Arise and Resist: Organizing for Peace and Justice Under Repression
January 19, 2025, 9:30am – 5:00 pm
Roxbury Community College, Media Arts Center, 1234 Columbus Ave., Boston, MA 02119
Speakers
Dr. Lara Jirmanus, press coordinator of the Vote No Preference MA campaign and a leading voice for solidarity with Palestine as well as an innovative health organizer. A Palestinian/Lebanese-American, she is an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a practicing primary care physician, community organizer and public health researcher. She co-founded the Health and Law Immigrant Solidarity Network, and during COVID, the Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity.
Dr. Karameh Kuemmerle is a pediatric neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, where she focuses on epilepsy and brain injury. Her clinical research centers on improving healthcare outcomes for refugee communities around the world, with a special interest in addressing the impact of social determinants like racism. She co-founded Doctors Against Genocide, an organization dedicated to mobilizing the medical community to respond to and prevent genocide and severe human rights abuses worldwide.
Rami G. Khouri is a Palestinian-American academic and journalist whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the American University of Beirut and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arab Center Washington, D.C. During his 50-year career in journalism across the Middle East he was Editor of the Jordan Times and the Daily Star (Beirut) newspapers, and contributed reporting and opinion pieces from the Middle East to the Financial Times, NPR, BBC radio, and other outlets.
Jamie McGonagill is a climate activist and climate communications consultant. She is the media coordinator for Extinction Rebellion (XR) Boston and AIR Inc. She also leads the communications team for Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere (SPJE) and assists with Climate Emergency Fund’s development team.
Khury Petersen-Smith, Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and Co-Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. He researches U.S. empire, borders, and migration and strategizes with activists to work against the violence that the U.S. carries out and supports around the world. Khury focuses especially on U.S. militarism in the Middle East and in the Pacific, and movements that resist it. He graduated from the Clark University Graduate School of Geography in Massachusetts, after completing a dissertation on U.S. military bases in the Pacific. He is one of the co-authors and organizers of the 2023 Black Voices for Ceasefire
Harris Gruman is executive director of the Massachusetts State Council of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation’s second largest labor union; co-leader of the Raise Up Massachusetts Coalition, and former executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor MA Education Fund.
Liv Santoro is deputy director for field education and mobilization at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Dr. Alexandra Piñeros Shields is a life-long activist and community organizer. She is an Associate Professor and directs the Master of Public Policy Program at the Heller School, Brandeis University where she teaches courses on immigration policy, economic justice, and participatory action research. Prior to joining the Heller faculty, she was the Executive Director of the Essex County Community Organization (ECCO), an interfaith network of 40 congregations working on racial and economic justice issues.
Mike Prokosch is a Dorchester climate, peace, and housing activist who leads popular economics workshops for community and union members. His latest workshop, “Who’s Afraid of Elon Musk?”, traces the US economy over the past half-century and what it’s done to workers and billionaires.
Breakouts
Attendees will join one of eight issue-oriented breakout groups, which will meet twice during the day.
Agenda
9:00am Welcome and literature tables open; coffee available
9:30 am Welcome and introduction
9:45 am Panel 1 – Palestine and the U.S.
Rami Khouri, Karameh Kuemmerle, Lara Jirmanus
10:50 am Breakouts 1
12:00 pm Palestinian style lunch
1:00 pm Organizing and coalition building – Mike Prokosch
1:15 pm Panel 2 – Domestic issues and other international issues
Harris Gruman, Jamie McGonagill, Liv Santoro, Alexandra Piñeros Shields, Khury Petersen-Smith
2:30 pm Breakouts 2
3:30 pm Plenary – Strategy and organizing
5:00 pm Adjourn
Venue: The Media Arts Center, also called building 1, at Roxbury Community College, features a 460-seat modern auditorium with a number of classrooms that we will use for breakouts.
The Media Arts Center is directly across Columbus Ave. from the Roxbury Crossing station on the MBTA Orange Line. There is ample free parking in RCC’s lot on Cedar St. near the corner of Columbus Ave.
Conference registration includes morning coffee and a Palestinian style lunch catered by Zaaki (rice with lentils, salad, hummus, falafel for vegans; chicken shawarma and kofta; bread). Register to attend.
The conference will be in person only.
Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Boston Democratic Socialists of America, Northshore for Palestine, Our Revolution Massachusetts, Doctors Against Genocide, Communist Party of Massachusetts, Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment, and American Friends Service Committee. Cosponsored by Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, CD8 for Palestine, Extinction Rebellion Boston, Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security, Green-Rainbow Party, Western Massachusetts for Palestine, and United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, Cape Cod DSA, Dorchester People for Peace, SEIU Local 509 (list in formation).
Massachusetts progressive organizations are invited to sponsor or cosponsor the conference, help plan it, or to set up literature tables; organizations sign up here to do so.
Goals and Overview
The purpose of this conference is to bring together a mass movement and situate ourselves in our political reality of repression in the US, genocide in Palestine, expanding US-Israeli war in West Asia, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the impending US confrontation with China. We must work in alliance with each other to build a society based on solidarity, peace, and justice. Our work here in Massachusetts will be shaped by national and international developments. We are holding this conference before the inauguration so we can prepare for the crises we will face after January 20.
We aim to take meaningful steps toward creating a vigorous alliance of organizations, unions, houses of worship, and other groups and individuals who pursue peace, protection of the earth, the well-being of working families, gender, sexual and reproductive rights, economic justice, and indigenous sovereignty, and oppose U.S. imperialism, militarism, genocide, racism, and other forms of oppression.
Over the past 15+ months, we have watched a live-streamed holocaust in Gaza, the acceleration of the ethnic cleansing and annexation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, the decimation of Southern Lebanon, the bombings of Yemeni ports, and the invasion and further occupation of Syria. With the complicity of U.S. cultural, academic, and other public institutions, a frontal assault on our civil liberties has begun: many speaking up against genocide have lost jobs, and university students have been brutalized on campus, suspended, and expelled. In Congress, a pending bill would give the incoming Trump administration the power to arbitrarily revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations, another would crack down on criticism of Israel. The tightly interwoven national security and surveillance programs of the U.S. and Israel used to surveil and exterminate Palestinians are already being deployed against our people at the border or in urban ghettos.
These challenges will intensify once Trump takes office. His top priorities include the mass deportation of up to 11 million immigrants which will require police state methods and concentration camps. The “Muslim ban” is once again on the horizon. Project 2025, once translated into policy, threatens civil liberties, public funding for education, and the rights of sexual and gender minorities.
Trump’s commitment to the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels presents the climate movement with its greatest challenge yet to reverse the increasingly deadly attacks on life on Earth. The transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist oligarchy will accelerate through more tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-wealthy and the slashing of public funding for healthcare, public education, and housing. Attacks on academic freedom and dissenting media will only increase.
These threats call for a more coordinated and strategic anti-war and pro-justice effort. We will likely face more overt repression than in most of our lifetimes. Yet this new landscape presents new openings and opportunities to build a more effective and lasting movement to create the world we envision. This is our moment to redouble our commitment to solidarity and defend ourselves, protect vulnerable groups, reach the disengaged and discouraged and expand our organizing to build broader constituencies and develop flexible strategies needed to survive and succeed. We must seize these opportunities together. Now!
On January 19, we will hear from movement leaders, go deep into issues in breakouts, brainstorm solutions, and peruse literature tables.
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