Hatem Abudayyeh, national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, has organized many of Chicago’s largest pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas that have prompted Israel’s two-year bombardment of Gaza, which has left more than 67,000 Palestinians dead. Abudayyeh reflected on the “somber commemoration” of Oct. 7 and renewed his call for an end to what a United Nations commission has deemed genocide by Israel in Gaza. This interview was edited for space and clarity.
How do you describe what’s happening in Gaza?
What we’re seeing today in Gaza is what we’ve been seeing almost nonstop for two years. The Israeli government and military are on a rampage, bombing residential neighborhoods, bombing schools, bombing hospitals, killing people indiscriminately. Sixty-five thousand already have been killed [Gaza’s Health Ministry said the toll passed 67,000 last weekend] and many others, including UN experts, mhave said that the numbers are much higher if you count indirect killings, meaning people who die not by being underneath a missile, but because of this genocide, are not able to get to a hospital, or the issue that we see now, which is the human-made famine that Israel has caused as well. That number could make the dead over 200,000. And it’s happening on our dime, the U.S. taxpayer’s dime.
What are you doing about it?
We are trying to provide some level of leadership for the Palestinian, Arab and other communities that also want to organize around this issue, that want to be out into the streets, that want to challenge the genocide enablers, and those that are complicit in genocide, that want to go after the weapons manufacturers. The more difficult goal we have is to reach the broader U.S. public, the public that is not very politicized and doesn’t know that much or maybe doesn’t care about the issue. Finally, after decades and decades of organizing, people are finally seeing Israel as the criminal, racist, apartheid, settler-colonialist state that it is.
What does Oct. 7 mean to you? Has Israel’s response been proportional to the 2023 attacks?
It’s important that we describe the last two years as accurately as possible, and the first way to describe it as accurately as possible is that this, this conflict, this war, this battle between the occupied and the occupier did not start two years ago. It started decades ago. We commemorate that day because it’s the beginning of the genocide. But we also say that’s not the beginning of what has happened to the Palestinian people. This struggle that’s over eight decades long is the struggle of a people who are trying to stay on their land, who are trying to liberate their land from one of the most violent criminal regimes in modern history.
Why doesn’t Hamas surrender?
Hamas is the largest, strongest and most powerful of all the resistance organizations in Palestine, but Hamas is not the only one. All of the Palestinian resistance organizations, political parties and civil society are united under a unified Palestinian resistance framework in trying to defend the Palestinian people and help win their liberation. It’s not a “Hamas vs. Israel” thing. It is unified Palestinian resistance and all the Palestinian people together resisting Israeli occupations, settler colonialism and genocide by all means necessary. It’s not just military, it’s political, diplomatic, it’s boycotts, divestments and sanctions. It’s all of these incredible elements and outlets of resistance that the Palestinian people and our allies have been using across the world.
Are you optimistic about President Donald Trump’s peace plan?
He’s a clownish figure and nobody takes him very seriously. The Palestinians are saying we will release captives if these mandates are met: Israel has to withdraw, stop the bombing, stop the genocide and let humanitarian aid in. Even Trump himself said that the resistance is making a good-faith effort and Israel must stop its bombing. And Israel has not stopped, so things do not happen magically at the drop of a hat because Trump wishes them to happen. The way you force Israel to do what you want, if you are the international community and they are violating international law, is to stop giving them the weaponry to do it. That’s the only way. The U.S. could stop this today.
Is a two-state solution viable?
The reason why a number of western European states have been talking about recognition of a Palestinian state in the past few weeks is not because they really believe that a two-state solution is still viable. I think they see what we see: an international popular consensus that says that Israel doesn’t have the right to exist any longer as a racist, settler-colonial state. They see that Israel is on its way out, that it’s going to go the way of the dodo bird, because in democratic pluralistic societies, you can’t have a racist, religiously exclusive state. We saw that in South Africa when apartheid was dismantled. I believe that Israel and Zionism are on its way out and that Zionism will be dismantled. We’ve always believed that the only solution is one single secular state for everybody that lives there.
What is your response to people who label criticism of Israel as antisemitism?
There’s nothing in our national liberation movement — nothing in what we say, nothing in what we write, nothing in what we project to the public, nothing that we say to our own people — that could be considered antisemitic. It’s not a struggle between non-Jews and Jews. The issue is a struggle between an oppressed people, a colonized people who are resisting white settler colonialism of the past 80 years. Is there antisemitism in the world? Absolutely. But when you weaponize antisemitism and use it to attack everybody who criticizes Israel and criticizes U.S. support of Israel, then you ignore and even cheapen the real antisemitism that is out there. Whether it’s our allies in the Jewish anti-occupation, anti-Zionist movement, whether it’s people in our own community, Palestinian and Arab and the broader Muslim community — all of us are rejecting it.
How long will the crisis last?
This has lasted longer than I thought, and regardless of the arrogance, bombast and clownishness of President Trump, I don’t think that it’s going to end anytime soon. My concern is that we have to actually escalate. We’ve got some really good campaigns here that are going after the people who can actually stop this thing. One of those folks is the Illinois state treasurer, Michael Frerichs, and the fact that there’s a massive investment in Israel through Israel bonds and a massive investment in all of these weapons profiteers with state funding [Illinois has held Israel bonds for decades].
What people in Chicago can do is sign our online petition saying that we need to disinvest from Israel bonds and disinvest from these companies that are providing weapons to Israel. Come out to the protests that we’ve been doing in the afternoon every single Saturday for two years straight. Continue going to the town hall meetings of Democratic Party leaders in Chicago to challenge them on their support for Israel. I think it’s really important for people to look up and say, yes, we know that the western European states and their leadership are not there yet, and we know that the U.S. government, of course, is not there yet, but so much of the world’s public is there. I really believe that this is the only way to bring about a just and lasting peace, that we have to dismantle this system the way South Africans and the international solidarity community dismantled apartheid in South Africa.
