What to Expect at Seattle's People's Tribunal on U.S. Complicity in Gaza

Linda Low: We are coming together to examine how the U.S. has contributed to policies and funding that has enabled this war and genocide in Gaza. It's a community education process to inform our decision-making as individuals and communities. We're living in a time when institutional accountability is fraying, so we are coming together to create accountability by establishing a public record that we hope will inform future actions, research, and people-powered learning and action.

Low: First, we live in a world of constant exploitative headlines. It's so hard to push through that, and this idea of coming together as a community for deep exploration is empowering because knowledge is power.

Second, it's important we have voices across community groups coming together to examine these key questions together. The more voices you bring together, the more thought you [have] and the more rich and substantive the conversation is. It's not a monolith. It's not an echo chamber.

Third, we're creating a public record of what we see happening, so that it's documented for not only all of us to learn from, but also inform future learning. We are creating accountability in the absence of it. Our institutional systems and accountability structures aren't working. When I started this journey, I had never heard of a people's tribunal, but now I hear about them a lot. It's one of the new forms of accountability that I think, moving forward, is going to be more common because the current systems are not working.

Michael McPhearson: Palestine has been pushed off the headlines. This brings it back up to the surface. If things aren't talked about and remembered, they're forgotten, and we don't want that. The Palestinian community here needs to know that people care. This is also about what's happening in the region, what's happening in Israel, and how our government is contributing to the horrors to the Palestinians, but to the Israelis too. And our government is not doing anything to help — it's making things worse — so we need to hold it accountable.

Low: We made an intentional decision as an organizing committee to go wide across multiple topics, rather than go deep into only one or two topics. We wanted to share as much information as possible. We have a legal team that has generated documents, evidence. They'll be interviewing witnesses and experts. We're asking questions such as "What happens to people with disabilities during war? What is international humanitarian law, and how does it work? How does it apply in Gaza? What happens to our civil liberties [First and Fourth Amendment rights] when we protest war and we get arrested? Who's profiting from war? What are our elected officials doing in our name with our taxpayer dollars?"

McPhearson: We are also looking at the morality of the situation. That's important because aside from what laws say, there's a morality that we all must have and share. Laws aren't always just, and I know that from my people's history [Editors' Note: McPhearson is Black.], so we lean on the morality of things in order to change the laws.

Low: When you walk in, there will be a stage with a witness stand, a podium, and a prosecutor. There'll be seating for the audience, just like you would see in a real court. We will open with a statement from a local Palestinian leader.

The prosecutor enters what we call evidence or information, and then they will call up the witnesses, either in person or remotely, and they will share their testimony. Different witnesses or experts will be interviewed. For example, we're going to have a legal expert on human rights, a researcher on disability law, and a Gazan family living in exile in Oman. They will examine the legal frameworks and bring to life these laws from a human perspective.

There will also be a jury made up of a number of diverse community voices with representatives from Rachel Corrie Foundation, Seattle Indivisible, Nidal Seattle, Valley and Mountain, and the UW Law program. The jury will receive all this information and have the opportunity to ask the witnesses clarifying questions. After the tribunal, they will have follow-up meetings together, and then they will generate a report with their assessment and reflections on what they've heard and learned.

McPhearson: We've been planning it together at least for a year. We went through some different iterations about where we should do it, what the scope should be, and things of that nature. There's a strong Palestinian community here. I want to be clear that this [Israeli actions in Gaza] has been going on for decades. It didn't start on Oct. 7. But there is a particular aftermath acceleration of things. There was a lot of activity here in Seattle as a result of it, such as the student protests, so we thought that this would be a great place for us to examine what happened and to remind the community, the region, what happened and what is still happening in Palestine.

McPhearson: I feel like that's a collective decision and development of what those things look like, with the Palestinian community at the center of that. So I can't speak for them or the community. The only thing I can do is be part of creating space, which is what I think this does and hopefully with the information empowering them, so they can go out and do the work that's going to develop the answer to that question, and create the political environment for whatever that accountability is to be able to happen.

Low: Accountability will look different from community to community. It's going to be for the local community to decide what that looks like. Just by the fact that we're having the conversation nationally, putting it back on the radar. We hope it will bring more people into the conversation that maybe haven't been part of it before. Ideally, it's a spark to create more action and more sustained activity.