As I climb the subway steps, a silhouette looms, recognizable even to those who have never been to New York: the Empire State Building. I’m in the beating heart of the Big Apple, where, amid dozens of fast-food and fast-fashion chains and where Macy’s alone occupies two blocks, on 37th Street, the People’s Forum was founded in 2017. As its name suggests, it’s a place of the people, and so it states on its website: “We are an incubator movement for workers and marginalized communities, aiming to build unity by transcending historical divisions at home and abroad. We are an accessible educational and cultural space, nurturing the next generation of visionaries and organizers who believe a new world is possible through collective action.” In less than ten years, having overcome the crisis of the pandemic lockdown, the People’s Forum has grown to offer a rich program of activities: language courses (ranging from Portuguese to Arabic), painting, graphic design, and theater, a program of revolutionary arthouse cinema (quite respectable), and support for as many as two hundred groups in organizing their own political and cultural activities in the city—or rather, one should say, “their grassroots action.”
For two years, Palestine activists have been converging on Monday evenings at the People’s Forum, filling the entire room. It’s the day of the plenary meeting, where the various groups gather to discuss and define the week’s activities. So today, while the powerful are eager to give each other credit for merits they don’t deserve, and the media is busy reporting their lies, here the common people, endowed with heart and brains, have gathered with a very different spirit. The battle for truth and justice has entered a new phase, one that will be arduous and treacherous, and that we too must prepare.
The meeting opens in such a poignant and beautiful way that it’s hard for me to describe. The Palestinian Youth Chord has taken the stage; they are all young and beautiful, wrapped in keffiyehs, singing sweetly “Salaam Li Gaza” (“Greetings to Gaza”), accompanied by two guitars and drums. The air vibrates with melancholy, yet one does not feel sad, much less desperate, but rather ready and aware.
At the end of the song, a Palestinian girl takes the floor to remind us that music has always been the soul of resistance. It has been for many peoples during painful moments in their history: songs born to embody the spirit of struggle, to keep the flame of hope alive; it has been for marginalized communities and exploited workers, like the Black people in the cotton fields and the rice weeders in the rice paddies. And who knows for how many others still, music has been food for the soul, the strength of the phoenix that rises when you think all is lost.
The floor is given to two activist musicians, Carsie Blanton and Leila Hegazy, who recently returned home after participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla and being kidnapped by Israel. They tell of a military power and a state that still claims to be democratic, who, blinded by revenge, have sunk so low that they spend their time teasing and humiliating unarmed young people, even going so far as to humiliate women in their most intimate aspects by denying them tampons. But how did these modern heroines react? Carsie and Leila are a raging river, telling us how, faced with such stupidity, instead of passively victimizing themselves, they responded with playful impertinence, using their own blood to write “Free Palestine” on the walls (tampons arrived promptly) and singing at the top of their lungs about their joy at being beautiful, young, and on the right side of history. Perhaps their jailers will have learned something: a witch sleeps inside every woman, best not to disturb her, and perhaps, I hope, in due time, when the storm has passed, they will remember this and want to contact them.
The speeches continued on stage; I was struck by the clarity with which the girls framed the historical moment (here I summarize their thoughts): the powerful, having understood that the goal of driving the Palestinians from their land is unattainable, have begun to cover up their misdeeds, even with legal measures, because they fear the courts to come; because all their destructive force is dissipated every time it clashes with the Palestinians’ incredible capacity for life, that Sumud represented by the Flotilla, which broke a blockade far more important than the naval one—[the blockade] of the mind in which so many human beings were held captive, [held] in chains as in Plato’s cave. Today, these liberated people see the Palestine-Israel relationship in a new way. This is the truly great benefit achieved by this movement: a human capital to be exploited. And not just to end a hateful colonial occupation… the stakes are even higher and involve us all.
After the on-stage presentations, we split into groups based on our boroughs (mine is Brooklyn). We gather in circles around other women leaders to discuss the action plan and the related field organization. Perhaps this is a special evening, but tonight I truly feel flattered to be a woman: we are the do-it-all queens, and the initiative is being conducted with great professionalism.
Before closing, I’d like to say a few more words about the People’s Forum. Chatting with Manolo De Los Santos, one of the founders, I discovered that the Trump administration’s constant threats to free speech (including a threatening letter from the White House, reported on the website) and the values of democratic civil society have led the group to decide to embark on a massive fundraising campaign to purchase and renovate a property, so as to become as independent as possible and less vulnerable to blackmail. The future headquarters will be in Union Square, further enhanced by the market that fills the square with color and fragrance almost daily. The project is currently being finalized; anyone wishing to contribute can do so through the website https://peoplesforum.org.
I wonder what it could mean that a place with such prerequisites was born here, right in the heart of the empire and making use of its rules (the shield of private property). I conclude that the highest expression of advanced capitalist society, with all the effort it has put into dehumanizing humanity, as Marcuse taught, by reducing it to “one dimension” (the consumerist one), is creaking. It has, in fact, failed to completely annihilate basic political and social needs, and today we are witnessing a rebirth. The People’s Forum and the thousands of young people committed to supporting their socialist-progressive peer Zohran Mamdani in pursuing the dream of putting humanity back at the center of the city, today, at least on a par with the Empire State Building, stand out as the hope of a new world in the making; a world where Palestinians and other oppressed peoples are free to self-determine, where colonialism is reduced to a few pages in the history books, where every human being can live a dignified life without being born with a six-figure bank account, and where, to paraphrase Roger Waters (Pink Floyd), “We’ve put you crazy people in a nice, clean asylum.”
