I'm going to ask you to do something that I have never asked you to do ever before: engage with this video, like it, comment on it, and share it with your friends. If you don't know what to comment, just ask me a random question about YouTube or content creation, and I will respond or comment an interesting fact. This is really important. According to my analytics, most of my audience is in their mid to late 20s, the same as me. At this age, if we have the privilege to do so, we are usually working towards our dreams and building a life that we love and one that we feel safe and comfortable in. But for millions of people across the globe, that is obviously not the case. For many people in Sudan, in Congo, and Palestine, even where I'm from in the United States, that opportunity has been forcibly taken away. This is the reality for Amed. I met Amed 5 months ago through o o, and I have talked about him in my previous videos as well as on my Instagram. He is a very

kind, very resilient, and innovative person living in Palestine. Like most of you, he is in his late 20s, and he's just trying to survive and keep his family safe. Here's a little about Ahmed and his journey in his own words. My name is Ahmed Matar, and I am 27 years old. I lost my father when I was six. He was martyred by the occupation forces during their 2003 assault on Gaza. Before the war, I completed my studies in media, fueled by a passion for photography and art. I dreamed of building a career, but the war shattered those dreams. Now, my only focus is keeping my family safe. In the early days of war, I lost 21 relatives, and my family has been displaced six times. We now live in makeshift tents in a commune with no real shelter. My niece Tagrid was born in November 2023 when we were first displaced. She's never known the comfort of a home or a peaceful night's sleep. Our conditions are beyond difficult. Food is scarce, and what little we find is

overpriced and poor in quality. We're forced to survive on whatever we can find. Diseases are spreading rapidly due to the lack of clean water and hygiene products, putting us at constant risk of illness. Every night, planes fly low over our tents, adding to the stress and fear we live with, especially for the children. The days are unbearably hot, and with winter approaching, we don't know how we will survive the cold without proper shelter. We are trying to raise awareness of the severe hardships we face in Gaza, that being a lack of food, the spread of diseases, and constant fear of attacks. We endure hoping the world will see our suffering and help provide the relief we desperately need. Ahed asked me to make this video so that even more eyes and ears can reach him day in and day out. Ahmed shares his life on Instagram, hoping and willing for people to pay attention. He shares the ways in which Palestinians have had to get creative in order to live under occupation. He describes what it's like

to go thirsty, hungry, and shelterless. To be awoken in the middle of the night or in the early morning, fearing for your life as planes swarm overhead and explosions go off in the gaining distance. Ahmed is very, very tired. His family is tired. His friends are tired. Everyone in Palestine is very tired. For many of us watching, but certainly not all, we don't know what that's like. We have the privilege to be in temperature-regulated households. We don't have to worry about a meal or where we'll sleep tonight. And we don't have to wonder if we're experiencing our last moment alive on earth when we hear a plane fly overhead. I ask that those who are able please consider checking out AMED's fund, which is always linked in my description. You can find it under the helpful resources title. Ahmed has also shared recently that his cousin Muhammad was diagnosed with leukemia and needs to travel abroad for treatment, as the treatment he needs is unavailable in Gaza due to obviously the occupation. That link will also be available in my

description if you're unable to donate for whatever reason, that is completely understandable. I will donate the proceeds from this video to Ahmed and his family, so all you have to do is watch and share with your friends, and I will also continue to personally and privately donate. Please make sure to follow Ahmed on Instagram, which will be linked in my description. Um, check out all the other links in there as well. I have links to aid organizations in Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and Yemen. And lastly, please check out Oob. That's where you can find other families like Ahmed's, um, who need desperate help. With all of that in mind, um, if I don't make this video at least 20 to 30 minutes long, a certain social media site will attempt to hide it from my audience due to low watch time and engagement. A lot of, like, most of my videos are about an hour long, so they go by, uh, watch minutes. So, a 5-minute video will not, uh, catch the algorithm, if that makes sense. To make up for this, I

thought I would read you a chapter from a very important book. Freedom is a constant struggle by Angela Davis. I brought this a year ago um when it was being widely recommended on social media. This book talks about the reality of interconnected struggle and how we are all meticulously dependent upon each other's Freedom. It uses Palestine and Ferguson Missouri to display its point. For those of you who don't know Ferguson Missouri became a kind of Center Point for social movement and protest during the 2014 um killing of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer. It was a death that radicalized many especially following the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin in Florida which um incidentally spawned the black lives matter movement. So I'm going to try to read to you a few passages um from this book and any highlighted sections that I found particularly engaging just so you can watch it through rewatch it and try to help it get picked up by the algorithm so that it doesn't get hidden by YouTube. So I want to start out with

an introduction that was written by Frank Barat that talks about the plight of the activist or the person who is trying to make change in the world. I work in a building that hosts various organizations and charities working for global justice, some focused on Western Sahara, some on Palestine, others on torture in Latin America or Africa. It is a good environment to work in, surrounded by people who believe in a fairer and better society and who have decided to act on their beliefs and dedicate their lives to trying to change the world. Sounds utopian, maybe, but the important word here is probably not the one you are thinking of; it's trying, trying, and trying again, never stopping. That is the victory in itself. Everyone and everything tells you that outside you will not succeed, that it is too late, that we live in an epoch where a revolution cannot happen anymore, radical change is a thing of the past. You can be an outsider but not outside the system, and you can have political beliefs, even radical ones, but they need to stay within the bounds of

permissible inside that bubble that has been drawn for you by Elites. What can we do? How can we do it? With whom? What tactics should be used? How should we define a strategy that is accessible to everyone, including a general public that has reached levels of depoliticization that can make atrocities seem acceptable? What is our vision? How can we make sure we are talking to everyone? How can we catalyze and connect sustainable cross-border and radical movements? These are the types of questions that many activists ask themselves on a daily basis, questions that are anchored in the present and will shape our future. It is easy to feel discouraged and simply let go. There is no shame in that. We are, after all, engaged in a struggle that seems, if we look at it using a mainstream political framework and a mass media prism, unwinnable. On the other hand, if we take a step back, look at things from a broader angle, reflecting on what is happening all over the world, in the history of struggle, the history of solidarity.

movements. It becomes clear, sometimes even obvious, that seemingly indestructible forces can be, thanks to the people's willpower, sacrifices, and actions, easily broken. Angela Davis is living proof that people power works, that an alternative is possible, and that the struggle can be a beautiful and exhilarating one. That is something we need as human beings to experience, and it's in everyone's power to partake in the struggle. So, in an interview with Frank Barat in 2014, Angela Davis kind of expounds upon the importance of not viewing yourself as an individual in a larger movement and instead to focus on the collectivity of that movement. She starts by mentioning Nelson Mandela. Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective, always also achieved by men and women who were his comrades, the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to disassociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-20th century U.S. Freedom

Movement. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle. Our tendency has been to consider Palestine a separate and, unfortunately, too often marginal issue. This is precisely the moment to encourage everyone who believes in equality and justice to join the call for a free Palestine. So, Frank asks Angela if the struggle of this is end, and she says, I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues, and new terrains on which we engage in The Quest For Freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk towards Freedom. So, Angela also talks about the connectedness across movements, that is, the connectedness of black lives matter to freeing Palestine, and she talks about how there's a connection between police brutality in the United States and police brutality in Palestine. It also might be important to point out that the Israeli police have been involved in the

training of us police, and therefore it means that when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli State, it's not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere in another place. It is also to do with what happened in US communities, and she further builds on the importance of making these connections. This is one of the reasons I think so many people began to identify with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It wasn't a sense of, Oh, we have to lend solidarity to these people over there in South Africa. It was because they began to see what we have in common, a common connection. If that's not created, no matter how much you appeal to people, no matter how genuinely you invite them to join you, they will continue to see the activity as yours and not theirs. And of course, one of the major conversations surrounding Palestine on the internet is people being afraid to talk about it because they think that there is too much complexity, too much history, to be able to join the conversation, and

Angela Davis mentions this in this chapter by stating, My experience has been that many people assume that in order to be involved with Palestine, you have to be an expert. So, people are afraid to join because they say, 'I don't understand, it's too complicated.' Then, they hear someone who is truly an expert, who does indeed represent the movement, who is so thoroughly informed about the history of the conflict, who speaks about the failure of the Oslo Accords, etc., when this happened and why it's important. But too often, people feel that they are not sufficiently informed to consider themselves an advocate of justice in Palestine. The question is how to create windows and doors for people who believe in justice to enter and join the Palestine solidarity movement. So, that the question of how to bring movements together is also a question of the kind of language one uses and the consciousness one tries to impart. I think it's important to insist on the intersectionality of movements. In the abolition movement, we have been trying to find ways to talk

about Palestine so that people who are attracted to a campaign to dismantle prisons in the US, for instance, will also think about the need to end occupation in Palestine. It can't be an afterthought; it has to be a part of the ongoing analysis. So, Frank asks Angela, What could we do to strengthen the pro-justice movement even more in the United States? And Angela replies, Well, I think that we constantly have to make connections so that when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence in relation to Ferguson, Michael Brown, and New York, Eric Gardner, we can't forget the connections with Palestine. So, in many ways, I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality, of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation. And then she and Frank kind of go deeper into talking about the connection with police brutality in the US and in places like Gaza. So, Frank says, We talked about the militarization of the police. You see it in Ferguson; you also see it in the West.

Bank in Gaza. You also see it in Athens, in Greece right now. Police forces looking like rooc cops. The fact that this is a global struggle becomes more obvious when you make those connections. And Angela replies, But they're shrewd, so we no longer see it in Ferguson because they have decided to make their militarization less visible. But even when we can't see it, we have to make the point, and I think that's perhaps even more important, that people learn to see it through the efforts to render those military influences invisible. So Frank asks Angela, What can black feminism and the black struggle offer to the Palestinian Liberation movement? And Angela replies, I don't know whether I would phrase the question in that way because I think that solidarity always implies a kind of mutuality. Given the fact that in the US, we're already encouraged to assume that we have the best of everything, that US exceptionalism puts us in a situation as activists to offer advice to people struggling all over the world. I don't

agree with that. I think we share our experiences just as I think the development of black feminism and women of color feminism can offer ideas, experiences, analyses to Palestinians. So can black feminisms and women of color feminisms learn from the struggle of the Palestinian people and Palestinian feminists. So I think the whole notion of intersectionality that has characterized the kind of feminisms we're talking about, that we cannot simply look at gender in isolation from race, from class, from sexuality, from nationality, from ability, from a whole range of other issues that Palestinians or people in the Palestinian struggle have given expression to and have actually helped people in the US imagine broader notions of intersectionality. Angela and Frank also talk about how the Palestinian struggle has changed specifically in the United States. And Angela says that it is increasingly becoming, that is to say, the issue of Palestine is increasingly being incorporated into major social justice issues. And my own experience has been that in the past I could always expect resistance or challenges when talking about Palestine, but now this has become

increasingly acceptable, and I think that has to do with what is happening in Palestine itself. It has to do with the rise of Palestine solidarity movements all over the world, not just in the US. It has to do specifically in the US with increasing numbers of people associated with black and Native American and Latino movements incorporating Palestine into the agenda. I think I spoke in the last interview about the tweets of Palestinian activists used to provide advice for protesters in Ferguson on how to deal with the tear gas. So, that direct connection that has been facilitated by social media has been important as well. And, of course, it's very important to leave off on a message of Hope because that is all we have in this situation, in this struggle. So, Angela says, I don't think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it's only optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. This is an era where we have to encourage that sense of community.

particularly at a time when neoliberalism attempts to force people to think of themselves only in individual terms and not in collective terms. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism. I hope you watched through this, even if you just let it play in the background. Um, please make sure to check out the links in my description to help Ahed. Um, and you can find those links in every video I post, even if it's not this one. Um, and please also check out the links to help Amed's cousin Muhammad and check out Oob, where you can find other families just like Amed's. Thank you for watching.

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