Let's Talk UNLV

This episode's special guest host Natalie joins Renee to chat with a local Southern Nevada Organization NPHR (Nevadans for Palestinian Human Rights). Guests Michael Arage and Annelise Friedman provide our listeners with useful resources and information to better educate ourselves on the Palestinian fight. NPHR hosts a number of community events to debunk common misconceptions and bring awareness to the issues facing the Palestinian community. Tune in and become an advocate for Palestinian Human Rights.

Instagram: @nphr_human_rights

What is Let's Talk UNLV?

Rebels, tune in to 'Let's Talk UNLV' with Dr. Tanya Crabb and Dr. Sammie Scales. Your express pass to everything UNLV — campus highlights, programs, and the latest buzz. Join us weekly as we chat with student leaders, administrators, and faculty, diving into the core of what makes us Rebels.

The program brings guests from different areas of UNLV every week to discuss campus highlights, programs and services, research interests that are essential to being a Rebel. Let’s Talk UNLV places its emphasis on connecting with student leaders who represent the voice of students on our campus. Guests also include administrators, faculty and staff responsible for upholding the mission of the university, which is teaching, research and scholarship.

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0:00:00
Well, we're here for another segment of Let's Talk UNLV. You're with your host, Renee, and we have a new special guest, Natalie Gutierrez. Welcome, Natalie.

0:00:18
Hi, thank you, Dr. Watson. I'm glad to be here today.

0:00:20
Please call me Renee.

0:00:21
This is the only time you can call me Renee. Okay.

0:00:23
So use it.

0:00:24
Natalie is part of the Minority Serving Institutions Student Council, one of the organizations on this campus that are making major change. And she came to me with this idea of hosting her own podcast. So this is really Natalie's thing. I'm really just, you know, just happy to be part of the party. But Natalie had this idea of hosting this podcast. And so I'm going to allow Natalie to share with us who our guests are and this very important topic that

0:00:52
we're going to get into today. So Natalie, take it over. Thank you, Renee. Today I invited two people from the Nevadans for Palestinian Human Rights Organization. So we have Michael Arrage and Annalise Friedman. They're going to be talking to us about how this organization has built connections across the Las Vegas community, going even broader than that, and specifically the connections and support given to UNLV students. The involvement of UNLV students has been built on extensively over the past summer that I have seen, and I found it very inspirational the way that community connections expanded and deepened so much with the motivation of Palestinian Human Rights. And so I'll go ahead and let our guests talk about their own roles

0:01:43
within the organization and the vision that this organization represents for the Las Vegas community.

0:01:49
Welcome. Thank you, Natalie and Dr. Watson. First time I'm meeting you, so I'm going to call you doctor. Fair enough. Thank you so much for having us. It's really amazing that you reached out to us and allowed us the space. It's not often that the Palestinian movement gets a space like this, so we really appreciate it. Like you said, my name is Michael Araj. I'm one of the founders of NPHR, Nevadans for Palestinian Human Rights, and we've been around since 2019 in Las Vegas. And you know, we are a diverse group of ethnicities, religions, genders, and what we do is through different educational events, advocacy actions, we create awareness and educate on Palestine. So we've, you know, it's been a struggle. This is a struggle here in Las Vegas, but if you were paying attention to the news this past May and June, we really gained a lot of momentum with what was happening over in Palestine and we capitalized, so to speak, on the momentum that was happening around the world globally and the uprising for the Palestinian movement. And here in Las Vegas we had such great turnouts to over four or five different rallies and marches that we had in Las Vegas. And we continued with educational events after that, more people starting to get involved, and that just transferred into us building off that momentum and actually creating and registering our first RSO here on campus for Nevadans for Policy and Human Rights. So, we are super excited to finally have a presence on campus, and yeah, we're just getting started and we're going to continue to build.

0:03:36
So tell me, you said that it's been a struggle. Kind of unpack that for us. What's been the struggle? How can UNLV community support in the struggle? And what have been some of the gains since you started, since 2019?

0:03:53
So the struggle, again, speaking globally, first, is that we are up against a lot of things that are working against us. We're working against decades of propaganda against what the truth is for the Palestinians. We are against mass media portraying us as something that we're not, all to advance an agenda that basically has ethnically cleansed Palestinians 1948. So, working up all against that, you know, it's difficult, but it's something that we need to take small victories with whenever we can. So, like I said, what we saw in May, we tried to capitalize on more people joining the struggle, wanting to get involved. And, you know, the wins that we've seen to transfer into a student group is just massive for us.

0:04:45
Thank you. I honestly, I see kind of this theme of land stewardship and the responsibility to stand up for that. And I think that the organization has built on this in the Las Vegas community, connecting with a lot of different organizations and building bonds. And I kind of just want to see what your guys' take on those connections that you built has been like and finding that kind of alliance.

0:05:09
It's been super amazing, but aside from that, it's essential to further both of our movements. Something that we talk about all the time is land back, and that's one of our main goals as a Palestinian organization, is to promote the notion that Palestine needs to be restored to its indigenous population, which rings, I mean, it's very familiar to the situation here. America is a settler colonial state, and so something that we fight for in our advocacy is with alongside indigenous Americans to restore land back. And that's been one of the great things about the momentum of this movement is just drawing in the sheer amounts of people has not only provided for a wonderful like mutual aid outreach program that we've been able to implement, but it's also showed and provided an educational opportunity, opportunity for the interconnectedness of this global struggle that oppressed people's face. Because a lot of the times, the oppressor is the same, and the movements and the vehicles of oppression are the same. And so it's really great to kind of invoke this international consciousness against settlers and colonialism in the world.

0:06:22
thing to that. It's amazing to see like with the different groups that we work with, like indigenous groups here in Las Vegas, socialist groups, whatever it may be, like Anneli said, we're fighting against the same oppressor. And when people start connecting their struggle with the Palestinian struggle, and vice versa, everyone's coming together to build a mass movement. And hopefully we can chip away at the oppressor. And yeah, when people start realizing that we're fighting the same fight, it makes us stronger.

0:06:53
Yeah, I think that's a really big point. I kind of see it in the name of the organization speaking on human rights. This is a huge aspect of the work that has been done by the organization that I have seen in the community. So organizing food shares, the film screening education is a big part of human rights and seeing how that's incorporated not just in the activism, but also in community building. I would love to hear more about what those events looked like in theorizing it and making it happen. And then just what was the outcome?

0:07:25
So one of the big things for us,

0:07:27
and Michael touched on it already, is just how hard it is to disseminate accurate information, specifically on Palestine in general. So as an organization, one of the main things that we wanted to focus on was education and getting accurate information out there because if you just rely on word of mouth or Google, you're going to hear just incorrect and usually just racist things that promote genocide and ethnic cleansing. So those coincidentally, those educational events are almost always the most fun. They're the most, or the easiest opportunity to provide bonding and a sense of camaraderie amongst peoples. And the turnout for those has actually been really great since like the momentum that we gained in May. A lot more people, I don't want to say are awakening, but that's like kind of, I guess the easiest way to coin it, they're awakening and they're interested in what's going on, particularly in the Middle East, which is something that just that whole geographical region has been demonized by American media for so long. But really, just the the power of social media this summer really put out there a lot of the atrocities that are going on. And it just seems like, you know, Americans fortunately aren't willing to stay as silent about this issue as they were before. And that's something that we want to, again, like Michael said, capitalize off of as we have these events. We want to, like, foster this growth that we have and, you know, handle it delicately in terms of, like, education and stuff like that.

0:09:05
So you mentioned that there are some resources or sources of information that are not good. Maybe share with our audience where they can find the information that's credible and information that really speaks to the movement.

0:09:17
So we have a link tree on our Instagram page and from that link tree we have a ton of resources that we back up and that we stand by. Some that are just easy to get to like BDS. Is it BDS.org?

0:09:33
BDSmovement.org

0:09:35
Movement.org is a great one to just learn about things, what's going on. Do you have any others, Michael?

0:09:40
No, I think you touched upon it in that link tree. It's a very composed set of resources that were put together by actually different organizations. So like Annalie said, we stand by them. We trust them. And hopefully anyone that's interested in this movement can just click on that and find where they want to go. So for those who are unaware of this topic, how do you broach this subject?

0:10:03
I mean, how do you know I'm at the dinner table, right? I'm at the dinner table we're passing bread or you know, we're passing, you know, some kind of poultry or something and you know Something comes up that may be inappropriate or is misinformation Kind of walk me through like what's what's your process having of having those kind of conversations those dialogues because this is a very heavy topic. It's filled with history, nuance. And so kind of what's my role? What things should I confront those that may be misinformed, and how do I start that conversation?

0:10:37
So there's different ways to go about it, but for me personally and as an organization, we always kick off starting when we speak about this topic is saying that it's not complicated because there's a lot of people that think that it is complicated. So when we kind of set that as the as the bar of it's not complicated, we get into the reasons why and basically it's a, you know, Zionism, which is the political ideology that created Israel or wanted to create a land for Jews in Israel, basically, is a racist based off of settler colonialism and the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people. When you look at it from that perspective, it's very easy to understand what's happening there. Now, as at the dinner table, you know, it's a tough topic. It doesn't mean that it's easy to speak about, but, you know, like Danielle said, this is a human rights organization and we focus on Palestinian human rights. So at the very essence, someone who is interested in this topic should just care about it because it's a human rights issue. But another angle that we take for an average American that doesn't know anything about it is money. So what we do is we let people know that your US government sends $3.8 billion in taxpayers' money to Israel every single year and is allocated for the next 10 years. Not only that, they continuously give more money to Israel for weapons and their so to speak something called the Iron Dome. They just granted an extra billion dollars in the last month. So if we can look at it from that perspective in terms of do you want your tax dollars going to a country that is killing Palestinian children? Or would you rather have that money go to all the needs that are here in this country, like health care, education, housing. So, you know, people if they, a lot of people are just ignorant, just, you know, not from, they're just ignorant towards the fact that they even know this, this is happening in terms of their taxpayer. Yeah, underwear.

0:12:48
Yeah, gotcha.

0:12:49
So if we can highlight that for them, they might now think, hey, yeah, this is, we need that money here. Why are we funding one of the richest countries in the world?

0:12:58
You have anything else you wanna add?

0:12:59
I would say just on a basic level,

0:13:01
to jump off everything Michael touched on, for people who are new to this, we do promote certain types of language. We call it an occupation and not really a conflict. We call it occupied Palestine, not really Israel, stuff like that. And those are kind of like minor advancements that you can like use to begin kind of like an anti-Zionist journey or just a journey of talking about like this this occupation the most accurately and just the most appropriately really. But I think like Michael said, just, you know, Zionism in general is a settler colonial project and they say as much, the founding members have said as much, and so if we don't like settlers here, you know, we have to connect that

0:13:51
struggle again. I think these are really important stances to take and I think that the UNLV student population is probably being exposed to a lot of these changes in rhetoric and trying to internalize it. So is this something that is being approached in the RSO, the registered student organization you guys are starting here on campus? And how does that kind of go?

0:14:11
In terms of like approach from what sense? Just addressing those issues?

0:14:16
I think the language, the change in language, the change

0:14:19
members, but actually people that are, you know, through tabling on campus, we want to make sure that if anyone comes with counter points that our members are ready to Understand how to approach that and set the set the record straight so like we said earlier There's a lot of propaganda out there that people will just throw at us to try to Divert the movement I divert the cause but when we educate ourselves. I always say to the students you know education is our biggest weapon, right, in this fight. So let's get our facts straight, arm ourselves with knowledge, and then we can go out there and start educating the campus. So talk to us about the development of the RSO.

0:15:02
How did you all come together? How did you find like-minded students? Do you have an exec board, or is there no board, or some other way of leading? What are some of your aspirations that you have with this newly founded registered student organization?

0:15:22
So off the, again, off the momentum of May, we had such a great increase in our presence online, on Instagram specifically, and a lot of the students that followed us there are just naturally UNLV students. So there's a lot of personal outreach by myself and you and Annalise to like connect with these students and we put out a feeler of like, you know, would you guys be interested in starting a student group on campus this year? And there was a lot of interest back. So we kind of started the process there and then we got the main people who were really wanting to be involved come out during the involvement fair, first week of campus, our table was popping. Like it was insane. Like we had I think 80 people sign up, give us their contact info. We had music playing. It was a great day. It was just like so overwhelming and such, it was like making me feel so good to see how many students cared. And we had a banner that said Free Palestine and people didn't even have to come up and say, who are you guys? They were just like, what do I gotta do to be involved? You know, they just know that they're on the right side when they see that sign, Free Palestine. So we made a contact list. We now have an executive board that we appointed. We did interviews for them, whoever was interested in being in an executive position. So we have a president, vice president, treasurer, and a scheduling liaison. So we're, you know, we're on the way, for sure. It's awesome to see that we finally have a presence here. Awesome. So, I mean, I can't even imagine what that would have been like without having the involvement fair and folks being back on campus. It just, you know, like things are easing up on the restrictions due to COVID. Like we've always had this, like we were around in 2019, we tried to kickstart something. Then we actually did get students interested and guess when we registered? February 2020. And then March 2020, everything went to you know where. So we're back now and the students are really excited to do a lot. And they're in the midst of planning many events for the coming school year.

0:17:42
And do you find the students are from all like classifications and levels both undergrad and grad or?

0:17:48
Yes, the diversity in terms of like, yeah, just age and, you know, majors, the diversity in majors, diversity in ethnic backgrounds, genders, it's just like, it's beautiful to see. I don't think a movement like this, I mean, you know, on the other side, you see a homogeneous kind of mix of people, not mix, a homogeneous set of people, where in our room, when we have a general meeting, you just see the diversity. That's what hits you in the face right away. So it's just like people understanding from different cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, economic status of their family, like they just understand that this is there's, there's a piece of it. Palestine is kind of like, at the top and everything kind of stems down. It's like, I don't know how to explain it. But yeah, they just understand that all the struggle, their own personal struggles can connect through Palestine.

0:18:46
I am just visualizing all of the stories you guys were posting over the summer and thinking about how the students that I saw on your pages were reading poems, they were singing, they were dancing, and this kind of like it became a culture very lively, very like heartwarming, and I'm thinking about like how did students come to that point where they could unite? How did the organization become accessible to students? At least, at what point did this contact really like break out? Like, is

0:19:18
this?

0:19:19
Yeah, I think again, I think it's just through our IG page and posting them attending those rallies that had like hundreds of people show up. And then the personal outreach and asking who would want to speak at the events. And then people will come back, I have a poem that I wrote, that I want to present at one of these rallies, right? And I want to do a vigil. I want to read the names of the martyrs in Palestine. Like those are all students that did that stuff. And then like you said, we had a singer just show up and start singing Arabic music in front of the Venetian. It's like, what? How is this even happening? It's just incredible to see. But that's a big part of our organization as well, is to show the Palestinian culture, that we what we are, you know, like, I'm Palestinian myself. And you know, one of the biggest things for me is to show that just to humanize us because we've been dehumanized for so long. And when we see poetry, when we see songs, when we see dancing, when we see our flag being waved on Las Vegas Boulevard, it's just so amazing to see. So yeah, it's incredible.

0:20:28
Yeah, representation matters. So have you found other RSOs that you can have some community with or who really rallied behind the cause that have been

0:20:42
very supportive and you might see some collaborations coming forth? Yeah, I mean, we've already connected with the YDSA, which is the Young Democratic Socialists of America. We have a connection with their main group off campus, DSA, Las Vegas chapter, again, Democratic Socialists of America. There's the BLM UNLV group that we have, you know, they've attended our events, you know, during the uprising, the George Floyd uprising in 2020, we were out there supporting them. And they just, they recognize it, right? There's a long history of black liberation and Palestinian liberation being connected. So that's something that we need to further and educate both communities on, and like the interconnectedness of that, because it's a beautiful history, it really is. And a lot of people don't know about it. So yeah, those are the couple of groups on campus already that we've connected with, and hopefully there are more out there that we can make connections with.

0:21:49
I'm thinking about these local organizations, basically national organizations, and the way that I've seen the events go, there's a lot of local businesses also being involved and in supporting. Is that something that has been built intentionally or something that happened?

0:22:04
I'm not sure which businesses you're referring to because there hasn't been many. Yeah, I think for us it's like the opposite.

0:22:13
A lot of businesses especially are afraid to stand behind this cause. Even people who personally, like business owners who personally identify with this issue or sympathize with it usually like don't want any, like they wouldn't touch it, you know, which has been like really difficult compared to like other forms of organizing. But this one is like a really, it's like polarizing, you know, in the business community.

0:22:42
So, so Michael shared a little bit about his connection and why this is so personal. Maybe perhaps share with us where does the the fight come from where you know how did you

0:22:53
become part of this cause so just briefly my history my family were genocided in the Holocaust so I'm Ashkenazi Jewish on my dad's side and Roma on my mom's side Polska Roma so both two of the largest ethnic minorities in Europe at one point in time prior to the Holocaust, and only a few members from each side of my family survived. So I come from a line of perseverance and survivors, but I grew up very religious, and in the—I'm Jewish, obviously—in the Orthodox Jewish community, Zionism isn't really common. So when my family assimilated into the secular world, I was really shocked by this thing called Zionism that had such a... They were just talking in place of Jews everywhere. And I was like, what? I don't know what this is as a Jewish person. So from there, I realized that this can't be done in my name, but also just how I grew up. I grew up, like, super poor. I just, I recognize the interconnectedness of it all, and just, like, struggling people around the world, you know, so it's not even like it has to do with me being Jewish or whatever, like, you know, I'd be here no matter what. So I do have, like, a close proximity to the issue through various different means, but it's not even like that for me, you know,

0:24:24
I would be here no matter what. Well this has been an exciting segment and thank you so much for sharing this topic. It's been enlightening and exciting to hear the start of this registration organization. Natalie what were your

0:24:38
takeaways? I feel much more connected to the cause and just learning about how the movement has grown, how it has become diverse, and community building. I think it's something that is a part of the UNLV community and it is something that is going to keep growing into something that UNLV students will somehow be impacting or be impacted by. So, thank you.

0:25:07
So Natalie, I know that you're part of the Minority Serving Institutions Student Council, which looks at how to provide programs and services that target historically marginalized, underrepresented

0:25:18
students.

0:25:19
How do you see that council helping this registered student organization? What might be on the horizon, you think? I think that this is something that the student council will definitely be discussing. It's something that will be on our table. We'll be talking about things that we've done with other communities and student organizations, potentially funding other support, like in terms of sharing information, in terms of including more voices in our programming and in our events that are forthcoming. Yeah, and I see that you have laid the pathway by inviting these wonderful guests. My first time meeting them, my first time understanding this phenomenon. And so thank you for being a forerunner in having this topic come to Let's Talk UNLV. For me, I just thought Michael said it's not complicated. So for those who may think that they have to do the history lesson or they have, you know, got to be a part of this culture or for those that believe that they have to have, you know, been a part of the political struggle for this long time. No, you don't have an out. It's not complicated. This is ethnic genocide, and we all have a role to play. We have to speak up. So thank you again for visiting us today. And that's a wrap. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of KUNV Let's Talk UNLV. For my co-host Keith, I'm Renee. Tune in next week, Wednesday at 12 on KUNV 91.5 Jazz and More.

0:26:53
Wednesday at 12 on KUNV 91.5 Jazz and More. Wednesday at 12 on KUNV 91.5 Jazz and More.

0:26:58
That's a wrap.

Transcribed with Cockatoo