We are Mendocino for Palestine, a gathering of residents of the north coast of Mendocino County. We are a diverse group, made up of young and old, brown and white, Palestinian and Jew and LBGT+. We are part of a long tradition of coastal people who have fought for a better world, a world where all people can be free and liberated from the ravages of war, conquest and occupation.

Today we see the horror of war in Palestine, where the Israeli armed forces have killed more than 50,000 people, displaced hundreds of thousands, and destroyed or damaged 70 percent of all structures and 92 percent of all housing units. Included in this are schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, mosques, churches, water and sewage facilities, and other historic and cultural sites. Ruthlessly, food aid has been curtailed and controlled. All this amounts to the murdering of a people and an erasure of its history and its culture —a genocide. And we see this genocide bankrolled and armed by our own government. We see our president giving a green light to ethnic cleansing, even proposing to turn Gaza over to the US and his corporate developers.

Against all this, we join others in our county and state, as well as hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions around the world who have demanded a ceasefire, an embargo on arms shipments, and an end to complicity in every horror inflicted by Israeli “Defense Forces” on the Palestinian people.

We fight to see an end to the slaughter and an immediate withdrawal of IDF forces from the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and Syria. We work to see apartheid abolished, the detention centers and prisons emptied, the barbed wire and walls torn down, the checkpoints and so-called settlements disbanded and the return of Palestinians to their homeland.

We today also fight for the liberation of all people. The fight for freedom in Palestine is connected here at home with the struggles of immigrants, of workers, for all people of color, the LGBT+ community, and indigenous peoples everywhere. We believe that through educating and by organizing, we can be part of building something new and support growing something joyful, beautiful, and life-sustaining in Palestine from the river to the sea – building homes and hospitals and schools, planting olive groves.  All impossible without decolonization and reparations. But any vision of the future of Palestine must be guided by the claims and aspirations of the Palestinian people themselves. Promises of reconstruction and economic prosperity by foreign countries are irrelevant unless tied to Palestinian self-determination