Webinar: Palestine is Our Neighborhood

For nearly one hundred years, Catholic Worker communities scattered throughout the U.S. have been leaning into a radical lifestyle rooted in nonviolence, the daily practice of the works of mercy, direct action (personalism), and neighborhood-based community organizing with those whom our systems and structures have scapegoated and abandoned.

Recently, two friends of the Amistad Catholic Worker in New Haven, Connecticut, answered a call to accompany Palestinian communities in the West Bank living under genocide, in the hope of exercising some measure of nonviolent defense and international solidarity with those living under the genocidal Israeli regime there. Mark Colville and his colleague Ben will reflect on the present reality in Palestine, while at the same time holding it up as a mirror to aggressive criminalization of homelessness in the United States.

Presenters:

Mark Colville is a cofounder and resident member (since 1994) of the Amistad Catholic Worker in New Haven, Connecticut, along with his wife, Luz Catarineau. In the backyard at Amistad, they’ve constructed an encampment for unhoused neighbors in defiance of city government, and are actively demanding that New Haven come into compliance with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in responding to the needs of its unhoused citizens.

Ben has spent the past four years in Catholic worker and worker adjacent spaces. He is fascinated by the way that community can foster action and action can foster community. Nowadays he resides in the New Haven area.