Host Jenka Soderberg interviews Monadel Herzollah of the U.S. Palestine Community Network and founder/president of the Arab American Union Members Council and Rebecca Tumposky, U.S. chapter organizer for the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. They were in Portland last week demonstrating how Palestinian and Jewish activists can appropriately work together for human rights without giving an appearance of normalcy or parity of suffering. Their appearance was sponsored by Al-Nakba Awareness Project and Advocating Freedom, Justice & Equality in the Holy Land.
Monadel Herzallah is the Founder and President of the Arab American Union Members Council and member of the Coordinating Committee of the US Palestinian Community Network. Monadel has spoken at conventions and conferences across the U.S. and internationally; he was one of the coordinators of the Israel Review Conference which took place on the sidelines of the UN Conference Against Racism in Geneva in April 2009 and a speaker at the Boston "one-state" conference in March 2009, as well as the National Coordinator of the Palestinian Popular Conference in 2008.
Rebecca Tumposky lives in Oakland, CA and is an organizer and coordinator of U.S. chapters with the International Jewish anti-Zionist Network. She is also part of the Coordinating Committee of the 2010 U.S. Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid which will be held in Detroit, MI in June, just prior to the U.S. Social Forum. Ms Tumposky, from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, represents an alternative organization for anti-Zionist Jews, a significant fraction of the US Jewish population. According to a 2007 National Survey of American Jews, only a little over half younger than 35 stated they were “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state.”
Points of Unity
While we all come from diverse organizing and activist experiences, and have diverse relationships to our Jewish histories and identities, we share the following points of unity:
* Solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian self-determination, including full political, economic, cultural, social and land rights for all those living in the historic Palestine, and the right of return for its refugees;
* Rejection of the Israeli apartheid state, premised on Jewish supremacy and Zionist ideology, and support for all struggles for legal and economic equality against it;
* Support for the building of just societies in historic Palestine, the larger region, and the other places in which we live;
* A commitment to the values of democratic self-determination, social justice and solidarity, gender equality and cultural rights, and to assert the same values in our own organizing and political practice;
* Commitment to the call from Palestine for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel;
* Challenging the current use of Islamophobia as a strategy for defending and justifying an imperialist US-European agenda;
* Challenging white racism, including its manifestations as Ashkenazi racism against Mizrahi Jews;
* Challenging the privileging of Jewish voices in conversations and negotiations about Palestine;
* Rejection of the ways in which the Zionist movement and Western governments exploit the Nazi holocaust to justify the historic and current actions of the State of Israel; and
* Rejection of alliances with anti-Jewish racists, white supremacist and Nazi holocaust deniers in our Palestinian solidarity work.