Special Edition - Artists for a Just Peace

Artists For A Just Peace – with Doreen St. Félix, Samir Eskanda, and Morgan Bassichis

Join us for an urgent conversation on solidarity, accountability, and cultural power, with artists and organizers united by the call for ceasefire.

Presented with Jewish Voice for Peace and Adalah Justice Project
Hosted by Judson Memorial Church, NYC

[December 2023]

VISIT THESOLIDARITYINDEX.COM FOR FULL SHOW NOTES

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TheSolidarityIndex.com

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CREDITS
THE SOLIDARITY INDEX podcast is produced by State of Mind Media
Hosted by Zahyr Lauren aka The Artist L.Haz
Created and produced by Jen Bell, Shalva Wise, Stina Hamlin, and Zahyr Lauren Audio editing and production by Stina Hamlin
Audio mix by Matt Gundy and Raquel Saldivar
Logo and identity design by Marwan Kaabour
Art direction, website and additional design by Jen Bell

THEME SONG
Until Everybody Is Free by Bella Cuts – featuring the voice of Maya Angelou
Released on Common Groove (2023)
All proceeds from download/streaming go to the Dr. Maya Angelou Foundation...

Transcript

ARTISTS FOR A JUST PEACE – WITH DOREEN ST. FÉLIX, SAMIR ESKANDA, AND MORGAN BASSICHIS

__________________________________

[WAVES SURGING]

ZAHYR [00:00:06]
Welcome back to the Solidarity Index for one more episode before we take a break to bring you season two. Every day the catastrophic suffering in Gaza deepens at the hands of one of the most powerful militaries in the world, supplied with US weapons and bombs as they wage war on an entrapped population of refugees, all funded by US taxpayer dollars without our consent. We share this bonus episode as we are called in real time to answer the question asked at the start of our first season. What does solidarity sound like? What does it look like? What does it feel like in action? The Solidarity Index partnered with grassroots leaders Adalah Justice Project and Jewish Voice for Peace to gather over 100 artists and cultural workers at the historic Judson Church in New York on October 26th. In conversation with Doreen St Félix, Samir Eskanda and Morgan Bassichis on the urgent responsibility of people with cultural power to speak out for Palestine and to help us imagine collective liberation so we can work to make it real.

[WAVES CRASH]

SAMIR [00:01:27]
My name is Samir Eskanda. I'm a Palestinian musician and activist based in the UK. I've come over to the U.S. to meet with artists and cultural workers and talk about peaceful calls for accountability.

MORGAN [00:01:40]
Hi everybody. My name is Morgan Bassichis and I'm really grateful and honored to be here with Samir and Doreen. I'm an artist, a performer, and also a member of Jewish Voice For Peace, New York City.

DOREEN [00:01:50]
My name is Doreen St Félix. I'm a writer and critic. I tend to write essays about art and race and performance and politics. I'm also very, very, very happy and proud to be here in solidarity with everyone in this room. I know that it can feel difficult and isolating in this moment in time as we face a genocide of the Palestinian people. But, we are gathered here today in support of life in all of its manifestations. So thank you for being here.

If you'll allow me, I'm going to read from a poem written by June Jordan. The poem is called Moving Towards Home.

"Because I need to speak about home. I need to speak about living room where the land is not bullied and beaten into a tombstone. I need to speak about living room, where the talk will take place in my language. I need to speak about living room, where my children will grow without horror. I need to speak about living room, where the men of my family between the ages of six and 65 are not marched into a roundup that leads to the grave. I need to talk about living room where I can sit without grief, without wailing aloud for my loved ones, where I must not ask Where is Abu Fadi? Because he will be there beside me. I need to talk about living room because I need to talk about home. I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian. Against the relentless laughter of evil, there is less and less living room. And where are my loved ones? It is time to make our way home."

And I chose to read from that poem, which was written in 1983, because June Jordan was my path to being politicized as a Haitian American woman who grew up in New York.

DOREEN [00:03:42]
And when I learned about her, in some ways, I would say she was ahead of the curve when it came to her support of Palestine and of Muslim women and of Arab women, and she was ostracized by other Black feminists because of it. And I bring her up to say that this, as much as I feel this community in this room, there are going to be moments of isolation and of fear. And I came into tonight feeling some discomfort, feeling unsure about what it would mean for me tomorrow when I'm alone, a Black woman in America having decided to come and share space with you. Also, as a journalist, I think that, um, journalists, we have these ideas of objectivity, of neutrality. But what we do is we tell stories, we take facts, and we are able to shift and create narratives in ways that can lead to the promotion of life, or the destruction of it. And so I come here completely objective in my belief that the stories that we're reading in The New York Times that are just repeating propaganda from the IDF, from Netanyahu's government, that this is a crisis of journalism, it's a crisis of truth. And so I'm very proud to represent myself as a writer, and to say that I don't feel that I am biased. I feel that I am on the side of the truth. And with that, I think we can start into our conversation for this evening. We want you to leave here today feeling that there are things that you can do tomorrow.

SAMIR [00:05:14]
These past few weeks, we've all seen images and videos that we may never be able to unsee. The 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are facing what international experts, including Holocaust and modern genocide scholar Raz Segal are calling genocide. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed. They are not numbers. They have names, faces, memories and dreams that won't be fulfilled. This includes artists. Heba Abu Nada was an award winning feminist poet and author of a novel entitled Oxygen Is Not For The Dead. And this is what Israel means when it says it's aiming for damage, not accuracy. And this who Israel is talking about when it says it's fighting human animals. It means every man, woman and child in Gaza. The priority right now of any humanitarian is to stop what experts are calling the unfolding genocide. How can we do that as artists and cultural workers? How can we contribute? The most urgent demand is for a ceasefire right now. We also need the unimpeded access of humanitarian aid into Gaza. We need clear positions: To reject ethnic cleansing. We need UN protection for the millions of Palestinians in Gaza. We need a military embargo on Israel. We need to stop selling these weapons to Israel. And we need a swift, thorough, International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity of apartheid and genocide. We have to try to shift the mainstream narrative. One thing we also need to do is refute the dehumanizing propaganda against the Palestinian people today.

SAMIR [00:07:16]
As a people and as a movement, we have never been so comprehensively demonized in the mainstream as we are today. And once you've completely dehumanized a people, you can do what you want to them. So it is essential that we humanize Palestinians. That we put a human face to these numbers, and we need to push for accountability. We need to end Israel's impunity. We need to cut links of complicity with Israel. In the past ten days, thousands of artists have signed letters and statements calling for ceasefire.

In one example, a letter organized by artists for Palestine UK, which was signed by Tilda Swinton and more than 4000 other artists, said together, quote, "Our governments are not only tolerating war crimes, but aiding and abetting them. There will come a time when they are held to account for their complicity. But for now, while condemning every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law, whoever perpetrates them, our obligation is to do all we can to bring an end to the unprecedented cruelty being inflicted on Gaza."

Hollywood figures too have called for ceasefire, going against the grain of the US mainstream. Joaquin Phoenix, Andrew Garfield, America Ferrera, Riz Ahmed, Cate Blanchett, Jon Stewart, Mahershala Ali said in an open letter, "We stand for freedom, justice, dignity and peace for all people." And in an atmosphere of blanket complicity in the West, these statements are significant, but we need far more.

MORGAN [00:08:53]
My beloved Rabbi, Miriam Grossman said, which I found really helpful. We don't wait to feel hopeful to act. We don't wait to feel hopeful. We don't wait for hope to come. We act hopeful. We act our way into ... We act for justice as a way to, um, to organise our feelings. We don't wait for our feelings to settle. We don't wait for our feelings to become comprehensible to us, or to become neat and politically neat and ordered. We act for justice. And there's a very clear call for justice, which is to stop this genocide. Our government here gives over $3.8 billion every single year to the Israeli military, far greater than any other military aid in any country in the world. And this genocide that's being carried out is, is impossible without the United States' support. Every single person in this room, no matter our relationship to Palestine, we all are deeply implicated, which also means we have agency. And where we have agency is where we have to act. We are in a absolutely horrifying moment. We know that over 75 years of Israeli apartheid, occupation and colonialism that has tried to dispossess ... Palestinians have been saying for years, this is a genocide. And the very term genocide has been part of Palestinians’ inability to even be believed on their own terms of their oppression. And so part of what we are doing is we are saying we listen and we believe you, what you're saying.

MORGAN [00:10:16]
We are getting a lot of gaslighting and manipulation from a lot of corners of our world to actively blame Palestinians and erase their deaths. One of the ways in which, um, that gaslighting and manipulation happens is by the weaponization of Jewish identity and Jewish grief and Jewish pain to justify the utterly unjustifiable genocide that is unfolding that Israel is carrying out against Palestinians in Gaza, and the, to use Jewish identity and Jewish grief and Jewish pain and Jewish history as a justification for Israel itself and for Zionism itself, and for $3.8 billion of military aid itself. So we as Jewish people are being used as moral cover for a colonial apartheid regime. We are being used. And let's be very clear that Zionism endangers first and foremost, Palestinians. It is the ideology that is used to colonize Palestine, Palestinians, but it also endangers Jews, and it also dehumanizes Jews. And it also hurts Jews in the same way that all systems of oppression hurt everyone on all sides of them. And we can hold the complexity that for some people, Zionism holds political and emotional attachments. But fundamentally, it's a colonial ideology that has been used to dispossess millions of Palestinians from their land. And I am committed as a Jewish person — I know so many of us are — to advancing Judaism beyond Zionism and to disentangling our ancient tradition from the historically recent colonial European ideology of Zionism.

DOREEN [00:11:49]
Morgan and Samir, you are both cultural workers and this is essential because we understand that genocide is able to occur in part because it occurs on the cultural front. We see these images, you know, we read these stories. You've seen the TikToks that are created by, um, the IDF and other organizations. And so I was hoping that each of you could maybe speak to how your individual art practices are powered by the work of liberation, and then vice versa.

MORGAN [00:12:18]
I think, first and foremost, I'm driven by a desire to honor our political ancestors. There have always been Jews who rejected Zionism, and part of the lie of Zionism is that somehow all Jews support it, and it gets to speak for all Jews. And so I think one thing that is really important is to call on the name of Shatzi Weisberger, who we call The people's Bubbie, who passed on a year ago, who's one of our many beloved Jewish anti-Zionist elders who, in their commitment to justice for all people, said, of course that includes justice for Palestinians. Underneath a lot of my projects and performance work is a desire to have us feel connected to the long stream of liberation that is behind all of us. All of us. Not just some of us, but all of us have liberatory streams that we get to claim behind us and get to fortify us through despair.

SAMIR [00:13:07]
In the music that I've made in the past, um, I wouldn't say it's been overtly connected to like a political standpoint necessarily, but whatever art you make, whatever cultural production you might be involved in, you have the choice. And I would argue that the ethical responsibility to not allow it to be used to whitewash systems of oppression, to whitewash apartheid, to whitewash serious human rights violations. We also, in the movement, have an ethical responsibility towards you to not ask you to do something that we think — or you tell us — may have a serious chance of, of harming you or your career. That's important actually, to us, it's a point of principle, of mutual respect and of mutual aid, but it's also a strategic point too. A lot of people are afraid at the moment because the repression that people are facing is real. And we don't want people to go out and do something, make a statement, join an initiative of some kind, if it means that in a week from now, you're going to fall back into silence because of a backlash. We need people to speak out. And so it's got to be possible for you to do that in a way that is ongoing and sustainable. All of that said, we have this urgent priority to speak up for a ceasefire, so I hope that we can find a way to do that that can be effective and use our voices together.

DOREEN [00:14:42]
I've heard individually, anecdotally of stories of retaliation campaigns in the art world and in the film world targeted towards people who have signed letters in support of a ceasefire. And so I was wondering if you could maybe inform the group here of some of the tactics that you've employed to protect artists.

SAMIR [00:15:03]
In September 2018, there was an initiative launched by electronic musicians called DJs for Palestine and that involved electronic musicians, DJs, producers, collectives, record stores, endorsing the cultural boycott of complicit Israeli institutions. Now, some German clubs didn't like it, and they reacted by canceling the shows of a number of DJs. And there was a lot of conversations had behind the scenes with those DJs. We worked to understand, you know, what had happened, and eventually the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — the BDS movement called to boycott three German techno clubs: About Blank in Berlin, Golden Pudel in Hamburg and Conne Island in Leipzig. A lot of this kind of repression happens in the dark, really behind closed doors. There isn't a paper trail. So, you know, I would encourage anyone who is aware of or maybe has, has personally suffered, you know, this kind of censorship to try to document it at the very least, because there may be a time when, like through legal or, you know, political means, it can be addressed.

DOREEN [00:16:33]
Morgan, I'd love to hear you talk ... Maybe this is an existential question about being in the paradoxical position of privilege, and of using your voice, and of using your Jewishness to bring attention to this issue, while also being aware that, you know, Palestinian voices, Palestinian outlets are being targeted and destroyed. So how do you handle that?

MORGAN [00:16:58]
I think it's an unresolvable tension that we will continue to be in and cannot avoid or prevent us from taking action. The tension that Jewish voices get more attention when speaking about Palestine, than Palestinians, and that somehow when something horrible happens to Palestinians, the mic quickly goes to Jews. Jews have a strategic and important role to play, which is to stop being the moral cover for this apartheid colonial regime. We need to be in a fluid role as Jews to say like, "Where are we most helpful? How can we also take some of the backlash away from Palestinians?" Given that different consequences that people face, Palestinian artists will have their entire shows canceled and have death threats, right? So we want to also right size the consequences that we're talking about, and we want to right size the risks that we're talking about. And I'm really clear, if you don't take any risk and you wait until there's no risk to take, you have waited too long. And the risks that we take, the risks are pale in comparison to what Palestinians in Palestine are facing. Also, Palestinians around the diaspora and Palestinian artists, Arab artists, Muslim artists, when they literally speak. Speak.

MORGAN [00:18:13]
So yeah. So we did have the largest demonstration of Jews in solidarity with Palestinian freedom last week. We did shut down the capitol for three hours. All members of Congress heard us. Over the course of that action, we realized we had power. What we were doing is we were using our bodies as a counterweight to the velocity of weaponization of Jews and saying, "NO." There is a constituency of us who will not let our identities and our grief be used in this oppressive way. And, you're right, it got far more coverage than any other protest has gotten. And so there's privilege in there, and there's power in there that has to be used. And I think it's an ongoing tension that we're, all of us are inside of, all of us. As people here in the United States. Like Samir was saying, our first and foremost job right now is to do everything we can to call for a ceasefire. This should be the least controversial demand. It should be the least controversial demand. And somehow our president, our government, has made that off limits to say. Somehow our congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, is getting death threats for proposing a ceasefire, death threats. That is where we are right now. Okay. And white phosphorus and bombs are raining down on on 2.3 million people in Gaza.

So our our first and foremost job is to be as loud as we possibly can about ceasefire, ceasefire. And then our second job, in my opinion, is to enter into long-term principled engagement with Palestine solidarity, and say this is the beginning of a relationship so I'm entering it with humility and entering it with not-knowing and knowing that I will have a lot to learn, and a commitment to making my discomfort less important than my commitment to action. Our discomfort has to be less important than our commitment to stopping mass death and mass murder and apartheid. And we are going to go through a spiritual and emotional process through action, not through just ourselves, but through action. Through putting our bodies on the line, saying no.

DOREEN [00:20:20]
We've seen our pressure exerted on politicians work. Joe Biden was not saying the word ceasefire at all. Now he is forced to say "We would not call for a ceasefire" but he's saying it. He had an address where he said that "We can't claim to believe the numbers coming out of the Health Ministry and Gaza with regards to how many people have died" which obviously is one of the most detestable things I think he said during his presidency, but is also very clear evidence that the Biden administration, in concert with Israel, understands that people are getting their news independently and they are able to cross check and verify and see that what they're being told by their government, by their mainstream news publications, is simply not true. The Ministry of Health in Gaza was able to put out a 200 page document with every name of each person who has either been killed or is still missing, likely under the rubble.

Samir, I think some people feel like they've signed a letter, or they've called their congressman every single day, multiple times a day. And yet there's still this sense of powerlessness. There's still a sense of when we have this media blackout, when people stop caring, in a month from now, that they'll feel isolated and they won't know what to do. And so I think if you could maybe explain for us more the goals of BDS and what the connection is between the cultural power these institutions have and how that literally translates to ultra-modern warfare being exacted on the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

SAMIR [00:22:05]
The moral obligation that we feel that artists and cultural workers have to not allow their art to be used to whitewash our oppression, that is a crucial first step. It's a prerequisite, you know, to true solidarity. It does have symbolic power. It does have political power, but it's meaningful in and of itself, too, because there are artists who are supporters of the cultural boycott of Israel today, who in the past have crossed the picket line. They've gone to play shows in apartheid Tel Aviv, and through private engagement, because we always reach out privately first. That's another step we can't skip, really. We have to give people the benefit of the doubt. And when they change their minds, we have to be open-hearted enough, despite everything that's happening right now, to welcome them.

What can people do next, after joining important initiatives to call for accountability and for ceasefire? Can we mobilize pressure within, and sometimes against institutions that you may have some association with? Whatever that association may be. A cultural institution, you have some form of leverage over it individually, but more likely collectively, let's say. Can you mobilize pressure on it to cut its own links of complicity with Israeli apartheid? Some other key principles that we would bear in mind are also how we make that work sustainable, so how we can be doing it today and tomorrow and the day after. People get burnt out. There will reach a point when the world's attention turns to something else. That's a fact. And how can we create the space for important work to take place in a way that does continue, in a way that is sustainable? We probably can't confront the biggest and most complicit institutions and stop them in their tracks from what they're doing, immediately. We can build up to it. We can start somewhere and we can start today, and then we can build support in, and around and against institutions that may be complicit and find ways to end that complicity and to challenge it.

SAMIR [00:24:34]
The cultural boycott of Israel has a predecessor. In the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the past, there was also a cultural boycott and a sports boycott and an academic boycott. The key things about the cultural boycott of Israel are really that it's rooted in international law and the universal principles of freedom of expression. The cultural boycott of Israel targets complicity, not identity, and its focus is institutions, not individuals. In practice, that means boycotting Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit in that regime of oppression. To give an example, what do we mean by complicity? It's not abstract, it's concrete.

SAMIR [00:25:24]
So, for example, there's a club in apartheid Tel Aviv called Barby. It's a smallish club, but for different reasons. It holds a certain place in Israeli cultural life. Over the years, a number of artists, fairly well-known, have played in that relatively small venue. Now, what is less well-known is that in the summer of 2014, as Israel was again massacring Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, that club printed t-shirts that said “[bleep] you! We’re from Israel”, and they put the club's logo on those t-shirts and they drove down to the South of Israel, near the fence of the Gaza ghetto, and they handed those t-shirts out to armed uniformed IDF soldiers. And then, they weren't shy about it. They posted it on their Facebook page, and as far as I know, it's still on their Facebook page today of that club. And it said they did it because they wanted to pamper their soldiers. That same day, an Israeli airstrike hit a building where Palestinians were sheltering and dozens were killed. So that's what we mean when we talk about the complicity of Israeli cultural institutions. It isn't abstract. We want to dismantle those systems of oppression for our collective liberation.

DOREEN [00:26:47]
Is it wrong to criticize someone for being silent?

SAMIR [00:26:50]
The way that we get people to speak up if they're not, in my opinion, is to understand what conditions need to be in place for them to be able to speak up. Because the reasons why someone may not be speaking out right now, or any other time, may not be obvious to another person. They could be psychological, they could be political, they could be financial. Um, and taking the time to understand that is not easy. And especially at a time right now when we so urgently need people to speak up and to speak up in strategic and sustainable ways. But that's, that's the work that we must do, in my opinion. And that's part of the work that we've been doing that has led to tens of thousands of artists speaking up. Let's focus on winning people over by welcoming them when they do speak up, being really intentional about the kind of messaging that people might be encouraged to then endorse.

DOREEN [00:27:57]
I don't know if we have a crisis of indifference so much as we have a crisis of denialism. I think that people don't feel empowered to judge what they see right in front of them and make a statement. And I think sometimes I know you don't always have the energy to do that. Sometimes you just don't want to have an argument with someone. But I have had a couple of conversations this week with people, actually, many Black Americans who just did not understand that they were empowered to look at these videos, to look at photos, to hear, in fact, the statements of Israeli government officials themselves who say that we are not focused on precision, we are focused on destruction. They didn't know that they could hear those things and then make a judgment on their own. I think Americans in particular have a hard idea imagining themselves as citizens of the world. And so I think sometimes just that little nudge of, "You're able to use your own discernment here" um, has been useful in some conversations I've had with people who otherwise were so upset when Roe v Wade was overturned, who were so upset to see people come to America as refugees and not have a place to stay because it's confusing. You're like, you understand it, you get it. So why don't you get it here? And I think that, um, the disinformation and the propaganda over 75 years has been so powerful. And so encouraging people to think ... It can go a ways longer than, than maybe it feels.

MORGAN [00:29:35]
I think silence is contagious, but I also think courage is contagious. And so we want to be, we want to be contagious in that way. And saying like, everything we want is on the other side of solidarity. I think what a lot of people are doing right now is scaring people out of solidarity. And that's so toxic, that when I talk about manipulation, I think the idea of saying, oh, you're not speaking up for Jews or you don't care. It's like that's, that's scaring people out of solidarity. You know, I think many of us are actively indoctrinated with lies. We're not taught about the Nakba. We're not taught about the mass dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages. We're not taught about the colonial history of this land that we're on right now, and we're fed absolute lies. So it's denialism, it's indoctrination. And I think when we learn about the Nakba, then we see, oh, what's happening in Gaza right now is an ongoing Nakba. The other thing that can happen is when we feel powerless, we try to reach to whatever's closest to us, which is really understandable. And we also have to keep our eyes on the prize, like we have to keep our eyes focused on people with power too. So yes, everybody needs to speak out, and yes, everybody needs to exercise individual risks. But let's not confuse that same thing with, like the people in decision-making power. We all have the ability to influence people. But I think sometimes we want to remember like, oh, let me, let me preserve the bulk of my fight on those with the power to stop this.

DOREEN [00:31:01]
What is the best lever to weaken the geopolitical concentration of power?

SAMIR [00:31:06]
You don't live in a military dictatorship right now, so you do have some limited influence over policymakers. And that's why actions like JVP has been doing recently, that's why they matter. That's why they're even possible, and that's why they can be strategic. As artists and as cultural workers, you may be able to access the media through statements.

MORGAN [00:31:35]
So many of us are artists, and I think so many people would look at the work we're up to, like, how did you make that? And we all know, like, oh, we spent years practicing. That's how we made it. And the same is true for organizing. The same is true for campaigns, like those come out of discipline and years of training at identifying targets that are strategic, and identifying paths to escalation to increase our power to have influence over those targets. And so, um, this event is being sponsored by Adalah Justice Project and Jewish Voice For Peace, and I think in addition to signing artists letters, which are so important and speaking out and of course, calling Congress and showing up to demonstrations ... To start keeping our eyes towards campaigns where we can be using our collective power in addition to the ceasefire and beyond the ceasefire.

DOREEN [00:32:24]
I just want to quickly, before we end, give an example of getting in where you fit in, because not everybody is comfortable going to protests. Not everybody is comfortable getting arrested. I found what happened at the 92nd Street YMCA to be really, really, I mean, horrible initially, but inspiring in terms of the response, which is to say, Viet – a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who wrote the book The Sympathizer, who writes about the refugee experience... his reading at the 92nd Street Y was canceled because he had expressed solidarity with Palestinians earlier that day, and the organizer of that event was able to put the event on at McNally Jackson. But what's more is that all of the other events that were part of this reading group, those writers decided to no longer participate in this series. And guess what? The lecture series got canceled altogether. Which is to say, we have cultural capital. I hate that phrase, but we have it and it flows both ways. And so I think it's about knowing that you can withhold the glimmer that these institutions are dependent on to get their power. We all have the capability of doing that. We all have the capability of withholding our labor. We are not freeing Palestine. Palestine is freeing us. Thank you Morgan. Thank you Samir.

[WAVE CRASHES]

ZAHYR [00:34:02]
We are not freeing Palestine. Palestine is freeing us. Thank you Doreen. Thank you Samir. Thank you Morgan. Thank you Jewish Voice For Peace and Adalah Justice Project for your leadership in this work for collective liberation. Also, many thanks to Mala Forever for documenting this urgent conversation and Judson Church for hosting it so, so generously. Head to our show notes for more information on the speakers, organizations and calls to action in this episode, and please share this episode with everyone you know.

[MUSIC] Until Everybody Is Free by Bella Cuts – featuring the voice of Maya Angelou [00:34:42]
Truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free. No one of us can be free, until everybody is free.

ZAHYR [00:35:10]
Thank you for listening to the Solidarity Index. This podcast is a production of State of Mind Media created and produced by Jen Bell, Shalva Wise, Stina Hamlin, and Me Zahyr Lauren. Audio editing and production by Stina Hamlin. Audio mix by Matt Gundy. Logo and identity design by Marwan Kaabour. Art direction, website and additional design by Jen Bell at Studio Analogy. Our theme song, Until Everybody Is Free by Bella Cuts is out everywhere you listen to music. All proceeds from streaming and downloads go to the Dr. Maya Angelou Foundation. You can follow us on Instagram at the Solidarity Index and anywhere you find podcasts. For more information, head to our website at The Solidarity Index dot com. I'm your host, Zahyr Lauren, aka The Artist L.Haz. Join us soon for Season Two and until then, don't stop demanding a lasting ceasefire and a just peace.

[MUSIC] Until Everybody Is Free by Bella Cuts – featuring the voice of Maya Angelou [00:36:25]
The truth is, no one of us can be free until everyone is free. No one of us can be free until everybody is free.