Rising Up For Justice: Campaigning for Palestinian Rights and Liberation

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FEATURING AHMAD ABUZNAID - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, our guest is Ahmad Abuznaid, the Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights and USCPR Action. Prior to joining USCPR, Ahmad co-founded the Florida-based Dream Defenders and went on to lead the National Network for Arab American Communities as the Executive Director from 2017 to 2019. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about USCPR's work.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: How do you summarize the work that USCPR does, including the main issue you work on, which of course is Palestine, but how do you summarize the, the, the entirety, if you will, of this issue and what you see as your organizational goals? 

Ahmad Abuznaid: Yeah, that's a great question. We are the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and so the title gives you a bit of a sense of what we're about. But in reality, it's deeper than that because since we are in the middle of the United States of America, the biggest backer, the biggest arms provider, and the biggest diplomatic defender of the state of Israel, we actually as tax paying citizens here, have a burden. We have a duty, we have a responsibility, and we should be ending all military aid to the state of Israel. That is our stated mission. That is our stated goal. 

And we believe that that accomplishes two things. That ending of military support to the state of Israel would empower the Palestinian people to be in a greater position to determine our self-determination, our liberation, without the United States of America supporting and supplementing and financing Israel's occupation. 

But on the other hand, that also would put US taxpayers in a greater position to demand where we would like our taxpayer dollars going towards. You know, I think we often hear time and time again how social security benefits need to be cut because they're too expensive. Healthcare costs cannot be supplemented by the government because it's too expensive. We have infrastructure falling apart in this country. We have teacher salaries that we can't afford and schools that are closing down.