a range of active movement organizations to ensure that all participants leave with ideas and actions to deepen their commitment to collective liberation. A lightly edited transcript of a panel conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, Rashid Khalidi, Ysabella Titi follows.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair at UCLA. His books include, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination and the forthcoming Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. His essays have appeared in several publications, and he also serves on the Advisory Board for Palestine Legal.
Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He has authored eight books, including the best-selling Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler- Colonialism and Resistance, which has been translated into over two dozen languages.
Ysabella Titi is an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. Ysabella’s work in the PYM focuses on political education and cultural work, as she is currently working on a project called the “Archietecture of Genocide” which is a large-scale, tactile map display of Gaza before and during the genocide.
Solidarity Fest was endorsed by: DJs Against Apartheid, Aye Defy, National Queer Theater, piece by piece productions, Worry Noise Dirt Heat, Less Than Rent Theatre, Unattended Baggage, Artists Against Apartheid, Anakbayan Manhattan, Nodutdol, Labor for Palestine National Network, Panoply Performance Laboratory, Caborca, Judson Memorial Church, Noor Theatre, Strangegirlzz, Neurodivergent Plays, Trans Voices Cabaret, 55B Productions, Floorwork Arts Collective, Sad Magic Productions, Filmworkers for Palestine, Amplify Palestine, Dancers for Palestine, Bechdel Project, Entertainment Labor for Palestine, JVP NY, Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre.
Palestine is For Everybody
TW4C: We’re in a moment of crisis on multiple fronts with the brutal assault on Palestine as a focal point. At the same time, what’s happening now isn’t necessarily new. The reason we’re an arts solidarity formation is because we believe that there are multiple connection points, historically and today, between struggles and on different fronts of resistance, which opens up many ways to take part in the movement for Palestine. And that too is nothing new. In the lineage of a radical theater artist like Bertolt Brecht, we think that history is full of possibility, radically unfinished. And so we want to begin looking backwards, perhaps with some historical grounding, especially given we have two historians in our midst.
Can anyone talk about the ways that different movements have come together, in mutually reinforcing ways throughout time for Palestine?
Robin D.G. Kelley: I always find it striking how little support there was for Palestine during the Nakba from the U. S. Left. This is something we sometimes forget. In the wake of the Holocaust, Israel’s violent dispossession of Palestinians masqueraded as an anti-colonial struggle, when it was actually a colonial occupation. I say that because when we talk about the history of solidarity with Palestine in terms of the Black movement, it really doesn’t start until the ‘67 war. And we know about SNCC’s position, we know that the Black Panther Party was initially split on the question of Palestine, but it was the first time that you began to see a significant Black opposition to Zionism. People tend to romanticize Black solidarity, but it was never the majority – to this day, it’s not the majority, I’m sorry to say.
What really matters to me wasn’t so much the individual organizations in solidarity, but what happened in the 1970’s: anticolonial struggles–whether you’re talking about Algeria, Vietnam, etc–opened the door for the UN General Assembly in 1974 to reaffirm the rights of Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence, and the right to return, and its 1975 declaration that Zionism is racism.
The more recent stories we know about: the Ferguson uprising in 2014, Black Lives Matter, Dream Defenders, going back to Black Radical Congress in 1998. But still we delude ourselves into believing that these movements reflect the interests of all Black people. On the flip side, the emergence of a kind of “Afropessimist-lite” idea that solidarity with anyone who is not Black is impossible in an anti-black world has dampened our relationship to the Palestinian movement.
But we also need to pay attention to what happened after Ferguson. A bunch of delegations of young Black activists from Dream Defenders and Ferguson went to the West Bank. They got to see firsthand what colonialism looks like.
I want to hold that up because it’s one thing to be in solidarity because you think your movements are analogous. It’s another thing to put analogy aside and commit to building a world in which there is no colonialism anywhere. Real solidarity need not be a quid pro quo, nor does their oppression need to look and feel like yours. But we must recognize that these distinctive forms of violence, dispossession, and oppression are part of a single global system, and in this regard Palestine is ground zero.
Rashid Khalidi: Solidarity actually goes back a lot farther than we may realize. In the 1930s, the British were trying to put down a revolt that they were having real difficulty mastering. They recruited 40,000 members of the Haganah to fight with the British Army, but they didn’t have enough soldiers because they were preparing for war with Germany. The suggestion was: let’s get the British Indian Army–there’s 200,000 soldiers in India. The Viceroy sends a message to London saying you can’t send them, they’re gonna stand with the Palestinians. People in India are supportive of the Palestinians, whether they’re Hindu or Muslim. So the British army was actually stymied for a year and a half in putting down the greatest revolt of the interwar era because they didn’t have enough soldiers and they could not call on the largest single contingent in the British imperial army.
That’s an example of solidarity that we don’t realize was there. That is an example of the kind of thing that you don’t realize about the vote for partition in 1947. I called the partition resolution a declaration of war on the Palestinian people. We know who voted for it. All the white settler colonies, all the western European countries, the United States, and all the countries that the US controlled in Latin America. Look at who didn’t vote for it: most of the rest of the world. In other words, there was solidarity with the Palestinian people and the only way people could express it at that time was through having their country’s delegations vote against stealing most of Palestine to turn it into a Jewish state and prepare for the Nakba.
We don’t sometimes see the degree to which solidarity is invisible, but it is there. It angers me and it depresses me that in the end, the British were able to put down the revolt of ‘36-‘39. They finally got enough soldiers there. Soon as Munich took place, divisions of the British troops put down the revolt, and it angers me that the partition resolution passed, Palestine was partitioned, the Nakba followed. But there was solidarity at those times, as there was in earlier times.
I can go back and bore you with more history, but I think that we are living in the belly of the beast, where so much propaganda is still in people’s minds, especially the minds of older people. I know some older people are enlightened, but most of ’em not so much. It’s hard to realize that the rest of the world does not like this. Most of the rest of the world always understood this as a colonial struggle. Most of the rest of the world understood the inherent evil of British colonialism. Most of the rest of the world understood that what was being done to the Palestinians by the British and later on by the United States and Israel was what had been done to them–people in the Caribbean, people in Africa, people in Asia. You talk to Irish people and they will tell you name after name: of this torturer who worked in Dublin Castle, and then was sent to Palestine; of this general who fought in Cork against the Irish during their War of Independence, and then was sent to Palestine, and so on and so forth. And people in India know these things; people in parts of Southeast Asia that were colonized by the British know these things; and people know these things in the rest of the world. And I think part of our job is to bring that consciousness to Americans who don’t perhaps realize the degree to which they’re in a little bubble.
Ysabella: The first thing that I thought about when I heard this question was 2014 and the significance of it. We saw the police murder of an unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. At this time, Black youth and youth in general, poured into the streets of Ferguson–poured into the streets of capitals across the country, demanding justice. At the same time, in 2014, there was a genocidal aggression in Gaza. This aggression lasted less than 60 days, but killed thousands of people. There was a tangible solidarity between the Black Lives Matter movement and Blacks in the US with Palestinians. Palestinians took it upon themselves to post on social media, to instruct Black Americans how to deal with tear gas and how to deal with regressive protest tactics that have been used against Palestinians. Black leaders traveled to Palestine, they solidified these relationships of solidarity. A lot of our members in the Palestinian Youth Movement were shaped by this political moment and this was a key part of our collective consciousness in the PYM.
Historically, Palestinian leaders, because of the nature of our struggle, because the core tenets of our struggle are anti-colonial and anti-imperialist–our leaders throughout history have aligned with progressive and international movements worldwide. This didn’t just come out of the current moment, it didn’t come from the current genocide, but it’s part of our revolutionary history of building an international solidarity movement against imperialism. In the PYM we have a diaspora movement of Arab and Palestinian youth, but we work very closely with leftist forces in the US and Europe because we know that this is following our revolutionary historical tradition.
Over the course of the genocide, while we have aligned ourselves with progressive forces, the Israelis have made it very clear throughout their history that they are going to continue to beat down liberation movements across the world and the aspirations of people, Arab people specifically, in the region. So Israel props up reactionary regimes in the countries surrounding it and on a global level, Israel has worked with far-right leaders, including the illegitimate right wing leader, Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela, who actually said that some of her first moves if she were to take office, would be to move the Venezuelan embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize the illegal Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.
The US aggression on Venezuela today is very pertinent to us and very pertinent to the Palestinian movement that’s rooted in anti-imperialism. As the US bombs the Venezuelan capital and kidnaps the president and his wife–and this is coming after decades of brutal sanctions that have targeted civilian life in Venezuela–right, there are members of the PYM here in New York that are out on the streets today in protest and across the country because we know how important it is to stand against this US aggression and we will continue to stand and push the broader movement to stand in principled solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
TW4C: Our conditions are always changing, which presents challenges, but also opportunities. And that’s also true in the terrain of culture. There’s a lot of artists and cultural workers who want to do their part, but I think there’s a risk sometimes in thinking that you do culture, then you walk away and culture does its work.
Yet there was a recent post from the Palestinian Youth Movement on the passing of Mohammed Bakri. They wrote that “For Bakri, culture was never separate from politics. It was part of the struggle itself. And, “Palestinian cultural resistance is intrinsic to the liberation struggle itself.”
So the questions I have here are about thinking through culture and struggle together: What role can theater and other forms of artistic and cultural production play in strengthening our social movements today in solidarity with Palestine? Or what can we learn from the role culture has played in Palestine? In what ways is steadfastness a cultural practice? I think a lot about Ghassan Kanafani. I think about “If I Must Die,” I think about The Freedom Theater. I think about The Gaza Monologues; I think about The Revolution’s Promise. I think about keffiyeh’s and watermelons and poppies–all these images and symbols but I think, again, it’s easy to think of art as empty symbols, but clearly what that post is highlighting is that for a lot of Palestinian artists, it’s never just about the art in a vacuum.
Ysabella: The role of culture has always been important. In the seventies when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was waging the struggle for Palestinian liberation, in Lebanon primarily, it was working on multiple fronts–and one of those was the cultural front. So much so that in 1982 with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the besiegement of Beirut, it is said that the IDF went knocking door to door looking for the PLO archives, and it would then not only loot the archives, but bomb them when there were workers working in the archive. This attack on Palestinian culture makes us aware that the Israelis themselves are acutely aware of the power of Palestinian culture. They target our cultural archives because this culture is our ability to exist. Culture is the fabric and the form in which our nation is sustained and reproduced. They know this very well and therefore they have always and continue to assault Palestinian culture. They do so by destroying it or they empty Palestinian culture of its political context. They think of Palestinians as people that are in the past, who are folkloric and we have to continue to reject this.
In the PYM we follow a long tradition of resistance, art, and culture with three main aims. The first one is to build our national unity, our shared identity across the diaspora and the homeland, and to remain connected to each other as a nation. We secondly use culture as a way to maintain our historical record. So within that, the most pertinent right now is to be able to document the genocide and understand everything that has happened in the past two years. And our third goal through resistance arts and culture is to inspire people, to excite people, to raise mass consciousness and to build a movement in which people are excited to take action. The cultural realm is really an appealing entry point to a broad base of society, and this is something that we need to capitalize off of.
I want to talk about three different projects that the PYM is doing. The first one is the present exhibit with a panel and discussion called the Architecture of Genocide. We’re building these large scale 30 foot tactical maps that go into the minutia of the genocide and destruction and builds a narrative of what happened. This is really a long term project that aims to not only document the genocide, but aims to bring us together as Palestinian and Arab youth in the process of building it. In the process of building these little miniature buildings that will be featured on the big map, we know that each one of those buildings that we’re making, they hold a story. And that story is something that we want to tell. We want to tell the story of the genocide. We want to tell the story of the prisoner exchange that came. We hope to show this exhibit at various cultural, educational, and community spaces across New York City.
Also, last year we started a Palestinian Youth Choir, which follows a history of Palestinian songs and we sing them in Arabic to tell our story and to root ourselves in our tradition of Palestinian revolutionary music. This is music with a fighting spirit and music that inspires us, not only to honor our martyrs, but to continue to struggle and to keep our cause alive.
Third, we have done a bit of publishing in the past few years. We translated two books from Arabic: the Trinity of Fundamentals, and we also worked with the People Center for Palestine to translate Wasim Said’s book called Witness to the Hell Fire of Genocide. This is a book that was written during the first ceasefire announcement. He wrote about his experience in Arabic and we translated it to be able to spread this heart-wrenching book to an English audience.
To conclude, culture encompasses everything we do and builds our existence as a nation and a movement both rooted in history and inspired to continue to fight for our liberation and return.
Rashid Khalidi: Thanks, Ysabella. That’s really so encouraging. I can only agree with what Ysabella said and what TW4C started with, which is that I actually think that culture and art are more important means of conveying certain truths than any other media–than journalism or history or political essays or almost anything else. Whether it’s autobiographical, whether it’s theatrical, whether it’s painting, whether it’s poetry–whatever form it takes, art actually is one of the best ways, I think in many cases the best way to convey certain kinds of truths about, in this case, our struggle against colonialism–about everything that we’ve been talking about here today.
And I think the proof, again, is something that TW4C touched on in what they started with [ed note: the festival opening remarks noted a recent IDF raid at the Palestinian National Theatre]. They would not waste their time shutting down theatrical performances for children if they didn’t think that this was something important. They wouldn’t waste their time, their energy, their money, send their thugs in to push the kids around, as happened in Jerusalem. And that’s not the first time that happened.
A play adapted from a novel by Ghassan Kanafani was banned in Nazareth a number of years ago by the Israeli government, which shut it down. And the extension of the Israeli government here in New York City at The Public Theater shut down a performance of a play based on Returning to Haifa, which is actually by the two playwrights whose work you’re gonna see this evening, [Ed note: A reading of Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi’s Visions from the Center of the Earth was presented later in the program] who had adapted it for the stage with a commission from The Public Theater. Oskar Eustis was gonna direct and it was all set, and nothing happened. The authors–my son and Naomi–contacted them and said, what’s happening? They said, “we can’t do it.” Why? “Our board of directors wouldn’t let us.” Why? “Ghassan Kanafani is a terrorist.” So they were afraid of a play to the degree that they paid a commission for adapting the play for the stage, and would not allow it to be performed.
That’s the soft end of the stick. The hard end of the stick is that they killed Ghassan Kanafani in 1972. They blew him up with his 16-year-old niece. They’ve killed many artists, many other writers and dozens of others in Gaza from this genocide. But this has been going on for decades and decades. Ysabella mentioned–the seizure of the PLO Research Center archives in Beirut to 1982–that is just one of many seizures of Palestinian cultural-historical artifacts and archives that this colonial project has been engaged in since 1948. In 1948, they set up looting teams to go through the abandoned houses in Jaffa, Haifa, West Jerusalem–the areas that they conquered–to steal the manuscripts and the books and the private libraries of residents they had forced out. So Khalil al-Sakakini’s house was looted, one of the great literary figures of that period in Palestine, and his books are in the Israeli National Library today in the “AP” section–for abandoned property. Not abandoned, looted property. That’s just one of many examples of this kind thing. When they took over Orient House, which is where the Palestinian negotiating team was based, it also was where the Arab Studies Society was based. The Arab Study Society had an archive including a very rich documentary collection going back to the forties and the thirties, all of which is now in the Israeli National Archive, stolen under the AP designation.
They would not do this if they didn’t understand the importance of culture and art. They would not waste their bullets or bombs on Ghassan or the many other artists they have killed if they didn’t understand how important this was. They would not be trying to prevent the showing of plays in New York, Minneapolis, London, Paris, or wherever it may be, or prevent the publication of books if they didn’t understand this is a very sharp weapon.
Robin D.G. Kelley: A couple things to add to that. One is that, of course, The Public Theater has a history of doing this. In 2016 it canceled a production of The Siege [developed by The Freedom Theatre of Jenin]. In 1989, Joseph Papp canceled the Palestinian National Theater (El-Hakawati) production of The Story of Kufur Shamma. Quite frankly, “cancel culture” begins with Palestine.
Second, representation is always political. There is a liberal impulse to focus on victims, to dwell on violence and suffering, and to frame it all within the “conflict narrative”–the myth of an entrenched, ancient, intractable “Israel-Palestine conflict” that requires dialogue and understanding to fix. Palestinian theater rejects liberal representations, and let’s acknowledge that, arguably, Palestine is the global epicenter of contemporary theater, period. There’s a great book by Samer Al-Saber called A Movement’s Promise, which talks about the vibrant history of theater and theater culture in Palestine, pointing out that much of the work written and produced under occupation is not about occupation. There’s so much about everyday life, complex relationships, and internal conflicts. In some ways this reflects what Ysabella was saying about the power of art and culture; it’s not just representations of violence but of sumud, about the steadfastness to make life and make love and make connection in community in spite of bombings and genocide.
I think Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace are two of the greatest playwrights of all time, as far as I’m concerned. And if you haven’t seen Sim’s [Ismail’s] book called Until I Return: the Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi, I would definitely say get that book. If you have no money, borrow some money. He authored Tennis in Nablus, Sabra Falling, Foot and Dead Are My People about anti-black violence and lynching that makes this connection. Naomi wrote The Fever Chart, Twenty One Positions: A Cartographic Dream of the Middle East, which she co-authored with Abdelfattah Abusrour and Lisa Schlesinger. And following on what Rashid said about The Public’s cancellation of their adaptation of Returning to Haifa, it ended up premiering in London at the Finborough, a very small theater. So we need to support their latest work, the brilliant “Guernica, Gaza: Visions From the Center of the Earth,” however you can, because when you’re an artist doing work to advance the liberation of Palestine, you are already at war.
TW4C: I want to move from suppression to repression just because it’s such a common experience, especially for some of the younger folks out here. I think a lot of artist-activists have faced intense repression for expressing solidarity with Palestine. The repression leads to a kind of overall chilling effect–the climate of fear, where even if you haven’t said anything, you’re less inclined to ever do so. I think that this is probably compounded among artists. Not that it’s a competition, but artists are already dealing with feelings of precarity. Like if I do anything that my potential future employer doesn’t like, I might not book the job and there’s only so many jobs out there. Even for me, I don’t wanna pretend like it’s not always on my mind in some way. So what are we gonna do about this? How are we gonna move through this? Is there anything that you would say to artists and cultural workers who either want to get involved with the movement for Palestine or want to get more involved, but are worried about that impacting their career viability or other forms of repression and blacklisting? Obviously, visa status is a very particular one, but it feels like the line is always moving further. That’s one version of the question. The other one is a little more theoretical: is there a relationship between solidarity and repression?
Robin D.G. Kelley: Yes.
TW4C: Say more!
Robin D.G. Kelley: This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. First of all, I’m sitting next to someone who has spent his entire career in a boxing ring. I cannot adequately express how proud I am to have been Rashid’s colleague at Columbia. Every year arguably the greatest historian in his field had to fight battles with Zionists with little or no support from the university, and as we’ve all seen, often with the direct complicity of the university administration. It amazes me that anyone showing up for Palestine would expect anything less than having to fight. So anyone who is worried about their career for taking a principled position against genocide is in the wrong profession.
Amiri Baraka delivered a memorable line while eulogizing the great composer/conductor Butch Morris: “If you don’t think your art can change the world, get another gig.” And so I just want to uphold Rashid, especially given his decision to break ties with Columbia in light of the sort of “civil” violence liberal institutions are known for.
Just two things I always want to emphasize. One is that, yes, there is a relationship between solidarity and repression, but it depends on who you’re in solidarity with. When you’re in solidarity with movements contesting the ruling power there will be repression, it’s inevitable. But solidarity with movements fighting on behalf of the ruling power–and here I’m referring to imperial powers, in the interests of global capitalism, you will enjoy protection. For example, support for the right-wing opposition to Maduro in Venezuela will not elicit the repression Palestine solidarity activists have come to expect. Looking at this question from the context of Empire is critical, because here in the belly of the beast, state repression is so often directed at movements fighting for freedom of others–anti-imperialist, anti-war, and so forth. And note how the state renders them threats to the “internal security” of the county. The word ‘sedition’ is the blanket legal term for any opposition to power, especially anti-war. Today the operative phrase is “domestic terrorist.”
Second, I’m the wrong person to ask about “career viability” and “blacklisting.” I’m married to LisaGay Hamilton, yes the brilliant theater actress and two-time Obie award winner, who was on the first Women’s Boat to Gaza in 2016. She works sometimes but she could work a lot more if she stayed silent on Palestine. Naomi Wallace was also on that boat. We have the extraordinary playwright and novelist Kia Corthron, who’s right here, who went to Palestine in 2002 with Naomi, and continues to show up at great risk to her own career. So repression should not surprise any of us. I’ve always said that cemeteries and jails are full of playwrights, actors, and artists.
What I will say is that if you are going to show up in solidarity, don’t do so alone. That’s why you have Theater Workers for a Ceasefire. It is about solidarity and community. You can’t fight this alone. That’s how you survive. I don’t want to diminish the fact that people lose their livelihoods, but if you make that choice, then it’s up to all of us to help those who pay the price for their principled position, to help them and create community with them.
Rashid Khalidi: The connection between solidarity and repression is that the more solidarity you’re able to demonstrate, the more they’re gonna repress ’cause it terrifies ’em. Anything that cuts across these divisions that they impose is a threat to their power.
I was so proud of the students in Columbia who, without any advice from anyone–they never listened to anybody in the faculty, they were on their own and all credit to them–when almost every single student organization, we’re talking about dozens, joined in solidarity over Palestine within a week of the beginning of the genocide, and they stuck to it. That solidarity terrified the US government, the New York State government, the New York City government, the billionaires who own Columbia–they are the fiduciaries who actually own this institution–it terrified ’em. The ferocity of the repression was a function of how powerful that solidarity was. It was a bunch of 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 year olds. It was only students, but it was every single group. One day, the Vietnamese students had a Vietnam-Palestine event. It was a brilliant event. I didn’t even know there were that many Vietnamese students at Columbia! They were all there! There were dozens of them! And it was a great event. And that was just one of dozens and dozens of student groups that were participating in this uprising, in what later became the encampment.
So if you’re gonna do it, and you have to do it exactly as Robin just said–you have to do it together, you can’t do anything by yourself–you have to hope that you’re gonna be effective, and you have to expect that if you’re effective, they’re gonna come down on you like a ton of breaks. That’s the dialectic. That’s the way it is, it’s always going to be that way.
I was listening to the inauguration, freezing my feet off, in front of City Hall the other day and our new mayor, God bless him, was talking about how New York can take the lead in this country, and we all hope and pray that’s gonna be the case. And I was thinking about the fact that the students at New York City universities, they actually took the lead in this country. They started a national movement, a bunch of students, and that’s not the first time you’ve seen this in American history. Anybody who follows Black Lives Matter, who follows the civil rights movement, anybody who follows any movement that’s changed anything in this country knows that this is the way it works. We watched it. We stood in solidarity with the students. We didn’t do anything. They wouldn’t have listened to us if we tried to tell ’em anything and we weren’t too foolish to try and tell ’em anything. It was entirely down to them. And they maybe didn’t fully realize the degree to which the repression would come, but they knew they would be punished. And they were punished. Dozens of them were expelled and suspended. Dozens of them didn’t get their degrees. Dozens of them were kicked out of their campus housing. Hundreds and hundreds of students were punished very severely. And they took it and they had an enormous, powerful, wonderful effect.
So that’s the best example I can give you in recent times of solidarity. It triggered something which provoked the repression that we’re all gonna live through for at least the rest of this administration, maybe longer. But it was, I would say, worth it. It was world historical. It changed things fundamentally. Public opinion in this country has shifted in large part thanks to those young people in the student movement. It has happened in American history before: SNCC and the folks who went down to the south, they changed American history, right? In many cases sacrificing their lives. And the repression that came down on ’em was not just dogs and not just firehoses. It was assassinations, it was murders. We have to recognize that’s gonna come. Oppression will always follow successful solidarity. But the more you know, the more that you are able to build alliances, the better your chances of surviving oppression and changing things, which I think in this case has already happened. They’re fighting a losing rear guard action. They have lost the narrative, right? Most people in the United States know they are liars. The lies and the myths and the garbage that they’ve been feeding people for generations are just not standing up anymore. A lot of young people put their careers, if not their lives, on the line and started this thing immediately after the beginning of the genocide. So yeah, there will be repression the more successful you are, but that’s what you have to prepare for.
And as far as losing your jobs, those are decisions everybody has to make individually. I’ve been asked by students, what do I do? I say, you really gotta make this decision for yourself. That’s not for me or anybody else to tell you. It depends on your family circumstances, it depends on your visa status. It depends on all kinds of things that none of us can decide for you. But doing the right thing, which I would argue standing in solidarity Palestine is, the right thing may have a cost and you just have to weigh the cost for yourself.
Ysabella: As a cultural worker myself, I acknowledge the stakes that we’re faced with when we organize and when we stand up for Palestine. There’s a patronage system and there’s the powerful and the wealthy who determine who gets to work in the arts. Therefore, for me and the PYM in general, we encourage organized struggle. We encourage us cultural workers coming together to change this dynamic in which the ultra wealthy get to decide who gets to participate in the arts.
So I urge you to think about the questions of: ‘how can our actions build unity in this moment–build unity across political divisions?,’ and ‘how can we build a sustainable and powerful movement that continues post-ceasefire?’
I commend organizations like Theater Workers for a Ceasefire, Artists Against Apartheid, Writers Against the War on Gaza, who have really organized the cultural community in the US to hold institutions accountable, institutions that have for years protected Zionism and have most recently, in large part not stood up against the genocide. I urge you all to not forget this, to hold people accountable, to not forget that there were art institutions that fired people in New York for wearing a keffiyeh. To not forget that the editor of Art Forum was fired for writing a ceasefire letter. In the future we will see attempts to deny the genocide, to deny the cultural institution’s complicity in the genocide, and we must reject this revisionism.
I salute those who have struggled against the cultural institutions such as WAWOG holding a continuous campaign against the New York Times, particularly targeting their opinion section, which has pedaled Zionist lies to justify the genocide of Palestinians. There’s been a lot of great work that’s been done on the cultural front, but we must continue and we must continue together. We must not be siloed and isolated, but continue to build organizations. And perhaps after two years of genocide, if you’ve been organizing, you may feel some sort of burnout. But I think it’s more important than ever, and this event is a testament that we will continue to harness the power that we have generated, and we will continue to fight for Palestine and to hold these institutions accountable until we change the system in which so few people get to decide who works in the arts.
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