Bay Area Artists Raise $13,000 for Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund

“All my homies throw down for Palestine,” said Palestinian-Lebanese American singer Camellia Boutros on stage at Oakland’s Continental Club on Oct. 29. “Everyone in this audience here today, even if we don’t know each other, we’re all friends and family because we’re all here sharing space, sharing joy and love and grief and anger and in solidarity with Palestine. And it’s so meaningful.”

As Boutros and her band launched into an up-tempo, psych-rock version of the Palestinian folk song “Wein a Ramallah,” which the musician described as an international symbol of resistance, the multicultural audience of nearly 500 20- and 30-somethings clapped along and danced. Yet there were also tears and heartbroken embraces at the For Palestine fundraiser, which collected $13,000 for the charity Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, co-organizer Janan Barance told KQED.

For the past three weeks, thousands of Bay Area residents have taken to the streets to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza, which have killed over 8,000 Palestinians — many of them women and children. While supporters of Israel maintain it has a right to defend itself after an attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 Israeli civilians, with 200 more taken hostage, a U.N. expert and other observers say Israel’s response amounts to a “mass ethnic cleansing.”

As global calls for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Gaza continue to mount, Sunday’s For Palestine fundraiser was Bay Area artists’ largest show in recent weeks of solidarity with Palestinians, who human rights groups like Amnesty International say have been living under apartheid conditions for decades.

The For Palestine fundraiser followed a long tradition in Bay Area activism of cross-cultural solidarity against colonialism. In the decades since the Black Panthers, Third World Liberation Front and other social movements of the 1960s, local artists like filmmaker Boots Riley, muralist Refa One and rapper Equipto have echoed that message. Following in their footsteps on stage at the Continental Club Sunday, a younger generation of performers connected the struggles of Palestinians, the original Ohlone inhabitants of the Bay Area and Black Americans.

“This is occupied land,” said Palestinian American poet Mx. Yaffa, an organizer at the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity. “This has been Palestine for over 400 years.”

“The state that is capitalizing on the killing and imprisonment of Black people is capitalizing and benefiting on the killing of the Palestinian people as well,” said Oakland experimental musician Aroma, who organized the For Palestine fundraiser with Barance and fellow musician Astu. “The apathy towards their death and their pain and their outcries, the gaslighting that they experience … I feel like I resonate with that as a Black person.”

On the screen behind performers, photos flashed of Bay Area protesters holding signs of Mexican, Ukrainian and Jewish solidarity with Palestinians. Barance, who is Palestinian American, said she’s never seen so much multicultural support for Palestinian rights until this month. “We always say people are liberal until it comes to Palestine,” she said of people’s reluctance to comment on the issue.

Indeed, mainstream American media has long described Israel’s blockade of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank as a conflict with two equal sides. Human rights groups, meanwhile, have warned that Israel’s systemic displacement, segregation and restriction of voting rights of Palestinians amounts to apartheid. Human Rights Watch has called Gaza “Israel’s open-air prison” due to poor living conditions and heavy travel restrictions, and since Oct. 7, Israel has blocked aid and cut off electricity and internet access in Gaza.

After Oct. 20, when President Biden called for $14.3 billion in aid to Israel, many Americans have spoken out against U.S. support for the Israeli military. (Cumulatively, Israel has received more U.S. assistance than any other country since World War II.)

“The more people know, the less uncomfortable they feel about talking about it, knowing that it’s not about a political issue, but about our human rights,” Barance said.

At Continental Club, Palestinian American drag performer Mama Ganuush shared appalling details from their family history, detailing how Israeli settlers murdered their father’s siblings in the 1940s. “The Minister of Defense of Israel called Palestinians ‘human animals’ two weeks ago,” said Mama Ganuush, imploring the audience to call their representatives and advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza. “This is what the Nazis called Jewish folks.”

Grief was heavy in the air at times throughout the event, but there was also hope and solidarity in the room. “The posts are great, calling Congress is great, but we have to go here,” Astu said on stage during her performance, gesturing to her heart. “Most of us come from genocide, and we just have been brainwashed to forget.”

To bring the energy up, poet Sarah O’Neal led the audience in a chant she learned in 2014 after protesting Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri: “We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains. I believe that we will win.”

As the evening came to a close, headliner Sammy Shiblaq, a Palestinian American rapper signed to EMPIRE, ended the night with a message of unity. “It’s about all of us,” he said. “We can’t just focus on one group of Palestinians. It’s the Muslim, the Christian, the Jewish Palestinians that no one talks about. … We love the Jewish people — we don’t like what’s going on. We don’t like that Zionism has taken over the name of the Jewish people.”

This story was updated to include a quote from Sammy Shiblaq.