Please join us for an evening of conversation and sharing. Sara and Zena Kishawi, Vancouver Island University encampment leaders, will be in conversation with Coast Salish community member Jada Gabrielle-Pape, who stands in unwavering solidarity with Palestinian people.

After the featured conversation, we will break for a shared meal catered by Palestinian Freedom School member Nazmi Kamal.

Community members will be invited to participate in a listening and witnessing circle to discuss lessons learned and future strategies to support a free Palestine as foundational for our collective liberation.

Image attribution: untitled (2024), Nora Pape.

Registration

All Freedom School events are free and by donation. Registration is recommended but not required for this event.

Explore all events in the series at https://events.humanitix.com/host/freedom-school-a-people-s-university.

Donations

All funds raised in relation to this event will go towards the legal defense fund for suspended Vancouver Island University Students.

Accessibility

We encourage attendees to wear a mask when not eating or drinking as an act of care for those for whom this is an access need. Extra masks will be available on site.

Full details on access to the Vines Den may be found here. Please note that the venue has a portable ramp, and we welcome advance notice to avoid any delays making the space accessible for you. The washroom is wheelchair accessible but is quite small - more details are available in the linked document.

Harm reduction supplies are available onsite.

Please contact the event organizers at drivinginpalestine@gmail.com to let us know how we can make this event more accessible to you, or with any questions.

About the Freedom School and Driving in Palestine

Held in conjunction with Driving in Palestine, Freedom School rides the wake of the Freedom Flotilla as we come together to assert that from Salish Seas to Palestine, occupation is a crime. Freedom School engages liberation praxis and community building in support of a free Palestine and all who advocate for justice in the face of settler colonialism, militarism, state violence and oppression in our shared and interconnected worlds.

In the free school tradition, we embrace education as critical, political, and liberational for ourselves and our community. Education as a practice of freedom must take place in community, which means that it is free, open, and accessible to all community members. This is the context in which we seek to activate and renew community solidarity, to bring attention to ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in the West Bank, to bring an end to the genocide and weaponized starvation in in Gaza, and to centre Indigenous solidarity movements for justice in the face of settler colonial regimes of violence, apartheid, and genocide, more broadly.

Here and now, we amplify and insist on what Sarah Ihmoud describes as decolonial love in the face of colonial oppression where, “to practice feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life.” We do this work together, in community because we know that it is through community that we will achieve collective liberation. Only we will save us.

For, as Nada Elia reminds us, “Today, more than ever, there is growing consciousness that our struggles are not parallel—a term which suggests that they will never meet—but intersectional, coming together at various nodes. Our hope is that the enactment of reciprocal solidarity is a long-term movement, not a ‘moment’.”