Sacramento Palestine Protest – Sat 10-14-23 (12noon to 4pm) at corner of 16th & J St. in Sacramento (updated time & location)

Sacramentans will march on Saturday, October 14th, to call for an end to hostilities and the beginning of a justice-driven approach to resolving the root causes of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Specifically, we join calls for the end of the Israeli occupation and illegal settlement of Palestinian land that includes a complex matrix of daily control and humiliation; the apartheid situation that grants more rights to Jews than non-Jews in all areas under Israeli control; and the 16-year inhumane siege and blockade of Gaza, which has been bombed repeatedly by Israeli fighter jets, resulting in thousands of casualties over the past decade alone.

The violence did not begin on October 7th. The overwhelming majority of Gaza’s inhabitants are refugees whose families were expelled from nearby villages and towns in what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe, of 1948. The Nakba transformed Palestine from a Palestinian majority country into the new, self-described “Jewish State” of Israel, suddenly emptied of most of its non-Jewish Palestinian majority. Since then, Israel has refused the right of refugees to return, has conquered the remaining parts of Palestine, and further built fortified settlements as a strategy of displacement and confinement of Palestinians.

The United States has provided immense economic, political, and military support to Israel as it violates international law and Palestinian rights. Addressing our representatives in the US Congress and across local, state, and national leadership and civil society organizations, we call for a principled stand that names and rejects injustice and advocates for a fair and just resolution based on equal value to Palestinian and Israeli lives, an end to the Israeli occupation in all its forms, equal rights for Palestinians in the entirety of their homeland, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. When the conditions of justice and fairness are firmly rooted, peace has a chance of prevailing.