Group Rides In Solidarity with Gaza and for the Liberation of Palestine
The ride kicks off a week of local activism meant to bring awareness to what organizers call a "genocide" in Gaza
Abde Elshafei’s father was born a refugee in 1948, during the Nakba in Palestine.
The Nakba, also known as “The Catastrophe,” was the violent dispossession of the 750,000 Palestinians who either fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and the Israeli army. It has been called the "shattering of Palestinian society" for the establishment of a Jewish state.
“I have been aware of the Palestinian cause and the fight for liberation for my entire life,” he said. “But I have been more acutely aware and active since October 7th.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas led attacks on more than 20 communities and a music festival near the Gaza Strip, as well as nearby Israeli military bases. That day gunmen killed hundreds of civilians, abducted more than 230 people and set in motion a series of events that have unfolded into war.
Elshafei, like many of us, has watched in horror as these events have unfolded. And for him as a teacher, it has been especially hard to see the effect this war is having on children.
“As a Palestinian American I am very interested in the cause,” he said. “But more than anything I'm a human being. I'm a public school teacher. I work with kindergarten, first and second graders. And when I hear things like 13,000 children have been killed in four months, and see pictures of children with their limbs blown off and their heads crushed under rubble, and now worse than ever, there are people who are starving, especially children who are starving in the north part of Gaza. And it’s not a natural disaster – it’s completely human-made starvation.”
Elshafei is a teacher in Leavenworth, and watching Palestinians suffer from afar spurred him and his wife to start traveling to Seattle to attend rallies for a cease-fire, but he felt like that wasn’t enough. So he started calling state and federal lawmakers to urge them to call for a cease-fire and has been posting the messages he leaves on Instagram.
He wanted to raise awareness in smaller, more rural communities without large Arab populations, like Leavenworth and Wenatchee. So he got connected with folks in Yakima, which has an established Palestinian population, to see what they were doing East of the Cascades. He also started coordinating with the folks from Wenatchee for Palestine, a grassroots organization that has been coordinating weekly rallies at Memorial Park.
That’s how the Ride for Palestine was born. On Saturday, a group of about 14 took off on the Apple Capital Loop Trail and they rode in solidarity with a group called the Gaza Sunbirds. The Sunbirds is a professional para-cycling team that has been providing aid to Gaza by cycling food and supplies to people cut off from life-sustaining resources. The athletes are all amputees and many of them lost limbs to Israeli bombs, Elshafei said.
The reaction from folks biking and walking the Apple Loop Trail was mostly positive, and a mother and her three children decided to join the ride when they learned why the group was there.
But there was also backlash. One man on an electric bike came up fast, swerved dangerously close to one of the riders, and screamed “Fuck Palestine!,” he said.
Pushback in the form of hate speech is something Elshafei has been experiencing a lot of because of his activism lately, he said. People have told him to go to Palestine and die and said other vile things that have led to him changing what he shares online.
You can listen to a clip about that from our interview here:
The ride kicked off a week of pro-Palestinian activism in North Central Washington, and organizers have identified a different focus for each day.
The week will culminate with the weekly “Stand with Palestine” rally on Saturday and a vigil on Sunday, both at Memorial Park.
Beyond this week, Elshafei said there are many ways for people to advocate for a cease fire in Gaza and the liberation of Palestine. In this clip he gives more details about on that:
And if folks want more information about organizations like the Washington Coalition for Peace and Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace, Elshafei put together this handout for Saturday’s ride that has QR codes linking to a variety of organizations committed to peace and justice in Palestine.
My Two Cents
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult to even talk about because no matter what you say you’re going to piss someone off.
If you admit the Palestinians were robbed you run the very real risk of angering those who support Israel and Zionism, and risk being labeled anti-semitic. If you come across as too sympathetic to the Palestinian cause you run the risk of looking at best naive and at worst ok with violent acts of terrorism carried out by murderous groups of sociopaths in the name of achieving political goals. Then there are the religious overtones for us Americans. Millions of evangelical Christians are Christian Zionists – they believe that the existence of a Jewish state in “The Holy Land” is a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ. To them, and ostensibly their elected leaders in Congress, this firmly-held belief informs their opinions about American foreign policy when it comes to Israel.
But if we divorce ourselves from the politics and the religion that so often cloud our judgement about this very emotional issue and try to understand the history I think it brings clarity.
The fact is this war, this ongoing, never-ending conflict was set into motion by colonial powers (the British and us) who fundamentally misunderstood the far-reaching implications of what they were doing in the Middle East after the end of World War II. They made a perpetual state of bloody conflict almost inevitable.
But what can we do now? And how can we expect to see any hope for a sustainable peace in Israel/Palestine?
I won’t pretend to have the answers to those questions. But I do think it’s always a good thing to learn more about the subject from sources with as little bias as possible. Or if the sources are biased at least make sure they’re up front about it.
I also think it’s worth noting that no one expected a lasting peace to take hold in Northern Ireland, another region with a long history of violence fueled by conquest, subjugation and inequality. But peace did take root there – and peace is possible in Gaza too.
But the first step isn’t understanding how we got here. The first step is doing what is Elshafei doing by remembering his own humanity, and the humanity of the children who are being impacted by the war.
War isn’t inevitable. It happens because someone wants to do it. It happens because they have the money and the guns and the bombs to do war. And this war in particular would be a lot harder for Israel to execute if it didn’t have the support of our government, or US munitions to use against Palestinians.
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot these last few months. How complicit are we in the human misery unfolding in Gaza?
There are always at least two sides to every story, and more information is usually helpful. Thanks for stepping out and reporting on this!