On October 7, 2023, Baltimoreans woke up, like untold millions around the globe, to the news of yet another outbreak of conflict in the Middle East. In the seven months since then, we have borne witness to the slaughter of over 30,000 men, women, and children in Gaza. It is one of the most visible genocides of our lifetime, bankrolled by the United States government and our tax dollars.
We know that this did not begin on October 7. The land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has already been home to decades of military occupation and oppression, and cycles of violence and pain that we have funded through our tax dollars. As Americans, our nation has a history of complicity and a history of manipulating vulnerable, marginalized people as tools for colonization. From the Maryland State Colonization Society’s employment of enslaved people in Liberia to our decades of extraction and imperial occupation in Puerto Rico, we are not strangers to these cycles of historical wrongdoing.
In conversation with the Baltimore Student Union, former Councilwoman Shannon Sneed said that we urgently need a cease-fire there, just as we urgently need a cease-fire here. Indeed, the reality of being a Baltimorean is bearing witness to the violence in our own communities. Being a Baltimorean is holding multiple truths at once, and holding compassion for the victims of bombs and bullets everywhere.
Fannie Lou Hamer taught us that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” To be a Baltimorean is to live by that rule, and to move through this city unapologetically in our call for collective liberation. In November, almost 200 community organizations, labor unions, small businesses, and newspapers united as one chorus to call for an urgent and lasting cease-fire in Palestine. It was the largest show of unity from Baltimore civil society since the outrage in response to the Baltimore Police Department’s murder of Freddie Gray in 2015.
From the Holy Week Uprising in 1968 to the 2020 reckoning after the murder of George Floyd; from the 2015 battle of Mondawmin Mall to the 2019 Garland Hall sit-in at Johns Hopkins University — some of Baltimore’s most formative political moments have coalesced when city residents have taken to the streets in the thousands and organized in response to injustice.
As Baltimoreans, we understand that our everyday struggle for survival is inseparable from the struggles facing people across the world. At a December rally in front of Senator Van Hollen’s office, school board Commissioner Ashley Esposito stated, “Right now, I am shouting from Baltimore to Gaza that I will fight for your kids too.”
We can, must, and will fight for Palestinian kids to have fresh air and safety from the carnage of war in the same way that we fight for our own kids to be safe. The same story of occupation, apartheid, and oppression that has played out for generations in the Black and brown communities of this city afflicts our brown brothers and sisters in Palestine, and so we cannot help but bear witness and move to action.
On May 14, we will head to the polls to vote on the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. We ask you to vote “uncommitted.” Baltimore must show our elected leaders that our votes cannot be taken for granted, bought, or kettled — they must be won and earned; that we will not tolerate bombs raining down on innocent children; and that we will mobilize with just as much fervor as we do in defense of our own.
Many of us move to action because we are the descendants of people who faced similar patterns of historical trauma and violence. We are uncommitted to a system that incarcerates university students in the United States for protesting war while fueling warfare that has demolished every university in Gaza and precluded the Palestinian class of 2024 from graduating. We are uncommitted to a system that harms our communities and inflicts immeasurable harm upon others overseas in our name. We are uncommitted to a system that never seems to have money or resources to build our public schools and provide for our families, but always has money to fuel bombing, destruction, and human suffering. An uncommitted vote is a vote for peace, and for the better world that is possible.
Ethan Eblaghie is an incoming sociology student at Columbia University, a community organizer with the Baltimore Student Union and Baltimore DSA, and former Student Commissioner of Baltimore City Public Schools.
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