[News] Elbit Systems - Localizing the Conflict

[Anti-Imperialist News]

scheerpost.com <https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/09/localizing-the-conflict/>
Localizing the Conflict
November 9, 2024
------------------------------
*Activist spraying graffiti on an Elbit Systems America facility in
Merrimack, New Hampshire, Nov. 20, 2023. (Courtesy Maen Hammad)*

*By Corinna G. Barnard / Consortium News
<https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/07/localizing-the-conflict/>*

*Part one of this story is here.
<https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/30/doing-time-for-palestine/>*

*P*aige Belanger stood with a megaphone on the bed of a white pickup truck
outside the town hall in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at a
Palestine-solidarity rally on Oct. 10, 2023.

A few dozen people had gathered with Palestine flags, flaunting keffiyehs
and holding up signs saying: “When People Are Occupied, Resistance is
Justified,” and “End Aid to Israel.” They chanted: “From Iraq to Palestine,
Occupation Is a Crime.”

Great Barrington has a population of about 7,000. *Smithsonian Magazine*
<https://crisseyfarm.com/news/2013/5/7/smithsonian-magazine-names-great-barrington-best-small-town-in-america#:~:text=Smithsonian%20Magazine%20names%20Great%20Barrington,say%20about%20the%20Berkshire%20town:>
honored
it in 2012 as “the best small town in America.”

Across the street a small counter-protest group formed, holding Israeli
flags.

Many of those on one side of the street knew someone on the other. Some of
the people in the facing groups were long standing members of the same
community. Some had gone to the same synagogue.

A few from the Israeli side crossed the street to argue with those on the
Palestinian side.

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” a member of the Palestine faction told an
envoy from the Israel camp. “But apartheid is apartheid.”

In 2021 a similar protest and counter protest occurred in Great Barrington
at that same place during a surge of Israeli violence against Gaza that May.

The street had been divided in the same way; Palestine supporters on one
side, Israel supporters on the other. There was arguing and taunting then.
But this time, two years later, the hostility was more intense.

Some from the pro-Israel contingent mingled in an aggressive manner,
filming people in the Palestine rally, where Paige Belanger spoke.

A photo of Belanger from that day now appears on her profile on Canary
Mission, the Israeli-intelligence-run
<https://www.thenation.com/article/world/canary-mission-israel-covert-operations/>
doxxing
site. (In March the Israeli Cabinet abolished the ministry that was
reportedly in charge of Canary Mission and moved its functions
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-14/ty-article/.premium/israel-to-scrap-superfluous-intelligence-ministry-slightly-slimming-bloated-government/0000018e-3999-d2fd-a1fe-3df9ac7a0000>
to
the Prime Minister’s Office.)

“All of us here know that Palestine has been under an illegal and genocidal
occupation for over 75 years,” Belanger yelled into her megaphone.

While expressing “great revolutionary love for the people of
Palestine,” Belanger went on to devote her speech to the presence of a
major weapons company there where she stood, in Berkshire County, and its
connection to “human suffering.”

“In this county, our second largest employer is the military industrial
giant General Dynamics,”  she said, referring to a weapons facility about
20 miles north in Pittsfield, her hometown.

Pittsfield General Dynamics’ website
<https://gdmissionsystems.com/about-us/major-locations/pittsfield> boasts
about its employment appeal at the top of its homepage:

“Working at our Pittsfield facility provides the opportunity to make your
mark by engineering technology used on the world’s most advanced ships and
submarines. You would have a chance to do work that matters, and then log
off to enjoy all the outdoor activities.”

Belanger was out to refute that pleasant message.

“General Dynamics is not a job creator here in the Berkshires,” she told
the rally in Great Barrington,

“it is a corporation that funnels the life of our community into the
destruction of others. Take a look at General Dynamics’ stock value and how
it has shot up in the past few days. War is profitable. Genocide is
profitable. Wealth is built on the back of human suffering.”

Two days later, Belanger was up in Pittsfield, outside  General Dynamics.
<https://gdmissionsystems.com/about-us/major-locations/pittsfield> Once
again she was yelling.

“The fight against genocide is in our own backyards,” she began her Oct.
12, 2023, speech. “I will say it again. The fight against genocide is in
our own backyards.”
*Specific Targets*

Belanger wanted to harness public outrage over the U.S.-backed Israeli
genocide and aim it at specific targets for specific objectives; a weapons
facility, in order to scar its social acceptability; a university
administration, in order to get it to divest its huge opaque endowment from
Israeli companies benefiting from Israel’s illegal occupation of
Palestine.

She doubted that broadly focused street demonstrations aimed at changing
the positions of the White House and lawmakers in Congress would do much;
at least not on their own.

For years, the politicians running the country had proven themselves
impervious to the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Trying
to persuade them to help stop Israeli war crimes in Gaza, in her view, was
like appealing to the morality of a criminal enterprise.

She believed that tactically speaking, a strict reliance on lawful street
protests would sap vital energy from other necessary forms of protest, such
as direct action.

Walsh was in full agreement a year ago.

They still see it that way now, if not more so.

“Zionism and its U.S. support will not be defeated at the ballot box, the
police-permitted parade, the performative die-in, the hummus aisle, or
through petty vandalism,” says Walsh. “Of course a diversity of tactics
ranging from boycotts to mass rallies to clandestine militancy is
necessary.”

Belanger, Walsh and two others, Sophie Ross and Bridget Shergalis, are the
so-called Merrimack 4.

On Nov. 14 they will begin a 60-day sentence for a direct action they took
on Nov. 20, 2023, against a building in Merrimack, New Hampshire, that
houses a U.S. subsidiary of leading Israeli weapons maker Elbit Systems.

In the aftermath of their plea agreement reached in September, Belanger and
Walsh reflected on the Elbit Merrimack action in emails with *Consortium
News.*

Walsh — who in June was the subject of a *Wall Street Journal* opinion
piece, *“The Making of an American Radical”
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-making-of-an-american-radical-students-protesters-politics-ae04326d>*
—
criticizes some in the leadership of the pro-Palestine movement for
disavowing militancy “in favor of liberal reformism as the only ‘correct’
tactic.”

By contrast, she praises the college encampments last spring that took more
militant actions and called on universities to divest from investments in
Israeli companies.

“The surge of militancy during the encampments showed how the
self-appointed movement leadership is tailing the masses in terms of how
ready they are to escalate,” she says.
*Lost Illusions *

Walsh, now 20, was already jaded
<https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/stan-politics-ed-markey-and-palestine/> about
electoral politics in high-school.

After heady success with an online re-election effort for Ed Markey (D-MA)
as a sophomore (she talks about that “stan” campaign here
<https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/stan-politics-ed-markey-and-palestine/>)
she realized something about the U.S. senator after he was back in office.
She didn’t like his votes on Palestine/Israel. And there was no way to get
him to shift, despite all the effort she had poured into his campaign.

Markey’s ultimate allegiance, she wrote in *Mondoweiss*,
<https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/stan-politics-ed-markey-and-palestine/> was
to the “Massachusetts Democratic establishment and the pro-Israel lobby.”
Working for him, she came to feel, had made her complicit in Israel’s
oppression of Palestine.

She concluded that essay by saying:

“History shows us that direct action, protest, and internationalist
solidarity are far more effective strategies than appealing to the morality
of elected officials who are in the pocket of the military-industrial
complex.”

Appealing to elected officials was over.

Belanger’s path to direct action, in a sense, begins with a book.

In 2013, Belanger graduated from Hobart and William Smith, a private
liberal arts college in Geneva, New York, where she completed a double
major in history and international relations and a minor in German. She
says she was poised for a career in diplomacy or the NGO sphere.

“I had always identified as some sort of Marxist, but I was profoundly
radicalized in my senior year of college after reading Walter Rodney’s *How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa*, which really opened my eyes to the realities
of imperialism and neo-colonialism in a way that I hadn’t understood
before, having studied Marxism mostly in its historical context in Europe.”

The political career she had envisioned suddenly appeared to “serve the
interests of U.S. imperialism, and that academia, the NGO sphere, and the
world of U.S. diplomacy were all dead ends that could never be
revolutionary.”

Not knowing what to do, she says she “wound up waitressing and bartending
throughout her twenties instead of pursuing a career.” During that time she
lived in California.

In 2020, Belanger moved back home to her hometown, Pittsfield, in western
Massachusetts, where she met James Cox Chambers Jr, aka Fergie Chambers,
the estranged member of the family that owns the privately held,
Atlanta-based global conglomerate Cox Enterprises.

Belanger and Chambers began working on political projects and looking for
ways to advance a revolutionary movement.

Now living in Tunisia, Chambers has been funding the Merrimack 4’s defense,
says Belanger, after he “promised very publicly to pay all legal fees of
anyone who chose to take direct action against Elbit.”
*Punishment by Other Means *

The 60-day sentence that lies ahead in Valley Street Jail in Manchester,
New Hampshire, represents the official portion of the Merrimack 4’s
punishment, which also includes
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/09/merrimack-4-defeat-felony-charges/> “a
24-month suspended sentence for three years, and a stay-away order from
every Elbit Systems facility, among other conditions.”

It follows what seems like a nearly  year-long punishment by other means.

“State repression” is the phrase Calla Walsh uses for it.

“The process was the punishment,” Walsh says. “The hardest part was all the
months of waiting, isolation, and fear of a lifetime in prison, which is
over now. Every day in jail I know I’ll be a day closer to getting back in
the streets with the movement.”

Belanger says their first  impulse after the initial arrests of the first
three, on Nov. 20, 2023, was to politicize the case.

“I remember saying that the legal system had become our new battleground.
This perception was immediately shattered. The nature of the state
repression forced our silence.  It was incredibly frustrating.”

At the time of Belanger’s belated arrest in January, two months after the
action, she was in a Nashua, New Hampshire, courthouse. She had traveled
there from her home in Massachusetts to provide court support to the other
three during a hearing. She had no idea that she would wind up in the
cross-hairs.

“I was never notified of a warrant,” she says, “and I had been to that
court before and not encountered any issues. I’ve since learned that it’s
very difficult, if not impossible, to see if you have an open warrant. You
basically need to be arrested to find out.”

“I was taken from there to a holding cell at the courthouse, then to the
police station where my arrest was processed, and then held overnight on
preventative detention. The bail commissioner explained to me that, since I
lived out of state and they were only able to arrest me because I had
showed up in New Hampshire, that I posed a flight risk, and his own job was
on the line if I weren’t to show up to court, so he had no choice but to
have me held in jail overnight.

I had a hearing the next day, which I did from Zoom in the jail. There was
a conflict of interest with every available public defender, as they had
represented the three others in their bail hearings, so I had to represent
myself at the hearing.

The prosecution initially posed a $20k bail for me, but I was able to argue
it down to $5k. Had it been $20k, I would have had to remain in prison for
much longer as that money was gathered, because New Hampshire has a
cash-only bail policy and no bail bonds, so you have to post the full
amount in cash to be bailed out.”

For a while Walsh’s passport — her only form of identification since she
doesn’t drive — was confiscated. So was her phone, she says, as the New
Hampshire Department of Justice tried, but ultimately failed, to get
permission to search it.

For months, a no-contact order set as a bail condition prevented
co-defendants from seeing each other.

“No-contact orders are typically only used when there is a threat of
witness intimidation or violence, which obviously there was not,” says
Walsh. “Our lawyers worked together to get the orders dropped, which
happened at the end of May 2024. We’ve also seen no-contact orders used in
the political repression in Atlanta, where defendants have been vaguely
banned from contact with anyone associated with the ‘Defend the Atlanta
Forest’ movement.”

Belanger adds: “It made it so we could not be there for each other as we
went through a difficult shared experience. When our no-contact order
dropped, Calla and I reunited within hours.”

Two months later, in July, Belanger discovered that police in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, were looking for her. They had a warrant for her arrest. It
was an error, tied to the old warrant in New Hampshire, from which she had
already been freed on bail. Nonetheless, Belanger became a temporary
fugitive as she tried to find a lawyer to resolve the mixup between
authorities in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

“I was in a visceral state of fight or flight throughout this whole
experience. I felt like I could be visited by police and taken to jail at
every second,” says Belanger. “Even just driving, I would think about being
pulled over for some other reason and then taken into custody, and not
being able to tell anyone that it was happening.”

Looking back on the Elbit Merrimack action, Belanger says she

“wanted desperately to try and make a material impact to stop the genocide
I was watching intensify by the day. I felt and still do feel that people
in the imperial core need to put their own bodies on the line to open a
front against imperialism here at home, although I have definitely learned
some very important lessons about how that should be done from engaging in
struggle the way that I did and dealing with the fallout of it.”

Walsh says that while they are in Valley Street Jail they can only receive
books sent from Amazon or Barnes and Nobles, “so we will be sharing our
Amazon wish lists.”

The list of writers on Walsh’s list are Samir Amin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter
Rodney, Gerald Horne. Also, “Soviet fiction, and a lot of works about the
Irish Revolution.”

Belanger says she’s “trying not to fill my reading list exclusively with
dense political non-fiction, although I do have some books I’ve been
meaning to get to about Marx’s concept of alienation.”

Belanger is studying herbalism and while incarcerated she plans to read
some “herbalism books so I can still feel connected to the Earth while I’m
locked away in concrete.”

Corinna Barnard

*Corinna Barnard*, deputy editor of *Consortium News*, formerly worked in
editing capacities for *Women’s eNews*, *The Wall Street Journal* and Dow
Jones Newswires. At the start of her career she was managing editor for the
magazine *Nuclear Times,* which covered the antinuclear war movement.
<https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2023/07/25/how-30000-californians-staged-prison-hunger-strike/>
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