Can We Dream Together Palestine?
Can We Dream Together Palestine?
Organizers, Activists and Artists from Ferguson, and the Dream Defenders Visit Palestine. A Story in Photos and Tweets. (Please note that we removed some of video links due to our website’s media capacity. For the full story, we highly encourage you to go here.)
Credit @theDreamDefenders Instagram, Caption “But through whatever you see, through all the rain and the pain, you gotta keep your sense of humor. You gotta be able to smile through all this bullshit. Remember that.” TuPac
Over the last ten days a group of artists, organizers, activists and journalists from Ferguson, Hand Up United, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Black Youth Project 100 joined the Dream Defenders delegation on a trip to Palestine to learn about the struggles of the Palestinian people and to build international solidarity across struggles. The trip was organized by the Dream Defenders legal and policy director Ahmad Abuznaid and activist and University of Southern California PhD student, Maytha Alhassen. Abuznaid stated that that goals of the trip,
“were primarily to allow for the group members to experience and see first hand the occupation, ethnic cleansing and brutality Israel has levied against Palestinians, but also to build real relationships with those on the ground leading the fight for liberation. In the spirit of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and many others, we thought the connections between the African American leadership of the movement in the US and those on the ground in Palestine needed to be reestablished and fortified.”
What follows is a collection of curated tweets, photos and Instagram posts from the Dream Defenders, Aja Monet, Maytha Alhassen, Tef Poe, Philip Agnew, Ahmad Abuznaid, and Marc Lamont Hill.
“Barbed wire & Israeli settlements: Probably not the “little town of Bethlehem” that you imagined… Although today is Christmas Day in Bethlehem, the streets were eerily bare and most of the shops in this historic town were boarded up due to the Israeli government severely limiting tourism under the oppressive Apartheid in Palestine.”? The Dream Defenders
“Walking through security on way back from Ramallah to East Jerusalem.”
“In front of the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank” Ramallah, Palestine
“Palestinian people are in love with life.”?—?Mahmoud Darwish, national poet of Palestine
“When Our Children Are Killed”
This is a SECTION of the wall that our friend, artist, and activist, Ayed Arafah created to remember the children killed during the Israeli massacre this past summer.
#DDPalestine #FreePalestine
Photo Credit?. @diplomatesq“Meeting with one of the founders of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti.” #DDPalestine#FreePalestine #BDS”
“Church of the Holy Sepulchre #Palestine”?Aja Monet
“Where they bathed him. #Jerusalem #Palestine”?Aja Monet
“Prayer is a petition for presence #LovePalestine”
??? ?????? ????????. Dome of the Rock. Photo Credit @mayalhassen
“Said a little prayer for you & the all of the heart beat of Life. SubhanAllah…it’s much more breathtaking than I could ever find word or voice to describe.Taking a piece of the unspoken back to my parents; wish they could have experienced this with me. #Jerusalem #alquds”?—?Maytha Alhassen
Members of the delegation meet with the Shoruq Organization ????? ???? based in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Palestine Bethlehem, West Bank. Shoruq is “an initiative by Palestinian refugees who are struggling to end the injustice of their continued forced displacement. Shoruq seeks to address political, historical, moral, cultural & socio-economic problems of all refugees in Occupied Palestinian Territories & the diaspora.”
“Hip hop was the way I was able to protest…It was how I could be angry and peaceful at the same time”#DDPalestine #LovePalestine”??Aja Monet
“The Sisters. #family #FreePalestine #soldiers #artists#creators”
“The brothers. #DDPalestine #Palestine @tef_poe @marclamonthill @philofdreams”
“A very strange mix of oppression combined with beauty … The true definition of the beautiful struggle!!! #Palestine #freedom #demand #blackseeds #survivors”?Tef Poe
“#Palestine #Beauty #struggle #purpose #people my view of white supremacy has Forever changed”?Tef Poe
#Mediterranean Sea at #Haifa: most West Bankers will never be able to walk on the #beach’s shore, let alone smell the sea salt hanging on air vapors—-and yet, they continue to dream of seeing azure waters crashing onto their ancestral homeland. We live for a dream. “We go on dreaming. Oh, desired dream. We steal our days from those extolled by our myths…” -Mahmoud Darwish #DDPalestine?—?May Alhassen
“#MediterraneanSea I threw a rock into this water for the brothers and sisters throwing rocks at the tanks in the #WestBank but won’t ever see this body of water because of the apartheid”??Tef Poe
“When I get home I get off the plane and go back to the north side of St. Louis a place where most of us are in just as much bondage as these people but the difference is we don’t know it or acknowledge it ….Power concedes to righteousness eventually .. Six months ago I almost killed myself ..the devil had me emotionally trapped .. I picked up the pencil and the pad and decided to fight back. #MediterraneanSea”?? Tef Poe
“love these people #DDPalestine #LovePalestine”??Aja Monet
#LovePalestine
“nothing was the same.
we just getting started.”
— Phillip Agnew