On a warm July evening, inside the Comox United Church hall on Vancouver Island, 70 seats were arranged around long tables for guests from the Comox Valley and other parts of B.C. The event began with a land acknowledgment of the unceded and stolen territory of the K’ómoks First Nation, where they were gathered. Then Judy Goldschmidt, one of the organizers, drew an unexpected parallel between the K’ómoks people’s sacred bond to the surrounding waters, mountains, and forests and the Palestinian people’s multi-generational bond to their ancestral olive groves, hills, and valleys.

“Both K’ómoks and Palestinian identities are inseparable from the lands they have protected against systematic displacement, erasure and fragmentation,” said Goldschmidt. “Whether in the Comox Valley or the Levant, the theft of land is an attack on culture, history and life itself.”

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