 I'm Justice for Palestine, yes. And we have four guests, honored guests, who will be coming up, Huwaita Arash, the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, Omar Badar, a policy analyst. We have Ariel Gold, National Co-Director of Code Pink, and Esti Chandler, Board Member of Jewish Voice for Peace. We will be having a capital calling party tonight after our Q&A with our guests. And we're going to put that action alert in the chat. I also sent it out over the Google group right before this program. We will be asking Biden and our representatives not to adopt what Trump adopted in that he defined anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism. So we wanna address that and urge Biden to reverse that executive order, along with another executive order, punishing those who support and cooperate with the International Criminal Court. Updates, Medea. Unfortunately, we have no good news on the Iran front. It's over a month now and it's pretty unbelievable that Biden has not just re-entered the Iran nuclear deal and if he had, we would have been in a totally different place right now, perhaps discussing regional issues with Iran and all the others in the region. And so we still need to be putting pressure on him. And I think we're getting some more of our congressional friends to start speaking out now to say time to make a move and stop moving the goalpost, just rejoin now. On the Yemen front, we're still waiting for a response to Rokana's letter to the Biden administration asking for clarification of what it means to not be selling offensive weapons to the Saudis and to clarify all the ways that we are stopping the support for the war in Yemen. And we are also pushing now a letter around Yemen to release the funds that had been blocked to go for humanitarian aid and call on the US to play a bigger role in the upcoming gathering that's taking place in which they're trying to get over $2 billion of pledges for humanitarian aid for Yemen. And there was just a meeting in NATO of the defense ministers that took place the 17th and 18th of February. The US is pushing NATO to be gearing up for the US Cold War with Russia and China. There is pushback from the Europeans because they have a lot of trade. In fact, China is the number one trading partner of Europe right now, surpassing the United States. And they have important economic interests with China and they also have important economic interests with Russia like the natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. There's also some pushback, especially in coronavirus time saying now is not the time for you to push us to spend more money on the military because the target of the NATO is a minimum of 2% of gross domestic product. Talk about a gross target that is really gross and we're hooking up with our allies in Europe to try to push back on that. So that's my update. Thank you, Ania, an update? Sure, well, we're very happy to launch the no sanctions, lift the sanctions campaign for 100 days focusing on majority Muslim states like Iran, Syria, Yemen, as well as Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea and Zimbabwe. We talked briefly about this last week on our call and I will share a form with everyone here for those of you who want to join the initiative to please sign up, let us know your time commitment and we would love to have you as a part of the campaign but this is a collective effort, collaboration with PDA, Middle East alliances as well as CodePink and other organizations to really commit to a 100 day to push Biden's administration and Congress to lift the sanctions that are right now blocking the majority countries that I mentioned from receiving medicine or medical devices and supplies during COVID. And what we're hoping to do is we're hoping to be able to export and make sure that there's re-exportation of medicine, medical supplies, PPE, you know, vaccines and other essential goods that are needed to address the COVID-19 crises in these countries. I, we have launched our website, so we're very excited about that and I will shortly share the form with you all. I would love to have all of you join the campaign, obviously, and we're gonna be communicating through WhatsApp and Slack, which I can take you all through how to set that up at a later time when I contact you via email. And yeah, let's remove these, let's push the Biden administration and Congress to remove these sanctions and I'll hand it right back to you ladies. Thank you so much, Hania. Also, I'd like to do an update on near attendant. I'm sure a lot of us are following this developing story. Near attendant is Biden's nominee to head the office of management and budget, which is a formidable position in that you oversee the entire federal budget, while drafting and implementation. She has come under criticism for her past tweets. The Republicans are upset. She called Collins a loser or the worst. She's called Bernie crazy. She headed up the Center for American Progress. And as the head of that, she accorded money from the UAE, which gave her about a $1.5 million to $3 million during which time she predictably fell silent on the UAE's war on Yemen. She has consistently opposed Medicare for all. She's the big enemy of single-player healthcare. She also opposed a $15 minimum wage. She called for cuts in Medicare and Social Security. We invited Netanyahu to come to the United States the Center hosted him. This was after he was very critical of Obama's effort to work out a deal nuclear deal with Iran. The list goes on. I think she pushed punch depending on who's telling the story of Bernie activists who asked her, asked Hillary why she voted for the Iraq invasion. This was back in 2016. And then someone else said that she outed them when they at a staff meeting of the center, when this person had been a victim of sexual harassment. Some of the people, the staffers who worked at the Center for American Progress, said they were told on certain terms that they were not to criticize Israel. So there are a long list of objections. She is, I heard she was organizing a Twitter campaign today to try to save her nomination. It's certainly in jeopardy. Joe Manchin came out over the weekend, I think, and said that he's voting against her. And then I guess the Biden administration was hoping that they might be able to wrangle some votes from some Republicans, but no. Susan Collins said no, she's not voting for her and a few other Republicans said no way. So now we face hearings. I believe the hearings are tomorrow in the budget committee. If she is confirmed, she will be the liaison with Bernie Sanders who chairs that budget committee. So you can imagine how awkward that would be. And he, as much as said that during some hearings recently, we've been, some of us have been lobbying members of the budget committee, principally, Jeff Merkley in Oregon, who's a great progressive on many issues. He also sits on that budget committee, urging him to vote no on your tenant. I'll post something in that about that campaign later tonight. I imagine some of you are interested. So time is really crucial right now. There are a couple of other names being talked about to head the office of management and budget if she is as the press reports on the ropes. One person is Jean Sperling who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations and has the support of Dean Baker. Another person is a woman named Shalanda, I believe young and she works, I forget exactly what her title is, but she's had a lot of experience too with economics in the administration. So we'll see what happens. The Congressional Black Caucus is rooting for her. Sperling has quite a long resume. Stay tuned. All right. Do you wanna read over the agenda? Hmm. You're muted. I'm muted? No, no, can you all hear me? No, we can, yes. Okay, wonderful. All right. Actually, let me try to find the document. Well, while you're doing that, I'll just briefly outline what's happening tonight. And then honey, if you can introduce Omar Badar as our first guest, that would be terrific. All right. So tonight at Justice for Palestine we have four terrific speakers. Lani is gonna introduce the first in a minute, Omar Badar and then we have Kuwaita Arraf. Following Kuwaita, we will hear from Ariel Gold and then Esti Chandler. We'll be talking about a lot of issues, the ICC ruling Wednesday versus Tuesday, vaccines, do you name it? And then we will have our Q&A followed and following that we will have our capital calling party to urge the Biden administration and to urge our representatives not to allow the United States to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which conflates it with criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism. If they were to adopt this, this would mean that civil rights investigators would use that as a yardstick to determine if somebody had been engaged in antisemitism. And we believe this will be particularly difficult for activists on campuses throughout the country who are working on justice for Palestine. Hania, I'll hand it over to you. Thank you. So our first speaker would be Omar Badar. Then we'll go to our second speaker. This is our Hawaii Arraf. Third speaker would be Ariel Gold and we will have Esti Chandler followed by Q&A and a capital calling party and emailing. And it brings me great pleasure to introduce Omar Badar to all of you who is a political analyst, digital producer and a human rights advocate based in Washington DC. He holds an MA in international relations and comparative political from the University of Memphis where his research focuses on US Middle East policy. He is a former executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of Massachusetts and the former director of Palestine Cultural Center for Peace in Boston. Omar, please take it away. Now I'm muted. Thank you, Hania, for the introduction and thank you to Code Pink for putting this event together. It's nice to see so many friends on here and to be sharing this talk with so many great people. I primarily want to talk about the Biden administration's policy but I think it's useful to just zoom out a little bit and look at the broader perspective and really let the entire history of US policy on Palestine sink in. Some of the history I'll mention, I'm sure will be very familiar to many of the folks on here because I know a lot of people who are on this call are very active on American foreign policy. But when you think about sort of the beginning of all of this with the Nekba, with the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians in order to facilitate the... Omar, you're muted. How about now, can you hear me? Yeah. When you think about the very beginning, we had the creation of Israel, which Palestinians regard as the Nekba, which translates to the catastrophe in which more than 750,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes. You've had more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages destroyed to allow for the creation of Israel. And then you fast forward less than 20 years, you had the war of 1967 in which Israel took over the remaining 22% of historic Palestine. They had taken over 78% with Israel's creation. And at that point, the United States realized that when Israel was able to expand its territory substantially in 1967 in the Six Day War by taking territory from Egypt, Jordan and Syria in under six days, that Israel was a vital resource for US imperial designs. And it was at that point that US military, the USA to Israel expanded more than a hundred fold. So that tells you something about the origin of US interest in the region and the origin of US policy in the region. That it was only when Israel proved to be militarily useful for a US alliance in a region that is very significant for the US for energy resources that the United States decided to invest in that relationship significantly. Now, it's interesting that a lot of people talk about the Nekba as a historical event, something that happened in 1948. But I think it's useful to really think of the Nekba as an ongoing process rather than a historical event. Because the acts of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians are not simply a historical event. They are an ongoing process. They're just happening in different forms. What happens today is really ethnic cleansing in slow motion. In the occupied territories, you have Israeli settlement expansion is happening consistently. Palestinian home demolitions are unfolding. And what is really happening is that Israel is slowly pushing Palestinians out of areas that it wants to hold on to permanently while allowing its population to take over those territories in obvious violation of international law. There was, in the 1990s, this idea of a sham peace process. The idea was that Israel was going to withdraw from the occupied territories, which again, are a mere 22% of historic Palestine to facilitate the creation of a Palestinian state. And that was a really massive Palestinian compromise when you think about it, because we're talking about a very, very small piece of historic Palestine. And Palestinians accepted that formula for the sake of being pragmatic and achieving some kind of solution. And Israel responded throughout the entire peace process by systematically entrenching the occupation of those territories, systematically expanding Israeli settlements in those territories and systematically undermining any possibility for Palestinian self-governance or freedom. And the United States throughout all of this paid lip service to the idea that it supported Palestinian human rights. While American policy in practice has consistently been to enable those very Israeli violations of Palestinian rights. So despite everything that Israel was doing to Palestinians, U.S. military aid continued increasing incessantly, reaching its highest, starting with the Obama administration, up to $38 billion per decade, which is really unprecedented. Israel is the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid. So the U.S., there was a fundamental contradiction in U.S. policy. It said one thing, but it did something else. And not only was the United States supporting Israel's erasure of Palestine and its undermining of Palestinian right to self-determination, it was ensuring that nobody else can hold Israel accountable. So the United States used its veto at the United Nations nearly 45 times in order to block U.N. accountability for Israeli actions, which to really put that in perspective, it is greater than the number of all vetoes cast by all other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council combined related to all issues for that same period. And while we've had this contradiction between American claims for concern for Palestinian human rights and American policy enabling those violations, what we needed was a president who had the courage and an administration that was willing to put its money where its mouth is to actually hold Israel accountable to say that if Israel is not going to respect Palestinian human rights, they are not going to receive America's backing. And what you ended up with with Donald Trump in the last administration is a president who resolved that contradiction in the wrong direction. So instead of adjusting American policy to fit American rhetoric, Trump adjusted American rhetoric to have it match American policy, which was essentially enabling, Trump effectively instead of just enabling Israel's war on Palestinians, he flat out joined that war and declared war on Palestinians in a way that I think a lot of people who are on the school are probably familiar with, cutting off all USA to Palestinian refugees, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the violation of international law, shutting down the Palestinian mission, diplomatic mission in Washington, moving the embassy to Jerusalem and the list just goes on and on. And what you have right now with the return of the Biden administration is potentially merely a renewal of the contradiction that existed before Trump, which is deeply problematic. I mean, I'm not going to say that all of it is meaningless. For example, Biden's decision to renew funding for UNRWA is significant. UNRWA helps Palestinian refugees survive. And so that money going back to UNRWA is going to be very, very significant and meaningful in changing the lives of real people. But beyond that, on just about everything else, Biden is going to a framework where we claim to care about Palestinian human rights, but where throughout the entire democratic primary process, Biden stood out as the person who most specifically opposed any possibility of conditioning US military aid to Israel. So he insisted on that accountability not happening. Now what I find promising in all of this, despite the fact that this new administration's position is really problematic, is the fact that there is very significant positive shift in public discourse on this particular issue where you have more and more members of Congress who are willing to be very critical of Israeli policy. You have Elliot Engel, a very significant still pro-Israel member of Congress who was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee being pushed out by somebody who's sympathetic to Palestinian rights, Jamal Bowman. You have the squad there. You have Mary Newman. You have somebody like Betty McCollum who sponsored bills about protecting Palestinian children who are being tortured in Israeli prisons. All of this is very, very significant shift in the way politics is happening around this particular issue. And it's also meaningful when you look at opinion polls where 64% of the democratic base supports conditioning military aid to Israel or reducing that aid because of Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights. That's very significant. But the backlash to this has also been equally significant and that when there was a time when the pro-Israel lobby, quote unquote, thought it could win this fight by engaging in the public debate, by trying to say that they have the better arguments, having all kinds of platitudes about Israeli democracy and shared values and this and that. But they're realizing that they are losing this because of really the work, the tremendous work that activists for Palestinian rights have done over many years where we have so much more clarity about Israel's violations of Palestinian rights and a better understanding of them. And precisely because of this positive shift in discourse, Israel lobby groups have shifted now to a new strategy of just flat out silencing advocacy for Palestinian human rights. We see it in the legislation being passed around the entire country against BDS, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement where boycotting Israel is now punishable in different localities in different states and in one particular egregious case from a few years ago to qualify for hurricane relief in a particular town in Texas, required people to sign to pledge that they do not boycott Israel. I mean, it's just really absurd. And that thankfully got a lot of backlash from the free speech community, not just from advocates of Palestinian human rights, but organizations like the ACLU spoke about them and there were lawsuits that were won in court against this obvious infringement against free speech. So now that this appears to be a losing battle also, because it's an explicit violation of the First Amendment, now there is this newest shift in the Israel lobby's tactic which is about smearing anybody who advocates for Palestinian human rights as an anti-Semite. It is not an explicit attempt at silencing. It does not violate the First Amendment to smear people as anti-Semites. However, it has the same effect, which is if you ultimately convince people, if you make it policy that advocating for Palestinian rights is anti-Semitic, you are creating an environment in which nobody wants to be active on the issue of Palestine. And that does ultimately create that chilling effect that makes people less likely to engage in the very important activism that we have to keep pushing forward in order to resolve this fundamental injustice and as really a blatant example of American policy being just flat out in the wrong in a way that is really obvious for anybody with a semi-functioning moral compass. And so we have the big battle, which is to hold Israel accountable by conditioning US military aid to Israel. That is absolutely critical on Israeli compliance with international law and respect for Palestinian human rights. And then now we have another battle, which is the need to protect free speech and to fight back against this attempt at conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, which is being pushed through this IRA definition, the International Holocaust Remembrance Clients, definition of anti-Semitism, which simply suggests that to accuse Israel of being a racist endeavor or to quote unquote demonize Israel, all these loose terms that are not defined that those would be defined as anti-Semitism. And once you open the door to this really incredibly loose and expansive definition, you can imagine that anybody who's critical of Israel on a college campus can find themselves the subject of an anti-Semitic harassment complaint. And that has in fact been the case in practice. And just one last point on this that I think is really important is that one of the lead authors on this IRA definition, his name is Ken Stern, he said that he drafted this loose definition of anti-Semitism for the sake of data collection. He admitted that it was expansive and not precise. And he said that if this definition were to be adopted domestically, it would have the effect of silencing activism for Palestinian human rights. And he opposed the imposition of that definition. So keep in mind that the forces who are pushing for this definition do not have a sincere interest in anti-Semitism, but are using a definition that it's whose own authors oppose using domestically and it's a blamed effort at suppressing advocacy for Palestinian human rights. I think I'll leave it at that. I know a lot of other speakers here have a lot of really important things to say and maybe we'll just join the conversation in the Q&A. Thank you. Thank you so much, Omar Badar, our policy analyst and the former director of the Palestine Cultural Center Peace in Boston, Massachusetts. Great to hear from you and look forward to your thoughts during the Q&A. Next, we have Sam Hindi who is going to introduce our second speaker, Waita, Sam, you're there. Thank you, I'm here. Thank you, Marcy. Good evening, everyone. I'm Sam Hindi, a Palestinian American whose family fled Lebanon during the Nakba or catastrophe, exactly what Omar has told you. A living witness, a living victim, actually, of that catastrophe in the Nakba in 1948 to an Israel evicted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Hawaii Dabra. Hawaii Dabra is a Palestinian American attorney and human right activist. She is the co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and former chair of the Free Gaza Movement which organized sea voyages to the Gaza Strip to confront and challenge Israel's deadly blockade on the two million Palestinians in Keishtar. She was one of the primary organizers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and was traveling with it when it was leafily attacked by Israel forces on May 31, 2010. Hawaii Dabra is based in Michigan where she practices civil rights law and continues to devote much of her time to activism on Palestine and other human rights and social justice issues. She is the co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Palestine Subcommittee. Please help me welcome Hawaii Dabra to Code Pink Congress. Thanks so much, Sam. Thank you, everybody. I'm really honored to be here. So I reiterate Alma's comments. It's an honor and a pleasure to be with all of you and with the esteemed speakers. And I'm particularly honored to have been introduced by Sam, a wonderful brother. And for those of you living in Foster City, know what also a great representative he is. So I am going to, I think, focus most of my comments on the International Criminal Court. That's one of the issues that we're going to act on tonight, asking, I believe, asking Biden to lift the sanctions immediately that were in place there. And I know there are probably, since it's a recent decision, that there might be a lot of questions on this. And I'll try not to make it too boring. But I do want to provide just a little bit of background. And then I'll go into what the recent decision means and maybe what we can expect for the future. So those of you that have been following the International Criminal Court for a long time might know that Palestine's bid to join the International Criminal Court goes back to at least 2009 after the Operation Cass led on Gaza in 2008, 2009, where we saw massive casualties. So Palestine lodged a petition to be to accede to the Rome Statute, which is the rules of the International Criminal Court. And the prosecutor at the time, Luis Moreno Campo, took about three years kind of investigating this. Can Palestine join the International Criminal Court in 2012? He came out with a decision that was a non-decision saying he couldn't really decide if Palestine was a state for the purpose of jurisdiction. And so he left it. In 2012, Palestine had a successful bid for statehood being recognized as a non-member state by the United Nations. And after that, they began to join international bodies. In 2015, they acceded to the Rome Statute. And they gave the International Criminal Court jurisdiction dating back to 2014, there was a 2014 massive assault on Gaza, which many of you may remember. It was dubbed Protective Edge, I believe that one. From then, it's been five plus years of Palestine trying to get the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into what's happening in Palestine and why. Because everything that Omar talked about, everything that we see Palestinians oppressed, being injured, killed, land taken away, homes destroyed, denied basic freedoms. And there is nobody holding Israel accountable. Israel has been acting with near total impunity. And so the International Criminal Court is almost seen as the only avenue for big Palestinian victims to maybe hold Israel accountable, to be able to see any kind of justice. And probably a lot of Palestinians are skeptical that even that will pan out. But what we have in 2015 are a Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute, gave the ICC jurisdiction. And the prosecutor then embarked on a preliminary investigation. We have Ben Suda now. That preliminary investigation lasted almost about five years until the end of 2019, where the Office of the Prosecutor came out with a pretty extensive opinion, saying that mapping out all of the issues concerning Palestine that might merit investigation by the International Criminal Court. And it was broken up or can be summarized into six different areas. Three, they attributed to Israel and three to the Palestinians. As far as the Israelis are concerned, they said that there are war crimes potentially that were committed in Gaza during the 2014 onslaught. The Israel's conduct vis-a-vis the Gaza Great March of Return, that was 2018 to almost 2020. And then the settlements issue, which is a war crime, the transferring of civilians from the territory of the occupier to occupied territory. And then as far as Palestinians are concerned, they said that the targeting of civilians by Palestinian militants, and they're referring there to a rocket fire from Gaza, there has been there is suspicion of torture in Palestinian detention centers. And that could implicate the Palestinian Authority. And the crime of murder, the murder of civilians in there, they're referring largely to attacks that were carried out by Palestinians inside 48 against Israeli civilians. But before the prosecutor would open an investigation, even though she determined that there are issues that merit investigation, she decided to ask for a ruling from the pretrial chamber, a legal ruling on whether jurisdiction exists. Basically, whether, even though Palestine is seated to the Rome Statute, and technically they're a member of the court, because there are all these political issues, and the Palestine is not a member of the United Nations she decided to kind of play it safe and ask the pretrial chamber for a legal ruling as to whether Palestine is a state for jurisdictional purposes. And that's a decision that we saw come down on February 5th. It was a two to one decision that ruled that Palestine is a state for jurisdictional purposes. There was one minority, the minority opinion came from a judge from Hungary who agreed that Palestine should be a state for jurisdictional purposes. But he focused on the Oslo Accords and he kind of focuses the Oslo Accords being a barrier if we have time, I'll get into that. So he did not go along with the majority saying that the investigation basically could be opened. Now, what we have is a situation where Fatima Ben Suda, who has been looking into this for the past five years, is retiring in June of 2021. And whether she will open an investigation before she retires, we don't know, probably not, the prosecutor who is coming in, it would be probably largely up to him, Karim Khan, who is a UK national, he will take up the mantle of new ICC prosecutor. Now, briefly, I just want to go into kind of the jurisdiction and some of the issues that we're looking at, what the court can investigate. And I'm sorry if this is too elementary, you guys all know this, but the crimes that the ICC can investigate are, one, war crimes, two, crimes against humanity, and those are severe crimes committed on a large scale, three, genocide, and four, crimes against peace, that being crimes of aggression, using force without justification, i.e. not in self-defense. And then the territorial scope that they have, because Israel, as many of you know, is not a member of the International Criminal Court. So the question is, well, how can the International Criminal Court assert jurisdiction now over Israelis? And that's also, sorry, I should point that out. It's not, the International Criminal Court does not investigate states, it investigates individuals. So it would be investigating Israelis and not Israel. So the territorial scope of their jurisdiction is, one, for crimes committed on a territory of a member state, two, if the suspect bears nationality of a member state, or three, if the UN Security Council decides to empower the court to investigate, which happened, for example, in the situation of Darfur. In this case, Palestine is asking, saying that there are crimes that have been committed on the territory of Palestine, and therefore we're giving the ICC jurisdiction. If we go back, and before I get into some of the other issues, if we take a look at the history of the court, there are some political considerations. And these will have been playing out, and that has to do with the makeup of the states that are party. Right now, if we look at it, it is mainly countries in the developing world, largely Africa, Latin America, and then you do have all Western European countries that are members of the court. Three, I guess you would call them now, world powers are not a member of the court, and that's US, Russia, and China. And of course, Israel is not a member. I think the membership is about to 130-something countries right now. But as far as the history of the court is concerned, there have been 13 situations that have been investigated, and those of largely 10 of them have been of African, basically the situations in Africa. And those that have been, the trials that have taken place have all been against African suspects. And therefore, there has been a growing discomfort with the court. There have even been accusations that this is not a world court, it's an African court, and this is not what we signed up for, and even some threats from some African nations of leaving the court, and no longer being a party in accepting jurisdiction. And that hopefully will be a consideration, if especially when we're looking at, is the new prosecutor going to even take, like after Fulton Ben Souda leaves, is the new prosecutor going to take up the case because it goes back to him, he actually doesn't have to. But I think that political situation and the credibility of the court, I hope will be taken seriously. After all of this has been invested into examining Israel, a five year investigation, a pre-trial chamber ruling, and to not to have the prosecutor then say, well, we're not going to take up Israel, is going to really send the wrong message. But Israel is lobbying very heavily, mainly European countries, and that also presents a problem because these European countries, as I said, are also the main financiers of the court. So the court is in a little bit of a tough situation, but hopefully it will act in accordance with the purpose for which it was established and that is to attain justice for victims of some of the most egregious abuses, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and also to deter future actions like this. If I have another minute, I will just touch briefly on two issues that you might hear. Well, maybe I'll just focus on one if we have time, I'll do the other one in question and answer. You'll hear some arguing for, Israel argues this a lot, is that we don't need the court to investigate us because we are perfectly capable in investigating ourselves. And it is true that the court is the court, the International Criminal Court is a court of secondary jurisdiction. That means it operates according to the principle of complementarity. It takes up a situation if the authorities responsible the country is unwilling or unable to prosecute violators. And that's when the court can assume jurisdiction. So if a country is or can show that it is prosecuting the certain allegations, the court will say that there's no place for us here. And therefore you have a lot of people and certainly Israel advocates saying Israel has a first world justice system and they investigate themselves all the time. But, and therefore the court, even if they open an investigation, they'll find that they cannot take jurisdiction. And I would say that one, this cannot be, certainly as it concerns one of the areas that the court will look into and that is settlements because they're not investigating themselves on settlements because settlement is a state policy, propagated at the highest levels. So they cannot claim that they've investigated themselves on their settlement enterprise. And when it comes to the two other situations, I would say even then Israel, it would be very difficult for Israel to be able to show that they have met their obligation and conducted any semblance of a credible investigation into what has happened. I mean, if we just take Gaza in 2014, the onslaught, a 51 day campaign or one of the most powerful militaries in the world attacks a small area of land where 2 million Palestinians have nowhere to run. 2,200 Palestinians killed in 51 days, at least 1,500 of them civilians, over 530 of them children. And no accountability. Adela, an organization that advocates for minority rights within Israel actually produced a damning reports on the Israeli military advocate general, showing that basically why the ICC is needed because they cannot investigate themselves. And specifically when it comes to the Gaza 2014, they showed that there were 500 complaints filed against Israeli soldiers and Israeli actions relating to 360 what they call exceptional incidents. Of those 360 exceptional incidents, the MAG, the military advocate general ordered criminal investigations into 24. And of those 24, 23 were closed without any criminal or disciplinary proceedings at all. Only one case there was an indictment and that was for looting and aiding and abetting looting. The soldier apparently took a few hundred dollars from one of the homes that was raided. And that is a pattern, certainly. Sorry, I hope we don't have time, leave it there. You have so much knowledge and expertise and we really appreciate hearing all of what you have to say, but we're gonna save some of it for the Q and A. We have two more speakers, so thank you so much. The next speaker will be introduced by someone she knows well, Medea Benjamin. So we have Arielle of Code Pink, who is a co-director of Code Pink and has been running the Middle East program. But even before she joined us at Code Pink, she has been one of the Jewish Americans who had been so active on Palestinian rights, passionate about it. And I would say have a lot of hutzpah, including protesting at the very sacred wailing wall in Jerusalem and being at the APAC protests, I mean, the APAC gatherings and going inside to confront them. So we're very happy to be working with and have tonight with us, Arielle Gold. Thank you so much, Medea, and so much appreciation to Omar and Heleda and Esti. It's such a pleasure to be part of this event with you. So I imagine that most of you in the audience, really you'd have to bury your head in the sand, not to have heard all of the hoopla that's going on about Israel's incredible vaccination success. They have vaccinated as they like to tout over 4.4 million people with one COVID-19 vaccination shot and more than 3 million people with both shots. And this has been largely on the news. Dr. Anthony Fauci has received an award from Israel and complimented Israel on its incredible vaccine success. But this is such a small part and such an inaccurate part of the story because while Israel says, this is fantastic, it's over 48% of our population that's been vaccinated, they are refusing to account for the around 4.5 million people that live under a brutal military dictatorship and for whom Israel has entirely denied the vaccine to. The vaccine to. So what we call this in reality is vaccine, is medical apartheid, vaccine, medical apartheid. And we saw this play out on Saturday Night Live when they spoke about Israel says it's vaccinated about half of its population and I'm gonna guess the Jewish half. And this is actually very much the reality of what's going on. So Israel says that they have no responsibility to vaccinate Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza because according to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian authority is responsible for the health of the population of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza. However, when the Oslo Accords were signed, this was a preliminary interim agreement where a larger peace agreement was supposed to be reached within five years. Now this larger peace agreement has never been reached. And in the meantime, Israel has entrenched its settlement enterprise, has flouted international law, has committed gross war crimes as Hoeda spoke about. And yet Israel says, but that's fine. We still don't have to vaccinate Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza. Israel finally, after an enormous amount of pressure and international outpricing will give, they pledged to give 5,000 vaccines to the West Bank. They've only delivered a couple thousand of those so far and when the Palestinian authority received vaccines, the Sputnik V vaccines from Russia and tried to deliver a couple thousand of those into Gaza, Israel held those up and refused to allow those vaccines to come in and went on to debate it in Knesset as though debating the health and lives of human beings was a valid discussion to have. They finally allowed some of those to enter, but we're again, we're talking about a couple thousand vaccines. Gaza is the most densely populated place on earth because of Israel's brutal air, land and sea siege on Gaza. And because of their repeated military assaults, Gaza survives without ongoing electricity. They survive without functioning, well functioning medical and sanitation systems with enormous rates of poverty and unemployment. Gaza is a place where quarantining and sanitation to address COVID-19 is nearly impossible. And so we have to look at the cruelty of not allowing these vaccines in within that magnification of this very dire situation that's going on in Gaza. Now, thankfully, Omar spoke about that we've really seen these incredible changes in US Congress where a decade ago, even five years ago, it was unheard of to have members of Congress support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement or to have members of Congress talk about conditioning US military assistance to Israel. Just a few years ago, members of Congress were jumping over themselves to be seen at APAC conferences. And that has very much changed. And we see now members of Congress, such as Marie Newman, such as Jamal Bowman, such as Castro, who has a prominent position, speaking out about the inequality and the grave, grave abuse that it is to carry out this medical apartheid, to refuse to vaccinate Palestinians. And so we even saw today, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, you know, I want to say dip a toe into addressing this. He didn't go too far, but while on a phone call with the Israeli Foreign Minister, his Israeli counterpart, he asked for help in securing the vaccination of Palestinians because it has become a topic that Israel is refusing to vaccinate the very people that it rules over. And you know, I want to say that this medical apartheid is only one of many aspects of Israel's system of apartheid. We have separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians. We have an entirely separate military court system in the West Bank where Palestinian civilians are subjected to Israeli military court, while Israeli settlers living illegally on stolen Palestinian land are subject only to Israeli civilian courts. And speaking of these Israeli settlers who live illegally in the West Bank, they have unrestricted access to Israel's supply of the COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, their Palestinian neighbors do not. And in these recent turns of events as well, Israel is now, they have purchased so many vaccines that they have a plethora of them and they are planning to give them out to such countries as Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary. And within that, they've agreed to give some as well to Palestinian medical workers or specifically and as well specifically the Palestinian workers who come into Israel. This is an issue that is ongoing and is really, really horrific. And we need to continue to ask more and more members of Congress to speak out and condemn this medical apartheid and to call on Israel to share the COVID-19 vaccine equitably and fully with Palestinians. For a long time, it's been a reality that this is a one-state, it's a one apartheid state system and we need to demand that Palestinians have equal access to the vaccine for COVID as well as other medical care. And with that, I'm going to close and I look forward to hearing from my dear friend, Estie. Thank you so much, Ariel. And for all your leadership and the petition, I think there's one in the chat that was posted. It's incredible. The conversation, it only took nine seconds for Michael Chay to expose Israeli apartheid mortality to the world and Twitter just lit up. Jewish Voice for Peace had a great tweet. So if you're on Twitter, please retweet them on Michael Chay. It's my great honor to introduce my friend now, Estie Chandler. In 2010, she founded the late chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Estie is now on JVP's Board of Directors and chairs the Board of JVP's Sister Political Organization, JVP Action. Estie Chandler is the host and producer of KPAFK's Middle Eastern Focus. And coming soon, Estie Chandler's podcast called The Breakout Room. Stay tuned. Estie, you're on. Thank you so much. And I just want to echo what my other co-panelists have said that it is such a great honor to speak at this forum and especially with these other amazing speakers. So I'm gonna talk about the IHRA definition which JVP sees this unscrupulous weaponization of the accusation of antisemitism as our top battle right now. Hopefully some of you have seen JVP's Facebook, we need to talk campaign and have signed our petition for those who have not. Facebook is considering giving into the Israeli government's demand that the word Zionist be widely accepted as synonymous with Jew. We first heard about Facebook's consideration of this last November and immediately began to plan because their executives were saying that they wanted to make a decision by February, 2021. This month, so we had just a couple months to launch a challenge big enough to get them to refuse to hand a significant victory to those who support Israeli apartheid at the expense of Jewish safety, which is the bottom line of this ask by Israeli authorities. This effort to conflate Zionists and Jews is integral to the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, definition of antisemitism that's currently being touted by the Israeli government and its supporters in an effort to shield themselves from accountability. While Facebook is claiming that their current policy is narrower in scope than the full IHRA definition, Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg is on record with Adam Milstein, for those of you who aren't familiar with him, he's a right-wing donor and a leading proponent of the IHRA definition campaign who is so extreme that even APAC distanced itself from him. So Sandberg is on record saying to Milstein that IHRA has guided Facebook's approach and that their policy indeed goes quote, even further than the IHRA definition, end quote. So now Facebook is considering amending its hate speech policy, adopting Zionists as a proxy for Jew or Israeli and thus blocking conversations about political, about this political ideology of Zionism and identity with real-world implications for Palestinian and Israeli people as well as Jewish people, Palestinian people and politically engaged people all around the world. Under this policy, valid attempts to hold the state of Israel accountable through constitutionally protected political speech could be labeled as hate speech and removed from the platform. Palestinians would be prevented from using Facebook like everyone else uses it to talk about their daily experiences, histories and their lives because their realities are shaped by Zionist apartheid policies. This policy wouldn't just censor Palestinian speech but discriminate against Palestinians as a class of people and silence nuanced conversation about Zionism. As GVP's deputy director, Rabbi Alyssa Weiser in the Guardian last week, the discriminatory implications for Palestinians are more than reason enough to reject this policy. But additionally, conflating Zionism with all Jews, many of whom like me are anti-Zionists struggling alongside Palestinians for their freedom and equality is itself a harmful assumption premised on the anti-Semitic notion that Jews are uniform in our beliefs and our political commitments. Even worse, it suggests that all Jews in America and elsewhere around the world are fundamentally loyal to a foreign government and that the real home for all Jews is Israel. Playing into the vile notion that we're unable to fully become part of the societies we inhabit that we don't truly belong in our home countries and communities. Of course, as Christians united for Israel, many members of Congress and sadly our current president exemplify, not only are all Jews not Zionists, not all Zionists are Jews. There are at least 10 million Christian Zionists in the US but our Christian allied organization, Friends of Sebel North America, estimates that 20% of the US population hold Christian Zionist views believing that Israel's occupation of Palestinian land will hasten the second coming of Christ at which point Jews either convert to Christianity or die. How's that for a seriously anti-Semitic proposition? The deflection campaign to redefine anti-Semitism began years ago with the invention of so-called new anti-Semitism, alleging that criticism of the self-described Jewish state stemmed from hatred of Jews and not from its discriminatory treatment of non-Jewish citizens, ongoing occupation and annexation of territories conquered in war and refusal to accept responsibility for expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and land or recognize their right to return as the three previous speakers have all elaborated on. Today, the deflection campaign is focused on an intense lobbying effort for a redefinition of the term anti-Semitism to the working definition of anti-Semitism put forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. That vague and convoluted definition, which I can post in the chat in a moment, is followed by 11 examples of what could be anti-Semitic, including examples which also could be and typically actually are common political criticisms of Israeli policy. The IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism is controversial both because it fails to capture or identify the true nature of anti-Semitism and its root or its root causes. So use of the definition does nothing to make Jewish people safe and it also poses a direct threat to Palestinians, Palestinian rights advocates and free speech. When Trump signed his so-called anti-Semitism executive order on December 11th, 2019, it mandated that federal agencies consider that definition in applying anti-discrimination laws, it did nothing to target the real manifestations of hatred because it wasn't designed or employed to do that. So some good news to report, JVP's Facebook, We Need to Talk campaign now has 48 organizations around the world that are part of the campaign. We gave ourselves four weeks to gather our goal of 25,000 signatures on the petition to Facebook and we reached that goal in just four days. We've now surpassed 52,000 signatures and I will also pop that link into the chat because if everybody can sign it as soon as possible tonight, it would be great because tomorrow morning, we will be virtually delivering it to 18 locations around the globe and I will also put in a link for an online event tomorrow where that will be happening. I'll just finish by stating the obvious that it's imperative that we dismantle anti-Semitism in all of its manifestations but the IHRA working definition only weakens that fight. Conflating Zionism with the Jewish people only entrenched anti-Semitism. Facebook shouldn't allow governments to blur the lines between hate speech and political speech and it must prioritize revisiting existing policies that disproportionately censor Palestinians and other marginalized voices posting about their experiences of racism and state violence. Thank you. Thank you. Excellent, Estie, you framed it so we all understand exactly what we need to do tonight. We're gonna be making calls and sending emails about this definition and how threatening it is, not just to the Palestinians, which is threatening enough but also to a free speech and robust debate in our country. Before we do that, we're gonna do just a couple of questions because we don't have a lot of time before our action. I do wanna raise the first question. It's a tough question. It's for Omar and Huwaita. My question is, do you think the Palestinians would be better off without the Palestinian Authority enforcing, being the enforcer for Israeli apartheid? Would the Palestinians be better off giving up this two-state solution notion that Israel has not honored and showing for the world exactly what the apartheid state of Israel looks like? Happy to address, Huwaita, should I just go first and you go next? Go ahead, get me, sure. Look, the short answer, I think to whether Palestinians are better off without the Palestinian Authority is yes, but let me explain why that's a little bit complicated. It's worth considering how the Palestinian Authority came to be in the first place. If you remember during the first Intifada, there were images broadcast around the entire world of Israeli soldiers breaking the bones of Palestinian demonstrators, unarmed demonstrators, literally clubbing them until their bones were broken, as a means of putting together this unarmed uprising that really shook the occupation and Israel did not know how to handle it and it was in desperation mode of how to quell this uprising without suffering all the public relations damage that it was suffering at the time. And they decided that the way to do it was to create this fake peace process to pretend that they're negotiating towards an end to the occupation, to bring the Palestinian leadership under occupation into the occupied territories where they're easier to control. And then they created the sly that if the Palestinian leadership were to cooperate with Israel that that would lead to Palestinian freedom. And what that effectively did is subcontract the occupation enforcement to the Palestinian Authority where they were the ones putting Palestinians down basically as a means of trying to push forward a process that could lead to a Palestinian independence and self-determination. And throughout this period, Israel made sure to make the Palestinian Authority as basically invaluable as possible as difficult to let go of. They not only made it difficult for Palestinian leadership Palestinian leaders to let go of the Palestinian Authority by giving them all these immense privileges that allowed them to live a fairly privileged life in a situation that affords very little privilege otherwise to Palestinians but they also ensured that the Palestinian Authority was the largest employer in the West Bank. So that getting rid of the Palestinian Authority ends up being incredibly painful economically for the Palestinians who are living under occupation. They created the situation of dependence that makes abolishing the Palestinian Authority very, very difficult. And if you think about Yasser Arafat when he got serious during the second Intifada about not cooperating with Israel anymore the consequences was Israel literally besieged him in his compound and sent soldiers into that compound to kill some of his security guards. It was a very intimidating situation. So you can imagine how Palestinian leaders today looking at what had happened before to people who genuinely refused to cooperate and have sincere fear for their lives. And that dynamic I think makes it very, very difficult that the Palestinians are being held hostage in that even though we're absolutely in a situation right now where there's no denying the fact that it's apartheid from the river to the sea there is no doubt about the fact that there is no reason for the Palestinians to continue cooperating with their occupiers under any circumstances. And that Israel should receive the full burden of trying to control a population that it has no business ruling over. It nonetheless is politically complicated at this point to try to figure out what the practical steps are to move towards a model where we see that relationship fundamentally change because of that. If I could just add briefly to that. I mean, Alma covered a lot and this is a much longer conversation but I think one of the biggest detriment I would say of Oslo, there's a lot of things wrong with it but one of the major things that it did to decimate really Palestinians was to change our, alter our freedom struggle. Like our leadership went from being a movement a liberation movement to being a state building kind of quasi acting like a state. And they completely disregarded or stopped focusing on this notion of liberation and what it means to be liberated and entered this bilateral relationship where Israel is obviously the stronger entity and supported by United States. They put all the eggs in the basket of Israel and the United States. And what they did also was managed to disenfranchise Palestinians all around the world. So the Palestinian authority does not represent me or Alma or anyone that is not living in the small banter stands over which Palestinian authority has limited authority for very administrative things. And that has weakened our struggle because you have the Palestinian refugees you have Palestinian in 48, you have more Palestinians living outside the occupied Palestinian territory than you have inside. And our national liberation struggle is all of ours. So the Palestine Liberation Organization which is supposed to represent this has gotten melded or confused with the Palestinian authority because there's a lot of crossover of people when as I'm gonna explain the Palestinian authority what their limited authority is and subcontracting and the very existence depends on Oslo and the sham peace process. What needs to be done and what Palestinians have been asking for for decades is to rebuild the Palestinian National Council which is the representative body of Palestinians all over the world in an effort to kind of reunite us and be able to utilize the strengths of Palestinian all around the world towards our national liberation strategy. So I think one of the biggest detriment of Oslo was that how it managed to manipulate it in the sense of Palestinian leadership into abandoning most of the Palestinian people in exchange for limited autonomy and this focus on having a state when Israel never actually intended for that. And so we do need to rebuild and Palestinians that are continuing to demand elections and a representative body. Thank you so much, Oeda. I know there's so many questions. It's 612 and we wanna make sure that we mobilize everybody to email Biden and call their representatives about the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and its threat to our democracy. So what I'm gonna suggest is if you have a contact email people can send you a question if that's all right please put it in the chat. And again, I really wanna thank our four guests who are just amazing. Omar Badar, Hueda Araj, Ariel Gold and Esti Chandler for this illuminating evening. We will have this recording up on YouTube. I'll be sending that out on the Google group. And if Mary, I think Mary put in the chat where you can sign up for the Google group. We send out announcements about our shows there and I will also send out the action alerts as well. So thank you and I urge everybody to stay with us. There are 193 people on the call. We need to get busy and follow up on this action. So thank you very much. And Mary, if you can, maybe we can share the screen. Thank you for the speakers. Yes, thank you. And thank our guests. Thank you, thank you for being here. Thank you very much. Thank you everyone, thank you so much. All right, so I think it's easier if you have it up on the screen, Mary. Can you put up the action alert on the screen? We, yes? Not to cut you off, Marcy. I don't know if Mary's internet is going in and out, but I can use my internet of my computer as a backup. Yeah. Bring it to the rescue. Thank you. Hi, I am here actually. I have been having a bit of difficult internet. We had a good deal of snow yesterday, but I seem to be okay for now. So I do typically share my screen during these actions, but they're a really long one tonight. And I don't think I can test them all on one screen. Sam Hindi has that to me. Dead, I have, I've pasted it all into a Google doc that is visible to anyone with a link. So it's going to share that link around and then you can all bring it up on your own computers, if that works. Also bring it up on this screen, at least some of it for those who grab that link. Basically what we've done, we've added to our alert. The first part deals with urging both Biden and our representatives to not to adopt this definition of anti-Semitism that conflates it with Zionism. And we're urging Biden to reverse the executive orders, one penalizing those who co-