HCW4P organizers, Dr. Sam Sharp and Sulwa Nubani, referenced the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by Israel during a Disability Justice is Liberation panel discussion in early 2025. “We’re focusing on being sick from genocide because … we as a community have become sick from genocide,” said Nubani, a Palestinian-American psychiatry physician who also organizes with Doctors Against Genocide.

Growing up in Palestine with a giving and loving culture with a “collective approach,” Nubani said the word “mutual aid” wasn’t in her lexicon until she came to the U.S. “Growing up in Palestine,” she said, when she ran out of sugar, she could go “knock on my neighbor’s door and get sugar.”

Nubani went on to say that accessibility is “such an odd thing” because “the systems we put in place makes it that we have to even come up with the word accessibility rather than it be a natural construct.”

“If somebody was at a bus stop and could not get onto a bus … The bus is going to be late … men and women will stop there, carry the individual, carry their supplies and put them on that bus. You bet that bus is not going to leave without them. So we will find a way. And the way we find that is through community.”

Nubani said community is the answer: “the thing is about colonialism and fascism and imperial world is to individualize you actually almost to a sickeningly pathological level, because then you focus on the you and not the US, the complete antithesis and the complete opposite of colonialist, colonial ideas is community.”

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