People’s Conference for Palestine kicks off in Detroit
Thousands of people are gathering for the second annual People’s Conference for Palestine in the US city of Detroit. The three-day event aims to strengthen the movement for Palestinian liberation in North America.
Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, reporting from the event, noted that it was “striking” how different the atmosphere was compared with the first conference. He said this has been largely down to the “awareness that was raised by grassroots action”.
“We have 60 percent of Americans in the latest poll calling for an arms embargo on Israel. We have 77 percent of Democrats calling it a genocide in Gaza, 50 percent of Americans overall, and a lot of that’s because of the consciousness raising that happened over the last year,” he said.
US establishment’s ‘attempts to suppress me’ have failed: Mahmoud Khalil
Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was seized off the streets of New York and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana for 104 days, spoke to Al Jazeera at the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit.
He said his “main message” was that “all the attempts to suppress me and to oppress the Palestinian voices in this country have failed”.
“Behind me, you see thousands of people who came together to this place to actually speak about Palestine, strategise together towards a mutual vision for liberation in Palestine,” he said.
“There’s a lot going into political education and into building communities, building cross-movement solidarity across different movements”, he said, adding that “the majority of the American public are now awakening to Israeli crimes, awakening to the US complicity in sustaining the Israeli occupation of Palestine”.
“We’re being faced by stubborn politicians, by a stubborn establishment that refuses to see that there is a public shift in the US streets … This is very disappointing to see that the politicians, the establishment, [are] not responding to the change that’s happening on the ground,” he said.
Mahmoud Khalil, former Columbia University graduate student
Israeli police intervene as thousands protest in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem
A drone photo of people protesting in Tel Aviv, August 30
Israeli police take away a protester from a road in Jerusalem during a demonstration to demand the return of all captives and an end to the war on Gaza, August 30
