South Bay Protestors March In Solidarity With Palestinians

By Jana Kadah, Bay City News Foundation

SAN JOSE, CA —"Free, free Palestine" echoed through the streets of San Jose's Santana Row as more than 200 protesters marched Monday evening.

Local advocacy groups American Muslims for Palestine, BLACK Outreach S.J. and the Palestinian Youth Movement held a protest to voice their outrage against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the United States' funding to Israel.

"In these last days of the month of Ramadan, Israel and its occupying forces have escalated the attacks against Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza," Ghiyath Alazzah, an organizer with Palestinian Youth Movement, said in front of The Counter restaurant. "They have stormed Al-Aqsa mosque and fired rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas canisters at Palestinians worshipping in and around the mosque and in Sheikh Jarrah."

In recent months, several Israeli court rulings have ordered the forced expulsion of many Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, including the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and the handover of those properties to Israeli settler organizations, according to the United Nations.

Over the last week, tensions were heightened in Sheikh Jarrah because a legal challenge by the Nahalat Shimon settler organization resulted in court-ordered expulsions of eight Palestinian families, according to the UN.

In response, many Palestinians took to the streets of Sheikh Jarrah to protest. The UN reported that on Friday, Palestinians protesting threw rocks at Israeli police and were met with stun grenades and violence from Israeli forces.

The violence resulted in 200 Palestinian civilian and 17 Israeli police injuries, according to the UN.

The violence also extended to Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest site for Muslims around the world — where Israeli forces reportedly used stun grenades and skunk water on worshippers on the last Friday of Ramadan, considered one of the most holy days for Muslims, Alazzah said.
And when Hamas fired rockets into Israel in response to Israeli actions in Jerusalem, Israel responded with air strikes that killed Palestinians.

The emergency protest in Santana Row was seen by local organizers as an act of solidarity with those in Sheikh Jarrah and Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza.

"It was basically our responsibility to amplify everything that was going on on the ground," said Nora Abushaban, organizer with American Muslims for Palestine. "That's what Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah are asking us to do."

For Alazzah and Abushaban, who are both Palestinian Americans, protesting Israeli actions is personal.

"It is settler colonialism happening right in front of us," Abushaban said. "Israel is forcibly removing Palestinians who have lived in their homes for decades so that a new Jewish Israeli population can live there. It's what they are currently doing in Sheikh Jarrah and it's what they did to my family decades ago."

The San Jose protest drew people from many backgrounds including Black, Korean, Filipino, Kashmiri and Mexican as well as indigenous people. Many said they were at the protest to stand in solidarity with Palestine, to speak out against the $3.8 billion in annual American funding to Israel and to draw connections between international struggles for liberation.

"What is going on in Palestine is similar to what's going on in San Jose and all over the U.S.," said Pamela Emanuel, vice president of BLACK Outreach S.J.

To Emanuel and other protesters, that common thread is police violence, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples and state-sanctioned violence against a particular group.
In the U.S., state sanctioned violence has historically been an effort to ethnically cleanse the Native Americans, state-sanctioned violence is used at the border to prevent Latinx immigrants from coming in and police violence is used against Black and brown communities, she said.

But is it fair to say they are connected? Abushaban and Emanuel said absolutely.

This is because American police departments are often trained in Israel, according to human rights group Amnesty International.

In Santa Clara County, Sheriff Laurie Smith attended a training at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America in 2005 and in 2013, officials from her department attended another training in Israel, according to a database by research group RAIA, Researching the American-Israeli Alliance.

The county's District Attorney Jeff Rosen attended a training in Israel in 2017 as part of the Bay Area Law Enforcement Delegation that included prosecutors, police officers and judges, the same RAIA database showed.

"When the U.S. police is trained by the (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers, it literally means that our tax dollars are going to a foreign military to use Palestinians as test dummies, so that they can refine their tactics and then bring them back home and use them against anyone trying to protest in the U.S.," Abushaban said.

However, Israeli officials say tax dollars are used to defend themselves against Palestinians.

On Tuesday, The Israeli Foreign Ministry tweeted that Israeli airstrikes in Gaza were a form of self-defense against "Hamas' deliberate targeting of civilians ... which caused a fatality, multiple injuries & sent millions of Israelis to bomb shelters."

However, the Gaza Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbed to 43 people, including 13 children and more than 200 injured as a result of Israeli air strikes.

Both Palestinian and Israeli actions drew criticism from U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price, who said there was "no excuse for violence."

"This includes Friday's (May 7) attack on Israeli soldiers and reciprocal 'price tag' attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank," Price said in a statement.

The UN also denounced the violence but was stronger in calling out Israeli actions — especially the court-ordered expulsions of families. Because Jerusalem is Palestinian territory under international law, imposing Israeli laws and mandating that Palestinians leave their homes is a violation of international law, UN spokesperson Rupert Colville said.

Protesters in San Jose called on the international community and those living in the U.S. to do more.

"Israel's policies in violation of international law will not come to an end as long as the international community does not take concrete actions," Alazzah said.

Copyright © 2021 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.