By Jane Stoever

At a meeting hosted in Kansas City, MO, April 28 by the local chapter of Amnesty International, some 40 persons listened, learned, and spoke out about apartheid against Palestinians. Leaders at the meeting at Waldo Library proposed these actions:

1. E-mail the KC MO City Council, asking it to pass a ceasefire resolution now: bit.ly/CeasefireResolutionNow.
2. Sign a ceasefire petition: bit.ly/KCCeasefireRes.
3. Attend the City Council meeting to present the petitions Thursday, May 16, at 2pm at City Hall, 414 E. 12th St.

Participants in the April 28 gathering, “Insidious Apartheid: South Africa, Palestine, and Beyond,” reflected first on apartheid in South Africa. Thirty years ago, on April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first democratic election, with all persons, regardless of race, participating. They elected Nelson Mandela president. This was widely viewed as the end of apartheid rule in South Africa. “But the impact of colonialism lasts so much longer,” Sharareh Hashemy, of Amnesty International KC, said in opening the program. Sharareh introduced the Amnesty International video, “Israeli’s Apartheid Against Palestinians.” The video, noting that apartheid classifies non-Europeans (the Indigenous) as sub-human, urged, “Join our campaign to stop Israeli apartheid of Palestinians.”

Shannon Ikerd, a featured speaker, drew from The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, by Antony Loewenstein. Comparing the situation of South Africa to that of Israel, Shannon said the US has been and is heavily involved in both countries, pointing to the diamonds and gold in South Africa and the US wish to use Israel as a base for influence in the Mideast.

The second featured speaker asked that his name not be used—to try to prevent reprisal. “I was born and raised in a refugee camp,” he said, one of 58 camps for Palestinians. “It was very crowded—about half a kilimeter squared, with 7-8,000 residents.” He came to the U.S. in 2014. “The sky looked bigger here,” he said, noting the buildings packed together in the camp. The Zionist Army would raid the camp most mornings about 3 am or 4 am “whether to arrest Palestinians or to train new soldiers in the use of weapons.” Most of the weapons bear the stamp, “Battlefield tested,” he said. “They test them on us.”

Concerning military checkpoints, the speaker said there are regular spots where people must show ID cards, but also random places, with a military vehicle stopping in the road and harassing people. His father, a teacher, gets up at 5 am to go teach in Bethlehem, not far away, but goes early because he may be detained at multiple checkpoints. The speaker’s own ID restricts him to the West Bank, and he is not allowed to go elsewhere. He said, “The right of freedom to move does not exist.”

Palestinians have to have a permit to build a house. Further, an Israeli settler may take a Palestinian’s house and everything in it. “All of this is done with full funding of the U.S. government,” the speaker said. “We’ve been trying to tell the world what’s happening for 76 years. The increase (in protest) has not been enough to stop the U.S. from funding genocide. It is hard to realize that your own taxes are being used to fund Israel.”

The April 28 program was cosponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace, Al-Hadaf KC, Citizens for Justice in the Middle East, and PeaceWorks KC. Sam from Jewish Voice for Peace said, “JVP is one of the first Jewish-led organizations that have called what is happening genocide—the war has claimed over 34,000 lives so far.”

Ann Suellentrop, a vice chair of PeaceWorks KC and retired mother-baby nurse, served on the committee planning this gathering. She said, “When I heard children in Gaza were having limbs amputated without anesthesia, and then without antibiotics, I was ‘on’” to working to stop the genocide. She advises listening to podcasts by Norman Finkelstein. The son of Jewish Holocaust survivors and the world’s leading scholar on Gaza, Finkelstein for more than 40 years has researched reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.

The meeting closed with José Faus reading his own poem (https://peaceworkskc.org/it-never-rains/) and poetry from the Middle East.

Jane Stoever serves on the Communications Team of PeaceWorks KC. (c) 2024, Jane Stoever, Ann Suellentrop, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.