In these times, when we are compelled to #stayhome to protect ourselves from COVID19, the value of the term "home" becomes greater than before. But what happens if your home is in a confined refugee camp? Or about to be destroyed by the Israeli occupation? How do you wash your hands several times a day when there is no access to clean water? 

Covid-19 is a fresh wake up call for us to address the rooted problems and historical yet continuous injustices that underlie our political system. Palestinians have long understood what is wrong and have led the struggle for a just and shared future. Today, with a greater reason, we need to listen, take responsibility and join their struggle to #ReturnHome.

Join Zochrot’s online gathering on Monday 18/5 at 20:00 Palestine time, to hear from our guest speakers who will discuss the conditions for Palestinians in light of this pandemic and the rooted problems and historical injustices leading to the devastating crisis a Covid-19 outbreak would generate within the camps, and why the solution to this health crisis can only be political.
 
You must register to attend this event: CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Our panel discussion will include:

 “Erasure of history in the making of medical knowledge” presented by Osama Tanous a specialized pediatrician a Master's in Public Health student in Tel Aviv University and a 2020 candidate for Fulbright Hubert Humphrey fellowship in public health and health policies.

Osama will discuss the Nakba as an establishing event for the livelihood and habitat of Palestinians inside Israel that has largely shaped their health, disease and well-being. Many resulting factors predispose them to mortality from COVID-19 while others like segregation and lower life expectancy paradoxically might protect them from the pandemic. He will discuss the erasure of history and the normalization of the products of state violence such as poverty, crowdedness and a lesser accessibility to health care as a given fact in medical knowledge production. 

“Explicating root causes in the current crisis: why Palestinian health is instrinsically linked to their liberation” by Bram Wispelwey, an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is a Co-founder and Chief Strategist of Health for Palestine

Bram will shed light on the current situation of Palestinians in refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian Territory, the devastating crisis a Covid-19 outbreak would generate within the camps, and current community-based responses. He will discuss a solidarity and allyship framework that centers root causes of health inequities within history and politics, highlighting the necessity of political solutions to ongoing health problems that derive from discrimination, military occupation, forced displacement, land theft, neoliberal aid regimes, and denial of reparations.

Moran Barir, activist, educator and film editor, Member of Zochrot & the return council, will discuss our vision for a shared and a just future of Return and our responsibility, now more urgent than ever, to call for acknowledging of the Nakba, righting the wrongs, and implementing the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.

We will also be listening to poetry by:
Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian American poet, writer, and organizer based in New York City. He is the author of the new released collection of poetry Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine. He is also the author of Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine (RoR Publishing, 2011).