On an upper 80-degree Saturday afternoon in October, thousands of people marched from Jane Byrne Park down the Magnificent Mile to the Gold Coast to commemorate one year of unified Palestinian resistance to the #GazaGenocide.
“It’s really important to show support. I’m a Black person, and I feel like we’re trying our best to show up and show out as we did during the Black Lives Matter movement,” Raina Newman, a Columbia College Chicago student, told The TRiiBE.
Speakers opened the rally with demands that the U.S. stop sending military aid to Israel and supporting Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinians. The Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine (CJP) organized the rally and march.
The movement for Palestinian liberation isn’t new; there’s a long, storied history of the struggle for self-determination and freedom from occupation. However, over the past year, it has shifted public consciousness unprecedentedly. In Chicago, mobilizations have continued through a multiethnic coalition of organizers and with support from some City Council members and even Mayor Brandon Johnson, including the Ceasefire in Gaza resolution. However, while public awareness around the conflict in Gaza and the Middle East is growing, speaking out about these issues has consequences for some.
October marks one year since Hamas’ attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. Since then, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing conflict, which South Africa labeled a genocide. More than 50 countries signed on to support South Africa’s case at the United Nations, accusing Israel of genocide. Demonstrations in support of Palestinians and demanding an end to the bombardment of Lebanon have been ongoing worldwide. Since October 2023, The conflict in Gaza has escalated tensions in countries including Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria.
The one-year march was also a moment of celebration for the movement in support of Palestinians, which has mobilized continuously over the past year and helped shift the narrative around the conflict between Israel and Palestine, Hatem Abudayyeh, a Palestinian-American, told The TRiiBE. He’s also the national chair for the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)-Chicago.
“We have played a role in establishing a certain narrative out there in public absolutely, and one of the fascinating elements of it is that people are not only talking about Israel in the context of the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem any longer,” Abudayyeh said. “They’re talking about Israel in a context in which an organization like USPCN has always been talking about Israel, which is that it’s a racist settler colonialist, apartheid Zionist state.”
Abudayyeh also recognizes the increased participation in demonstrations worldwide and international solidarity with helping shift the narrative.
The relationship between Palestinian conflict and Chicago organizers
Throughout the last year, the CJP has led 53 mass mobilizations, demanding that the U.S. stop sending military aid to Israel and supporting Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinians. In total, there have been 100 mobilizations, including college student encampments and solidarity organization events, according to Abudayyeh.
Although there were concerns about losing momentum after a year, the presence of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago allowed local organizers to gain national attention, offering a renewed sense of hope and a resurgence in momentum, which is crucial for attracting more people to the movement.
“We’re hearing directly from children who are suffering and being terrorized and killed themselves, directly through social media,” Steven Thrasher said. He’s an assistant professor and Daniel Renberg Chair at Northwestern University. “I think that’s had a big effect. Chicago has a long history of activism around this issue, and it’s been able to tap into other existing networks.”
Abudayyeh echoed those sentiments. Palestinian journalists, such as Bisan Owda, Motaz Hilal Azaiza, and others, have documented the impact of the ongoing violence and devastation in Gaza and on the Palestinian people since its start a year ago. Owda has amassed more than five million followers across social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Over a hundred Palestinian journalists have been killed since last October.
In January, Chicago became the largest city in the U.S. to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. The Chicago City Council voted 23-23 to pass the “Uniting for Peace” Resolution, and Johnson voted to break the tie. The effort was led by Ald. Rosanna Rodriguez Sanchez (33rd Ward).
Abudayyeh said the ceasefire vote was one of the major successes of the movement for Palestine over the last year.
“We worked very hard on that movement. It was the Black and brown coalition for Palestine that made it happen,” he said, referring to the solidarity between USPCN and organizations like the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR).
The CAARPR is one of many Black-led organizations that have participated alongside the movement for Palestine in Chicago, showing their presence at demonstrations and offering support.
“We have a mayor who said to Mother Jones that this is a genocide and that we need to call it what it is,” Abudayyeh said. “This is the mayor of one of the biggest cities, most important cities in the world, who said it publicly and openly, who said, I am a product of the Black liberation movement. I understand what liberation is. I understand what national liberation is, and so I understand the Palestine question as well.”
Throughout the last year, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has upheld her office’s protest policy. The CCSAO does not prosecute peaceful protestors and will decline to prosecute cases with misdemeanor charges, including disorderly conduct, public demonstration, unlawful gathering, criminal trespass to state-supported land, and curfew charges.
However, the city’s law department opened new misdemeanor charges against 40 protestors in the O’Hare case after the CCSAO dropped them in June.
Some organizers found the move by the city’s law department concerning, and those fears carried into the DNC, where mass demonstrations were planned. In the months since Oct. 7, the movement for Palestine sustaining momentum throughout the DNC was also a concern.
“It had been nine months of intense weekly actions in Chicago. That’s almost impossible to sustain,” Abudayyeh said.
USPCN, the CAARPR, and nearly 300 organizations joined forces to create the March on the DNC Coalition. During DNC week, they held a series of rallies and demonstrations, and seeing thousands participate was a turning point. The March on the DNC mobilized 39,000 people during that week.
“Even though I was super concerned that the DNC might be disappointing, it was absolutely not disappointing. The numbers were what we wanted and what we expected. We were very happy with them, and the fact is the whole world was watching, but not what was happening in the United Center. They were watching the DNC protests instead,” he said.
Seeing those numbers inspired Abudayyeh. “This is not slowing down. This is not subsiding,” he said, referring to the movement for Palestine.
Calls for disinvestment, or other calls to action
Following the Oct. 5 rally, thousands marched for over an hour from Michigan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive and continued to East Schiller Street and North Astor Street to the home of Gov. JB Pritzker. During the march, organizers, over loudspeakers, demanded that Illinois divest the $130 million in Israeli bonds held by the state.
Pritzker’s office did not respond to The TRiiBE’s request for comment on the protesters’ demands.
The specific calls for disinvestment and boycotts from Israel have also trickled down to college campuses in the U.S. For example, in April, a coalition of student organizations at Northwestern University erected a Palestine solidarity encampment on their campus, joining the hundreds of college students who were also demonstrating similarly. The TRiiBE spoke with J.J.*, an organizer with the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter. J.J. chose to use a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation.
“We’ve done a lot of coalition building and developing points of unity, getting to know our neighbors, advancing our own political understanding of the nature of Zionism,” J.J. told The TRiiBE, reflecting on what they’ve learned from the encampment. “We are looking to further combat both the new wave of repressive policies that universities are implementing to silence the student intifada as well as continue to impact the ability for the United States to furnish Israel in its ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”
Students demanded that Northwestern stop supporting Israeli apartheid and occupation, protect student civil liberties and safety, end partnerships that legitimize genocide and occupation, disclose and divest from war and apartheid, and more.
After setting up the encampment on April 25, student demonstrators were “almost kicked out by the Northwestern University Police Department (NUPD). Organizers formed a human blockade by linking arms to keep the police out,” according to previous reporting by TRiiBE contributor Bridgette Adu-Wadier.
“It all unfolded very quickly, and I would say, within 15 to 30 minutes, the university police were out. The Northwestern police were moving in on the students, and so that’s when other faculty members, staff, some graduate students, and I tried to make a line to defend the students,” Thrasher recalled.
Northwestern University reached an agreement with the Northwestern Divestment Coalition on April 29. The university officials agreed to support “pro-Palestinian and Arab spaces and allow peaceful demonstrations—from members of the NU community—on Deering Meadow until the final day of spring quarter classes on June 1,” Adu-Wadier wrote.
That same month, four university employees, including Thrasher, were charged with obstructing police during the April campus demonstrations. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) dropped the charges in July. However, this fall, Thrasher was suspended by Northwestern and is currently under investigation. His fall semester classes were canceled.
“I miss teaching my students at Northwestern. The charges against me are bogus, as you can see, and it’s because they don’t like my politics, but also that I defended our students,” Thrasher told The TRiiBE. “They’re trying to make an example to scare other people into being quiet.”
Now that conflict has spread into neighboring Middle Eastern countries, the stakes have never been higher, according to J.J. For their peers at Northwestern, they encourage becoming more involved.
“If we had a message for the student body or for the people that may not have engaged in the struggle, or may not have felt that they were meaningfully engaged in the struggle, what we say is: join an organization, get organized, learn about what our government, what our university, what the Zionist powers are doing, and organize to stop it.”
Abudayyeh also expressed concern with the escalation of violence in neighboring Middle Eastern countries, yet he sees the potential for increased mobilization going forward.
“More people are going to join the movement now because I think there’s a section of the anti-war movement that has been rejuvenated by the work around Palestine, and I believe that that anti-war movement is growing by the day, especially if this ends up escalating into a regional war.”
