For the past year, Emad al-Turk has watched from his home in Mississippi as 16 relatives and an untold number of friends and classmates in his native Gaza have been killed.
al-Turk, who’s lived in the state for more than 40 years, is a native of Gaza City, which like much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble since Israel launched its retaliation for the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7 killed more than 1,200 Israelis.
“The last year has been extremely difficult,” he told MPB News. “Our family is an example of what has been happening in the last year – the targeting of civilians, women, children, the elderly, first responders and journalists. These are among the worst atrocities any government has done since World War Two.”
He's also one of hundreds of members of Mississippians for Palestine, a non-profit founded in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks.
"Gaza has really been an open-air prison controlled by Israel for over almost 19 years. The pattern has been every three or so years Israel goes in to hit the Palestinians, and they call it 'mowing the lawn -- we're going to teach the Palestinians lessons that they cannot resist against occupation and resist against us'. They go in and destroy some homes, kill some civilians. And they've been doing this for 75 years in Gaza, but not to this level. They want to make it uninhabitable."
Last October, the group consisted of a few dozen members; largely religious leaders, college students, community activists and members of Jackson's Muslim community who wanted to lend their voice to a growing movement demanding the human rights of Palestinian civilians be respected as the conflict unfolded.
In those 12 months, the world has observed the complete unraveling of those very rights.
The Palestinian Health Ministry estimates at least 40,000 Palestinian civilians -- largely in Gaza -- have been killed directly by Israeli forces. When taking indirect deaths into account, caused by combat-adjacent dangers such as famine or illness, the international relief NGO Oxfam estimates as many as 186,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed.
In addition to that, the United Nations has reported nearly 2 million Gazans have been displaced at least once from their home, a rate of 9 in every 10 civilians in the territory. Widely considered to be the densest human settlement in the world, as much as 70 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed in one year.
A marked increase of IDF incursions into the West Bank, considered by the United Nations to be Palestinian land illegally occupied by Israeli settlers, has killed an estimated 700 Palestinian civilians, among them 150 teenagers and children. Thousands more have been arrested and imprisoned, in some cases under questioning holds for months at a time.
But what began then as a protest in downtown Jackson, just as Israel began to formulate its response to the attack, has swelled to a base of support nearly 1,000 people strong through the state.
The group has held several demonstrations since, and has also met with prominent Mississippi elected officials such as second district Congressman Bennie Thompson to voice concerns over the targeting of civilians in Gaza, as well as the provision of U.S. manufactured arms and defense funds to Israel.
It's come as demonstrations across the world, particularly among young people, have broken from traditional Western support for the country and have shifted instead to calling for observing the human rights and self-determination of Palestinian civilians.
Delana Karimi-Tavakol, co-lead organizer of Mississippians for Palestine, says support for the Palestinian cause has grown both in Mississippi and nationally as more Americans have realized what’s at stake.
“Being in Mississippi in particular, knowing its important history and human rights movements, knowing the ways that oppression moves here and has moved here -- racial oppression against black people in particular -- I see so many parallels between what happens here and what happens in Palestine,” she said.
“I’ve felt for a really long time that so much power is possible if we connect Mississippi's people and Mississippi's movements to global people and global movements. So this particular moment felt like the right one to capture it and build on it, to connect Mississippians to the world, to connect the world to Mississippi, and to start or continue the process of learning from each other so that we can all be free.”
Some in Mississippi's Jewish community, like Debra Kassoff, a Rabbi with the Hebrew Union Congregation in Greenville, have felt the full weight of the past year.
“I personally have found it very hard as a Rabbi and as a committed, religious Jew who is also very progressive in my perspective toward Israel and its Palestinian neighbors. I’ve found it extremely painful,” Kassoff told MPB News.
Once widely considered to be an example of liberal democracy in the Middle East, Israel has for years leading up to the Oct. 7 attacks been mired in scandals and infighting at the highest levels of its government.
Only months before Hamas militants flooded the country's heavily-militarized border, hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens marched in protest of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's proposed judicial overhaul, which many criticized as an attack on the country's system of checks and balances.
Those criticisms have only grown louder following the Oct. 7 attacks, with many Israeli citizens expressing frustration that a number of hostages, suspected to still be alive and in Hamas hands, have yet to be returned to the country.
Especially as Israeli forces have advanced throughout Gaza, and now that tensions seem to have reached their highest in years with regional rival, Iran, Kassoff worries about the prospect of both ending the conflict soon, and in a fashion that achieves a lasting peace in the region.
“I feel like it's very hard to find a middle ground where I can say, ‘yes, Israel does deserve to exist’, while also saying that Palestinians deserve to live in peace, freedom and dignity.I would like to repudiate the idea that you cannot be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It's been a really scary time for People in Israel, and it's also been a really scary time for for Jews in this country. And I think some people respond to that kind of danger, whether perceived or real, with fear and anger, or respond to the events of last October with rage and a desire for vengeance on others."
Candace Abdul-Tawwab, another co-lead organizer with Mississippians for Palestine, says she began to better understand the Israel - Palestine conflict in college, where she learned of the struggle to break the decades-long hold of Apartheid in South Africa, and particularly U.S. support for the regime.
Combined with her experience as a lifelong Mississippian, she says her motivation to organize for Palestine took priority over her fears of what retribution she might face.
“Let's talk about all of the atrocities that Black folks have been subjected to in this country, specifically in the South, specifically in the state of Mississippi.”
“The same thing is occurring in Palestine: it’s the not having access to move freely on your land, it's not having access to vote, it's not having access to proper education, being forced to live in certain areas and being heavily policed. Their story is our story. What I have to say is, how could you not stand up and fight for these people?"