Socialism 2026 is now underway in Chicago. The four-day conference, organized by Haymarket Books, runs from September 4 through September 7 at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place and advertises more than 100 meetings and workshops.
A previous Jewish Onliner report identified the conference as an organizing hub for campaigns targeting military suppliers, university boards and schools. The programming now underway makes that agenda more explicit. Sessions promote writings by PFLP figures, bring together networks involved in pro-Palestine teacher training, celebrate union divestment from Israel, accuse U.S. and Israeli technology companies of facilitating “genocide,” and describe Israeli prisons as a “death camp.”
Panel Promotes Texts by PFLP Leaders
The September 6 session “Palestinian Revolutionary Thought and the Prisoners’ Movement” asks what the Palestinian left can teach activists today. Its description centers prison writing and recently translated texts by Ahmad Qatamesh and PFLP terrorist Walid Daqqah, who was convicted in 1987 for participating in the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam.
Qatamesh has a lengthy history with the PFLP. In 2019, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency described him as a PFLP leader when reporting his arrest in the West Bank. An Arabic-language profile published by the Vision Center for Political Development states that Qatamesh joined the PFLP in the early 1970s and became active within its ranks, spending 17 years underground engaged in clandestine activity against Israel. The profile also says Israeli authorities accused him in 1992 of leading the PFLP in the West Bank during the First Intifada and belonging to its political bureau.
The panel is sponsored by the People’s Center for Palestine, and its three listed speakers are current PCP staff. The organization identifies Danya al-Saleh as its education director, Jenan Awaida as operations and communications manager, and Ribhi Hussein as program coordinator. PCP describes itself as a “resource and organizing institution” for “Palestinian liberation” and says its publishing work prioritizes prison writing, political theory and Palestinian political thought.
The Palestinian Youth Movement, which sponsors another Socialism 2026 prisoners panel, separately led a campaign for Daqqah’s release and published a 2023 statement titled “Freedom or Martyrdom: Walid Daqqah’s fate is in our hands,” presenting his writings within a broader framework of resistance and liberation.
Awaida’s own public rhetoric adds further context. At the separate 2025 People’s Conference for Palestine, the Anti-Defamation League reported that Awaida called for every sector of society to become a front against Zionism and urged campaigns designed to strike multiple pressure points.
‘Sumud’ Panel Brings K-12 Pro-Palestinian Networks Together
The “Sumud in Praxis” panel brings explicitly pro-Palestine political organizing into the education sphere. Its speakers are Anita Fernández, Zeiad Abbas Shamrouch, Samia Shoman and Jenine Wehbeh.
The Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing describes an ongoing partnership between XITO and MECA’s Teach Palestine Project. The same page uses the “Sumud in Praxis” title for a professional-development institute that trains K–20 educators to connect Indigenous liberation on Turtle Island, the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and pro-Palestine activism.
XITO identifies Fernández as its co-founder and executive director. MECA identifies Shamrouch as its executive director. Shoman is credited as an author of Teach Palestine’s “Teaching Gaza Now” curriculum, while a University of Illinois Chicago profile identifies Wehbeh as a co-coordinator of MECA Teach Palestine.
The curriculum’s framing is explicit. Teach Palestine’s materials say that Hamas’s October 7 attack should not be the starting point for teaching the current war and ask students to consider whether the situation meets the United Nations definition of genocide. In a public interview, Wehbeh said, “We teach to liberate.” The original interview remains publicly available.
Shamrouch’s official MECA statement describes the “Nakba” as unfinished, calls Zionism settler colonialism and Israel apartheid, and invokes a Palestinian “culture of resistance.”
The school-facing work has already generated controversy. The Los Angeles Times reported that Santa Ana Unified School District agreed to terminate a $92,000 contract with XITO after Jewish plaintiffs objected to political statements by one of the institute’s consultants. The settlement shelved three ethnic-studies courses, dissolved the district’s steering committee and required a transparent process with public input before the courses could return.
MECA’s funding relationships also warrant scrutiny. MECA’s own project pages document grants to the Union of Health Work Committees for medical equipment and hospital infrastructure. A 2025 Network Contagion Research Institute report alleged that MECA had fiscal and personnel ties to entities associated with the PFLP, including grants involving UHWC and other organizations.
Panel Celebrates UAW Israel Bonds Divestment
The September 7 panel on “UAW Divestment From Israel Bonds” centers a campaign that already succeeded in moving a major American labor union toward institutional divestment from Israel.
At the UAW’s June 2026 constitutional convention, delegates voted to prohibit UAW funds from being invested in Israel Bonds. The UAW’s official account confirms the vote, while campaign reports from ALAA and Labor for Palestine put the vote at 321–287.
The resolution targeted bonds issued through Development Corporation for Israel, the broker-dealer behind Israel Bonds. The securities are debt issued by the Israeli government. They are not “military bonds” earmarked for a specific weapon or unit. The campaign’s position is that purchasing Israeli government debt constitutes support for the state during wartime.
A broader proposal considered at the convention would have supported workers taking labor action to interrupt weapons production and restricted political endorsements tied to support for weapons to Israel. That proposal did not advance, while the narrower divestment amendment passed.
The panel’s speakers reflect the organizing network behind the vote. Bill Mullen is a professor emeritus and USACBI organizer. Andrew Bergman is identified as a UAW Local 22 member and UAWD co-chair. Sophia Gurule is a UAW Local 2325 trustee and Labor for Palestine organizer, while Michael Letwin is a former Local 2325 president and founding member of Labor for Palestine.
In 2025, Labor for Palestine published a call for a “Worker Intifada” urging workers to use walkouts, protests and strikes.
Panel Says Israel Is Turning Prisons Into a “Death Camp”
The September 7 session “End the Genocide Behind Bars” says Israel is “turning prisons into death camp” and describes “Palestinian political prisoners” as the “Compass of the National Struggle for Palestinian Liberation.”
Unlike the other panels, its speakers are listed only as “Nawaf A.” and “Jenan A.” The session is sponsored by Freedom for Palestinian Political Prisoners and the Palestinian Youth Movement. The conference listing provides no biographies or explanation for the abbreviated names.
The corresponding Action Network campaign identifies PYM as its sponsor.
Panel Accuses U.S.-Israeli Tech Firms of “AI-Powered Genocide”
Another September 6 workshop, “The Deadly Tech Exchange: How Tech Companies are Profiting from Genocide and Anti-Immigrant Violence,” links pro-Palestine activism to campaigns targeting major U.S. and Israeli technology companies and investors.
The panel description says participants will map U.S. and Israeli companies and investors allegedly “fueling the world’s first AI-powered genocide in Gaza,” examine what it calls a “revolving door of tech and capital” between Silicon Valley and Israel’s technology sector, and develop “cross-movement campaigning” against those networks.
Speakers include Izzy Mustafa, co-executive director of the Adalah Justice Project, whose conference biography says the organization challenges “militarism, big tech, and systems of oppression”; Edith Romero; and Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer for 7amleh, an alleged-PFLP linked organization.
A Broader Radical Agenda
The conference’s own mission statement says it seeks to bring together a “wide range of radical politics” and explicitly connects political education with left-wing social movements and organizing.
Elsewhere, the program features sessions titled “Fighting for Trans Liberation in the Midwest: Organizing Under Hostile State Governments,” “Psychic Militancy,” “Radicalizing Labor Unions,” “Are All Cops Bastards?” and “Insurgent Spiritualities for Revolutionary Struggle.”
The result is a conference that places promotion of writings by figures tied to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, pro-Palestine teacher organizing, campaigns targeting Israeli investment and technology, anti-police politics and explicitly militant or revolutionary movements alongside one another under a common socialist banner. Its programming repeatedly presents them as interconnected fronts for transforming schools, unions, corporations and other American institutions.
https://youtu.be/PQ3ygHIDlsM?is=Ui8yyq7CInl26pgw