New York City

We are excited to announce the upcoming 9th annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) starting late February in Europe and moving to various countries through the month of March.

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is an annual international series of events (including rallies, lectures, cultural performances, film screenings, multimedia displays and boycott of Israel actions) held in cities and campuses across the globe. Last year’s IAW was incredibly successful with over 215 cities participating worldwide.

IAW seeks to raise awareness about Israel's apartheid policies towards the Palestinians and to build support for the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel campaign.

For more info visit: http://newyork.apartheidweek.org/

***NYC SCHEDULE***

Monday, March 11, 7PM
Location: NYC LGBT Community Center (208 West 13th St.).

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/346534565451256/

QUEERS AGAINST ISRAELI APARTHEID (QAIA) is proud to welcome Sarah Schulman to the NYC LGBT Community Center for Israel Apartheid Week.

is (extremely!) proud to present:

Sarah Schulman

with a reading from her new book, "Israel/Palestine and the Queer International." In her book, Schulman questions the contradiction between Israel's investment in presenting itself as gay friendly—financially sponsoring gay film festivals and parades—and its denial of the rights of Palestinians. At the same time, she talks with straight Palestinian activists about their position in relation to homosexuality and gay rights in Palestine and internationally. http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Palestine-Queer-International-Schulman/dp/0822353733

This event is a huge victory for free speech and queer organizing, and we hope you’ll come celebrate it with us! Beginning in March 2011, the NYC LGBT Center banned any discussion of Palestine, in response to pressure from wealthy supporters of Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies.

In February 2013, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) applied to the NYC LGBT Community Center for space for this reading. But in response to that denial and the two years history of censorship at the Center, the LGBT community mobilized in outrage, and overturned the ban!

From Palestinian Queers for BDS:
‘As Palestinian queers, our struggle is not only against social injustice and our rights as a queer minority in Palestinian society, but rather, our main struggle is one against Israel’s colonization, occupation and apartheid; a system that has oppressed us for the past 63 years… In the last years Israel has been leading an international campaign that tries to present Israel as the “only democracy” and the “gay haven” in the Middle East, while ironically portraying Palestinians, who suffer every single day from Israel’s state racism and terrorism, as barbaric and homophobic.’ (pqbds.com) 

QAIA-NYC: queersagainstisraeliapartheid.blogspot.com

Free & open to the public!

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March 12: Columbia SJP and NYACT

And the Native Did Not Disappear: Challenging the Omnipresence of Colonialism from the U.S: to Palestine

Barnard College - James Room - 7:30 PM
Organized by: The Native American Council & Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine

Cosponsors: The Department of Anthropology, Students Against Mass Incarceration, Muslim Students Association, Talk Magazine of the Intercultural Resource Center, Radical C.U.N.Ts

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/435643843190369/

We are told that we now live in a post-colonial world, that if colonialism is even to be mentioned, it can, at best, be brought up and discussed as a ‘history’ rather than a ‘present’, a phenomenon that happened and is now over. What, then, of modern day nation-states, liberal democracies, whose very foundations lie in the act and perpetuation of settler-colonialism? As two nations founded on the coming of primarily European settlers to a land upon which native people had existed and kept existing, the U.S. and Israel have much in common. The question then becomes one of how to talk about Israeli settler-colonialism here, across an ocean, to those living in another settler-colonial nation. We wish to interrogate this connection in light of a continuous colonial framework , propped and perpetuated up by cultural appropriations, containments, the destruction of previous ways of life, economic and military pressures, genocide and various practices of representation and history-writing.

Professor Joseph Massad: Teaches and writes about modern Arab politics and intellectual history. He has a particular interest in theories of identity and culture – including theories of nationalism, sexuality, race and religion. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1998. He is the author of Desiring Arabs (2007), which was awarded the Lionel Trilling Book Award; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinian Question (2006); and Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (2001). His book Daymumat al-Mas’alah al-Filastiniyyah was published by Dar Al-Adab in 2009, and La persistence de la question palestinienne was published by La Fabrique in 2009.

Professor Jeniffer Denetdale: As the first Diné/Navajo to earn a PhD in history, Dr. Jennifer Denetdale is an expert in Navajo history and culture. Her articulation of employing Indigenous feminisms and queer Indigenous critiques illuminates the processes by which tribal nations have been fashioned into heteronormative patriarchies and the necessity of engaging gender in discussions of tribal nationbuilding and decolonization.
(http://www.firstpeoplesnewdirections.org/blog/?p=5528#_edn4)

Simon Moya-Smith: An Oglala Lakota, Masters of Arts student of political journalism at Columbia University School of Journalism and freelance journalist for the magazine and website Indian Country Today Media Network provides expertise on contemporary manifestations of settler colonialism in mainstream American media’s appropriation of Indigenous North American culture. He has a B.A. in Political Science with a Minor in Ethnic Studies from University of Colorado at Denver and is currently completing his Master’s of Arts thesis. Follow him at: http://iamnotamascot.blogspot.com/, https://twitter.com/IAmNotAMascot, and YouTube: I Am Not A Mascot."

Also:

NYACT leafleting/protest outside Google's offices - 111 Eighth Ave (at 15th St) 5 to 7pm

https://www.facebook.com/events/485167688192412/

Cornell NYC Tech, a partnership of Cornell University and The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, started classes earlier this month in office space donated by Google for a one-year Masters of Engineering degree in Computer Science. This space will be used until 2017, when the first building of the permanent campus on Roosevelt Island will be ready.

The Technion is complicit in Israel’s violations of international law and the rights of Palestinians, specifically by designing military weapons and developing technologies that are used to drive Palestinians off their land, repress demonstrations for their rights, and carry out attacks against people in Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere. The Technion also practices institutional discrimination against Palestinian students by severely restricting their freedom of speech and assembly, and rewarding Jewish students who, unlike Palestinians, perform compulsory military service in Israel. This is in direct contrast to Cornell University’s founding values of universalism and inclusion embodied in the university’s motto “any person any study”.

New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT) are asking that Google not support this partnership, and that Cornell University and the City of New York ends their collaboration with The Technion, in line with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanction of Israel.

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March 13: Hunter SJP

Freedom of Speech, Except When Criticizing Israel: Systematic Attempts to Silence Palestine Solidarity Supporters on U.S. College Campuses.

Hunter College - Hunter North C002 - 8:30PM
68th street and Lexington Ave

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/358471634265977/

From the Universities of California to the City Universities of New York, there is a disconcerting increase in intimidation of Palestine solidarity supporters on U.S. college campuses. This panel will bring together a legal expert, academic scholar, and student activist to discuss the various forms of repression that are happening across the country and what is being done to advance and secure the constitutional rights of activists doing human rights work around Palestine. Specific emphasis will be given to discussing the nationwide increase in Title VI lawsuits and how they are being used as a tactic to silence and prevent speech critical of Israel. 

This panel will shed light on the legal issues involved in Palestine solidarity organizing in addition to the constitutional issues at stake, as well as what this could potentially mean for academic freedom in particular, and freedom of speech in general. 

Panelists:
Sundus Seif, BC SJP President
Kristofer Petersen-Overton, Doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center and Graduate Teaching Fellow at Lehman College
Maria LaHood, Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights

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March 14: Brooklyn College SJP

Film Screening of 5 Broken Cameras
Brooklyn College
(East 27 St and Campus Road, Brooklyn NY, 11210)
Student Center - Gold Room - 630PM

Students for Justice in Palestine and The Political Science club bring you a screening of 5 Broken Cameras. This Oscar nominated documentary has received critical acclaim for a first hand account of life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/126849007496181/
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March 15: NYU SJP

Join us for a discussion with Jared Malsin and Chris Hedges.

Refreshments will be served.

Location & Time: 7PM
Kimmel Center, NYU, Room 914

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/335112586588479/ 

Launched in 2005 after over 170 Palestinian civil organizations issued a call for a campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, an annual international series of events has been held in cities and campuses around the world. Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) seeks to penetrate the consciousness of those uninformed about the apartheid nature of Israel, as defined by international law, that functions as a system characterized by institutionalized and systematic racial and religious segregation. Join NYU SJP for a discussion with Jared Malsin and Chris Hedges, who will each discuss their experiences as journalists in Palestine, including Gaza in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, and their experiences within the state of Israel

CHRIS HEDGES began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times' investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. Hedges has written 12 books, including "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.

JARED MALSIN is a journalist who has reported from the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Egypt, the United Nations, and the streets of New York City. Malsin spent two and a half years living in the West Bank working for the independent Palestinian news agency Ma'an, where he served as the agency's chief English editor. In January 2010, while returning from from Europe, he was questioned, detained for a week, and then deported from Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. In the last two years, he has extensively covered the Occupy movement in New York and the aftermath of the revolution in Egypt. He has contributed to TIME, VICE, Foreign Policy, The National, Columbia Journalism Review, and the East Village blog of The New York Times, among others.

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March 16: Adalah-NY and Scientific Soul Sessions

Building Solidarity across Black, Native American, and Palestinian Struggles
~ an evening of discussion and live music ~

6pm, Saturday, March 16
St. Mary's Church
521 W. 126th St, NYC

Confirmed speakers: Aaron Dixon, Janene Yazzie, and Riham Barghouti, with Dave Zirin moderating, and an introduction by Joel Kovel of St. Mary's Church.

Featuring performances by saxophonist L. Mixashawn Rozie, composer Alia Ahmed, hip-hop/jazz drummer Kimberley Thompson and spoken-word artist/rapper Farrah Burns, and the Columbia Palestinian Dabke Brigade.

Here in the US, how can we connect the Palestinian resistance movements to those closer to home, namely, Black and indigenous struggles against structural oppression?

Do certain strategies for liberation cut across these different constituencies? Where does the Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) fit in as a tactic?

How can we recognize what is distinct about these struggles, while making connections and acting in solidarity?

From the dispossession of Palestinians and First Nation Peoples to the political suppression and mass incarceration of African Americans in the United States, we live in an age of continuing colonization, segregation, and government-sanctioned brutality. Please join us as we learn from each other's histories of oppression and resistance.