The grass of Union Park in Chicago is empty and the trees sway in the wind. This is where Hatem Abudayyeh (Chicago, 1971), spokesman for the American Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), speaks to elDiario.es the day after thousands of protesters gathered against the war in Gaza on the day the Democratic Convention that crowned Kamala Harris as the White House candidate began.
“When I came home that night, I felt good. There were 20,000 people in the park, black, Latino, Asian, Native American, white. People of different faiths. And it’s powerful,” says the activist, who was one of the promoters of the March to the Democratic Convention Coalition that brought the war on Gaza to the doors of the United Center in an effort to pressure Harris to end the war by sending weapons to Gaza. Israel. “I know we’re not going to get the demands we want in four days. We’re not going to make them say, ‘We’re stopping, we’re going to force Israel to stop the genocide.’ But what happened here yesterday is shocking, and it should worry Democrats,” Abudayyeh says.
Monday’s pro-Palestinian march brought together the legacy of the anti-Vietnam War protests, which also took place in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The anti-war movement in the United States began in 1965 and lasted for nearly a decade of mobilizations until 1973. The troops withdrew. That’s why Abudayyeh emphasizes that the next step must be to build “a broad social consensus” against the war in Gaza. The conflict, now in its tenth month, has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians.
“We are witnessing the first televised genocide,” Abudayyeh says, and this “has revealed that Israel and the United States are their imperialist accomplices.” For the activist, it is important to clarify that the conflict in Palestine is also closely linked to colonialism. In this sense, he believes that – despite the distance – the struggle in the United States “is heading towards the same point where we reached with the fight against terrorism.” apartheid in South Africa”: “There was an international consensus around the South African anti-apartheid movement. And I think we are close to those who are starting to say that Israel has no right to exist as a white supremacist, colonialist, racist, apartheid and Zionist.
We are close to those who are beginning to say that Israel has no right to exist as a white supremacist, colonialist, racist, apartheid, and Zionist state.
When he speaks about Israeli colonialism, Abudayyeh speaks from experience. His parents were forced to leave Palestine and settle in the United States. Like him, many of the participants in Monday’s protest were children or grandchildren of Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes during the first Nakba. The first generations to arrive in the country were also present.
Chicago is one of the most Arab cities in the United States (about 100,000 people according to the census) and has a large Palestinian community. Many Palestinian-Americans who live here still have family and friends in Gaza and the West Bank. “Every time there are new images and you see the murdered babies, the blood and the debris, it’s emotionally and psychologically devastating for the community. I have a hard time expressing what I feel… I feel like I’m desensitized. I don’t think about death the same way anymore. “I think it happens to me because I can’t let it destroy me, because if it happens, I have to be ready the next day: to hold a protest or a press conference.” Abudayyeh says that since the conflict began in October, hundreds of people have gathered in the city every weekend to protest the killings in the Gaza Strip.
Activism comes naturally to Abudayyeh: her father was a co-founder of the Arab Community Center in the 1970s, and her mother was president of the Chicago chapter of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations. “I learned a lot from my parents and their friends, about my own community and our cause as Palestinians. They were Arab nationalists and they came from a left-wing perspective. They taught me that we should support other liberation movements that are very similar to ours, like the black liberation movement or the Chicano liberation movement.”
“witch hunt”
Abudayyeh’s first protest was in the 1990s, against the Iraq War. From there, he became more involved in community and activism, becoming executive director of the Arab American Action Network in 2002, a position he still holds today. Devoting his life to activism and becoming a prominent figure has also caused trouble for Abudayyeh. “After 9/11 and the climate that developed against Arabs, the FBI charged me with terrorism and raided my house for helping organize a pro-Palestinian protest against the Republican convention in Minnesota in 2008. And 23 people were called to testify. We refuse to testify. They never arrested anyone. They never charged anyone. It was a witch hunt.”
Abudayyeh recounts how the FBI opened the investigation because he had infiltrated one of its agents into pro-Palestinian organizations in Minnesota. “And that agent provided the information – most of which was false – that they then used to investigate us.” But that didn’t surprise him. “The repression against the Palestinian community in the United States has been ongoing for decades.” And Palestinians aren’t alone, he points out: “In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, right from the beginning, the Black Liberation Movement and the Civil Rights Movement were attacked by the state. “The FBI spent millions and millions of dollars trying to destroy these black organizations, the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”
The Black Panther movement was very present in Chicago in the 1960s, and one of its leaders, Fred Hampton, was assassinated in 1969 by the FBI and local police while he was sleeping. “Clearly, they don’t come for us in the same way. But this repression against the movements is quite normal. All the Palestinian organizations are on the government’s list.”
The most recent case of harassment that Abbuyadeh has experienced was a few days ago. “Before the march against the war in Gaza, I received a threat in my mailbox,” he says. He and other members of the organization are already used to constantly receiving “nasty emails and calls from racists and Zionists.”
Since the start of the Gaza war, Islamophobic sentiment in the United States has grown. At the protest, Tarick, a 24-year-old Palestinian-American, said he now has to think twice before leaving home wearing his kufiya. “I worry that other people who are not visible figures in the movement don’t have the same protection from harassment and attacks. So, as a movement, we have to try to make everyone feel safe,” Abudayyeh said.
Tarick, who is already the second generation of Palestinians born in the United States, explains that for him the war in Gaza also causes an “identity crisis.” The young man says it was very difficult for him to conceive of the idea that his country was complicit in the slaughter of his land. In Abudayyeh’s case, the contradiction that this entails has shaped his identity in a different way. “I am an American citizen, I speak the language and I studied here. But I don’t feel American at all. When you know that the government of the country you live in is responsible for the exile of your parents, and you never saw your grandparents because they lived in another country, and you see the poverty, the occupation, the destruction of the olive trees and since it is all the fault of this government, how can I say that I am American?”
Abudayyeh says they have been accused of stirring up “anti-Semitism” in the city. “They said we were going to bring violence to the streets, that we were anti-Semitic.” Other protests against the Gaza war have also been attacked under this label. A good example, the activist says, are the pro-Palestinian camps that have spread to universities across the country: “You know you’re doing a good job when you’re being attacked by the other side. The students did an incredible job in the spring and really brought the issue to the forefront. “It’s going to be really exciting to see what happens in the coming weeks when university classes start up again.”
