Aber Kawas

Part of the reason that I wanted to run for office was that, at the peak of the genocide, I witnessed so many elected officials not say a word. I had been organizing around Palestinian human rights for many years. I’ve gone to elected officials’ offices and talked to them about the Great March of Return [the 2018–19 protests at Gaza’s border with Israel]. I’ve talked to them about boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) legislation and the Not on Our Dime bill, which we helped introduce with then assemblymember Zohran Mamdani. I’ve seen so many elected officials hesitate and say, “I can’t take this on.” But I didn’t expect we would be in the same place at the peak of the genocide.

What that represented to me was a class of electoral politicians who did not represent the people. I saw millions of people hit the streets, student encampments — almost every day, there was a protest about Gaza. Yet elected officials failed to act. Our elected officials allowed the genocide to happen without saying anything.

That is a differentiator between “progressive except for Palestine” politics. I think that’s something that socialist candidates represent at this moment on a national level: that step forward beyond progressivism to acknowledge the international.

As you mentioned, you’ve organized for a long time around the Not on Our Dime bill, a bill in the New York State Legislature that would crack down on the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations that work to support apartheid and genocide in Palestine. The bill was first introduced by then assemblyman, now mayor Zohran Mamdani, and was recently reintroduced by fellow Queens DSA member Diana Moreno. What’s this fight been like, and how has it changed since the bill was first introduced in 2023?

The fight has really changed. The Not on Our Dime bill came into development through organizers and activists who had been working on Palestinian human rights and part of Palestinian rights organizations. We had never really touched the political arena. But we thought if we were able to actually create a policy vehicle where elected officials had to state or sign on to something that reflected their values around Palestinian human rights, that would be a way that we could engage and have another tactic to use to build on this movement.

When we introduced Not on Our Dime — which took almost a year to develop, and it was introduced by Assemblymember Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport — there were maybe ten to fifteen people in the room. On that day, people were telling Zohran Mamdani that his career was over. We felt like, wow, he’s doing the right thing, but he maybe is destroying his political career.

It was introduced in 2023. The next year, we showed up to Albany with three hundred people. People were standing [in the state capitol] and yelling “Free Palestine” in Albany, a place where Palestine was not even uttered or considered. That was amazing.

I overlap with the district that assemblymember Diana Moreno represents. People call it the “Commie Corridor.” It’s a really socialist, progressive part of Queens. It’s also a very immigrant- dense part of Queens. Zohran Mamdani as an assemblyperson was able to introduce a bill like that because his constituents were supportive of it. That’s what gives us the ability to build momentum and have other people sign on to the bill.

Aber Kawas

Now there’s much more potential for people to sign on to this bill. We’re at a place right now where we have new elected officials signing on to the bill, because they understand that it’s what their constituents want. You’re not risking your seat by signing on to this bill. But also we’re in a moment of growth for the movement for Palestinian human rights.

The way that I often compare this is to South African apartheid. People think that South African apartheid just ended overnight. But actually it was a long history. People had seen images of people being killed, of the apartheid government killing youth in the streets who were protesting against apartheid. But it took decades after that for the apartheid government to fall. That took international pressure. It was a combination of the internal struggle and international pressure. That’s what I hope is going to happen for Palestine in this moment.

We’re seeing that on a local level and a congressional level, where so many congresspeople sign on to the Block the Bombs Act, speak about rejecting AIPAC money, and speak about denying Israel military aid. On all levels, we need politicians to start to disengage and divest from Israel and treat it as an apartheid state that needs to be reconstituted into a democracy.

Aber Kawas

It’s a good thing. I think about this on all levels. There are a lot of people who say, “I thought Trump was great the first time around, I bought into this ‘America First’ thing, and then I realized that this was a farce.” And then they’re interested in socialism. Great, come into the fold.

Aber Kawas

Yeah, and the same thing with the Palestine movement — there are people who grew up as Zionists, their families were Zionists, they went to camps where they would learn about Israel, they went on heritage trips. Organizing is about meeting people where they’re at and helping to shift them to the place that you want them to be, to create political movement and growth. I’m never someone who rejects growth. It’s important for people to move and for us to build on that.

I’m someone who moved to engage in electoral politics. I used to be like, “I don’t believe in that stuff. I’m not out here to vote or door knock for people. I’m just going to keep hitting the streets, doing this thing or that.” That’s growth. Movement is good.

It is the most significant part of my childhood. I was about twelve years old when my dad was picked up by ICE. He was in ICE detention for almost three years, then he was eventually deported. That period of my life was very formative. As I was entering into my teenage years, I was beginning to understand the world a lot more. And I was spending every weekend taking three-hour rides to a detention center. The story was about my family.

I can talk about how family separation affects people economically, psychologically, your physical health — everything gets impacted. If one person gets picked up, it’s not just the one person that’s impacted; it’s their entire family. But also I would spend time in the waiting rooms, and I would see people who are in prison for many different reasons, including immigration. And it really opened up my eyes at a very young age to the injustices that occur in this country and how human life can be discarded.

From that moment, I started to organize around immigrant rights. I started organizing around the DREAM Act, around comprehensive immigration reform. This was about allowing people who were brought to this country as young people to have a pathway to citizenship. And then that got watered down to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), for people who were brought over as children to have a temporary registration. The DREAM Act never really passes. And now we’re at a point where DACA is repealed. There’s all these bans on people being able to come in.

We’re not even fighting for more rights for immigrants, for pathways for them to stay legally. We’re fighting against a rogue entity, ICE, picking up people off the streets. And we see the violence that started at the time when my father was deported — it was the post 9/11 period — where so many Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim were targeted by ICE. Now we’re seeing ICE escalate to targeting undocumented people in all sectors. It’s really sad to see that we’re actually in a worse place, when there’s so much awareness around immigrant rights, when there are so many people who are calling to abolish ICE. We have a big fight ahead of us, because we need to move from that defensive posture to actually fighting for things, to be able to bring people and give them a pathway to live legally in this country.

You recently released a platform entitled Fighting for the World in the World’s Borough, which is a reference to the staggering diversity of Queens. How do your politics connect the local in Queens to the global? How do you practice those politics as a state legislator in a way that makes sense for people who think of that, as a job, it’s pretty far from global concerns, and maybe have extraordinarily mundane, hyperlocal concerns like a pothole that has not gotten fixed? How do you connect the dots for people?

There is an internationalism to this city, to New York City and Queens, one of the most diverse places on earth. We have immigrants from all over the world come here. Oftentimes the immigrant conversation, the conversation about immigrant rights here, is about what you’re experiencing in this country, which is horrific. It’s not just ICE picking you up off the street; it’s you being denied wages sometimes at jobs, not being able to get work — so many forms of exploitation.

But what’s also really important is the idea that in the world’s borough, where there’s a huge immigrant population, people don’t just care about what’s happening locally. For me, the job is to serve the district, to serve people who are struggling to afford their housing and health care, with the parking spot or the pothole near their home. That’s immensely important. But those same community members also care about what’s happening across the globe, and they want their politicians to speak out against that, or to speak out about that.

Our platform is fighting to afford health care, to afford housing, to afford transit. But it’s also to fight destruction. Take the example of climate disaster. In state, we’re going to be fighting for New York to use alternative energy, clean solar energy that would take away our reliance on fossil fuels, which actually makes our climate worse and hurts our pockets more. We are seeing the US government go to war with Iran, send our tax money to Israel. Many times, there’s also this geopolitical conversation around energy.

We have a huge Bangladeshi community in Queens. A few months ago, Bangladeshi university students could not go to university because there was a fuel crisis in Bangladesh. And the fuel crisis was actually caused by the war in Iran. So the US is taking our tax money, starting an unjust war in Iran that costs almost a billion dollars a day. It is causing a fuel crisis where university students cannot go to school in Bangladesh. And then there’s a huge Bangladesh diaspora. Why do people come to this country? They’re coming to this country for economic opportunity, many times because maybe they can’t get a college degree in their own country, or the college degree does not suffice because they’re constantly dealing with climate disaster, they’re constantly dealing with economic disaster in their country. So they come here. There’s a direct connection of why people come here and how we’re all connected.

We are trying to actually stand up for humans, whether they are our neighbors in our own district or whether they are members of the countries that our neighbors come from. I think that is a message that people want to see from politicians.

I think that’s what people saw in Zohran Mamdani. People loved his internationalism, his appeal, his background. And that’s what people want to continue to see: somebody who’s really acknowledging the entire story of somebody who’s in the United States as an immigrant.