This is tomorrow ~ keep your eyes on Palestine!
Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 15th, Palestinians will be making an historic ride like others before them who sought equality in the Jim Crow South. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a middle-aged woman from Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white man. After her arrest, Martin Luther King helped organize protests against bus segregation. It was decided that black people in Montgomery would refuse to use the buses until passengers were completely integrated. With support and solidarity from white allies, King, Parks and others who insisted on equality were arrested, beaten, harassed and intimidated, but the protests continued until the buses were integrated.
Like the Deep South, it is not a matter of if but only a matter of when. The time is coming when the world will no longer stand idly by and allow yet another apartheid to continue, be it in the Deep South, South Africa, or Palestine.
For those of you who have not been to Palestine and Israel, and even for some of those who have, you may not know about the apartheid bus system and bus routes in the region. Know that in the Jim Crow South, Rosa Parks was fighting to sit in the front of the bus. Palestinians do not even ride the same bus as Israelis or American visitors, in part because they are not allowed to visit the same destinations.
Artist and activist, Ethan Heitner, was commissioned by Jewish Voice for Peace to make images for a solidarity action Tuesday, November 15th in New York City supporting a new phase of popular struggle in Palestine. His work supports the Palestinian activists who will use their bodies nonviolently to assert their right to basic human needs of access to their holy sites in Jerusalem, freedom of movement and equality. They will attempt to peacefully board and ride settler buses in the same manner that Freedom Riders boarded buses in the Deep South.