Blockades, Demonstrations, and Direct Actions Continue in Solidarity With Palestine

photo header: Alissa Azar, NullAgent, and @Wearedissenters

Hundreds of thousands of people hit the streets this weekend, the latest in a wave of demonstrations in solidarity with those living in occupied Palestine, as the death toll from Israeli attacks reached 10,000, (almost half of them children), and Gaza City became completely surrounded by Israeli forces. Communications have once again been cut off, water and sewage systems have collapsed, and Israeli troops on Tuesday night began to enter the city with “full force.”

According to one report, “Almost 70 percent of the Gaza population is internally displaced, 710,000 of them sheltering in UNRWA facilities. Gaza’s Ministry of Interior says that almost 900,000 people are still in northern Gaza, where most of the armed clashes between resistance fighters and Israeli soldiers are taking place.”

Mass demonstrations took place across the United States and beyond. Tens of thousands rallied in San Francisco, New York, and many other cities, while an estimated 100,000 marched and rallied in Washington DC.

Port and Weapons Blockades Spread

As thousands marched against the war and occupation, direct action campaigns also began to take shape. On Thursday, November 2nd, protesters blocked a freeway in Durham, North Carolina for several hours, demanding a ceasefire and an end to the occupation. Then on Friday, November 3rd, hundreds of protesters rallied in Oakland, California and attempted to shut down a ship carrying weapons headed for Israel. As one report wrote:

For over 9 hours, community members demanding a ceasefire in the Israeli war against Gaza at Berth 20 at the Port of Oakland delayed the Cape Orlando, a US military supply vessel bound for Israel. The blockage escalated, and protestors occupied the berth. Three protestors locked themselves to the ladder leading onto the ship contributing heavily to the delay of the ship. After police forcefully moved in, the three locked-down protestors were detained by the Coast Guard, and are still in their custody. Currently over 300 community members are protesting directly outside the vessel in different sites of the berth. After police and Coast Guard moved in several times on the occupation, the ship departed under heavy pressure.

On November 4th in San Francisco, California over 100 “healthcare workers from San Francisco General Hospital and UCSF walked off the job” in solidarity with those in occupied Palestine and to condemn attempts by management and officials to make workers “remain silent about the massacres and loss of life caused by US supported Israel.” According to a report on Indybay:

Over 100 healthcare workers walked out at San Francisco General Hospital and rallied to demand an end to the massive criminal bombing of the people of Gaza and the genocide of Palestinians. Their anger and pain over the attacks on hospitals and healthcare workers who are taking care of the injured was powerful as they recounted the stories of workers under these conditions.

On November 5th, protesters converged on the Port of Tacoma, again blockading the same ship targeted by demonstrators in Oakland. Responding to online calls for a blockade, hundreds converged on the Tacoma port, forming a massive picket, as Indigenous demonstrators, as Alissa Alizar reported on social media, “…successfully blocked off [the] shipping container from getting to the ship.”

As one report noted:

Monday’s protest lasted more than 13 hours and included kayaks and other small boats which blocked the Cape Orlando from leaving. Hundreds of protesters were supported by large numbers of other sympathetic residents who have donated food, weather-resistant clothing and tarps to help sustain those marching.

While there have been no reports of protesters again boarding the vessel, there were reports of at least two workers who have refused to handle materiel headed to Israel in solidarity with the protests.

In Barcelona, “dockworkers…refuse[d] to load or unload ships bound for Israel,” while in St. Charles, Missouri, protesters also organized a blockade of a Boeing weapons plant. A report on TruthOut wrote:

This morning, over 75 youth activists blocked all entrances to Boeing Building 598, a major weapons manufacturing company located in St. Charles, Missouri. Bringing together members from at least five different local and national grassroots groups, the action aimed to disrupt Boeing’s delivery of more than 1,000 bombs to Israel.

Organizers used their bodies to physically block the three separate entrances to the Boeing 598 bomb facility beginning at 7 a.m., before the first workers at the plant arrived…After two hours of resistance and harassment by a Boeing employee — who Tang told Truthout created a “Boeing Freedom” sign — the building’s representatives announced that they would shut down the third entrance to the facility where trucks and shipments enter and exit. “That felt like a win to us because they weren’t sending out any bombs today,” Tang told Truthout.

Finally, protesters in Illinois held a picket in front of the home of Congresswoman “Jan Schakowsky…blockading a main thorough street…in Evanston, IL” for several hours, demanding a ceasefire.

More protests are called against Boeing in the Pacific Northwest area on Wednesday.

Sabotage and Direct Actions Continue

Along with mass protests and blockades, anonymous communiques posted online claimed credit for various sabotage actions. In Montreal, a post from MTL Counter-Info reported:

A banner was hung in front of the building where Mélanie Joly’s office is (225 Chabanel O., Montreal). Red paint was poured, and the list of the names of the Palestinians killed by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (produced by Palestine’s Health ministry) was left in front of the door of the building.

Canada, yet again guilty of genocide

It is said by some that Gaza is the biggest prison in the world. We fully agree with such a description, although it is obviously now a euphemism, since Gaza has become an extermination camp. Blocking water, food, medicine, electricity, fuel and internet to a population wholly dependent on imports and international aid, while carpet bombing them, can only produce one outcome. You can avoid the word as much as you please, but the reality is this : the Israeli government is committing a genocide, in full view and with your full support, Mélanie Joly, Justin Trudeau and the rest of the parasitic invertebrates that supposedly represent our will and our interests.

The international network of complicity

By the time this statement is released the latest phase of the  genocide will have killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. This number includes entire families, teachers, doctors, journalists, students, drivers, nurses, street vendors, artists and so on. The colonial Israeli state tests the world’s threshold on crimes against humanity with every passing day. Canada might not be the one who is  dropping a thousand bombs daily in Gaza, or handing out assault rifles to settlers bent on annexation and shooting families. However, Israel wouldn’t be able to do so without the unrelenting support of the imperialist states of the “global north”. Israel wouldn’t even exist today if it wasn’t continually armed, financed, and legitimized by the imperialist powers of Europe, some of their former colonies like Canada and Australia, and the hegemonic empire of the US.

Bound together militarily by NATO, and economically through trade agreements and forums like the G7, this imperial coalition fosters its alliance with the fascist state of Israel as a way to keep a military fortress in this historically strategic region. This alliance is crucial to the destabilization strategy put forward by the US, which seeks to prevent the peoples and the states of the region that are hostile to US hegemony from uniting themselves in an anti-imperialist struggle. Israel is vital to the US empire, which is essential to Canadian power. Mainstream medias, held by capitalist conglomerates or states, work hand in hand with this coalition to legitimize the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by disseminating the dehumanizing fascist discourse of the Israeli government.

…

We stand with a liberated Palestine, from the river to the sea

As citizens of the settler colonial state of Canada, our immediate task is not to deliberate on the legitimacy of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, but rather to help the Palestinian struggle for self-determination by striking Israel’s international network of complicity. It implies overturning our own imperialist states, attacking our governments and blocking the capitalist production and exportation of goods to Israel. Weapons manufacturers supplying Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people must be blocked, trashed and shamed. You can find the ones closest to you on Worldbeyondwar.org (see their “Canada: Stop Arming Israel” campaign).

Calling for the enforcement of international or humanitarian law is an hopeless endeavor. As long as the US and it’s lackeys like “Canada” remain the dominant powers of an international order based on capitalism and imperialism, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians will go on, no matter how many millions decry it. This is not an opinion but simply a description of the actual situation. Only a popular and international uprising, employing militant means and defiant methods, has the potential to overturn the international network of complicity. That is our solidarity.

Solidarity forever, intifada everywhere.

Read the full action report here.

According to a communique posted to Indybay.org, anarchists claimed responsibility for the following actions:

Heartbroken, raging, yet tenderly hopeful, we began a series of actions across multiple Bay Area cities in unconditional solidarity with Palestine. We attacked four targets, one financial, one military, one corporate, and one tech:

1.) Under the surveillace of Transamerica building security across the street, we smashed the windows of HSBC for maintaining business relations with more than a dozen companies selling weapons and technology to the Israeli military.
2.) With personnel still inside, we smashed the windows of a US military recruitment office because the US is Israel’s primary source of military support.
3.) We smashed the windows of a Starbucks for their repression of pro-Palestine unionized workers.
4.) Sneaking past their security, we drenched 8 Cruise cars with red paint for being a subsidiary of General Motors, which has offices in Israel and is invested in Mobileye, an Isreali self-driving car surveillance technology company.

These attacks are also a continuation of our ongoing revenge for Banko Brown, in solidarity with Sean “Tucan” Monterrosa and Tortuguita, and in response to the call from Filipino/a/x comrades asking anarchists in the US to memorialize Jennifer “Ganda” Laude.

Read the full communique here.

Another claim of responsibility posted to Indybay.org on November 2nd took credit for smashing “seven windows at the “alameda county” courthouse,” in Oakland, California. Not to be outdone, on the same day in so-called Minneapolis, according to a communique posted to Abolition Media:

On November 2, 3 years 5 months since the colonized and enslaved masses of these lands brought the u.s.a. to its knees, the local administrators of settlerism in occupied Mni Sota Makoce–city council of so-called ‘minneapolis’–voted to approve a replacement site for the 3rd Precinct.

Located half a mile away from that fateful intersection where a three-day siege ended in beautiful triumph over the anti-Black pig power structure, the new precinct, at 2633 Minnehaha Ave, is being rebranded as a “Community Safety Center.”

Inspired by BRB on the west coast, Anti-Colonial Action Brigade (ACAB) paid a visit to the site early morning November 6. We tagged the building with ‘MNI SOTA TO GAZA,’ ‘OFF THE PIGS,’ ‘ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS,’ ‘FREE PALESTINE,’ ‘UPRISING 2 INTIFADA,’ ‘FUCK THE POLICE,’ FUCK ZIONISM,’ ‘FUCK 12,’ ‘DEATH TO AMERIKA,’ and smashed one window.

As the US backed carnage continues unabated, anger is only growing on the streets with more demonstrations and actions being called as the war in Gaza intensifies.