Workshops

Intro to the Movement
This track is for people new to the movement for freedom, justice, and equality, or those who have been around and want a refresher. Topics include Palestinian history, resistance to settler colonialism, and introduction to boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS).

  • Palestine 101: Not That Complicated (Saturday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 1)
    • Do you want to become a more effective advocate for Palestinian rights, but feel you lack enough knowledge? This workshop is intended for those new to Palestine solidarity work. The session will offer an overview Palestinians’ past and present, as well their continued resistance to ongoing dispossession. The workshop will clarify terminology and connect the Palestinian quest for historical justice and equality to other liberation movements and social justice issues in the United States and beyond.
  • Grounding Solidarity: Accountability to Palestinians in the Face of Fragmentation (Saturday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 1)
    • This panel will be broken down into three parts: looking at the ways in which Palestinian leadership and representation are fragmented in the post-Oslo Era, contemporary Palestinian political organizing on a transnational scale, and accountability for those doing Palestine work within the context of Oslo and Transnational Palestinian movements today. Who orients our organizing efforts in the Palestine solidarity scene in a fragmented reality? This panel will contextualize some of the challenges of Palestine solidarity organizing today in order to build our accountability to Palestinians and their various trajectories, whether in the diaspora or in Palestine.
  • BDS 101: Until Freedom, Justice, and Equality (Sunday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 1)
    • Join two experienced organizers and campaigners as we walk through examples of building a BDS campaign, organizing around a target, organizing around artists traveling to perform at Israeli venues, and campaigns countering Israel’s culture whitewashing. There will be plenty of time for questions, including those about how best to address talking points attacking BDS and better understanding the nuances of the cultural boycott.
  • Connections: Bringing Palestine into Classrooms and Community Organizing (Sunday 2:30-4pm in Governors 1)
    • In this interactive workshop for teachers, youth workers and organizers, we link issues critical to youth in the US—including criminalization of youth, border walls and migration, gentrification, environmental racism—to Palestinian history and current realities. The focus is on youth voices, critical thinking, and building understanding of the changing forms of colonial conquest. You’ll leave with a wealth of information, resources, ideas, and confidence.

Transforming Power from Grassroots to Grasstops
This track features workshops related to how we continue to build our grassroots power and then translate that power into policy change. 

  • Freedom Cities: Shifting Power & Policy with Cross-Movement Municipal Campaigns (Saturday 11:30am-1:30pm in State 1)
    • From the anti-Apartheid movement to cities divesting today from fossil fuels, prisons, and the US-Mexico border wall, municipal campaigns leverage the power of everyday people to shape policies and a local progressive agenda. Inspired by the Movement for Black Lives’ Invest/Divest policy framework and the Freedom Cities platform, this workshop features organizers from cities like New Orleans, Durham, Portland, and Cambridge who will share lessons learned, key organizing principles, and new resources for designing and carrying out powerful cross-movement municipal campaigns that challenge state violence and invest in oppressed communities from the US to Palestine.
  • Speak Truth to Power: Grassroots Advocacy Skills to Make Congress Listen (Saturday 2:30pm-4pm in State 2)
    • Grassroots advocacy is an effective and powerful way to communicate with elected representatives and start a policy-centered conversation. It is key to advancing your mission for Palestinian human rights, amplifying the voices of the underrepresented, and educating policymakers. But it’s no simple task: How can we organize in a way that centers people traditionally excluded from policy work? How do we use our people power to hold politicians accountable while making a real impact? Join us to learn more about how you can be a part of moving Congress to support freedom, justice, and equality for Palestinians.
  • FILM SCREENING: Imprisoning a Generation is No Way to Treat a Child (Sunday 11:30am-2pm in State 2)
    • Imprisoning a Generation is a newly released documentary film exploring the ways Palestinian children are detained and imprisoned by the Israeli State, in an attempt to break the next generation. The perspectives of four young Palestinians who have undergone arrest, along with the voices of their families, combine to form a lens into the entangled systems of oppression that expand well beyond the prison walls. Following the film, there will be updates on the situation of Palestinian child detainees and No Way to Treat a Child campaign efforts in support of HR 4391
  • Protecting Your Right to Boycott: Victories and Pitfalls of Confronting Anti-BDS Legislation in State Legislatures (Sunday 2:30pm-4pm in State 2)
    • This workshop addresses the importance of grassroots organizing to defeat anti-BDS legislation. Using constituents, community-based organizations, teachers, students, small business people shows that all play a critical role in speaking their truth to the bodies that hold hearings in state legislatures. The process of reaching out, planning testimony and exposing folks to each other creates stronger bonds for future work not only for achieving Palestinian human rights but for maintaining civil and human rights in this country through intersectional organizing.
  • BDS Beyond Palestine: The Vision and Practice of Cross-Issue Divestment (Saturday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 3)
    • With the continuous rise of corporate power, movements for racial justice, indigenous and immigrant rights, environmental justice, gun control, and against militarization and incarceration are joining with Palestine activists in asking our cities, universities, churches, pension funds, unions, and themselves to invest in justice and step away from all corporate abusers. This workshop will present the vision and practice of such campaigns, discuss the challenges and opportunities they present to Palestine activists, and ask what lessons learned from BDS can be applied across struggles.

Skills Building to Win
This track provides opportunities to teach and learn the skills we need to win.

  • Media & Messaging 101 (Saturday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 4)
    • This workshop will cover interview tips, identifying media opportunities, best practices for engaging with journalists, and the basics of managing a media campaign. Building off of recent research, we will also help participants develop effective and accessible messaging while remaining true to the movement’s principles.
  • Anti-Oppressive Facilitation: Whose Voices Are We Amplifying? (Saturday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 4)
    • Dealing with the one man in your group that always talks over everyone? Experiencing things in your group that push people of color out? Is your group not accessible to working class people? In this workshop, we will explore how facilitation can strengthen group meetings and local organizing, plus discussing its role in reinforcing or disrupting oppressive dynamics. We’ll be practicing concrete skills to improve facilitation, with focus on interrupting oppression and creating a space for all to participate in helping your local group be the fiercest and most welcoming it can be.
  • Taking to the Streets: What You Need to Know for Your Direct Action (Sunday 11:30am-2pm in Governors 2)
    • In this workshop, participants will learn best practices for organizing and carrying out a range of direct actions, including a brief on their rights and responsibilities.

Together We Rise
This track focuses on intersectionality, strengthening our commitment to cross-movement building, and our responsibility to principled organizing.

  • “From Palestine to Mexico, All the Walls Have Got to Go:” BDS and Border Militarization (Saturday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 2)
    • “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go!” rings out at anti-Trump mobilizations across the country, even as Netanyahu cheers Trump on for holding up Israel’s walls, which steal Palestinian land and hinder freedom of movement, as a model for expanding the US/Mexico border wall. This workshop explores how Israeli corporations such as Elbit and Elta/Israel Aerospace Industries support further militarization of the US/Mexico border, including by building massive surveillance infrastructure on indigenous land, and how to use BDS tactics against corporations profiting from expanding border militarization. We will learn about the linkages between the struggles against walls and border militarization and how we can strengthen our resistance and support freedom of movement for all.
  • BDS in the Labor World: “Wokewashing” and What to Do (Saturday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 3)
    • In this workshop, we’ll cover an intersectional analysis of labor organizing in response to the new trend from the liberal Zionists to frame boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) as harmful to the workers of Palestine.
  • Indigenous-Palestinian Solidarity: Connecting Native Struggles (Sunday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 4)
    • This workshop will be a panel discussion featuring the voices of indigenous people and Palestinians about the commonalities in our current struggles, our histories, and our solutions. The common themes that have recurred can help us build solidarity with each other as we are able to view a reflection in each other from the history of land loss, the use of religion as an excuse for colonization, to natural resources interests, and the solution of sovereign self-governance.
  • Palestine, White Supremacy, and Collective Liberation (Sunday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 3)
    • In building strong broad-based multiracial movements that are striving for change, how can we simultaneously work towards bringing down the systems of oppression that pit us against each other while maintaining unthinkable violence? Join organizers to discuss the ways white supremacy plays out within the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States. This workshop will lift up the critical need for Palestinian leadership, social justice campaigns that are directed by those most affected by state violence, and strong systems of accountability while explaining the importance of doing Palestine justice work within an anti-Zionist framework that includes the histories of settler-colonialism and indigenous genocide in North America, and of criminalization and exploitation of poor, Black and Brown communities.

Cultural Resistance
This track highlights the use of arts, literature, and other cultural practices as part of our campaigns and organizing.

  • Performing Solidarity: Resistance on the Stage (Sunday 11:30am-1pm in Governors 3)
    • This workshop will address how art/culture can be the platform on which cross-movement organizing takes place. Specifically, we will examine different models of solidarity building developed around “There Is A Field,” a documentary play which addresses the police killing of a 17-year old Palestinian citizen of Israel. We’ll look at how the play has become an organizing tool for the Black Mama Bail Out Fund in DC; a political education tool with Black and Brown youth at the Highlander Center; and a solidarity-building tool with Indigenous folks from Turtle Island. We will also expansively address questions of why cultural platforms are such an effective way to build together, and how art can be leveraged for powerful organizing.
  • Art for Palestine: Harnessing Creativity for Change (Sunday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 2)
    • Whether a poster, sculpture, fashion, music, song, dance, film, photography, or a poem or story, art can influence us in profound ways that become etched in us. We will discuss how to apply our creative impulses to educate the public and promote understanding of and activism for Palestinian rights. We’ll outline tools like understanding the target audience, the psychology of effective visual and verbal communication, and connecting with others, to accomplish a successful creative campaign, event, or project. Participants will have the opportunity to complete a plan-of-action and/or poster by the end of the workshop.
  • Storytelling: Using Our Story to Move Others to Action (Saturday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 2)
    • This workshop explores using storytelling to counter colonial narrative and inspire others to action. We will look at how storytelling is an important part of our movement and participants will get a chance to explore the art of storytelling and learn practical narrative strategies. Stories allow us to express our struggles not merely as abstract facts, but as lived experiences that carry values and which have the power to move others. This workshop supports participants in framing their own stories of hardship alongside resistance, in order to demand solidarity rather than pity, hope rather than fear, and urgency rather than paralysis.

General

  • Fighting State Suppression of Palestine and Native American Organizing: Know Your Rights (Saturday 11:30am-1pm in State 2)
    • In recent years, the movement for Palestinian rights in the US and the movement for Native American and environmental justice have been targeted by legislative attacks and law enforcement surveillance aimed at censoring political speech and chilling activism. This panel will be part know your rights and part discussion. Panelists will provide an overview of state suppression of both movements and activists’ legal rights. Panelists and participants will address the significance and impact of cross-movement building efforts, and will highlight successful campaigns and legal strategies in mobilizing against the violent and oppressive nature of state policing and censorship.
  • Confronting Zionism: Campaigns that Target and Expose Zionist Institutions (Saturday 2:30pm-4pm in State 1)
    • This workshop will argue for the importance of targeting and exposing Zionist institutions as part of BDS, defense, and educational campaigns. Zionist institutions like the Jewish National Fund, Histadrut, World Zionist Organization, and others were central to the colonization of Palestine and Israeli state building, and they provide the political cover, propaganda, funding, and even relocation of Jews worldwide to continue them, while mobilizing backlash against Palestinians and their allies. Focusing on Zionist institutions is key to resisting Islamophobia, police exchanges, and US military aid to Israel. The workshop offers information for identifying targets and concrete examples of campaigns.
  • Resisting Global Policing: Disrupting US-Israel Exchanges (Sunday 11:30am-1:30pm in State 1)
    • This workshop examines the history of the Israeli military economy and how it emerged as a global leader in the security industry with the aid of the US government. We’ll discuss US-Israeli joint police trainings and their contribution to heightened militarization in Palestine and the US. We’ll survey ongoing efforts to challenge these collaborations and strategize with participants about future campaigns. Learn about organizing linking policing, militarism, and Zionism; about the cross-movement building work of the Stop Urban Shield coalition and strategies that led to their success; and about RAIA’s new database where activists can research local police exchanges with Israel.
  • Indigenous Sovereignty and the Fight Against Enbridge’s Line 3 Pipeline (Sunday 2:30pm-4pm in Governors 4)
    • This workshop will be a chance for participants to learn about the strong resistance movement that has formed against Enbridge’s proposed Line 3 pipeline on treaty territory in the north woods of Minnesota. We will discuss some of the strategies of this campaign, the current status of the fight, the various communities that have come together, and the importance of centering indigenous leadership, as well as the ways Enbridge has attempted to control the narrative and completely disregard and undermine indigenous sovereignty on ancestral lands. This particular moment of struggle is a piece of the long history of resistance that has played out in this place, and is connected to the struggle for indigenous rights all over the world.
  • Jerusalem in Practice: Tourism As a Tool of the Occupation (Sunday 2:30pm-4pm in State 1)
    • Lost in the sweeping portrayals of Jerusalem—as a “holy city” or “future capital for two states”—are the details of Israel’s colonialist policies, and the deliberate erasure of Palestinian history and presence. In this workshop, Al-Haq will provide two case studies on the “City of David” in Silwan and Nabi Samwil, which underscore Israel’s use of tourism and national park declarations to transfer Palestinians and create an alternate discourse on the city. Al-Haq will further discuss Israeli policies used to capture the tourism market in Jerusalem, the ways in which businesses facilitate these actions, and what activists can do to help end the erasure of Palestinian Jerusalem.

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