Interview with DC for Palestine Organizer
Apartheid-Free sat down for an interview with Washington, DC resident and organizer Emily Siegel to discuss how her Apartheid-Free community, DC for Palestine, has grown into a city-wide campaign to make DC apartheid-free.
About DC for Palestine: DC for Palestine is a coalition of community members in Washington, DC, united in ending their city’s complicity in Israel’s military occupation, apartheid, and genocide of Palestine. They are organizing to push DC institutions to sever ties with companies and organizations that profit from or support Israel, while working to educate the public on local and global implications of these connections. Their mission builds on local organizing in DC and in solidarity with Palestinians within the DC community, connecting the fight for Palestinian liberation with efforts toward justice at home.
[Interview has been shortened and edited for clarity]
Thank you so much for sitting down with us today. We are hoping to ask you a series of questions about your Apartheid-Free community, DC for Palestine. Tell us more about your community and describe what the decision process was like when signing the Apartheid-Free pledge.
Of course, thank you for having me.
DC for Palestine initially started as ‘DC for Ceasefire’ and began when a group of us who had already been organizing around Palestine realized that the DC government was doing a lot of things about Israel that we didn’t like. They lit up our city hall in blue and white, and a week after October 7th, they met with Israeli embassies. I don’t know why one of the [Israeli] diplomats needed to meet with a local government, but they did. So our group started as a rapid response campaign to try and get a ceasefire resolution passed [in DC].
After about six months of trying to do that… it failed. [The DC government] did not pass one [resolution]. At that point, it was the summer of 2024. We thought to ourselves ‘you know what, we’re not picking this back up when they come back in session,’ ‘it’s too late to call for a ceasefire, they should be divesting, they should be doing so much more than just a symbolic kind of resolution about a ceasefire.’ Through that kind of thinking, we mobilized, and now, we have an email list of over 3,000 people.
We knew we should take advantage of this and do something more with all of this energy. What could we do that has a material effect? As we started to look into different things, the months kept going by. Trump was elected. We realized that right now was not a time we could push the DC Government to do anything because they were so under fire from the Trump administration. What we could do is start to build mass support across the city for cutting ties with Israel. I knew about the Apartheid-Free Campaign (AFC) because I used to work at Eyewitness Palestine, and at the time, I had worked very closely with AFSC. I remembered the Apartheid-Free campaign, went to the website, and saw all of the materials that AFC already created. DC for Palestine felt like doing something very local in DC and trying to gather lots of entities and establishments to sign on.
So [joining the AFC] was really the combination of the kinds of work we wanted to do around cutting ties [with Israel] and looking towards ways that DC as a city could do something.
How does being so close to Congress and the Federal Government shape your approach in Palestine advocacy?
Something that not everyone totally understands is that Washington, DC is not a state and that the federal government has a lot of control over the city. While we have a local mayor and a local city council, if Congress wanted to take over the city with a vote, they could. Throughout the years, DC has been able to get more control over their budgets, but still, every year the DC the government has to submit a budget to Congress for approval.
So although may not have a vote in Congress, we can still go to Congress and lobby directly any day of the week, right? We have access. We decided as a group that what was missing was that there weren’t very many groups that were trying to connect to the local DC issues that are tied to Palestine. For example, think about our city’s homeless population. There’s not money for them in our city budget, but our tax dollars as DC residents are going over to Israel.
I think for DC, there’s always this tension between working with federal targets located in our city and working with actual DC communities and residents. From just two years ago, organizing for Palestine has grown immensely. I’ve lived in DC pretty much all my life, and I’ve never experienced the amount of people involved [in this movement] as I have in the last two years. I think, now, we have the capacity to meet that challenge, where we can have groups focusing on national things, and we can have groups that are really delving into the local aspect of DC. That, in a lot of ways, is very independent from national politics.
What does your advocacy look like and what are some of the biggest challenges that DC for Palestine has faced in the past year and a half?
DC for Palestine is not even two years old. At the beginning, we were very focused on the DC government and especially the DC City Council. Since then, DC for Palestine has gone through a series of escalations with our advocacy.
We began by having meetings with all of our city council members, bringing together constituents in their neighborhoods to meet with them, and trying to make the case about why they should pass the ceasefire resolution. When that wasn’t moving anywhere, we decided we needed to increase our advocacy at a different level that wasn’t playing as ‘nice’ or within the sphere of ‘normal advocacy.’ We started disrupting city council meetings, we started to bird-dog city council members at their community meetings and asking them there, “why won’t you pass a ceasefire resolution?” We mobilized people to go, in pretty large numbers, to their different community meetings so that the majority of people there were asking about a ceasefire resolution.
At one point, there were about 50 of us that went to a meeting with the chair of the city council. Literally, the entire room was filled with people saying “you need to do something about Palestine. This is not just an international issue, it affects people locally.”
The reason I bring this up is because I think one of the challenges we face is that we escalated somewhat quickly for a group that did advocacy because of the urgency of the moment. We know that advocacy takes a while, but in this moment, there’s so much urgency that we thought we couldn’t wait a year or two years for this to continue. But because we escalated so quickly, some members of the city council kind of wrote us off as this “fringe radical group”.
Painting us as this fringe local group made it hard for us to be able to start to do advocacy with the same group of council members and ask for something else besides a ceasefire solution. That’s part of why we had to take a step back to our community and say, “okay, we need to be able to show mass support.” We decided to get involved with advocacy that maybe wasn’t directly Palestine related but affects Palestine organizers. We got involved with a short-term campaign to try and stop an emergency resolution from being passed that would curtail protesting in residential neighborhoods.
We partnered up with a number of other DC groups to try and fight back against that resolution. We were not successful, but it was a way to connect with other DC groups. Since then, we really focused on organizing ourselves by ward or neighborhood and building out of each of those neighborhood groups to delve into the connection between Palestine and that specific neighborhood.
We look at very hyper-local issues in each neighborhood and think about the ways in which we can engage with that neighborhood about Palestine, which is what led us to Apartheid-Free, because you know, it’s the neighborhood restaurants, the neighborhood organizations, and the neighborhood religious institutions that we can really build community with.
In your experience, what are some misconceptions about Palestine that you commonly encounter?
I think the biggest one is people thinking that Palestine is not a local issue and that it doesn’t affect people on a local level, which I think is absolutely not true. We all pay towards the military aid that we give to Israel, and all of the extra support, especially over the last two years. Each one of us is complicit in what is happening. It’s a very local issue. It affects every single person that makes any money in the United States. We are giving to this. I think I would say that’s the biggest misconception that we’ve really had to push back on.
I think the second one is that somehow this issue is scary or dangerous to the Jewish community. We have had to really push back on that misconception. You know, Jewish organizations in DC that are working for Palestinian liberation are also really fighting back against the Zionist perspective that somehow says us asking for a ceasefire resolution or doing advocacy for Palestine puts Jewish residents in danger or makes them upset, and therefore, we shouldn’t be doing it.
What keeps you doing the work that you’re doing?
I think there are two levels that keep me going. The first is building real community locally. Like I said earlier, the amount of people that are involved, not just the number of people, but how deeply involved people are is incredible. The people that I organize with around Palestine are the people that I am closest with, they are my chosen family. Not only are we there for each other about Palestine, but we’re there for each other for anything that we might need. I think building that community is creating the kind of world that we want to see. We want a community that will fight for each other, that will support each other, and that will help lift up each individual. I think that being able to have close relationships through organizing really helps to continue to push me forward, even when facing such awful times.
The other level that keeps me going is the beauty and power of the Palestinian people. I’m very lucky that I have gotten to travel to Palestine and build very strong relationships with people there. Seeing the Sumud, the steadfastness of Palestinians, who every day, have to face all of this and not give up or not leave. I have to be able to do that too, because I live in a place where I have a lot of privilege, and I don’t face attacks or daily hardships like that. Palestine to me is about community. It’s where I learned what a community can really look like.
Do you have any last thoughts you would like to share with fellow Apartheid-Free community organizers?
I would say that the struggle for liberation of Palestine has been going on for almost 80 years now, and for people that are just getting involved, it can be really heartbreaking when we can’t make a difference right away. But looking at it on a longer-term spectrum; I started organizing for Palestine in 2006, about 20 years ago. The amount of people involved now versus back then is something I would have never imagined. So if we look at our progress short-term, it can get very frustrating. If we look at it on a larger scale or a longer timeline, we can see all the progress that we’ve made. I would say it’s not fast enough, obviously, because we should have never gotten to the point that we’re at now. But, you know, the great progress we have made is because of the people who put time and energy into this movement and didn’t give up. We owe pushing forward and continuing our organizing to all of the people that came before us who were doing that.
