Omar Suleiman: belief

Transcript context

…You mentioned that Palestinians invoke the plight of Indigenous people like Native Americans. What works and doesn’t work about this analogy? I think that there’s a powerful connection between the Palestinian people and the Indigenous in this land and in other places that have been wronged. We are living here in the United States on stolen lands that is drenched in the blood of the Natives, and that was built upon with the blood, sweat, and labor of enslaved Africans that were brought from overseas. It’s a great evil that we have to reckon with constantly, so I think that’s the power of solidarity. If you look in Canada and you look in places like Australia, there has been a refocus on the crimes against the Indigenous of those places. I think that what makes the Palestinian plight deeply painful, and maybe where the analogy even doesn’t do justice, is that from the river to the sea is less than 500 times what the United States is in terms of land. It’s not that big of a piece of land. The original lie was, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” The problem was that there were people on that land that were forcibly removed. So I think that the sheer size, right? We’re talking about a tiny piece of land, and a lot of people that were removed forcibly from their land, and that continue to be brutalized under those miserable conditions. Why is Palestine a special place, a holy land?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.