Translator: Riaki Poništ Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I've always thought of myself as a fair person,
a do-gooder, a peacemaker.
I always tried to remain neutral in situations of conflict
to bring everyone together rather than taking a side.
I thought that was the moral high ground.
But I was wrong.
We hear about the importance of neutrality all the time:
Reporting should be fair and balanced.
Our opinions should be fair and balanced.
A perfect example is when the topic of Israel-Palestine comes up.
Yes, Palestinians have been killed, but so have Israelis.
It's complicated, we're told.
Shouldn't we be a moderating force to help both sides come together
rather than being one-sided?
I had to question these assumptions when I traveled to Palestine,
to see for myself what life was like
for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
I found a system of segregated roads
with nice roads for Jewish Israeli settlers
and separate roads for Palestinians.
I comforted a friend whose six-month-old baby died
slowly in her arms of a simple asthma attack
as they waited for hours at an Israeli checkpoint,
prevented by soldiers from crossing
to reach the Palestinian hospital on the other side.
I stood beneath a 25-foot concrete wall
that separates Palestinians from their own families, their schools,
their jobs, their lands.
And all around me, I saw inspiring Palestinian Popular Resistance
and its violent suppression by Israel,
a military superpower armed by my own country, the United States.
I began to understand what was happening around me
as part of the ongoing displacement of indigenous Palestinians
and resettlement of Jewish Israelis in their place.
And I knew that Israel would pay me to leave the United States
and move onto that same Palestinian land anytime I wanted
simply because I'm Jewish.
What did it mean for me to remain impartial
as I witnessed these injustices?
Whom did my impartiality benefit?
It became clear that neutrality wasn't a catalyst for mediation or change.
It was the exact opposite.
It maintained the power imbalance exactly as it was,
leaving the scales tipped in favor of those with power.
The thing is, I had grown up like many Jewish Americans, as a Zionist.
That is I supported a Jewish state in historic Palestine.
My grandmother's stories of her escape from Nazi Europe
and the murder of most of our family were deeply formative for me.
I wanted so much to believe that a Jewish state could be a good thing.
I was a balanced person, I told myself,
I wanted peace for everyone including Palestinians.
I did not know at the time
that Israel's Jewish majority could only exist
with the removal of Palestinians.
But deep down, I knew that there were contradictions
between the important lessons that my grandmother had taught me
and what Israel was doing to Palestinians in my name.
Well, here's a surprise.
When I finally gave myself permission to take a side and reject Zionism,
I found a liberation I could never have expected,
a liberation from my fear of the other,
a liberation from the contradictions and the paralysis.
I had worried that I would lose so much,
but instead I had found exactly what I was looking for.
I was not rejecting who I was;
I was finding who I was.
Today, I want to encourage you
to give yourselves permission to take a side.
Do it, and own it,
because it's the right thing to do.
And because your own liberation depends on it.
I want to acknowledge
that the stigma against taking a side isn't shared by everyone.
In fact, the lessons I've learned are downright obvious
to people targeted by state violence,
who have no choice but to fight for their rights.
Many of them have pointed to the dangers of neutrality for centuries,
but people like me weren't listening.
Today, I am speaking to the many out there like me,
who have remained neutral in the face of controversy.
It's time for us to listen and to act.
Taking a side means being accountable to those being oppressed,
not deciding for them what they need or how they should get it.
It means heeding their calls to action,
which can look like starting conversations with your family and friends,
engaging in campaigns like boycotts and divestment,
and, when the time comes, stepping out of our comfort zones
and taking to the streets.
Let me ask you something.
How many of you, like me,
celebrate the civil rights movement and imagine
that you would have been the one holding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s hand,
marching from Selma to Montgomery,
that your home would have been a stop on the Underground Railroad
for runaway slaves regardless of the personal risks?
The thing is, it's easy to be against slavery
and 1960s Jim Crow laws today.
But we forget how controversial they were in their own time.
We forget that the successes of the civil rights movement
didn't come from legitimizing both sides,
that slavery didn't end from bringing both sides together.
Change happened because people took sides and took risks.
Anyone can celebrate Dr. King today,
but there is one question to gauge the likelihood
that you would indeed have been there with him.
Where do you stand on the freedom struggles of our time?
Do you stand boldly with the freedom fighters?
I found today's Selma when the Ferguson uprisings
erupted a short distance from my home in St. Louis
following the police killing of unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, Jr.
A grieving community
engaging in time-honored tactics of protests and civil disobedience
was met by a militarized police and National Guard
armed with guns and teargas,
backed up by every level of institutional power.
I came to understand Mike Brown's killing in a larger national context
in which black people in our communities
are routinely stopped and often killed by the police,
who are almost never held accountable.
Black people are four times more likely than white people
to be killed by the police
and more than five times more likely to be imprisoned,
often for drug convictions,
even though statistically,
white and black people use drugs at the same rates,
and white people are more likely than black people to deal drugs.
When Mike Brown was killed,
Ferguson had an almost all-white police force
that pulled over and arrested almost exclusively black people
even though according to their own records,
white people pulled over were more likely than black people
to be carrying drugs or weapons.
These things don't come out of nowhere.
I learned that our system of policing
evolved as a continuation of slave catching,
just one example of how our national legacy of white supremacy
continues to this day.
And through my own internal work,
I came to see the ways in which I personally benefit from racism
and have been socialized to be racist.
And even if I didn't choose that socialization,
I still have to work to unlearn it.
In a system of inequality,
we are all granted different levels of access, opportunity, and power,
often from the day we were born.
The hand we were dealt is not our fault,
but it forces us to reckon with the reality
that whether we choose to act or not, we were never neutral to begin with.
Neutrality is a convenient illusion.
On the streets of Ferguson, I saw the key to our collective liberation.
Because white supremacy dehumanizes us all.
It's killing black, brown, and native people quickly,
and it's killing white people slowly.
Our liberation is intertwined
just as the liberation of Jews cannot be realized
without the liberation of Palestinians.
When we stand together on the same side,
not in co-existence but co-resistance to injustice,
we reclaim our own humanity.
So what is the key to picking the right side
when it comes to controversial issues of today.
It's simple.
There's a golden key.
Look at who has power and who doesn't, and side with those who don't,
who are seeking the rights that others take for granted.
Instead of talking about abstract equality,
we need to talk about equity.
Equality is about treating everyone the same.
Equity is about seeing the imbalance and actively leveling the playing field
by lifting up and standing with those who have been held back.
When we say "Black Lives Matter,"
it's not because we don't value other lives.
It's because in today's world, black lives are devalued,
and their value must be affirmed.
Every life matters.
But every life is not under daily threat from the police.
When we say "Freedom for Palestinians,"
it's not because we don't want Israelis to be free,
it's because Palestinians are denied the freedom
that Jewish Israelis enjoy every day.
It only takes a small but critical mass to change the course of history.
So go ahead, risk change, and take a side.
And I'm not talking about siding with one racial or ethnic group
against another.
I'm talking about taking the side of justice,
the side of history.
And you may be surprised to find exactly what you've been looking for
all along.
Because taking a side is the best thing that can happen to all of us.
It allows us to realize the person we want to be,
for our neighbors, our children, our own integrity.
Take a side,
because this is the fight of our lifetimes.
Thank you.
(Applause)