 The entire Palestine Solidarity movement in North America has united behind the demand for a ceasefire. For the first time in years, organizations of the working class, including labor unions, have been united against the status quo of Western foreign policy and taken an unprecedented stance against Israeli violence. At the same time, important sectors of the movement have been trying to push the demands even further. The Palestinian youth movement, a major formation of Palestinian youth all across North America, has been working to push the movement beyond dreaming of an end to current aggression and into demanding full liberation from Israeli occupation. To talk about PYM's latest demands, which include an end to occupation, the release of all Palestinian political prisoners, and an end to Western complicity and Zionism, we're joined by Munir Marwan, who has been a student organizer for Palestine with Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts University, has worked as a journalist for many years, and is now a leader in the Palestinian youth movement here in New York City. Munir, can you just start by saying a bit about yourself as an organizer and how long you've been in PYM? Absolutely. So my name is Munir. I'm a member of the Palestinian youth movement. I've been organizing around Palestine for many years, over 12 years since I was 18, part of my SJP at Tufts University, served in SJP National for a little while, worked as a journalist for a few years, and I've been organizing with the New York chapter of PYM for almost two years now. Palestinian youth movement, of course, an organization that exists all across North America, they just released a list of demands around this particular war on Gaza right now. A really prominent demand that has come to the fore in North America has been this demand for ceasefire, but I think it's interesting that the Palestinian youth movement is moving beyond that and talking about what we need beyond just a ceasefire, beyond just stopping aggression. And I'm wondering if you can take us through that list of demands and why it's important to go beyond this initial demand, and if we can just start with lifting the siege on Gaza and what that means to the organization. Absolutely. We are organizing around demands that Palestinians have been asking for for many, many years with regards to the siege on Gaza. This is a military blockade, a suffocating siege that has been in place for over 17 years, and this is a blockade that literally counts the number of calories that enter Gaza, keeping its population just above the starvation line. So it's completely inhumane. Israel controls the borders, the sea borders, the airspace, the telecommunications, electricity. There's literally no element of life that is outside of there, sort of the tyrannical control of this occupation, and that needs to end. It's clear that that situation is untenable. It's a pressure cooker. Some people have used the analogy of an open-air prison, but some have even said it's worse than that. So this needs to be at the forefront of our thinking around this because what does it mean for there just to be a ceasefire? This genocide has displaced over 2 million people. So where are those people meant to go? Their homes are destroyed, apartment blocks have been turned to rubble. We need to start thinking beyond just the inevitable ceasefire and the military failures of the Israeli occupation forces has become exposed for the entire world to see. It's interesting how this demand draws attention to a fact that many people in the U.S. don't know, right? That Gaza has been under siege for years now, right? That the siege, the latest siege that happened in October is actually not the beginning, and that Israel has been tightly controlling the Gaza Strip for many, many years. Absolutely. These conditions are part of what has sparked Palestinian resistance for so many generations, right? And we've seen Gazans resist in all sorts of ways, including the Great March of Return, which the international community, a very powerful movement that called attention to the fact that the majority of people living in Gaza are already once displaced, right? They're mostly refugees. Most of them traced their lineage to areas in the 1948 borders of Palestine where they were displaced from. These refugees sort of banded together to do a nonviolent march to the border to say that they had a right to return to their homeland, and they were violently suppressed. They were attacked by Israeli snipers. Many were killed. Many were martyred. So this is a cycle, it's clearly a cycle of violence in Razer that we need to completely dismantle this oppressive structure that produces this violence. And I also wanted to draw attention to the second demand, which I think is extremely crucial, releasing all Palestinian political prisoners. I think a lot right now in the media, in the rhetoric, is this idea of releasing the hostages, releasing the Israeli hostages in Gaza, and a lot of what is left out of that rhetoric is the fact that over a thousand Palestinian political prisoners are being held by Israel and have been for many years, and a lot of people don't know that, and that's not spoken about. So if you could talk a bit more about that, that would be great. Yeah, just to get to that number, a thousand who are held simply without charge or trial. That's in addition to the many, many other prisoners who are detained on completely fabricated charges, and including minors, who Israel is the only country in the world to try minors in military court. So literally children are being quote-unquote tried by their military courts. The rate of conviction is... It makes it clear that there's absolutely no due process whatsoever, and they're filling their... They're literally raiding people's homes, taking their family's prisoner, and then using that as a sort of bargaining chip in their negotiations. So it's almost... It's very clear that this is a tool of social control, and it's meant to, just as imprisonment is here, break apart families, rupture the social fabric, and collectively punish Palestinians in something that is completely illegal under any kind of humanitarian or international standards. And I think also the conditions that these prisoners face in the Israeli state are some of the most appalling, right? And I'm wondering if you can maybe touch a little bit on the process of administrative detention and some of the real hardships that these prisoners endure while in Israeli custody. Absolutely. There are several Israeli human rights groups that have reported on... Israeli and Palestinian and international human rights groups that have reported on the horrendous conditions that Palestinians face within Israeli captivity. One of them is sexual violence, right? There's been many, many reports of sexual assault, rape, and sort of using this horrendous tactic as a means of punishment and essentially terror, striking terror into the hearts of an occupied population. Nonetheless, Palestinian prisoners, they have served as sort of the compass of our movement. They are a guiding force in our sort of intellectual thought. Later this year, the PYM intends to publish a novel, actually, by one of the Palestinian prisoners, a writer who has been in prison for so many years. And we're very much looking forward to sort of translating his renowned Arabic novel into English for a wider sort of reader base. That's really, really exciting to hear. Definitely how the cultural aspect plays into the broader movement, especially in the Palestinian struggle. There's such a history of that. I also wanted to talk about the third demand, ending the occupation. I think this has been quite a prominent one for many years, and I think it's important to bring it back to the fore. I wanted to speak about this a little bit, but also express that PYM is an organization that has not lost sight of the fact that there is this ongoing occupation. It really is not just about the ongoing genocide right now. It's this ongoing unjust situation that led to all of this violence. So, yeah, if we could just speak on that for a little bit. Absolutely. While a genocide rages on at the hands of the Israeli military and Gaza, there's also an occupation that has been festering in the West Bank. Gaza is also under occupation, but this year has been one of the deadliest years on record for Palestinians living in the West Bank. We've seen increased settlement expansion, settler violence. We've seen raids deep into Palestinian territory. And this all points to the fact that the Israeli occupation has become increasingly untenable. And when we say end the occupation, we mean this entire system of coercion, control, and dominance has to be dismantled. And this has to be dismantled not only because Palestinians are suffering, but Israelis are suffering under the system too. It's bizarre for a society to take its 18-year-olds and draft them, conscript them into military service where they are put in a position where they have to inflict cruelty and violence on a captive population. This is something that is tormenting for the psyche. I see that you have a poster of Franz Fanon behind you and in the wretched of the earth, Fanon talks about the impact of torture and this kind of violence, not simply on the psyche of the colonized, but also on that of the colonizer. So it's of utmost importance that the international community recognize that this occupation is completely unsustainable. And it is one of the fundamental things that needs to change in order for there to be any kind of justice from the river to the sea. You know, the importance of the context of what's been happening is very, very crucial. And I'm glad that you brought it back to the West Bank because there have been killings in the West Bank in this period of time even, like the most recent two months. And that is just like how the violence spills over to all of occupied Palestine is definitely important to note. And of course, there is a demand that we hear a lot in the US about the Western complicity in Zionism, the fact that Western governments, including in the United States and Canada, fund Israel with billions of dollars in weapons. Can you talk about that? And can you talk about the impact of that on the working class of this country? We need to be, you know, we need to be very clear that the Western world is the largest, the single largest enabler of the regime, the sort of occupation and colonization of Palestine. And they're not doing this because they've decided that this is some kind of moral stance. They're not doing it out of charity. They're doing it because they're deeply complicit in and profiting from this ongoing militarization and genocide of Palestinians. Arms companies, Western arms companies, Western tech companies are deeply complicit in upholding this system of, you know, weapons sales to Israel when the United States, you know, allocates billions of dollars to this, to funding the, you know, to aiding quote-unquote the Israeli military. A lot of that money is being used to purchase American arms, right? Weapons that are manufactured here and shipped there in order to, you know, destroy entire apartment buildings, wipe out families, you know, even their sort of tech exports, artificial intelligence is being used in this genocide like never before. So, you know, Western complicity is the fundamental enabler of this entire situation. The rest of the world sees this quite clearly. You know, this occupation is deeply unpopular among the global south and, you know, we're in most places that are not, you know, as the West is profiting off of this. So, you know, when we say ending Western complicity, we mean sort of dismantling that system. So, you know, this demand is something that should resonate across working class communities domestically in the United States. It's quite absurd that when this society, this government hasn't fulfilled some of the most fundamental and basic needs of its own people, such as healthcare, you know, a proper social safety net, right? Infrastructure that is decaying and crumbling, that they're literally spending billions of taxpayer money to fund this, you know, literal genocide that is happening across the world. There's zero tangible benefit for the average American. And, you know, not to mention that it's, of course, a horrendous atrocity that we are literally funding. You know, going off of that, there have been these mass protests across North America in the United States in major, you know, capitalist centers like New York City and also in the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., where all of this funding is generated, essentially. Can you speak to, like, this moment right now in the movement for Palestine where we have people in the working class of the countries that most support Israel are very clearly saying that they don't support this in huge numbers? Yeah. You know, what I think we're seeing is people paying attention to this issue like never before, right? And when people pay attention to this, it's quite clear that something isn't adding up, you know, and that something is deeply wrong, right? It also points to the incredible undemocratic nature of the society we live in. You know, while the U.S. pretends to be, you know, the world's, you know, most established democracy, the reality is that over 80% of Democrats or 60% of even Republicans support a ceasefire, which is one of our most basic demands and long-standing demands in this conflict. Yet our politicians are completely cowardly when it comes to actually reflecting the desires of their constituents, right? It's a political class that has grown wealthy on corruption and does not reflect the actual needs and desires of the people. So, you know, in addition, when we say that Palestine will free us all, that's a chant that we're hearing on the streets. That also refers to the fact that we need systemic change in this country where we live. We need, you know, working class uprising and essentially a revolution, a political revolution that will make our systems truly democratic, right? There's obvious common-sense reforms that, you know, need to happen, but the political establishment is, you know, too afraid to allow that to happen. And they, you know, they're using every dirty tactic in the book, but they fundamentally cannot win because it's clear that the people are united behind this cause like never before. We're seeing an anti-war movement along the lines of, you know, the anti-war movement during Vietnam. It's a movement that is only escalating in its, you know, reach and people power. And it's something that, you know, has created bonds and solidarities that are unprecedented, right? Quite literally unprecedented in this country. So, you know, we have every belief that we will triumph in this and that Palestine will contribute to the freedom of the countries that, you know, are of the governments that are funding this genocide. You know, we're seeing today mass mobilizations on a scale that is really unprecedented in U.S. history. It's not just this, you know, not just the scale of the marches. Over half a million people, you know, descended on Washington, D.C. early in this process to demand a ceasefire in a march that was organized by PYM and a huge coalition of comrades. But we're also seeing constant disruptions on a daily basis, active civil disobedience, disruptions of, you know, fundraising events for the Israeli military, confrontations of politicians, spontaneous actions that are being planned by, you know, groups of concerned, you know, comrades who are coming together to oppose this, you know, horrific war machine. And the scale of the protests is, it's non-stop, you know, that even we recently heard from a journalist who was interviewing a member of law enforcement that the police, the NYPD, one of the biggest, by far the biggest police department in the country is feeling stretched very thin and strained by the amount of protests happening and that officers are literally unable to keep up with the long hours, getting fatigued from standing on their feet. Here are chance in their heads as they're trying to fall asleep and know that they have to wake up the next morning to another massive protest. So that's really inspiring that that is being seen by people in Palestine and across, you know, across the world, across the global south. And that's inspiring even more acts of solidarity, courage, bravery and sacrifice. And we hope to keep seeing that as time continues. Thank you so much for making the time for this. That was excellent.