This breakout event from the North America Nakba Tour and the Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp will be a community dialog between Palestinian refugees from Lebanon and other indigenous/black/brown organizers and the Ramapough Lenape Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp about building a common struggle against colonialism across borders and oceans and to strategize about how we can coordinate and build together.

The event is open but primarily intended for indigenous rights organizers, the Ramapough Lenape community, and other Indian/Native/indigenous national groups. The full Nakba Tour presentation, discussed below, will be available at additional venues. See the Nakba Tour page and website (nakbatour.com) for more information.

For more information on the Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp and how to assist with their struggle against the Pilgrim Pipeline, an oil pipeline being build through tribal lands, check out the Prayer Camp page.

The Rampough Lenape Nation created the Split Rock Prayer Camp in October 2016 in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Nation’s own campaign against the Pilgrim Pipeline in New Jersey and New York. The camp is located on Ramapough land in a rural private development of exclusive mansions and the prayer ceremonies triggered harassment by wealthy homeowners and their association, backed by local police.

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Khawla Hammad has been a stateless refugee in Lebanon for 69 years. At the age of sixteen, she was expelled from her village of Kabri, in Palestine. Now she is 85 years old, and and still a refugee in Lebanon, with no citizenship in any country at all. Israel expelled most of the population in 1948, and has prevented them from returning to their homes. Kabri and hundreds of other towns and villages were leveled to the ground, a crime that Palestinians call al-Nakba (the Catastrophe).

But Israel did not stop there. It repeatedly attacked Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, killing three of Khawla’s children among many others. Before the Nakba, Khawla’s father also lost his life as a Palestinian freedom fighter. Khawla has a message that she wants to bring to North America. So does 23-year-old Palestinian refugee, journalist and translator Amena Elashkar, whom many of you know from the 2016 Nakba Tour. She and her parents were born as stateless refugees in Lebanon and have never lived in their own country.

Khawla and Amena have a different message from other Palestinians. They are not living under Israeli occupation. Israel does not allow them to visit their homes, much less live there. As exiles, they have a different perspective from Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the part of Palestine that became Israel.

Hear Amena & Khawla speak! Check out nakbatour.com