This past weekend, thousands gathered in Detroit for the second annual People’s Conference for Palestine.
This year’s guiding principle was, Gaza is the Compass.
“This conference is a place for all, whether it’s activists, students, workers who have been on the streets and organizing at their institutions for Palestine, or families with young children hoping to build consciousness in the minds of the next generation,” declared the organizers. “We will all convene to recommit to Gaza and to collectively determine the next phase of our movement for liberation.”
Speakers included Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Freedom Flotilla, Handala participants Chris Smalls and Huwaida Arraf, formerly detained activist Mahmoud Khalil, and a variety of movement leaders.
“It’s safer to remain silent,” Khalil told attendees. “But silence is not an option. I will not remain silent in the face of genocide. I will not be silent when people are being starved and massacred.”
“We should build a national liberation movement,” he continued. “The movement is bigger than me. It’s bigger than any of us.”
“They thought they could kill us, rape us, imprison us, violently uproot us from our olive tree farms, starve our children to death, and we would disappear,” said Tlaib. “Well, guess what, now we are in Congress and we’re in every corner of the United States.”
“Y’all, they just don’t get it,” she added. “They just don’t get it. They will never truly comprehend, even after seven decades, that we aren’t going anywhere. We are just getting started. I want to say to all of them, every genocide enabler, look at this room, motherf–kers, we ain’t going anywhere.”
“Gaza needs to be saved now. It saved all of us, liberated all of us. It is time for us to pay back and stop the criminals, the perpetrators, the child murderers,” said Dr. Nidal Jboor during a Doctors Against Genocide panel. “And we all know who they are. We all know who they are, whether they are in Israel, in Tel Aviv, in Washington, in Germany, in Europe. We all name them. We all know them. They need to be locked up. They need to be taken out. They need to be neutralized to save children, to save children. To save humanity.”
“We are not saying this out of hate, we are saying this out of love,” Jboor explained. “Out of love for the children, love for life. Love for humanity where every life is equal. We only hate the war criminals, the killer murderers. We need to act now. Speaking up alone is not enough, it’s too two years old. We have been speaking up for two years, now it’s time to escalate and to act.”
“Today, I spoke to young people whose college graduations are being held up as punishment for protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza,” wrote Mondoweiss’s Dave Reed in his weekly briefing. “I talked to organizers from all over the country who were desperate for other people in other communities to know about their efforts and were looking for validation and encouragement. I reconnected with movement leaders who are still putting in the long hours building the movement for Palestinian freedom. There is a real sense here that something is shifting in the struggle against Israeli apartheid.”
If you missed the conference, you can watch the event on YouTube.
Microsoft workers fired
Two Microsoft workers were fired for participating in a sit-in at the Washington office of company president Brad Smith.
Anna Hattle and Riki Famel, along with five other former employees and community members, were arrested during the sit-in. Shortly after their arrests, Hattle and Famel were terminated by Microsoft via voicemail.
“We are here because Microsoft continues to provide Israel with the tools it needs to commit genocide while gaslighting and misdirecting its own workers about this reality. We are a few among thousands of workers who refuse to let their labor be used for the mass murder of Palestinians,” said Hattle.
“Microsoft has dragged its feet at every opportunity to address the mass death that is directly enabled through their technological infrastructure,” declared Fameli. “Our drastic action is a direct response to their drastic inaction in cutting ties with customers that have continually violated international law and Microsoft’s own human rights standards.”
Microsoft provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud and AI services. The Palestinian BDS National Committee identifies the company as a priority boycott target and, “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.”
The protesters had delivered a”court summons” notice to Smith’s office charging him with crimes against humanity. They are demanding that Microsoft cut ties with Israel, call for an end to the genocide, pay Reparations to the Palestinians, and end discrimination against workers.
The action was part of the wider No Azure for Apartheid, which calls on Microsoft to end its complicity in Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
Earlier this year, Mondoweiss spoke with Hossam Nasr and Abdo Mohamed, two former Microsoft workers who were fired after holding a Gaza outside the company’s headquarters.
“We can look back at Microsoft’s history. It divested from apartheid South Africa in 1986. It took action to end sales to Russia amid the invasion of Ukraine,” Nasr told Mondoweiss. “We also know that Microsoft once divested a nearly $70 million investment from an Israeli cyber-surveillance start-up under internal and external pressure.
“So there’s a precedent, and Microsoft could divest. It could choose to uphold the human rights statements or its own standards, but it’s choosing to ignore them and prioritize the bottom line. You are seeing Microsoft actively choosing profit over human rights.”
By: Michael Arria
Source: Mondoweiss
