🍉 VanGran4Pal Community Newsletter
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**Neighbours and Friends, **
We’ve been grieving heavily this week. With our whole hearts, we honour every journalist who has been martyred. We honour every mother, father, daughter and son of Palestine. There are no words. Please read or listen to the last will of Anas al-Sharif. Scroll to the bottom of this email and read the words of Mousa in Gaza and learn about the Connecting Gaza initiative.
Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend what’s happening and you feel like just closing your eyes, shutting everything out and disappearing. Take care of yourselves. Allow yourself to rest. Allow yourself to grieve. Call in sick if you need to. Reset, and come back to advocate louder and stronger than ever, as soon as you are able to.
Indigenous cultures around the world and across human history have practiced drumming, singing, dancing, collective public grieving. If you need to scream, let it out. If you need to cry, cry. The culture that tells us to suppress our grief, that tells us to ‘act normally’, or to be polite in distress, is the same culture that has brutally colonized people in the name of white supremacy and of profit, and is destroying the planet. Resist by any means. Bang your pots loudly. Go to a protest and chant with your comrades. Satisfyingly shred zionist propaganda if you see it. Give a peace sign to someone you see advocating for Palestine in the streets. Hug someone you love. And then, pick up the phone: call Taleeb and leave him a message. Sign a parliamentary petition demanding an arms embargo and forward it to a friend who you know hasn’t yet spoken up. Be kind, be brave, be steadfast in the spirit that unites this community and knows right from wrong. Trust yourself. And always, be in solidarity with Palestine.
Action Updates
Call Taleeb’s office!
Follow @vangran4palestine 📢 Call to Action: Phone Zap for Gaza – Arms Embargo Now
Friends, the time to escalate our solidarity is now. This week, Israel’s assault on Gaza has intensified to even more horrifying levels. We cannot look away - and we cannot stay silent.
VanGran4Pal is mobilizing a mass phone zap to pressure our MP, Taleeb Noormohamed, to demand a full arms embargo on Israel. No more empty words. We need real action.
We’re asking you to call Minister Noormohamed starting this week to demand that our representative take a clear stand. We’re calling on you to take part by making at least one phone call to Minister Noormohamed’s office - and ideally, signing up for as many days as you can over the coming weeks. The more sustained the pressure, the harder we are to ignore.
✅ We’ve created an easy-to-follow call script
📝 Use the signup sheet to choose a time that works for you
📞 The more voices, the more pressure. Every call counts
👉 Call script: https://tinyurl.com/2juj4cun
👉 Signup sheet: https://tinyurl.com/h9fffeme
Let’s show up for Gaza. Let’s make it impossible to ignore our calls
House of Commons Petition
‼️Urgent Call to Action‼️
The government petition to suspend all arms exports to Israel IS LIVE and open for signature. Calling all Canadian citizens and residents to sign this petition. It needs at least 500 signatures for it to be read in the House of Commons, but the more signatures it gets the bigger the impact it will have. It currently has almost 27,000 signatures. Tell everyone you know!
👉 Click here to sign the petition - and don’t forget to check your email to verify your signature afterwards.
No team israel at the Davis Cup
Halifax will host a Davis Cup World Group I tie between Canada and Israel on Sept. 12-13, at the Halifax ScotiaCentre.
Call for the immediate cancellation of this event,. No sports-washing genocide, war crimes and apartheid.
Tennis Canada should have the political foresight, maturity, and the moral capacity to refuse what is business as usual. The Davis Cup does not occur or exist outside the context of Israel's egregious actions. If the City of Halifax, the Province of Nova Scotia, the Scotiabank Centre, the International Tennis Federation and Tennis Canada, proceed with this match, all will be complicit what is nothing other than an effort to launder the reputation of a state committing genocide and guilty of illegal military occupation and apartheid.
👉 Call for the immediate cancellation of this event.
Upcoming Events
Mass organizing call | Thurs Aug 14
📅 Thursday August 14, 2025 @ 5pm PT
📍 Location: Online
From act350.org: Join us on August 14th to hear from a powerful cross-movement panel about the interconnectedness of our struggles and why we are uniting on September 20th to Draw the Line and demand that Prime Minister Carney and the Canadian government pick a side: injustice, violence, and climate destruction— or a just and safe future for all of us.
We refuse to stand by while the government and Canada’s richest corporations hoard wealth, gut our public services, fuel climate collapse, attack migrants, exploit Indigenous lands, and prop up a genocide. We are building a historic alliance to fight back.
Rally | Sat Aug 16
🗓️** Saturday, August 16**
🕣 3:00 PM (PDT)
📍 Surrey City Hall
From @freepalestinebc As the siege on Gaza intensifies and forced starvation continues, "Canada" maintains their stance of empty promises while continuing to send bombs and bullets to "Israel".
The only way forward is a two-way arms embargo and to reunite families.
Mourn the martyr, save the living NOW! 🇵🇸✊🏾
Rally | Every Sunday
📅 Every Sunday @ 3PM
📍 Location: Coquitlam City Hall
From @freepalestinetricitiesbc: Every Sunday outside Coquitlam city hall !! Come show your support for the people of Gaza who are being bombed constantly and at this very minute!
All eyes and hearts on Palestine! 🇵🇸
If you're feeling powerless, frustrated and lost for words, please get your feet on the street now and use your voice if you haven't already! Keep it strong. Louder ! 📣
Skytrain station La farge/Douglas on the millennium line. 30 second walk.
Special guest speakers lined up. Poetry, music, family zone with arts and crafts. Postcards for Palestine. Pin making. Flags.
We look forward to meeting you.
Free Palestine 🇵🇸
** Freedom School | Mon August 25**
📆 Monday, August 25th
⏰ 6-8 PM
📍 Vines Den, 825 East Hastings Street
From @weaving.our.worlds: ⭐ ANNOUNCING: New Policing Tech, Same Colonial Empires: Global Policing, Border Controls & Technofeudalism from Turtle Island to Palestine
Join Weaving Our Worlds, Freedom School, and Driving in Palestine for an evening on Global Policing, Border Controls & Technofeudalism from Turtle Island to Palestine.
💜 Snacks served, Masks Mandatory, ASL Interpretation confirmed.
💢We are witnesses to the growing military-police-prison-border state here and everywhere. We see this with the growing collaboration between enforcement agencies, new technologies to surveil and oppress, and coordination across borders to monitor people and repress movements.
Dozens of colonial Canadian police chiefs visited Israel & the Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP are training the Palestinian Authority in pacification tactics, new surveillance technologies are being battle-tested by ICE & CBSA and border police on migrants, and the VPD & RCMP budget is expanding with new streams of policing collaborations with so-called community agencies.
📣 We will hear from speakers on Global Policing, Border Controls & Technofeudalism from Turtle Island to Palestine. We will then discuss together what we can do to resist the colonial police state, surveillance, and border imperialism locally and globally, as we move in solidarity with the resistance of Palestinians, Indigenous land defenders, criminalized communities, migrants, and people in struggle everywhere.
🔗 LINK in bio for details
Image description in alt text and comments
** Thrift 4 Gaza | Sat August 30th**
📆 Saturday, August 30th
⏰ 11am-4pm
📍 Trinity Grace Church, 803 E 16th
From @crescentjusticecollective: Via @yvr_thrift4gaza Ready for an end of season wardrobe reset? Looking to support Palestinian families? We are thrilled to announce our first thrift event Saturday, August 30 at Trinity Grace Church! Proceeds will go to @branchesofhope4gaza mutual aid fund and distributed among six families in Gaza. Tell your friends! 🇵🇸🍉
Rally at David Eby’s Office | Sept 2nd
📅 Sept 2nd
🕘 3:00pm
📍 2909 W Broadway
From @retiredteachersdivestbc: Parents for Palestine: #StopCensoringPalestine in BC Schools
Rally at David Eby’s office
Community Spotlight
**A Message from Gaza **
From Jasleen, a member of our community and the Connecting Gaza team:
This week I received some deeply moving words from a family in Gaza. Every time I contemplate these emotions I am moved to tears.
Two weeks ago, Mousa (one of our Connecting Gaza families) wrote to us describing how unbearable the situation in Gaza was - the extreme starvation conditions amidst constant bombardment and indiscriminate murders by israel. It was a raw reflection of life under the weight of genocide.
More recently, Mousa wrote to us again—opening with the same words, “Everything is unbearable,” but this time, he followed with something new. The thoughts and emotions described next were not a sign that things have become easier, but a glimpse of their resilience, and a quiet insistence on survival. Two days after Mousa wrote this, his nephew was murdered by israel at the so-called aid camps run by american mercenaries. We share Mousa's words below as a testament to the unimaginable strength it takes to keep going.
“Everything is difficult and complicated. You can say that everything around you is trying to kill you and destroy you, but inside each of us is a strange world without limits. There is something inside us that is faster than light. It transports you between depression and happiness. It carries you in the blink of an eye to where you want. What is this imagination inside us? You hear about a star a billion light years away from us, and your imagination reaches it in fractions of a second. This contemplation tells me that I will not break unless I break from within and lose my imagination, which is deep and profound faith, faith in God.” - Mousa
👉 Click here to learn about the deeply important work that Connecting Gaza is doing. Click here to donate if you are able to. Everything helps and we must do what we can.
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With gratitude and in solidarity,
Your Neighbours
Van Gran 4 Palestine
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