We will not be taking a moment of silence. Because silence is precisely what is allowing genocide to happen in Palestine. Because if we took just a minute for each soul that has been taken by the Israeli occupation, we would be here for years, sitting in silence.

May 15, 2025 marks 77 years since the Nakba—Nakba means catastrophe that led to the displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. Yet, the Nakba is not a historical event confined to the past; it is a continuing reality for Palestinians today. Since October 8 2023, the Israeli occupation has been committing a genocide in Gaza. Although reports indicate that over 52,800 Palestinians have been killed, half of them being children, and more than 104,000 wounded, the Lancet reports that this number is significantly lower than the hundreds of thousands it counts. The Palestinian people are actively being exterminated by the United States, Canada and the UK.

While people scream Free Palestine on the streets of the world’s biggest capitals, Palestine is the one freeing the world—particularly in breaking the illusion that democracy exists in the Global North. Because if it did in fact exist, governments would have stopped bombing Palestine.

Palestine is the heart of all of our collective struggles: gender, climate, social, disability, environmental, trans, LGTBQ justice. The Nakba never ended, it is ongoing. It has displaced millions of Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. Our diaspora constitutes 6% of the world’s forcefully displaced populations, 122.6 million of us. But today, just in Gaza, 1.9 million people—which is about 90% of Gaza’s population—have been displaced, while 1.2 million are being starved to death. We will not get a moment of silence. I am here to fill the space with our reality—as I stand here, hundreds of thousands of my ancestors are standing here with me.

My grandfather lived through the Nakba. As a child, he walked from Palestine to Lebanon to survive the atrocity inflicted by Zionists. The heartbreak our ancestors carry, of being persecuted, forcefully dispossessed of their homes, their land, their olive trees is a story that has been told 750,000 times. Yet it is ongoing. Since we are speaking of olive trees, did you know that since 1967, the Israeli occupation and their settlers uprooted (or destroyed) over 800,000 Palestinian olive trees in the West Bank and Gaza? These trees, many over thousands of years old, existed long before Zionism was invented, long before monotheistic religions existed.

Palestine is sacred, Palestinians are sacred. There isn’t enough I could say to teach morality. It’s either something one has or or hasn’t. Gabor Maté, Canadian physician and holocaust survivor, recently came to New York to give a talk, I was invited to attend. After his powerful speech for Palestine, someone in the audience asked him: “how do we make people do something about Palestine?” He replied: “I never tell people what to do, because that never works.

But people will have to live with their choices; between the discomfort of risking their careers for saying and doing something, or the suffering they feel when imposing on themselves to be silent.” In the words of Audre Lorde, Black American lesbian feminist, poet, and civil rights activist “Your silence will not protect you”. But now imagine if we collectively filled the colonial silence with justice and supernatural energy as one of our colleagues here called for yesterday.