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March on DNC ties Palestinian liberation to national struggles [1]
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Date: 2024-08-20
“Just like 1968! There’s nothing here to celebrate!” Protesters chanted those lines on the first day of pro-Palestine demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as the Democrats prepared to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential candidate. Many news outlets have also made comparisons to the 1968 DNC, which was also held in Chicago, when police viciously attacked anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. The chaos is thought to have contributed to Republican Richard Nixon’s victory that November.
On Sunday and Monday, police responded to protests with a massive show of force that was at times violent, leading to 14 arrests and two protesters hospitalized, according to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). That’s an ominous beginning, but thus far it has not dominated coverage or the DNC itself as the widespread police violence did in 1968.
Despite police antagonism, the protests have been defined by broad progressive solidarity with Palestine. Protesters made consistent, focused demands for the end of U.S. military aid to Israel and for an end to a genocidal Israel military assault, which has killed 40,000 Gazans, 70% of them women and children.
The Coalition to March on the DNC, which organized the protests, includes more than 270 organizations focusing on a wide array of issues. Speakers from some of those groups took to the stage at Union Park to address the crowd gathering in the mild Chicago summer weather.
Third-party independent candidate and longtime civil rights activist Cornel West and Chicago singer, songwriter, and poet Jamila Woods were the two highest-profile speakers. Other speakers included representatives from the University of Illinois Chicago nurses’ union, who just went on strike for better pay and staffing; Chicago for Abortion Rights; Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, an organization that builds power for low-income people of color on the South Side; and more.
These diverse speakers all emphasized that Palestinian liberation is connected to their struggles. They pointed out that tax money that goes into weapons is not invested in health care, schooling, and building strong communities. They added that the racist dehumanization of Palestinians normalizes the dehumanizing of other marginalized people.
Many of the people on the ground echoed the message from the stage. Nick Tilsen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, the president and CEO of NDN Collective, told Prism that his organization demands that land be returned to Indigenous people and that President Joe Biden pardon American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted in the 1975 killings of two FBI agents during a standoff on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Tilsen linked these demands directly to the Palestinian struggle.
“The billions and billions of dollars being sent to Gaza to fund the genocide, it’s coming off of the stolen lands of Indigenous people and the resources that were extracted from our lands,” he said.
Photos of the Monday (8/19) protest march against the DNC in Chicago. (All photos by Aaron Cynic)
Kobi Guillory, cochair of the March on the DNC and member of the Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression, speaks at a rally in Chicago before a march on the DNC. (Photo by Aaron Cynic)
Hatem Abudayyeh, spokesperson for the Coalition and U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), speaks at a press conference ahead of a rally and march outside the DNC in Chicago. (Photo by Aaron Cynic)
Hatem Abudayyeh, spokesperson for the Coalition and U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), speaks at a press conference ahead of a rally and march outside the DNC in Chicago. (Photo by Aaron Cynic)
Cherrene Horazuk, the former president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 3800 at the University of Minnesota, arrived at the park early, wearing a union shirt. She told Prism that Palestine is a workers’ issue first because “money that goes for war is not available for jobs.” She added that “there is a movement calling for disinvestment from public pensions.” She compared it to the movement to divest from South Africa: “It was successful then,” she said, “and I think it will be successful again.”
While the demand for Palestinian liberation was uniform, attitudes toward Democratic nominee Harris were more mixed. Harris has replaced Biden on the ticket after he stepped down last month following a highly criticized debate performance against Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Most speakers who took to the stage spoke of Harris as complicit in Biden’s policy of support for Israel. Attacks on “Genocide Joe” were matched with denunciations of “Killer Kamala.”
There was also “Abandon Harris ’24” signage, urging people not to vote for the Democratic candidate. But some people Prism spoke to were more ambivalent. Kylie Madhav, the senior director of DEI at the LGBT New York advocacy organization SAGE, said she has been checking Harris’ campaign website daily but feels that it still lacks substantive information on her stance on the war in Gaza.
“I’m a lifelong Democratic voter, but I will not vote for Kamala unless there’s a firm commitment to ending arms sales to Israel, among other things,” she said.
In contrast, Jon Trott, a Chicagoan wearing a “Jesus Wasn’t White” T-shirt, said he would vote for Harris because “an outright fascist is running for the presidency right now.” Trott said that Trump forced him to leave evangelicalism and that now he is “living in a world that’s complicated, and I’m going to protest what both the Democrats and Republicans have done as far as so many of these issues.”
Following three hours of speeches, the thousands of people in the crowd marched to Park 578, in sight and sound of the United Center, where the DNC is hosted. The city had insisted on a route using mostly narrower side streets, and that, combined with a massive escort of police lining the road with bicycles, made progress slow.
At the park, protesters chanted along to drums and banged on the fencing separating them from a football field’s worth of pavement leading up to the United Center. After 45 minutes or so, most marchers headed back to Union Park. A smaller group stayed, however, and some managed to tear down one of the barricades (though others, as well as a police line, remained). A few protesters were arrested, and police put the barrier back up. Then, about a half hour later, hundreds of police in riot gear descended on the park, forcing the remaining protesters (as well as a large number of journalists) out. The protest permit ended at 6 p.m., which was presumably the cause for the eviction.
“The response by Chicago police to First Amendment-protected activity we’ve seen so far is extremely intimidating for people wanting to speak out at this crucial time,” Amanda Yarusso, a member of NLG Chicago’s Mass Defense Committee, said in a statement.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has called for a ceasefire and characterized Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide. The police response belies his statements of support for protesters. But so far, the scale of the repressive response to protest is significantly less than in ’68, when 600 protesters were arrested, and more than 219 people (at least 100 protesters and 119 police) were treated for injuries.
Whatever the actions of the police or of the politicians in the DNC, protesters said they remained unified for an end to U.S. policies that escalate the war in Gaza.
“If anything has shown itself to be true, it’s that the source of change won’t be from within the Democratic Party,” Faayani Aboma Mijana, Coalition spokesperson, said in a press statement. “That’s why our focus is to build a mass movement that can fight for the very changes this country needs.”
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[1] Url:
https://prismreports.org/2024/08/20/march-on-dnc-palestinian-liberation/
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