Anees Mitri – Reflection
Throughout this semester, our class has taught me that Latinos have shaped the history of the United States while battling harmful immigration policies and attempts at questioning their ability to be loyal to both the United States and one’s homeland. Further, Puerto Ricans have remained a stateless people with no American citizenship nor an independent nation for themselves. In spite of this, Latinos have organized collectively to build political consciousness, multiracial coalitions that are beneficial, and embrace a multiracial identity. One instance of such is El Plan de Santa Barbára, which led to M.E.C.H.A organizing on college campuses and embracing a Chicano identity that is based on a mixed identity. In connection with the Chicano effort to understand their identities and organize collectively for protection against discriminatory government policies is my own effort to understand my identity as a Palestinian-American and organize based on this identity in order to protect Palestinians and Arabs in the United States who are under attack by discriminatory administrations – Cornell’s administration and the presidential administration of Biden.
As a result of my effort to understand my Palestinian-American identity and organize based on my identity in order to protect Palestinians, I interviewed my grandmother – a Palestinian immigrant to the United States who became an American citizen. I interviewed her in order to understand how our identity has changed through immigrating to the United States, as well as if she felt that myself and her other grandchildren should identify as Palestinians, Palestinian-Americans, or something else. Unsurprisingly, she told me to identify as a Palestinian-American and to embrace both cultures. My grandmother mentioned that we ought to embrace being Americans because of how great of a country the United States is, and how we are able to be safe and free from war by living here. However, recent news shows that Palestinians are under attack by college administrations and by Zionist supremacists that have sought to kill Palestinians wherever they exist. For example, those three boys that were shot by a Zionist supremacist in a hate crime went to the same school in Palestine as my own mother did – and that hit home for me.
Because of this news and what I gained from my interview, I now understand that there is an essential need for Arab activism and building organizations, like M.E.C.H.A, that embrace our Arab and Palestinian identity and seek to collectively organize politically in order to secure our rights as Americans to organize and protest, secure into law our constitutional right to boycott Israel, and build a multiracial coalition that may never be defeated by the forces of racism, hatred, and its culmination in Zionism. In this effort, I know that I am joined by those of the past, such as Cesar Chavez and the brave Cornellians that marched on Day Hall, in my mission of embracing my identity both as a Palestinians and as an American, as well as in my mission of forming an organization that is based on both an Arab and American identity and seeks to protect the civil liberties and the civil rights of Arabs in the United States as we seek to grow and prosper as a people.