Several dozen Somerville residents gathered in the early morning of Feb. 28 to celebrate a year of daily Somerville High School standouts in support of Palestine – the longest-running pro-Palestine protest at a high school in the country.
The standouts, which have been attended by students, educators and community members, were started in February 2024 by Jamal Halawa, a Palestinian who teaches English as a second language at the school.
“The city wasn’t saying anything about this genocide. The school department wasn’t saying anything about this genocide,” Halawa said. “I wanted to do something.”
Over time, people started joining, and the protests have kept up. Each day they gather from 7:15 to 7:45 a.m., before the first school bell rings.
“It’s a solid thing and it’s become a routine,” Halawa said. “So many people drive by on their way to work – the same people give us love everyday, and new people give us love everyday.”
Between Oct. 7, 2023, and May 29, 2024, the standouts on Highland Avenue were found to be one of the top 10 longest lasting pro-Palestine protests in the country, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Community members continued standing out through the end of the 2023-2024 school year and began again when the 2024-2025 school year started.
“We want to keep Palestine and the plight of Palestinians in people’s hearts and minds, and we also want to point out to people that the struggle there is linked to struggles for liberation all over the world, including here in Somerville,” Halawa said. “Immigrants are under attack, queer folks, trans folks, and all these struggles for liberty are intertwined.”
Another goal of the standouts, Halawa said, is to remind people of the role Americans play and that “there is no such thing as neutrality.”
“Our tax dollars are going toward killing Palestinian kids. Our tax dollars are funding an apartheid state, and we are complicit,” Halawa said.
Arriving at the one-year anniversary is a “catch-22,” he said, because “while we’re proud, we also can’t believe we have to keep doing it.”
In Cambridge, a group of residents have held a Black Lives Matter standout Fridays since the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. Though moving from between Harvard and Porter squares to The Port, the informal group has been at it for 250 weeks. “The last time I looked, there was still a lot of injustice in the world. It didn’t just end in 2020,” a member of that standout said in a 2022 video by an Emerson student, Maddie Khaw. “So we always have work to do.”
Though the Somerville High School standouts have experienced some counterprotesters over the past year, for the most part participants have seen “displays of love,” said Leyla Abarca-Gresh, a senior and the founder of Somerville High for Palestine.
“It very much became a community thing. I started looking forward to waking up every morning, talking to the regulars, and just all having time together before school,” Abarca-Gresh said.
There’s no leadership structure to the group; Halawa said the standouts will continue as long as people want to show up.
“I asked, ‘Should we take a break or anything?’ and they all looked at me like I was crazy,” Halawa said. “It doesn’t look like we’re stopping anytime soon.”
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