A teach-in aimed to help DC-based activists connect with the Palestinian struggle

by Cat Haseman

Around fifty people gathered in Malcolm X Park on a sunny day in early June. Keen to attend one of the first in-person events since the pandemic hit DC, eager activist-types settled in on the grass, chatting while a Palestinian rap song played from a portable speaker. 

Four DMV-based organizations—Occupation Free DC (OFDC), Heal Da Homies, Defund MPD, and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)—brought the motley crew together. While focused on different constituencies, the groups share a common dream: abolition. “To us, abolition doesn’t just mean tearing down the military-industrial complex,” explained Scotty, an organizer with OFDC. “It also means building up new systems together, envisioning new ways of being in the world.”

A local movement created by Jewish Voice for Peace, OFDC originally focused on pressuring lawmakers to end the “Deadly Exchange,” a term coined to describe US-Israeli police training exchange programs. Rather than spend taxpayer dollars on militarizing the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), OFCD has demanded investment in a new form of collective community safety. “Recently, we’ve expanded our vision to include abolition more broadly, around the world and in DC,” clarified Scotty. “We are starting to think about and stand with anti-imperialist, anti-colonial movements more broadly.” 

Throughout May, the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah flooded American progressives’ social media feeds. Palestinian families living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem faced imminent eviction by illegal Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli state. Tweet threads and Instagram infographics incisively connected the events in Sheikh Jarrah to the systematic ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians. The unending viral social media content stirred up real-time conversation, and digital activism soon materialized, taking to the streets.

Carrying homemade signs with slogans like “End Israeli Apartheid” and “Free Gaza,” thousands gathered for pro-Palestine solidarity marches and demonstrations in dozens of cities across the United States. On 15 May, Nakba Day, which commemorates the displacement of the Palestinian people beginning in 1948, fifteen thousand people marched from the Washington Monument to the US Capitol, demanding the US cut its billions in unconditional military support to Israel. 

Despite being primed by a domestic racial reckoning, American progressives have long viewed Palestinian liberation as third rail—politically untouchable thanks to long-standing bipartisan support for the Israel. Yet, with a steady stream of protests, online activism, institutional solidarity statements, and op-eds flowing, a renewed wave of support for the Palestinian liberation movement seems to have crashed onto the United States. 

When the street demonstrations quieted at the end of May, OFDC did not want to lose this momentum. Instead, the organizers decided to heed the call of Palestinian activists and continue connecting the dots between US militarism and Israeli state violence. The resulting event—“Dreaming Abolition from DC to Palestine: A Teach-In and Collective Art Space”— swapped chants and megaphones for printed hand-outs and think-pair-share techniques. 

A form of popular education, teach-ins seek to raise participants’ social or political consciousness, equipping them to see how their personal experiences are connected to societal injustice. “Protesting is a powerful tool that creates public tension and forces people to face society’s problems,” said Scotty, “but we also need spaces to learn and share knowledge. Teach-ins are an interactive, participatory way to do that.”

The two-hour-long teach-in aimed to help DC-based activists connect the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism with abolitionist movements that hit closer to home. The organizers broke into three discussion groups: one dissecting surveillance techniques, one examining US-Israeli police exchanges, and one problematizing the term “terrorism.” 

The discussions sought to illustrate that, regardless of geography, policing and militarism are a two-headed monster that targets Black and Brown communities. In stark contrast to the cyclical isolation of online activism, these face-to-face conversations fluttered into a nuanced back-and-forth exchange. 

After the discussions, the group gathered around a long white banner that read “Abolitionist Love Letters from DC 2 Palestine.” Kneeling in the grass around the canvas, the activist-students took turns painting, filling the banner with meaningful symbols and lyrics from Arabic poems. “We wanted to provide a space where we could write to our siblings in Palestine,” shared Scotty, “We filled it with messages of solidarity, of love, and of resistance.”

Organizers provided art supplies and a blank canvas in order to translate abolitionist dreams into art.

While collective banner-making may not be the most common activism tool, imagination and artistic expression are crucial elements of envisioning an abolitionist world—a world without police, imprisonment, and militarism, a world that does not currently exist. “Incorporating art at the end of the teach-in gave people a way to take all the things they’d learned and get it out of their heads and on the canvas in front of them,” concluded Scotty. Powerful and fun, the collective painting allowed attendees to illustrate their solidarity. 

The demands heard at pro-Palestine rallies to “divest,” “defund,” and “abolish” are not new. Yet, making connections between transnational struggles has the power to renew the calls. Continuing to solidify and manifest these connections—either through art or otherwise—seems to be the way forward.

Cat Haseman is a student, writer, and soon-to-be US diplomat. She is interested in political culture, local government, and how foreign policy affects real people. Cat is a Pickering Fellow, an MA Arab Studies student at Georgetown, and a copy editor for Jadaliyya.