 To read the statements from President Biden and Secretary Blinken, General Austin and leaders of both parties, you'd hardly know Palestinians existed at all. There has been no recognition of the attack on Palestinian families being ripped from their homes in East Jerusalem right now, or home demolitions. No mention of children being detained or murdered. No recognition of a sustained campaign of harassment and terror by Israeli police against worshipers. Feeling down and praying and celebrating their holiest days in one of their holiest places. No mention of Al-Aqsa being surrounded by violence, tear gas, smoke, while people pray. Can my colleagues imagine if it was their place of worship filled with tear gas? Could you pray as stun grenades were tossed into your holiest place? I can't stand silent when injustice exists, where the truth is obscured. If there's one thing Detroit instilled in this Palestinian girl from Southwest, it's you always speak truth to power even if your voice shakes. The freedom of Palestinians is connected to the fight against oppression all over the world. Lastly, to my city in Palestine, I shan't on a whack of Hannah. I stand here because of you. Thank you. Incredible speech, gut wrenching, heartfelt. It's incredible. I do want to move on to Ilhan Omar's. This isn't as long, but she says something here that's really substantial. This Israeli government and their far right ethno-nationalist leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has legally raised Palestinian ancestral homes, leveled entire neighborhoods, and finally suppressed any resistance. This is all to make way for illegal Israeli settlement outposts designed to displace Palestinians from their homes and prevent a future Palestinian state. Since 1993, when the first Oslo Peace Accord was signed, illegal settlements have increased by nearly 400,000. And Netanyahu has made explicit his goal to annex much of the West Bank, home to over 3 million Palestinians. On top of that, Palestinian movement, speech, and economic activity are severely limited. Palestinians are not allowed to leave the Gaza Strip except in extreme cases. Medical shortage, our rampant, and youth unemployment was already 40% before the pandemic hit. People who protest including young children are routinely shot by the IDF soldiers, often killed with no consequence in Israeli courts. So this is significant because she referred to Netanyahu as a far-right ethno-nationalist. That's significant for a member of Congress to say. This is our business because we are playing a role in it. And the United States must acknowledge its role in the injustice and human rights violations of Palestinians. This is not about both sides. This is about an imbalance of power. I don't think people really get this. They don't get the power dynamics here, and that Israel is the occupier. And they don't understand the way that our government is so complicit. Like, this isn't just some random thing happening across the globe that doesn't affect us. No, it directly affects us because our government is complicit. We're funding this. Palestinians are being told the same thing as black folks in America. There is no acceptable form of resistance. We are bearing witness to egregious human rights violations. The pain, trauma, and terror that Palestinians are facing is not just the result of this week's escalation, but the consequence of years of military occupation. In Sheikh Jarab, the Israeli government is violently dispossessing yet another neighborhood of Palestinian families from homes they have lived in for decades. We cannot stand idly and complicitly by and allow the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people to continue. We cannot remain silent when our government sends 3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children, and displace Palestinian families. A budget is a reflection of our values. I'm committed to ensuring that our government does not fund state violence in any form, anywhere. Just to have so many members of Congress now speak up with this level of clarity, it really feels like this is a paradigm shift. I mean, even with Andrew Yang with that terrible tweet that he made, for him to get that much backlash, that itself is even new. I mean, I get on the Internet, people are going to be vocal, people are going to speak out. But what we're seeing is a bit of a change here. For the first time, as long as I've been alive, people are actually speaking out and condemning Israel unequivocally because they are the aggressors. When serious human rights abuses compound, such as the recent attacks on places of worship, like the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the forced removal of people from their homes, most recently in East Jerusalem, but ongoing in the West Bank for way too long, the jailing and military court trials for Palestinian children, the dehumanization of the lives of the Palestinians by having roads and entrances that are separate for some people, which all too often looks like a former South Africa. The blockade and open-air prison conditions for the people in Gaza, where food and clean water is often scarce, when those types of human rights abuses occur, we're not just putting the lives of Palestinians and Israelis at risk, but we're also putting the United States at greater jeopardy. And eventually, that could mean the lives of men and women from the United States getting involved in a greater escalation of violence in the region, which none of us want to see. Today, we want to talk about the very long-term problems that have been for too long ignored by U.S. policies in the region. Fortunately now, more and more members of Congress are wanting to address peace in this region in a more forthright way. As human rights giant, South African Desmond Tutu said, if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. Incredible. Incredible. Great speech. St. Louis and I rise today in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in memory of our brother, Bassa Masri, a Ferguson activist who was with us on the front lines of our Uprising for Justice following the police murder of Michael Brown Jr. Bassa was a St. Louis Palestinian. Bassa also lived in Jerusalem, Palestine. Bassa was one of us. He showed up ready. As a Palestinian, he was ready to resist, to rebel, to rise up with us as our St. Louis community mourned Mike Brown Jr.'s state-sanctioned murder. And as we demanded an end to the militarized police occupation of our communities. Palestinians know what state violence, militarized policing and occupation of their communities look like and they've lived that reality of having to go through checkpoints while trying to live their lives. They know this reality and the reality of so much more. So when heavily militarized police forces showed up in Ferguson in 2014, Bassa and so many others of our St. Louis Palestinian community, our Palestinian siblings showed up too. I remember sitting in a circle on the grass near where Michael Brown Jr. was murdered. And I remember them describing to us what to do when militarized law enforcement shot us with rubber bullets or when they tear-gassed us. I remember learning that the same equipment that they used to brutalize us in the same, is the same equipment that we send to the Israeli military to police and brutalize Palestinians. I remember Bassa putting his life on the line with us. I remember him live streaming for the whole world to see our struggle. I remember our solidarity and I remember the harassment, the extortion, the brutalization he faced for resisting with us. That harassment, that extortion, that brutalization by heavily armed militarized presence in our community, that's what we fund when our government sends our tax dollars to the Israeli military. We are anti-war. We are anti-occupation and we are anti-partite period. If this body is looking for something productive to do with $3 million instead of funding a military that polices and kills Palestinians, I have some communities in St. Louis City and in St. Louis County where that money can go, where we desperately need investment, where we are hurting, where we need help. Let us prioritize funding there. Prioritize funding life, not destruction. Let me just say, I'm so impressed by the members of Congress who are so clear. I'm gonna say it is a turning point because it feels like it is. It feels like they're no longer missing words, they see what's at stake and the Israel lobby is already against them, so fuck it. Shadow asks, how is Palestine under siege? Oh, well, let me show you. May 13th, Gaza Strip, 50% children very densely populated area. See all this? That's what we'd call a siege. Didn't the Palestine government send a barrage of missiles? So I just went over quite a bit, but I'll do it again because I think that this is really important. So the reason why there's a clash happening right now, which is not really a clash, is because in the East Jerusalem city of Sheikh Jarab, Israel is trying to expel aid families and I shouldn't say trying, they successfully have already expelled most of the families. Now, I don't know about you, but if somebody came into my home and kicked me out of my home, I would be fucking outraged. I would wanna fight. But what they did in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Sheikh Jarab is Palestinians took to the streets to protest. And then do you know what Israel did in return? Brutalized the protesters. They were protesting around al-Aqsa mosque and not even in the mosque. They're not protesting in the mosque. You don't protest in mosques, just around the mosques. And guess what Israel did? They fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the mosque while people were praying, completely innocent. So as Israel was brutalizing protesters, Hamas, they set out this ultimatum to try to get Israel to stop. And they said, if you don't stop, they will fire these missiles. Israel didn't stop, Hamas fired the missiles. Now, luckily for Israel, they have something known as iron dome that just automatically shoots the missiles out of the sky. But do you wanna know what happens when Israel does these airstrikes? They don't have iron dome. When they do an airstrike in a densely populated area like this, people die, limbs get blown off, children die. Understand that all of this could end if the oppressor, the occupier, stopped everything that they're doing, gave Palestinians back their life. They are building thousands of settlements. I mean, we just have to find the borders of Palestine over time and you can see what's happening here. So this is not something that is, oh, well, it aren't both sides equally terrible. One side is the oppressor, one side is the oppressed. And yeah, I'm glad that Karakas Kio pointed that out. Biden's response is racist. It's immoral. It is literally an endorsement of ethnic cleansing. It's not just that he's giving Israel a pass. The response that we're seeing from Democratic Party leaders, they are literally greenlighting ethnic cleansing. And look, if it were the case that Joe Biden or Democrats cared about Palestine, especially Joe Biden, because he's really in the highest position of power, he could simply do one thing, pick up the phone, make a call to Benjamin Nen, and YAHUN and say, listen, if you do not stop right now, no more aid. You do not get any more aid. But he's not doing that. He's not doing that. And on top of that, he says, Israel has the right to defend itself. Do Palestinians have the right to defend themselves? I asked this question on the show the other day. When do we ever hear anyone say, well, the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves? Listen, if somebody barged into my home and said, get out. I mean, I think that as a human being, I'd have a right to say, no. But if Palestinians speak up, they get killed. So it's not just that somebody barges into your home and kicks you out, expels you from your home. It's not even an eviction. It's an expulsion. It's not that simple because that's preferable to what's actually happening because not only do they have to endure being expelled, but they have to zip their lips as it's happening to them. They have to literally shut the fuck up and take it. Otherwise they get killed or beat up if they're lucky because oftentimes Israel does not hold back. So you're lucky if you get out of this with your life. Muhammad El-Kurd, this is a young man who you probably seen this week on CNN, on MSNBC, on Democracy Now. He knew that there would be a time this week likely when he would be expelled from his home. And he was explaining to mainstream news outlets that look, if I try to fight back, if I try to stand my ground and refuse to go, they're literally going to kill me. That's what's going to happen. And he was evicted forcibly from his home. And to even call it an eviction isn't necessarily accurate. And he explains that that's more of a legal term. This is an expulsion. Now I want to go to this video, Michael Brooks. I mean, a lot of other people are saying this, but nobody says it the way that Michael Brooks says it. Are you not concerned about the binary between either condemning Israel entirely, being also a stance that a lot of very strong and notorious anti-Semitic people agree with, versus seeing this as more of a complex issue where it is wrong what's going on and that there's also a way to do this that Israel still exists and is supported? So it's not a complex issue. That's the big thing. It's super simple. There's one group that has enormous power. It's the most powerful country in the Middle East. It's backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything. So there's no symmetry in the relationship, period. And just as like a thought experiment, IDW people, if we know that if somehow a population of Jewish refugees ended up in West Bank and Gaza and an Arabic government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv had an open air prison in what, you know, Jewish Gaza which they bombed white phosphorus. They killed civilians indiscriminately and they had no provisions for medicine. They had an embargo that blocked food, that electricity wasn't running, that there was an over 48% unemployment rate, life expectancy and malnutrition. Statistics were horrifying. One of the major policymakers in this hypothetical Arabic Palestinian state said, we need to put those Jews on a diet. In the West Bank there was another Jewish area where there was a little bit more autonomy but there was regular Arabic settlements where they pulled up the Jewish farmers' foods, they terrorized them with rocks, the security forces broke children's bones and they couldn't drive their own roads. We'd all have no problem understanding what that was. So there's nothing complex about it. The second part of your question, it's a pure asymmetry relationship and the question is rights or not. So that's it, it's not complicated. The second part of your question, at this point, there's always gonna be crackpots who are anti-Semitic who condemn Israel. That's not what drives the movement. It's particularly in the United States. If you work around most people who are concerned with this issue, it's actually populated with a lot of Jewish people. The real question we have to ask is why is it that APAC is hosting a information minister for Slobodan Milosevic? Why is it that there's relationships between the Israeli government and far-right parties in Europe? Why is it that Benjamin Netanyahu's son is posting borderline alt-right memes? Why is it that Israel is an alt-right state, even though it is from the descendants of the victims of one of the greatest crimes in history? That's a serious question and that's inseparable from the racism of the project which goes back to the first part that we have to solve. But thank you, Shalom. And I am serious about it coming from Jewish values. Like Tony Jutt, my reading to the extent I do, which I actually do have some connection to that in a religious sense, it's unacceptable for me. But yeah, no, I know. Whoa, whoa. Ha, ha, ha, ha. But it's not complicated. It's not complicated. Man, I miss Michael Brooks so much. It seems complicated if you tune into the mainstream media because they present this thing in such a skewed manner. You know, oftentimes you'll see the word clash and before I even saw a segment on clash, I already anticipated the word clash. They wanna make it seem as if, oh, well, there's this conflict. We often even hear to it or hear it referred to as the Israel-Palestine conflict. There's no conflict. There's no conflict between Israel and Palestine. Israel is subjugating an entire population to third class citizenship and in the case of Gaza, it's an open air prison. Nobody gets in or out unless Israel gives them the go ahead. So to kind of make it make sense in the American context, imagine if you wanted to leave the United States and you wanted to go to Europe. You wanted to go on vacation to Europe to see one of your relatives in Europe. Imagine if in order to do that, you had to get permission from the Canadian government. We had to ask Canada whether or not we could leave our country. Doesn't that seem a little bit preposterous? It's like, wait, why do I have to ask another government if I can leave my own country? That's bizarre. But that's literally what's happening as unbelievable as it sounds. And it goes much more deeper than that. Israel controls the electricity, the water supply. Palestinians are the subjects of Israel. They have zero control on the situation. So to say that it's a conflict that presupposes that both sides are equally culpable here when that's not actually the case. One side is the aggressor, the oppressor and the occupier who quite literally is carrying out an ethnic cleansing. And again, I have to really stress this because this is something that I've never heard a persuasive answer to from people who are Israel has a right to defend themselves people. What would you do if somebody barged into your home and they expelled you from your home? How would you respond to that? I mean, for me, I know that I would be paralyzed in fear. I know that it would be horrifying. I wouldn't know where to go. But this is what's happening to people. And whenever anyone condemns it, they're called anti-Semitic. When Palestinians take to the streets to protest they get brutalized by Israel. So they're backed into a corner and they have no way out of that corner. This isn't a conflict. They are cornered and they aren't getting out of that corner unless Israel unilaterally lets them out. So the question is, when is Israel gonna let them out of this corner? When is Israel going to let their foot off of the necks of Palestinians? And the answer is when there's finally, when there is finally international condemnation, especially from the United States. Now the reason why Israel has been able to get away with it is because the United States is the most powerful country on the planet. And also we have veto power on the UN. So whenever the UN tries to take actions against Israel and even condemn it, the United States is always there to have Israel's back. We send Israel billions of dollars in aid. And so basically what's happening is all of these bad things that's happening to Palestinians, the bombs that are being dropped on the heads of Palestinian children, we pay for those. The United States government paid for those. Your tax dollars paid for those. So this isn't just a situation that doesn't affect us. It's not out of sight, out of mind. We have a government that is complicit. And that's why there's so many people in the United States reacting and they have such a strong emotional response to this because we're culpable in a way.