about on my personal IG account on October 14, 2023. It also hap- pened when I was getting the most social media traffic during the 10th Anniversary celebrations of FLACC when we were purchasing a bunch of ads, boosting posts and following a lot of new accounts, including Palestinian accounts, to get the word out about our Latinx dance festival while simultaneously staying engaged and in solidarity with the people suffering in Palestine. Between October and November 2023, Human Rights Watch docu- mented over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content on Ins- tagram and Facebook that had been posted by Palestinians and their sup- porters. After giving FLACC’s dance festival ads three totally different warnings for violating “community guidelines,” we concluded that Meta’s politically manipulated algorithms had targeted us. Note to all: Make sure you have back up admins on Facebook! I still have a personal IG and we did make a new @flaccdanza_ account, but only FLACC’s Market- ing manager, Marivel Mendoza, has access to FLACC on Facebook as an administrator. We both also had our WhatsApp accounts suspended on the same day during our festival in late October, but gained them back sev- eral months later, without an explana- tion from Meta. To continue leveraging our public platform, one of FLACC’s solidar- ity efforts as a Latinx and Indige- nous arts organization has included sending monthly newsletters to our subscribers promoting the Pales- tinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The campaign, created in 2004, was inspired by tactics for successfully ending the South African apartheid regime through the power of boy- cott, divestment and sanction (BDS) efforts. Similarly, the liberation of Palestine will require the rest of the world to stop supporting any entity (including art and entertainment)
awareness-building by raising the algorithms through reposting, liking or following Palestinian journalism, to signing petitions and calling elected officials, encouraging faith leaders to get involved, donating relief funds for Gazans, creating public art interven- tions, engaging in direct action pro- tests, risking arrest and much more. In early December 2023, I attended a teach-in at Bandaloop studios in Oakland by Lebanese-American researcher, dancer, scholar, writer and activist, Leila Mire. Leila is a UC Berkeley PhD Performance Stud- ies candidate who has been speaking out about how Israel and the U.S. use dance as a form of “soft power” in an attempt to normalize the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to art- wash the cultural image of Israel. In an article she wrote for thINKing- DANCE in 2021, Leila writes: “As artists, our priority should be shift- ing narratives to resist oppressive regimes. Art is incomplete when the voices and embodied knowledge of indigenous voices are silenced. The world is listening to Palestinians, and it is time the dance community does the same.” If arts organizations and funders are aligned with indigenous rights movements and decolonization efforts, this principle should extend to Palestine.
that is funded by, aligned with or supportive of Israel’s terrorism. The boycott is aimed against the state of Israel, not against individual Israeli artists, or against Jewish artists, but against any artist or academic who supports the apartheid state of Israel and its imperialist policies against Palestine. I wanted to write this article for In Dance to encourage more dance readers to use their own platforms to take a stand and to highlight a few local dance artists in the SF Bay Area who are tirelessly working against oppression by using their personal and profes- sional resources in solidarity with Palestine. I gathered statements and material from local dancers Leila Mire, Cookie Harrist, Tessa Nebrida, José Navarrete and Leyya Tawil. They are among hundreds of artists in the Bay Area who are uncompro- mising towards Israel’s displacing, starving and bombing over half the Gazan population for the last six months with U.S. weaponry. Our efforts, and yours, ultimately gain strength when we are principled and united for a cause against the ille- solidarity
gal occupation of Pales- tine which forces every U.S. taxpayer into shar- ing responsibility for this genocide in Gaza. To build a coalition implies that we are all connected to the suf- fering in Palestine—as we are all connected to the western capital- ist agendas in Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and many other countries both historically and currently. Solidarity can range from simple
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