SJP commemorates Palestinians lost, demonstrates for a Free Palestine at UNL

Students raise Palestinian flags for the Students for Justice in Palestine memorial service at the Nebraska Union Plaza on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Photo by Izzy Lewis.

Co-byline: Andres Lopez, Izzy Lewis

One year and one day after the Israel-Hamas war began, Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln commemorated the loss of Palestinian lives with flags lining the green space outside of the Nebraska City Campus Union Tuesday evening.

From 5 to 8 p.m. around 100 individuals placed flags, listened to speakers and advocated for justice in Palestine a year after the conflict began.

Seth Huertas, second-year history major and member of SJP, said they placed over 1,200 flags with the names of Palestinians killed in the conflict. 1,100 of the flags had the names of Palestinian children less than 3 years old. The other 100 had the names of Palestinian journalists, Huertas said.

“This is only a decimal of the actual amount of Palestinians killed by Israel in the last year,” Huertas said.

It is estimated that up to 186,000 or more Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, roughly 7-9% of the population of Gaza in 2022, according to the Lancet Medical Journal.

The process of making the flags and setting up the event took about a month, Huertas said.

Amani, a third-year psychology major and executive member of SJP, said SJP wanted to humanize those lost and make students see them as not just a number.

Following the destruction of all universities in Gaza, SJP wanted to open the eyes of college students in Nebraska.

“We just wanted to give a visual representation to the student body,” Huertas said of the flag display.

The first speaker of the event, Willy Massay, a critical care ICU nurse from Omaha, who worked in the healthcare field in Gaza for six weeks, shared his experience seeing the grotesque nature of war.

“It's only in Gaza that the world has normalized healthcare providers to hold the brain of a child that has been bombed by Israel, nowhere else,” Massay said.

Having seen first-hand traumatic injuries, Massay said he will never be able to get the images out of his head, which inspired 99 healthcare workers, including Massay, to write a letter to President Biden after witnessing what they saw in Gaza.

“One of the things we wrote to Biden was ‘we cannot eat, we can't sleep.’ I hate my bedroom because I feel I am reliving and have abandoned my people. We have abandoned the beautiful children of Gaza,” Massay said.

Massay said students in Palestine came up to him several times sharing their support from protests at universities across the nation.

“Many times they asked me, ‘Can you please tell the Americans, especially the students, we saw you protesting last semester, please do not forget us,’” Massay said. “They are asking: ‘do not give up.’”

Massay said the time to act is now and that taking a step back is counterproductive.

“They teach us what it means when we say, after World War II, ‘never again,’ they are reminding us, ‘never again’ is now,” Massay said about those he spoke to in Gaza.

An SJP representative encouraged participants to repeat after them, reiterating what was said about the loss of lives and destruction caused by Israel.

“A genocide, repeat after me, a genocide, which has taken hudreds of thousands of martyrs, leveled entire cities, towns and villages, demolished family homes, and centuries-old holy cites and forced 2 million people to the brink of starvation as they survived annihilation in makeshift tents and temporary tin shacks,” the representative said. “Throughout this massacre our universities have affirmed their role as the firmest backers of U.S. imperialism.”

The representative said those killed shouldn’t be forgotten.

“We will never be able to understand the extent, and they deserve their acknowledgement, but they also deserve dignity and survival. They deserve life,” the representative said. “We will never be able to get that life back.”

SJP fundraised throughout the day inside the City Campus Union. 25% of the profits will be directed to Middle East Children's Alliance to fund food, shelter, clothes and medical supplies to those in Gaza, according to Amani.

“We believe it's our duty to help ease the hardship of the Palestinian people by providing that critical life saving supplies also while organizing to end the genocide,” Amani said.

At the end of the event, organizers picked up the flags and finished chanting in hopes of UNL divesting funds from any program that directly or indirectly supports Israel in the war.

“

Build schools, not bombs,” the crowd chanted finishing up the night.

Published in the Daily Nebraskan, read here.