Thursday Mezze: ACLU and Palestine: Where Power ... Interlocks and Intersects

I’ve just returned from the 2026 ACLU Biennial Leadership Conference in the District of Columbia. It was a challenging and wonderful experience, familiar and enlightening and I loved being in the company of so many people working together to extend the promise of America to the marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed.

I am honored to be a board member of the ACLU’s New Hampshire affiliate.

New Hampshire rocks.

It was our NH team that on Inauguration Day, January 2025 - just two hours after President Trump signed an executive order attempting to ban birthright citizenship - filed a case in Concord NH that became Trump v. Barbara.

A case that was argued at the Supreme Court.

A case America won!

I want to share a couple of my impressions of the Biennial Leadership Conference - and also share my concerns over an issue where I believe the National Board is failing me, failing itself, failing the occupied and the oppressed.

I first want to share this photograph I received while at the Biennial and the generous comment that accompanied it - a special treat for me:

Hello! This is [name withheld] from the other day! … It was so wonderful to meet you at the [ACLU]awards celebration, I honestly didn’t expect to see anyone representing and advocating for Palestine in the ACLU since they’ve been pretty silent about it. Seeing you there in the keffiyeh and PRESS shirt in honor of Shireen Abu Akleh was honestly a highlight of the whole camp. Here’s the photo I took! Much, much respect to you! I hope you have had a good week!

I got that on Friday. I loved it - Thank you.

I had a good week. There were a few other keffiyeh’s there and was pleased to be wearing one of them.

Let me be clear - all I write below I write only for myself. I do not write on behalf on the ACLU or for any other organization.

I write for my family and grandchildren, I write for those who have no platform, for the Other whom I hope will share my passions.

It was a dynamic weekend, a gathering of national and affiliate board members, executive directors, and activists who came together to brainstorm, strategize, build community - occasionally complain - and present civil rights awards.

I found it mostly exhilarating but also a bit exasperating. It was mostly a wonderful time though I didn’t sleep well - it was as though someone had put a pea under my mattress to torment me.

The first night - Friday night - was amazing. Hundreds of teenagers mingling with affiliate and national members sharing stories, ideas, strategies.

I loved it as I love the ACLU, especially when Elizabeth Foster, Colin Kaepernick*, and Bruce Springsteen** were among the Americans presented civil rights awards.

My favorite was Elizabeth Foster, a teen-ager from South Carolina. She was named ACLU Next Generation Leader in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and I found her acceptance speech so humble, moving, and heartfelt. She was recognized for mobilizing students to protect to protect civil liberties - ranging from free speech to LGBTQ rights - and for restoring banned books on local library shelves - even if it meant smuggling them back into libraries on her own.

I loved Foster because she appeared to speak for a generation who understood positionality and intersectionality, a generation who had moved beyond my generation’s focus on pluralism and had moved toward a more complex understanding of our humanity.

We are too often transactional. They demand transformation!

“We'll take our stand for this land / And the stranger in our midst”**

The last day was Monday, when over 1,000 teenagers - volunteer members of the ACLU’s National Advocacy Institute - joined forces with board members and national leaders and visited over 400 congressional offices advocating for passage of the Dream and Promise Act, a bill that would create a “pathway to citizenship for Dreamers who came to the country as children, people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and other long-term residents who have become integral members of our communities. It stops President Trump from using legal status as a weapon and mass deporting our neighbors on a whim.”

A Dream drafted to spare Americans from having to bear witness to ICE shooting people in the streets, murdering people, terrorizing our neighbors and neighborhoods, separating families.

A Promise of a commitment to overhaul a broken violent, inhumane and often illegal immigration system.

Throughout the weekend I met amazing people, had thoughtful engagements, and wandered about in awe of teenagers who perhaps will help to redeem the promise so many of us have failed to deliver.

I was also still uncomfortable - not sleeping well - as the weekend moved on it appeared to me, as Yogi Berra once said, "… like déjà vu all over again.“

Two years ago I took issue with the National Board’s rejection of a petition from over 680 ACLU employees over the issue of Palestine in my Substack commentary.

In that commentary I quoted from the petition :

It is long past time for the ACLU to condemn U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, oppose legislation supplying the Israeli government with more U.S. weapons, and disclose and divest from companies profiting from the Israeli government’s human rights violations ... If the ACLU fails to act during this pivotal moment, our organization risks damaging its credibility and undermining the very principles it advocates for.

Crickets.

On this past Saturday, in the perhaps prophetically-named International Ballroom, I attended a panel entitled: Reimagining the Right to Belong: A Vision for Immigrant Justice and an Inclusive Democracy.

The title held promise.

I thought perhaps there might be a mention - pick one: Palestine, Gaza, Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, Apartheid - even of Lebanon, Iran, Israel - or even of conflicts where America might be complicit with war crimes, of lands being leveled by American munitions while students from those lands were being persecuted.

Crickets.

Not a single mention. Nearly two years had passed and nothing had changed. I remember when the ACLU didn’t ignore Vietnam and South Africa.

I couldn’t let it pass.

On Saturday, as I believed that if the ACLU continues to be silent they will acting in a manner complicit with genocide, I interrupted the panel and asked the same questions asked two years ago.

What about Palestine? What about Genocide?

The room went silent.

Crickets.

I had my answer. I left the room.

*A column I wrote about Colin Kaepernick in 2017

** Lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis

In 2017 Kimberlé Crenshaw - today Distinguished Professor of Law and Promise Institute Chair in Human Rights at UCLA Law - who coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, said “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.”

In my world I expand Crenshaw’s definition to speak of worlds where domestic and international issues collide; you cannot, in my world, speak of defending a pro-Palestinian protestor in New York or Washington DC without accounting for the fact that the American government trying to prosecute or deport the protestor is the same government providing the bombs to destroy the protestor’s homeland.

Endit.

Sumud