Dima Khalidi's Op-Ed on the Biden Transition and Palestine Advocacy
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Director Dima Khalidi published an op-ed in In These Times about the need for the Biden administration to rescind policies from Trump and his predecessors against Palestine advocacy.
The article focuses on undoing Trump’s executive order that silences Palestinian voices and rejecting the “terrorism” framework that threatens all of our justice movements.
“While we may feel relief knowing that Trump will soon be stripped of his access to the nuclear codes, we must remember that President-elect Joe Biden represents an entrenched power structure poised to continue failed policies that hurt so many of our communities. This includes Biden’s career-long history of supporting Israel’s aggression toward Palestinians.
Though the progressive wave in the House has been an encouraging development, and Georgia now appears to have handed Democrats the Senate in a historic runoff, Palestinians have only a handful of allies in Congress.
Nonetheless, Palestinians and our progressive allies have no choice but to try to push the incoming Biden administration — and to make our oft-ignored voices heard…
…Israel and its allies are doing everything in their power to shut the movement down, silence us, and discredit our voices and efforts to achieve justice.
There are two primary tools that Israel and its allies are using to achieve this: pushing measures to define Palestine advocacy as antisemitic, and making false accusations of support for terrorism. Both of these, as deployed in the U.S., are undermining fundamental constitutional First Amendment rights, as my organization, Palestine Legal, has documented.
If Biden truly wants to live up to his mandate to repudiate Trump’s anti-democratic policies, he needs to do the following to protect not just our constitutional rights to call for Palestinian freedom, but our moral obligation to do so as well.”
Read the full article here.