The Muslim Student Association (MSA) at Cal State Long Beach will be hosting a series of events for Palestine Awareness Week starting today.
The group has three events this week that are aimed to educate people on what it’s like to live in occupied Palestine. Today’s event, called Checkpoint, is on the Friendship Walk from noon to 2 p.m. Members of MSA will be re-enacting the daily struggles Palestinians face with checkpoints in occupied Israel.
There will be between 10 and 15 actors involved in the event.
“Imagine not being able to get to work on time if you don’t wake up at sunrise to wait in line to pass the checkpoint. Imagine your mother or father being sick in an ambulance, only to be denied passage to the hospital,” said Zeina El Kassem, an MSA organizer. “These checkpoints that Apartheid Israel has put in place are a means by which they control the day-to-day lives of Palestinians.”
On Tuesday, MSA will hold another event titled “Life in Occupied Palestine.” The event will take place at noon in the Beach Auditorium, where Anna Baltzer will be speaking about her experiences in Palestine. Baltzer is a 28-year old Jewish American who has spent the last few years in Palestine and promoting her book, “Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories.”
The week’s last event will take place on Wednesday at the Speaker’s Platform, in front of the University Bookstore, at noon. In a speech titled “Hypocrisy or Democracy,” speaker Amir Abdul Malik will address the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the issues surrounding it.
