IMMIGRATION
A Legacy of Resistance
Hatem Abudayyeh’s family has organized Palestinian solidarity in Chicago for generations. BY ALMA CAMPOS
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n May, thousands of protesters marched in downtown Chicago, joining cities around the world in decrying the latest Israeli attacks against Palestinians. The attacks began when Israeli security forces stormed Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque on May 7 and fired on worshippers with tear gas and rubber bullets in response to demonstrations against the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah. Hamas, the militant political party that controls a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council and is the administrative government of Gaza, demanded the Israeli security leave the mosque by May 10. When the deadline passed, Hamas militants fired rockets into Israeli territory, and Israel began bombing Gaza. Between May 10 and 21, Israeli airstrikes and artillery killed 256 Palestinians in Gaza, including sixty-six children. Rockets fired by Hamas killed thirteen people in Israel, including two children. Hamas first called for a ceasefire on May 13; after international protest, Israel agreed to one on May 21. The evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, and the violence they precipitated, are only the latest expulsions of Palestinians from their ancestral homes to make way for settlements—evictions that began decades ago during the creation of Israel, according to Hatem Abudayyeh, the executive director of the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) and national chair of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) in Chicago. And May’s protests in Chicago are the latest in a long tradition of organizing for Palestinian solidarity here. Abudayyeh said the evictions in 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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Sheikh Jarrah are a continuation of the Nakba, or “the catastrophe, which is what we call the founding of the state of Israel.” During the 1947-49 war that established the state of Israel, more than 750,000 Palestinians—about eighty percent—fled or were forced from their ancestral homes by Israeli forces, who also killed 13,000, according to figures from American Muslims for Palestine. “That's what has led to us becoming a refugee population,” Abudayyeh said. “It is what led to the colonization of Palestine, and, ultimately, what led to the occupation of the rest of it. It's not a brand-new conflict.” Since then, Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem, as well as refugees in Chicago, have organized resistances to their displacement. In 1987, the First Intifada began as a series of protests against Israel’s then-twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. During the Second Intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005, Palestinians rose up in response to the Israeli occupation and policies that violated international law and deprived Palestinians of their basic human rights. In 2014, the Israel Defense Forces invaded Gaza, sparking protests in Chicago and around the world, and in 2018 and 2019, solidarity marches were held in support of the Gaza Border Protests. Chicago and the Southwest suburbs have an extensive immigrant and refugee Palestinian community that has been active in organizing in solidarity with Palestine for decades. According to Dr. Louise Cainkar, Professor of Sociology & Social Welfare and Justice at Marquette University and author of a number of books on Arabs in the U.S., Palestinians have been living in Chicago for the last hundred years. The Chicago metropolitan
area has the largest concentration of Palestinians in the United States, according to Cainkar. The Census does not include information on how many residents come from the Middle East and North Africa, because the federal government labels them as white. Cainkar’s research shows that about 200,000 Palestinians Americans and their descendants live in the Chicago metropolitan area today. Early Palestinian immigration, according to Cainkar, consisted mainly of young men living on the South Loop. “You're hypervisible when it comes to surveillance and hate crimes and discrimination and bullying, but you're totally invisible when it comes to getting any kind of statistical information,” says Cainkar. “That's a problem.” Abudayyeh’s father, Khairy, immigrated to Chicago at the age of twenty in 1960 from Al Jib—a village near Jerusalem in the West Bank. He became a student organizer at Roosevelt University, having been an activist back home. “He had lived the Nakba,” Abudayyeh said. Khairy was eight years old during the Nakba. For many Palestinians who emigrated at that time, “it was very difficult economically to live in a situation in which you see the colonization happening next to you,” he said. In the 1980s, Palestinian families moved to Chicago’s Southwest suburbs such as Burbank, Oak Lawn, Hickory Hills, Bridgeview, Alsip, and Palos Hills. Palestinians contributed to the formation of the Mosque Foundation, a large mosque that opened in 1981 in Bridgeview, according to Cainkar.
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budayyeh’s father was in Chicago during the 1967 Six-Day War. Approximately two years later, Khairy went back to Palestine, married Abudayyeh's mother, Khairyeh, and they both returned to Chicago to raise a family. Khairy co-founded the Arab Community Center in 1975. The Center, which first opened in the Northwest Side and later moved to 63rd and Kedzie, focused on foreign policy and education about Palestine and the Arab homeland in North Africa and the Middle East, and is the city’s “hub for the Arab progressives and the Arab left,” Abudayyeh said. The American Community Center became a springboard for what is now the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which combines political organizing and helping Arab immigrants and refugees in Chicago access social services. While raising her five children and holding a part-time job, Abudayyeh's mother also became an activist. She joined the Arab Community Center and served for some time as the president of the local chapter of the Palestinian Women's Association, a national organization. “My siblings and I learned about Palestine, about struggle, about the fight for national liberation by osmosis,” Abudayyeh said. When Abudayyeh was a child, his parents’ Northwest Side living room was often filled with friends and colleagues who would discuss the many issues close to Palestinian self-determination over the years: from the Lebanon War in 1982 and the Intifada of 1987 to the U.S. War in Iraq in 1991, the Oslo Accords in 1993, and more. “They spoke in an ideological language that I did not learn until much later in life, and they were so impressive,” Abudayyeh said. “I saw my mother and her colleagues as the organizers I wanted to emulate, those who dedicated their entire lives to their communities, those who brought the issue of Palestine to the forefront of U.S. discourse from the mid-seventies to the early nineties.” By the time Abudayyeh was a teenager, he already had a political education. After attending University of California, Los Angeles, Abudayyeh returned to his community in Chicago and began working as a youth program director at the Arab American Center
