(Lander, WY) – The local organization Fremont County for Ceasefire Now and the statewide group Wyoming 4 Palestine are hosting a documentary screening next week at the Lander Library.
The film, “Resistance Climbing,” examines the “lives and realities of Palestinian climbers in the Israeli occupied West Bank,” according to the event description.
The screening will take place at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 14, in the Carnegie Room at the Lander Library, 200 Amoretti St., in Lander, followed by a discussion.
The event is free, but donations are welcome, with proceeds going to help Wyoming student Abdalrahim Abuwarda raise money to support his family members in Gaza.
Teach-ins
The upcoming documentary screening follows W4P’s spring lineup of “teach-ins” that organizers conducted throughout the state, including in Lander, in an effort to “build education around the decades-long harm being done to Palestinians in the West Bank – and why understanding this systemic oppression is crucial to understanding the broader genocidal violence in Gaza and all of Palestine.”
“It’s important that the media is focusing on Gaza and the indiscriminate bombing of people there and just how it’s essentially a death camp,” W4P member Taylor Pajunen of Lander said. “But (the) West Bank … shows the broader context of how and why Palestinians resisted in the first place.”
Pajunen was one of two W4P members who traveled to the West Bank this year in response to a “direct call from Palestinians on the ground to come and stay in peoples’ homes” in order to “do documentation work and report back” – and to “stand as a presence next to aggression and hopefully deter the aggression, or at least minimize it or reduce the harm.”
The aggression Pajunen witnessed in the West Bank typically came from armed Israeli teenagers living in illegal settlements or outposts who would “harass” and “taunt” the local Palestinians, often deploying surveillance drones, destroying property, killing livestock, and becoming physically violent.
Settler infrastructure, like roads and settlements, presented another form of violence, Pajunen said, physically dividing families and friends and making it difficult, if not impossible, for community members to maintain contact with one another.
“The goal of the Israeli settlement is to (make) life so unlivable that Palestinians either are killed or are just forced to move,” she said. “Many Palestinian communities have been ethnically cleansed already because people have had to move, or been killed, or been imprisoned.”
The situation presents a “mirror image of U.S. colonization and westward expansion,” Pajunen said – a point that W4P made sure to highlight during its teach-ins this year.
“We would think a lot about the U.S. Homestead Act that allowed white settlers to move westward and incentivized white settlers (to) do the dirty work of the U.S. government by killing and murdering and stealing Indigenous people and land,” Pajunen said. “The same tactics are being used with Israel, (and) the U.S. is funding it with our tax money. …
“Palestinian solidarity really shows, or unveils, how these colonial regimes are deeply intertwined.”
W4P is “not the first” to call the United States a “colonial regime built on the extraction of people and land,” she noted, referring to the international Land Back movement that is working toward “reclaiming autonomy for the Indigenous people and the land” and “dismantling (the) settler-colonial government that props one group over another.”
“It’s the same in Palestine,” she said. “The idea that it’s one people’s chosen land is just invalid, and if some people believe in that, that still doesn’t give you the right to ethnically cleanse other people.”
She encouraged area residents to join the local “network of resistance” to Israeli occupation in Palestine by participating in organized boycotts and protests, following Palestinian journalists online, donating to Palestinians on the ground, speaking with family and friends about the situation, or even embarking on a “solidarity trip” as she did.
“(There’s a) whole spectrum of things to do,” she said. “We want things to change. … We truly believe that when Indigenous people everywhere are respected as an autonomous people, then we’re all going to heal.”