The Pantagraph · Bloomington, Illinois · 30 May 2021
CP-2021-003
Rally seeks free Palestine
About 60 gather at museum to protest Israeli occupation
Lenore Sobota, Bloomington
Transcribed from the clipping
“BLOOMINGTON — Noor Alsaqri and her sister Salma of Normal grew up hearing stories from their grandparents of how they were forced out of their homes in Palestine in 1948. They became refugees in Jordan with the formation of Israel and eventually came to the United States. ‘They left without anything,’ said Noor Alsaqri.
‘It was called Nakba, “the catastrophe.”’… ‘I was tortured in an Israeli prison. I wasn’t allowed to go back to Palestine to attend my sister’s funeral.’… ‘When I die, my kid will carry the flag.
When my kids die, their kids will carry the flag until Palestine is free,’ said Dabeet… Much attention has been focused on the area recently because of rockets fired into Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas, and Israeli airstrikes that they said targeted Hamas sites but included residential buildings.
The 11 days of hostilities, which ended with a ceasefire on May 20, killed more than 230 Palestinians, including 65 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, along with 12 people in Israel, including a 5-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl, the Associated Press reported.
But those speaking at the rally said atrocities and assaults on human dignity against Palestinians go back much further… Mahmoud Ali of Normal, one of the organizers of the rally, said, ‘This is not about talking against Jewish people. This is about the injustice happening there.’ Ali said, ‘I’m against what Hamas does,’ but he also said Palestinians ‘are out of patience.’
Those attending the rally chanted, ‘Free Palestine,’ ‘Stop funding genocide’ and ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’”
Context added by this archive
Filed under a 1991 caption on the microfilm. The story itself is May 2021: the eviction case at Sheikh Jarrah, the ceasefire of 20 May, 230 Palestinians dead, and a Twitter handle in the reporter’s contact line. Corrected by thirty years. The word genocide reaches the page as a chant the reporter writes down. Nakba is in quotation marks, in 2021.
Cite this clipping
"Rally seeks free Palestine," The Pantagraph, 30 May 2021, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2021-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2021-003
This clipping is read closely in the section below
More from the 2020s
- Joe and Bibi talked, but what's it mean? Biden and Israel, the scorecard.St. Louis Jewish Light · 24 February 2021
- Phoenix family shares recipe for rice dishThe Arizona Republic · 28 April 2021
- Cooking TogetherChicago Tribune · 7 May 2021
- Palestinians fear loss of homes as evictions loomThe Palm Beach Post · 11 May 2021
- Beset by virus, Gaza’s hospitals now struggle with woundedKentucky New Era · 15 May 2021
- Biden supports cease-fireDaily Citizen · 18 May 2021
- All 202 clippings from the 2020s →
In these collections
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2021-003.
Read in: Nakba, in quotation marks, for 38 years
Everything printed in 2021 · Printed on this day · See it in the archive reel · Full text of every clipping · Dataset