Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded on Thursday, Sept 19. On Wednesday, Sept 25, The Jerusalem Post reported Netanyahu has cancelled his trip to New York.

Nearly a year into Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, US support for the pariah state has not ceased. Now, as Israel drastically escalates indiscriminate bombing and massacres in neighboring Lebanon, the US is preparing to receive Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York City, where he will address the United Nations on September 26. The Shut It Down for Palestine coalition has called for a mass march at 3:00 PM on that day, beginning at Bryant Park in Manhattan and then heading to the UN. Layan Fuleihan, Education Director at The People’s Forum, returns to The Real News to discuss Netanyahu’s visit, how the movement for Palestine will rise to confront him, and why solidarity with Palestine remains the most pressing political question of our time.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

Ju-Hyun Park:  Welcome to The Real News podcast. This is Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor at The Real News.

Today we’re discussing Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United Nations in New York on Thursday, Sept. 26, and how the people of the city are preparing to confront him.

Before we begin, we’d like to extend our gratitude on behalf of The Real News team to you, our listeners and supporters. We are proud to be a nonprofit newsroom that tells the stories corporate media won’t. And as part of that commitment, we don’t take ad money or corporate donations, period. We depend on listeners like you to make our work possible. So please consider becoming a sustainer of The Real News today at therealnews.com/donate.

Internationally wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu is on his way to the United Nations General Assembly, where, on Thursday, Sept. 26, he’ll deliver a speech to the very institution whose highest court has put out a warrant for his arrest. Organizers with the Shut It Down for Palestine coalition are calling for a major protest to oppose Netanyahu’s presence and, once again, call for his arrest.

Returning to The Real News today is Layan Fuleihan, director of education at The People’s Forum, one of the key convening organizations in the coalition organizing against Netanyahu’s visit. 

Layan, welcome back to The Real News.

Layan Fuleihan:  Thanks so much for having me on.

Ju-Hyun Park:  Layan, let’s start from the jump with what people really need to know. When and where is the protest, what are you calling for, and why is it so important that people show up?

Layan Fuleihan:  Well, the protest will gather at Bryant Park on Thursday, Sept. 26 at 3:00 PM in the afternoon, and we will rally and then march towards the United Nations. Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak that afternoon at some point between 3:00 and can go all the way up until 9:00 PM.

And so we are going to be ready to have a very strong presence whenever that time may be, and to send a very strong signal to not just Netanyahu, but also to the entire world that the people of New York, the people of the United States are very aware that Benjamin Netanyahu is a wanted war criminal and has no business addressing the international community in the halls of the United Nations.

Ju-Hyun Park:  Layan, we’re nearly a year into this genocide, and we are now seeing a growing number of estimates, including from The Lancet medical journal, that are beginning to place the death toll in Gaza at estimates in the hundreds of thousands. We are also seeing a major escalation along the northern front with Lebanon. There have been daily Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon going back for months. Just this week where what is now being called the Tuesday and Wednesday massacres when Israeli forces hacked and detonated pagers being carried across the country of Lebanon, killing dozens of people, injuring thousands of others.

Some people may be wondering, by this point, if the things we do from within the US are truly having an impact. What’s it going to take for the movement in solidarity with Palestine to achieve its political objectives?

Layan Fuleihan:  Thanks for that. I think the number one thing that we need to be doing as organizers, as the movement, the people that make up the movement for Palestine in the United States, is to continue growing the movement. And that means a lot of different things.

One, it means showing people the fact that growing the movement and the movement itself is actually important. It can feel strange because people came out on the streets almost now a year ago saying, no genocide on Palestine. We want to end the genocide on Palestine, and spoke directly to the United States government, of which we are constituents, to say, please stop everything that you are doing to make possible this genocide.

As the months went on, many people grew conscious of the fact that the United States is actually the perpetrator of genocide. The way the relationship between Israel and the United States is shaped and is formed means that Israel cannot do any of the things that it is doing without the support, whether it is public open support or not, of the United States.

And we saw multiple moments in which the US’s role was actually exposed in more direct ways, whether it was actual US military personnel on the ground in Gaza helping the Israeli occupation forces carry out massacres, or whether it was US intelligence agencies providing more information for the Israeli occupation than the Israeli intelligence services themselves.

So the question of complicity has moved now to be transformed into a greater understanding that it’s not about complicity at this point. The United States is responsible for the genocide.

That said, it isn’t the movement in the United States that is fighting on the front lines in Gaza. It is the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinian people who are the ones fighting directly against the military machine of imperialism. And we’ve seen that the United States is completely unwilling to listen to the demands of its own constituents, of its own population, and to shape its foreign policy along the lines of the demands of its population.

And so what we’ve watched over the past year is that the battle has been played out and has prolonged primarily because the Palestinian people have not yet been defeated. There have been huge massacres. The pain of the losses and the immensity of the losses is impossible to describe at all in words.

And the everyday torture that the Palestinian people are going through in Gaza is just impossible for anyone to really understand. What we’re witnessing is so inhumane and so brutal that it is just beyond human comprehension.

That said, the Palestinian liberation struggle has not been defeated. And we can see the results of that. I think what you mentioned about Lebanon is extremely important, and I want to say a few words on this because what we’ve now seen is that Netanyahu and his administration, frustrated by the fact that they can’t win in Gaza, have now moved to open a new front of the war.

They’ve been threatening this for the past year, but with the massacres that they committed and the terrorist attacks that they committed yesterday and their declarations of war with that act and with their actions today as well claiming that they’re going to triple their bombardments of Lebanon every day, that now Lebanon is the focus of the war.

They’ve added a new objective to the war, which is returning the Israelis back to the north, which they had been evacuated from to avoid casualties from the conflict across the border.

So we’ve seen now that Netanyahu has no qualms about expanding the war of extermination to Lebanon because he’s unable to reach a conclusion that works for him in Gaza.

Now, I’m giving all this context because it’s important for us to understand the shape of the genocide and the war of extermination that the United States is carrying out alongside its Israeli partner. And we have to understand also that our role is extremely important. The United States cannot publicly say right now that they’re willing to go ahead and open another front of the war of extermination with Lebanon.

If you listen to what the White House is saying, they’re saying diplomacy, de-escalation, et cetera. They’ve been saying now for months, and they’ve been trying to trick the population into thinking that they are engineering a ceasefire when, in fact, we know that they are providing cover for Netanyahu to create obstacles to the negotiation process.

Again, we’re not believing the words of the White House, but this is a sign that the public opinion is acting as some form of restraint, that the White House is anxious to fully associate itself with its own actions in the region right now.

And we need to keep building that restraint, keep building that pressure. And most importantly, the most important thing that we can do is, through the movement, change public consciousness in the United States.

Public opinion is one thing. Public opinion right now is not on the side of the White House and on Israel. The majority of people in the United States would like to see an end to this terrible chapter of human history.

Consciousness is another thing, and consciousness is that realization of the fact that it’s the US system itself, the US capitalist and imperialist system itself that has created the conditions for this genocide to occur. And it is only by changing that system that we are going to be able to end not just this chapter of the genocide, but the entire occupation of Palestine and all other US imperialist wars across the world, one. And two, that we’re going to be able to have a system in which the demands of the population itself has an impact on the decisions that the government makes in regards to both foreign and domestic policy.

So I was a bit long-winded there, but I think it’s a complex issue, and one of the main roles that we have in the movement here is to bring this kind of analysis and this kind of understanding to people who have been in the streets now for almost a year, who have changed their entire way of living.

Many people used to do things on the weekends, like other things, like go see people and have brunch. I don’t know what people did. Now you go to protests. You go to meetings. You go to actions. You go to teach-ins. A large section of the population, their whole daily life has been transformed. They have changed their routines. They have reorganized themselves to become not only people who participate in the movement, but who organize it.

And it’s important that all of us actually develop the skills and the capacity to understand the shape of this genocidal war as it continues, because the number one thing we need to do is not let down with the movement. We need to keep it growing. If war breaks out in Lebanon, direct war, a larger scale war with Lebanon, if it breaks out in the region, if it breaks out in other places, this new shift in consciousness that we’ve created, we need to build off of it.

We don’t want to have to rebuild it again. So we are really committed to continuing to mobilize, continuing to organize and to not allow the White House and the propaganda arm, the mainstream media, to distract people from our task.

Ju-Hyun Park:  It certainly says a lot that we are now a year into this process and we have seen an incredible amount of changes, I think, among many, many different sectors of the population. As you’re saying, people are becoming not only agitated to take action on one or two occasions, but really to engage in a deep and committed process as part of a larger movement in which we have all found different ways to play roles.

I think something that has emerged from this process as well is how obvious it has become just how little regard US leaders hold for the opinion of the public.

For instance, we now know that more than 60% of Americans support ending US aid to Israel, yet neither presidential candidate or major party has expressed any interest in doing this. In fact, they are sticking to their guns, quite literally, even more firmly than ever before. Kamala Harris and the Democrats have proven especially impervious to demands made on their party to end its support of genocide.

What would you say to those who think Palestine needs to go on the back burner in the lead up to this election, given that there are many people who have had the shift in consciousness, and yet at the same time there are also many who have not really participated, yet continue to see this as an issue that is perhaps distant from them or secondary to things that they might consider to be more important concerns like the outcome of the presidential election?

Layan Fuleihan:  Well, I can understand where that thinking comes from, unfortunately, knowing the way in which people have been shaped in this political system that we live in here. But I completely reject that formulation that Palestine has to go on the back burner, that we have to measure out, find the lesser of two evils for this round of the presidential elections in order to survive another day so we can keep mobilizing and keep protesting. I think that that is completely misleading people and doesn’t give people an honest assessment of what is really laid out in front of us.

What we really have laid out in front of us is what you just described. We have two ruling class parties who are united on the issue of imperialism. They may do it with different words, they may do it in different ways. One party may favor some forms of soft power, the other may favor other ways of doing it. At the end of the day, it’s the same objectives: full US global domination, US hegemony across the world.

And the result of that is what we’re seeing before our eyes, this livestreamed genocide that we’ve been witnessing for the past year. To say that there are other issues now that we should turn to and that Palestine is less important is operating under the idea that we have no options in front of us, that we have no political power, and that we have to take the best that we can get, and the best that we can get is to scramble for a slightly nicer version of the same ruling class that we have been seeing in these election rounds every four years.

I reject that idea because I believe that we do have political power. History has shown us that we have political power. The world today shows us that we have political power. Does it mean that that comes through elections? Not necessarily.

But I think it’s not insignificant that, this year, third party candidates are getting much more support and traction than ever before. People are rejecting the two-party ruling class system of the elections that we’ve been living through for decades. And not just that, people are rejecting the idea that the elections sets the agenda for what’s important and what’s not.

How can we tell people that a genocide right now is not important? We also don’t tell people that police brutality, that immigration, that the extreme economic crisis that people are going through, that healthcare are not important. All of these things are important, but they’re all also very connected. The same system that produced the genocide is the same system that is producing these crises in the domestic arena.

So I think it’s misleading to tell people, let’s put Palestine on the back burner so that we can figure out these other issues, when, in fact, it’s the same root cause that’s created all of the problems, including the genocide in Palestine.

And the number one thing that we can do is help organize so that people can feel that our political power doesn’t rely on the electoral process. That, in fact, our political power comes from organizing. It comes from organizing and building consciousness to understand that we are the majority in this country. We are the working class. The people who do work every day, day in, day out, who are out in the streets right now are the ones who are making this country possible. And we also can build a different system if we organize ourselves to do it.

Is it going to happen in this electoral edition? Probably not. But I’m confident that whoever is elected will face the same political power that we’ve been building over the past year and every single time there is an uprising and a mass movement over the past years. So we just have to be ready to confront any challenges that a new administration brings us, but clear and confident that we’re not going to have salvation in a more nicer packaged version of one or the other.

Ju-Hyun Park:  Thanks for giving some direction around that discussion in terms of seeing organizing as the real base that our power comes from.

Speaking of organizing, and given the fact that you and I are both New Yorkers, this protest is happening in New York where the UN headquarters is located, I want to bring in some of the issues swirling around the NYPD this week.

For listeners who may be unaware, first of all, the Adams administration, multiple members of the top brass of the NYPD, including the former police commissioner, are currently under FBI investigation for a number of different crimes and alleged violations.

In addition to that, there was a really horrific NYPD… You can’t really call it anything other than a mass shooting that occurred earlier on the week of Sept. 16 in which NYPD officers at the Sutter Avenue L stop opened fire after someone was suspected of jumping the turnstile. In other words, not paying their fare and just attempting to get onto the train.

Now, I will note that the fare for the MTA, that’s the New York subway, is $2.90. So over $2.90, you had multiple officers firing their weapons in a crowded subway station, ultimately wounding four people, including 49-year-old Gregory Del Pesh, a Black man who is now in critical condition after being struck in the brain by a bullet from the NYPD.

I’m wondering if you can connect the issue of police violence and the presence of police as a kind of occupation in communities across the country, particularly in communities of color, to the question of Palestine and the movement in solidarity with Palestine?

Layan Fuleihan:  Well, I think that’s exactly right. I think that the similarity doesn’t just come from the similar actions of US police brutality and Israeli occupation forces. It comes from the fact that they are both institutions that come from a system that has the same interests. The Israeli occupation would not exist without US imperialism right now. It didn’t exist without European colonialism, and this is where it comes from.

The Israeli occupation forces come out of the militias that were formed in order to massacre and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land. US police forces, their history also comes from this kind of terrorist militia type violence. It comes from groups of people assigned the task of finding and imprisoning and returning enslaved workers who had found a way to escape and return them back to the slaveholders.

So this is the shared history of the US police and Israeli occupation forces is that they come out of this genocidal, settler colonial violence. And we don’t have to draw direct comparisons that can be a little bit clunky and that can flatten the details, because obviously it’s not the same thing at all. Right now what we’re seeing in Palestine is an all out mass bombing, genocidal war.

That’s not what we’re seeing in the United States, but we are seeing the police and we have been seeing the police used as a way to completely repress, and not only repress, but to see, in particular, poor and communities of color as completely worthless. I mean, $2.90 is nothing for a human life. It’s completely outrageous, but it’s also not out of character for the way the police acts. The killings that the police have carried out across this country for decades, this is part of the character of the police of the United States.

And I think that the clarity that people have developed over the past year in understanding the way the United States has no care for human life, not here, not in Palestine, not in Lebanon, not in Iraq, not anywhere in the world, not in the DRC, not in Sudan, the list goes on. It doesn’t matter where people are, they do not care for human life.

And people can understand very clearly that it’s not now a question of making people see that they should care about human life, it’s the system itself that is producing this kind of violence, and we need to overthrow it. We need to change it.

I think that the clarity that people have gathered from their experience over the past year is going to help people address things like police violence and police brutality also with more clarity.

There’s a great chant that has been heard many times, that we’ve heard together in the protests we’ve been to together, “Gaza will free us all.” And I think it’s a very symbolic message for the moment right now. Because in order to help Gaza, we need to also organize against the system here. And that system is the one killing Black and Brown and poor people across the country for no reason, just for being poor, just for existing, and just for being a threat.

We are a threat organized. We are a threat to the ruling class system that would like to exploit us for as much profit as they possibly can. In fact, even kill us to make sure they get that $2.90, and are not getting as much profit as they possibly can from every part of lived experience.

Ju-Hyun Park:  Yeah, thank you so much for that wonderful answer. And I would also just throw in very briefly, the NYPD is one of many police departments across the country that received direct training from the armed forces of Israel. And so we can see that there’s a sick cycle at play where the US pumps billions of dollars into propping up Israel as a state that colonizes Palestine, that rehearses and experiments really horrific methods of repression against the Palestinian people, refines them, and then exports them back to United States, where it is police officers that walk our streets that have learned these methods and are then ready to use them against the population here. So we really do see a shared struggle like in a real unity in that oppression that we all need to be combating together.

Now, I do want to wrap this conversation up. And taking us back to the question of Netanyahu coming here to New York, I’m wondering if you can talk to listeners about how to keep up with information about this march specifically coming up on Thursday, but also if you can tell us how to plug into the movement after Thursday, Sept. 26.

Layan Fuleihan:  Sure. First, you can go to shutitdown4palestine.org. That’s four, the number, so shutitdown4palestine.org, where you can get the updated information about the march. You can get posters. You can get templates, graphics to download and share and put up around your neighborhood. And that’s one way to get all the news.

You can, of course, follow social media. You can follow our social media here at The People’s Forum. That’s People’s Forum NYC. You can follow the Palestinian Youth Movement.

We also have many organizations in the Shut It Down for Palestine Coalition here in New York, all of whom are great sources for the information about the protest, but also across the entire country. So unfortunately, New York has the burden of Netanyahu’s visit, but of course, we’ll take that burden with a lot of duty, revolutionary duty, and we will meet the task.

But the rest of the country also is carrying out many different actions, protests, mobilizations, and we’re getting ready for a national day of action on Oct. 5 to mark one year of the genocide and one year of resistance. There will be mobilizations and actions across the country, and it’s also paired with a fundraiser to support the needs in Gaza right now on the ground, a national fundraiser.

So you can get all that information also on the Shut It Down for Palestine website, where you can see actions registered across the country, you can register your own and you can meet people.

And the last thing that I’ll say is that every Monday at The People’s Forum, we have an open meeting for organizing actions for the Shut It Down for Palestine movement. So you can come every Monday at 6:30 PM. You can meet other organizers, you can meet other organizations, and you can meet other people, make new friends, new comrades at these meetings where you can get involved in any kind of action, large or small, and find collectivity in organizing them together.

Ju-Hyun Park:  Thank you so much. To reiterate, the march against Netanyahu will be taking place at 3:00 PM, Bryant Park on Thursday, Sept. 26 in New York City. There are also volunteer meetings every Monday at The People’s Forum in the evening. And of course, there will be nationwide actions occurring probably in your city as well on or around Oct. 5. You can go to shutitdownforpalestine.org for more information on that.

You’ve been listening to The Real News podcast. This is Ju-Hyun Park speaking with Layan Fuleihan of The People’s Forum. Before we go, we’d like to thank all you listeners once again and take a moment to recognize The Real News studio team: David Hebden, Cameron Grenadino, Kayla Rivara, and Alina Nehlich, who make all our work possible. Stay tuned for further updates on Palestine and everywhere else that working people are on the front lines of struggle to fight for a better world. This has been The Real News. We’ll catch you next time.

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