Report Back: A15 Blockade and Arrests in Eugene, OR

Report from so-called Eugene on the recent April 15th blockade in solidarity with occupied Palestine. Check out a roundup of April 15th actions here.

Amidst a genocide in occupied Palestine, Eugene, OR joined the people of the world to make their demand clear: we want a free Palestine. Despite months of protesting, contacting officials, and boycotting, the governments of the Western world unsurprisingly refuse to listen to the voices of their people and instead continue to enable the violence that facilitates their imperialistic stronghold in the Middle East. On Monday, April 15th, advocates for Palestinian liberation from around the globe participated in economic blockades to shut it down for Palestine

Locals in Eugene, Oregon and surrounding areas participated in this effort, allowing the call for liberation to stretch from Palestine to Oregon. Standing arm in arm on the I-5, over 60 people stopped traffic to halt the flow of commerce. They chanted, sang, and held signs that proclaimed their alignment with a free Palestine and opposition to the global imperialist regimes that instigate oppressive violence against the people of the world.

In response to this action, 6 state agencies (EPD, OPD, SPD, Lane County Sheriffs, and the SWAT team included) showed up with over 127 officers equipped in riot gear and with chemical weapons. While protesters stood in the road, even sitting cross-legged for some time, officers responded by mass arresting everyone present, even those who attempted to comply with their demands and leave the freeway.

Why does a group of people walking onto a road necessitate such a massive response? The answer is glaring, permeating, and insidious. It lives at the forefront of the mind of every person that has ever found themselves at odds with the US regime, and is buried deep inside the hearts of those who survive by assimilation or domination inside it.

We know.

The State will do anything, sacrifice anyone, to maintain control, and dominate people who demand, by their actions or very existence, an end to white supremacist, colonial rule.

62 arrests were made and the protesters were kept overnight, some for over 30 hours, for this call to end a genocide that has already martyred over 30,000 Palestinians.

Every protester that was arrested has been charged with disorderly conduct in the second degree, further underscoring the desperation of the State to maintain control.

The United States continues to send billions of tax-payer dollars to the Israeli occupation forces for their brutal assault against the indigenous Palestinians; a violence that echos that of the country’s own treatment of the indigenous people of Turtle Island.

While the State remains strong in its support of violence, the people remain strong in their support of liberation. The goal of this global solidarity effort was to shut down the economy that funds the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine.

The call for a free Palestine is a call to end the global imperialistic regime that uses violence and repression to control the people, and subsequently their resources. From the bombed and blood-stained streets of Palestine to the swept and surveilled streets of Eugene, an imperialistic state will always use the threat and execution of violence to force complicity in their crimes.

Eugene was not the only city to see this increase in state repression and violence. On the same day, mass arrests were made against protesters at Columbia University; in Philadelphia, Connecticut, and New York; and across the country. The Eugene Police, the New York Police, and the Israeli occupation forces are all arms of the same imperialistic war machine committing genocide and oppressing the very citizens they claim to protect and serve.

Free Them All: Oregon to Palestine Prisoner Solidarity

⁨Palestine is not unique but perhaps exemplary among struggles for liberation. The prisoner movement holds the immediate goal of a united field of struggle, whether clandestine armed struggle or popular mass movement. Situated in the belly of the beast, we in the US recognize the carceral nature of settler-colonial occupation and imperialist state repression, and elevate the crucial call for freedom to all Palestinian prisoners. The importance of this call and this goal cannot be overstated. Imprisonment in occupied Palestine is ubiquitous, affecting everyone: roughly 20% of Palestinians have been imprisoned by the Zionist occupiers and every Palestinian family has a loved one or knows a loved one who has been imprisoned by the occupiers. The object of incarceration is likewise collective, affecting every form of political, social, or community commitment as a way of collectively punishing an entire population for resistance against occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and using imprisonment to actively further these genocidal aims.

We have all seen the numbers: over 9,500 Palestinians imprisoned since October 7th, including 275 women, 520 children, 66 journalists, and 5,168 orders of administrative detention without charges or trial, and at least 16 Palestinian prisoners tortured to death. Among these are leaders of the Palestinian prisoner movement, and the number of Gazan detainees who are held in military camps and forcibly disappeared is unknown. We have all seen the images of Gazan prisoners run over by tanks alive with their hands cuffed behind their back. We have all seen the images of hundreds of Gazan prisoners stripped naked and cuffed before field executions, including in the yards of besieged and destroyed hospitals.

We who struggle in the belly of the beast for the liberation of Palestine and an end to imperialism, see the aims of imprisonment in occupied Palestine as collective punishment for resistance and as a tool of occupation and displacement. We see those same aims here, too, where members of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army are being killed by the small tortures of prison accumulated over a lifetime. We see those same aims here, too, where where Leonard Peltier is still not free, where Mumia Abu-Jamal is still not free. We see those same aims here, too, where where dozens of our friends and comrades are locked up for standing up against anti-Blackness and the police state during the George Floyd Uprisings. We see those same aims here, too, where where the Zionist-collaborating terrorist police in Georgia are still imprisoning our friends and comrades for fighting for their lives against Cop City.

Lastly, we know that despite the universality of imprisonment as a weapon of warfare and occupation, it is also –– since wherever there is repression there is rebellion –– a school of resistance, even amidst the most severe forms of brutality and technology of death. In occupied Palestine –– like in the H-Blocks in occupied Ireland, the F-type prisons in Turkey, and everywhere from Attica to San Quentin, from Guantánamo to Pelican Bay –– prisons are a place of political and militant development and training, where all of the resistance is represented following and in turn leading the outside struggles for liberation.

Our 24-32 hours in jail are nothing in compared to what political prisoners all around the prison world experience, but for those of us for whom this was the first experience in a cage, we re-affirm our commitment to the struggle for freedom for Palestinian prisoners and prisoners everywhere, against the police and prisons, against the occupation, against American imperialism, against capitalism, for a better world the slight chance for which we will not fail to seize.⁩

The people of Eugene unite with the people of the world in this clear demand: We want Palestine to live, and we want Palestine to be free. 

photo: Stop the Sweeps Eugene