Muslims, Jews, and Christians Demand a Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza to Save the Children

On Sunday, December 3, The Atlanta Multifaith Coalition for Palestine held a press conference and a funeral march for the victims of the war in Palestine. Thousands gathered at the intersection of Moreland and North Avenue on Freedom Parkway to pray and mourn those who have lost their lives in this violence and to demand that our elected officials immediately call for a ceasefire in Gaza that is killing thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children.

Netanyahu believes the war in Gaza is his opportunity to stay in power and out of prison over corruption charges. Three-quarters of Israelis want him to resign. Thousands marched in Jerusalem, calling on him to focus on freeing the hostages. At his home, Israelis break through police barricades to protest his security failure that led to the October 7 attack by Hamas. 

Worldwide, millions march to protest the slaughter of civilians by Netanyahu’s extremist party. Israel may be on the verge of a civil war between liberal Israelis and the fanatical extreme Zionists in Netanyahu’s government, according to knowledgeable sources.

There is no military solution in Israel because you can’t kill your way to peace. You only make more terrorists and keep the cycle of violence going from one generation to another.

The moderator at the press conference, Azka Mahmod, with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization and part of the Atlanta Multifaith Coalition for Palestine.

CAIR calls upon our elected leaders for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, full access to humanitarian aid, and an end to the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. In the last two months, Israel has killed over 16,000 civilians, with more dead under the rubble. Over 200 civilians have been murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and extremist settlers in the West Bank, and hundreds of Palestinians have been kidnapped and imprisoned in Israel.

We are gathered to demand an immediate ceasefire, and we will continue to gather until we see a free Palestine.

The first speaker, Rev. Fahed Abu Akel, is a Palestinian Christian and former moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the USA.

We are here to mourn the death of all the Palestinians and Israeli civilians.

 We are watching the second Nakba on television. The first Nakba was in 1948 when the new state of Israel destroyed 530 villages and towns in Palestine and exiled by force more than 750,000 to one million Palestinians who today are refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and Egypt. 

Today, more than one million Palestinians are being forced to move from the north of Gaza to the south of Gaza. Their homes are being destroyed. It looks like 1948 again, but this time, people worldwide are watching on television and saying enough is enough. Palestine must be free.

Today, between the river and the sea, we have seven million Israeli Jews and seven million Palestinian Arabs, Christians, and Muslims. Both people need to live in freedom, justice, and equality.

The second speaker, Iman Plemon T. El-Amin, is the Iman Emeritus of the Atlanta Masjid of Al-Islam, one of the largest and most progressive Mosques in the U.S.

Two months ago, Palestinians were told to leave North Gaza and go to South Gaza for safety. Now, North Gaza is nothing but rubble where 660,000 thousand buildings are demolished or severely damaged. Literally 1,000 and 2,000 thousand pound bombs are dropped on North Gaza. Any one of those bombs can flatten a 20-story apartment building. You have to go back to World War II to find that kind of bomb dropped in urban populated areas.

The United States provided the Israeli government with those one and two thousand-pound bombs, which killed 15,000 thousand civilians. Of those deaths, 80 percent were women and children. More civilians have been killed in two months in Gaza than were killed in Afghanistan in 20 years.

The third speaker, Iman Arshad Anwar, serves as the Imna at Masjid Jafar in John Creek.

All faiths, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, teach that the taking of innocent life is wrong. It is like killing all of humanity. When we see collective punishment, the massacre of almost 20 thousand Palestinians, the majority of whom are children and women. We are shocked that so many people can witness this and still have to convince those with power to do something. We are witnessing a moral loss of the human soul. 

Why do our elected leaders make it difficult for us to meet with them? When all we want is to speak to them about stopping the massacre of innocent lives.?

We are going to mourn and offer prayers for those who have lost their lives and continue to lose their lives. We pray for peace and urge those in power to call for an immediate ceasefire to end the occupation and address the underlying reason behind the violence in the region. We ask the American public to continue joining with those calling for peace. We are the majority, and we can make a difference.

The fourth speaker, Musa Ghanayem, is a Palestinian Christian and a criminal justice lawyer. Musa served as the Legal Advisor for the American Federation of Ramallah Palestine for ten years. 

The last time I spoke on behalf of the children of Gaza, I asked our elected officials for a ceasefire. Today, I’m here to eulogize them. We have to show that the Palestinian people are human beings because some of humanity has forgotten it. We must show our losses are real because some people fail to believe it. 

I have chosen to speak on behalf of the children of Gaza. The children, women, and elderly have lost their lives. Your loss is not in vain because you’ve lifted the veil on a brutal regime and exposed the horrific occupation you’ve been subjected to for nearly a century. Your death has exposed the inhuman blockade that has forever stifled your borders. Your loss is not in vain because now we all know what mowing the lawn means (bombing Gaza). Your loss is not in vain because you have exposed the callous hearts and genocidal rhetoric of your occupiers, and you have captured the moral high groups. 

The fifth speaker, Renne AlNoubani, is a Palestinian American. She is a student at Georgia Tech and the president of the Muslim Students Association at Georgia Tech.

I am the granddaughter of Palestinians who were exiled out of Palestine many years ago. Our community had been grieved and traumatized by everything we have been witnessing in Gaza. 

A Muslim Palestinian student on our campus was harassed and physically assaulted. We are seeing the rise of Islamophobia and hate crimes occurring on campuses across the nation against Muslim and Palestinian students.

We contacted Presiden Cabrera and the administration of Georgia Tech, asking them to support us. President Cabrera refused to show any public support for us, and our administration has not done enough to show support to our community.

As students, we have been witnessing the destruction of 100,000 buildings, including churches, mosques, hospitals, refugee camps, United Nations schools, and universities, through Palestinian student journalists like Mark Dez.

We are watching the genocide unfold through university students who are videoing on the ground in Gaza. It is traumatizing because Dez and other Palestinian journalists and all the children and students have died. They have lost their dreams of becoming teachers, doctors, artists, and engineers. We demand an immediate ceasefire to this genocide.

(The Committee to Protect Journalists reports 61 deaths of journalists and media workers; 54 were Palestinian journalists, four were Israeli, and three were Lebanese.)

The sixth speaker, Rev. Keyanna Jones, is an associate minister at Park Avenue Baptist Church and a lead organizer for Community Movement Builders.

If the facts make you uncomfortable, then get used to it. I live an uncomfortable life every day as a black woman in America, having to worry if my child is going to be gunned down in the street, just like Palestinian children. There’s a Palestinian mother worried about where to go for safety and who does not know if the Israeli occupation forces will snatch up her child for no reason. We are not going to stop until there is a free Palestine.

We will not give up until I don’t have to stand here pleading for the lives of Palestinian children until I don’t have to stand here begging for people to be able to live in their homes without having them taken by settlers’ violence. Until we no longer have to do this. We will do it and don’t care if it makes you uncomfortable.

The next speakers are Allison Glass and Clara Green with the Atlanta chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. JVP is a multi-racial, cross-class, intergenerational movement organizing U.S. Jews in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people.

We are the descendants of people who have survived genocide, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and persecution because of who they are.

 We know the price of silence, and as Jews, we are compelled to speak out against the slaughter and dehumanization of Palestinians in our name. Schools and hospitals in Gaza have been bombed intentionally, and thousands of children have been killed. Entire families have been wiped out. We refuse to remain silent in the face of this wholesale murder and dispossession of colonized and oppressed people.

Jewish people are not a monolith. Millions and millions of Jews across the world are no longer willing to unquestionably pledge their allegiance to the State of Israel. It is absolutely vital that we differentiate prejudice or attacks against Jews from legitimate criticism of Israel. 

The attempts to silence our voices by saying we are not real Jews and other atrocious, anti-semitic vitriol that we and other Jewish Voice for Peace members have received are attempts to delegitimize and censor hard truths. 

From a Jewish tradition that has opposed empire colonization and nationalism, that values every human life and is rooted in social justice. It’s from those values that we need to stay focused on ending the root cause of the violence we’re currently seeing—Israel’s decade-long apartheid system of discrimination, dispossession, and overwhelming violence against Palestinians. The violence from a system of occupation and apartheid is incredibly dangerous and deadly for everyone.

The last speaker is Rep. El-Mahdi Holly, a representative for the 116th district of the Georgia General Assembly.

Today, we extend our condolences to the friends and families of all who have been killed since October 7. With more than 1,200 Israelis and more than 15,000 Palestinians in our grief, we begin to mourn people who are still here anticipating their deaths.

We ask you not to lose hope, even if the world seems completely unfair and your efforts have not yet resulted in a ceasefire. The people of Gaza are telling us that we are not powerless. We have to speak up. We must call our members of Congress every day, even on a Sunday. 

Congressman Hank Johnson has the honor of being Georgia’s first representative in Congress to call for a ceasefire. More than 50 members of Congress are demanding a ceasefire. The American Postal Workers Union, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, Restaurant Workers United, and the United Auto Workers Union call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Over 1,000 Black faith leaders have also called for a ceasefire. And this is our message to Congress: More than half of the Republicans and 80% of Democrats, voters across the political spectrum, are calling for a ceasefire. 

We are not alone, and our numbers are growing.

The Funeral March

After the press conference and the Muslim and Jewish prayer service for the victims of war, thousands marched through Little Five Points, near the Carter Center, and back to Freedom Park.

https://youtu.be/5xCHRadtkmY?si=mXwUHtZD7na3IBsp

Funeral March Video by Judy Conder Georgia Grassroots Video

Feleestinya’s Story

In the Funeral March, this reporter walked with a young woman originally from the West Bank. She told me her personal, sad, and horrifying story about why she could not go back to her home in the West Bank. She requested to be called Faleestinya, which means Palestinian woman.

Faleestinya said,” Her family’s land was stolen by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the early 1990s. I will not go back to the West Bank because an IDF soldier put a gun in my 4-year-old son’s face, threatened to kill him, and said there is nothing you can do about it.”  She stood in front of her son and refused to move and kept saying, “Leave him alone; he is a child.” Eventually, the soldier laughed and left. “I  also watched a young boy about 7 or 8 years old throw a rock at a soldier and then run behind his older sister to hide. The soldier shot and killed his sister.”

“The IDF especially likes to humiliate and degrade the Palestinian men. They will line all the men up in a family and make them get on their knees while they urinate on them while the women and children are forced to watch. They do this to instill fear in Palestinians,” Faleestinya said.

The Times of Israel also reports a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers allegedly bound, stripped, beat, burned, and urinated on three Palestinians in the West Bank after the October 7 attack by Hamas. This has been happening for years, and even worse, atrocities, especially by extremist settlers. 

Combatants for Peace gives us hope. They are ex-Israeli and Palestinian soldiers who are committed to nonviolent action against the Israeli occupation and all forms of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Combatants for Peace

written and photos by Gloria Tatum