They Got 60 Days in Jail for Protesting Israel’s Largest Arms Maker — and Say That’s a “Huge Victory”

Activists target the Elbit Systems offices in Merrimack, N.H., blocking entrances and painting the facility red, on Nov. 20, 2023. Photo: Maen Hammad

In mid-November, four young women will start two-month jail sentences for an action attempting to halt operations last November at a weapons factory in Merrimack, New Hampshire, operated by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer.

It could have been far worse for the Merrimack 4, as the women are called by fellow activists. New Hampshire prosecutors had originally charged them with multiple felonies carrying sentences up to 37 years — an extreme overreach given that the defendants were alleged to have engaged in trespass and minor property damage at the facility. 

After a drawn out process, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office eventually dropped the felony charges and the co-defendants pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief and criminal trespass. Alongside jail time, they received a 24-month suspended sentence and a stay-away order from every Elbit Systems facility, including 6 factories.

The Merrimack 4 are not worried about 60 days in jail. Or, as two of them told me, they keep their situation in perspective. 

“I’ve talked with friends from Palestine who’ve been arrested and interrogated and tortured in prisons,” said Calla Walsh, 20, a co-founder of Palestine Action U.S. She contrasted her own sentence with the Israeli practice of detaining Palestinians indefinitely in “administrative detention” without trial: “At least we know how long we’ll be in for.”

The activists’ concern, rather, is that the wrong lessons will be taken from their cases. What they don’t want is for movement participants to look at their sentences and shy away from escalation and direct action. There remains, they said, an urgent need to shut down the production and circulation of arms deployed in the ongoing atrocities against Palestine and Lebanon.

The action in November last year, less than two months after Israel’s war on Gaza started, was part of a campaign, under the banner of Palestine Action U.S., where autonomous groups around the country targeted Elbit for demonstrations. In Merrimack, activists blockaded the road leading to the Elbit facility, threw red paint on the building’s facade, broke several windows, and released green, white, and red smoke flares from the roof — Palestine’s national colors. 

“Our action has only become understood as more logical and reasonable and righteous.”

“I think our action, when it happened, was seen as illogical and dangerous. And the more that the genocide has gone on and the more that the movement in the U.S. has grown in militancy, especially with the student encampments,” said Walsh, “I think our action has only become understood as more logical and reasonable and righteous, while also acknowledging we did not engage in these tactics perfectly.” 

“We don’t want anyone to replicate what we did,” Walsh told me. “We want them to learn from it and whatever they’re going to do, do it more effectively than us.”

Rupturing Supply Chains

Questions of strategy and tactics hang heavily over a movement that, a year into Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide, is run through with desperation. Efforts like the “Uncommitted” movement to put pressure on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign have, while impressive in garnering numbers, extracted no concessions from the Democratic nominee. 

Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses, although powerful in their politicizing and radicalizing effects, were swept away with violent police raids, with participants facing unprecedented campus repression. 

Countless mass marches, boycotts, and open letters calling for a ceasefire and an end to U.S. complicity have been met with silence, if not outright disdain. Money and arms continue to flow, without conditions, to Israel’s expansionist campaign. 

It is only reasonable that activists would search for ways to directly rupture the supply chains on which Israel’s war machine runs.

Paige Belanger, 33, an herbalist and co-founder of Palestine Action U.S. and one of the Merrimack 4, said, “Most of the response in the United States was an emphasis on these nonviolent, peaceful protests that were really toothless calls to those in power, to somehow appeal to their morality and change the way that weapons were imported into Israel to commit genocide on the Palestinians.”

Consequences

For the Palestine Action U.S. founders, the need for escalation and direct action was and remains clear.

“There’s no peaceful protest that’s going to appeal to the fascist morality enough to change it and create a better world for us,” said Belanger.

Walsh and Belanger helped found Palestine Action U.S. in mid-October last year, as Israel’s campaign of collective punishment was already well under way. Palestine Action U.K. — which shares no organizational structure with the decentralized U.S. movement — had already been active since 2020, with the aim of dismantling Israel’s weapons trade in Britain. 

There have been successes. In England, Elbit shuttered its facilities in Tamworth, Oldham, and Leicester, as well as closing its London offices after repeated protests, vandalism, and short-term occupations led to expensive damages and ever greater security costs.

According to the U.K. network, four U.K. companies, including property managers and employee recruiters, cut ties with Elbit following Palestine Action pressure. In the U.S., a sustained campaign of weekly protests at Elbit’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, forced the company to end its lease there.

The risks for activists are hardly negligible. In August, four activists in Scotland were jailed for 12 months, and one for 14 months, for throwing smoke bombs and engaging in low-level property damage at a weapons equipment factory in Glasgow. 

The FBI has reportedly opened an investigation into Palestine Action U.S., even though the network is not a formal organization, and functioned rather as a banner for autonomous actions and an online platform for sharing news. (As of August, the Palestine Action U.S. platform announced that it would be reconstituting itself as a “propaganda front” renamed Unity of Fields.)

Walsh, who lives in Cambridge, also faces further felony charges, along with another Merrimack co-defendant, Sophie Ross, and other activists for their involvement in a protest last October 30 against Elbit’s Cambridge location.

“I’m facing a felony from that day for allegedly throwing an egg,” said Walsh, “a charge that’s been dragged out for a year.”

“A Huge Victory”

The shuttering or temporary disruption of a small number of weapons facilities may seem Pyrrhic victories when participants face arduous and expensive legal processes, as Israel’s genocide continues unhindered and Elbit makes its profits. Elbit CEO Bezhalel Machlis told Reuters that the company’s sales goal of $7 billion by 2026 would be reached “much earlier” because of military demand.

The anti-genocide movement is on the back foot at a time when nonviolent protest camps on college lawns are deemed grounds for police raids. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu called the action against Elbit — a multibillion-dollar weapons firm — an act of “antisemitism” and “hate”; no opposition to Israel’s actions appears exempt from such perverse demonization.

Prosecutorial overreach is also rife, as it has been in the efforts in recent years against the Black liberation uprisings, and the related movement to stop the construction of police training compounds in Atlanta and elsewhere. Hefty and groundless charges are thrown at activists, draining movement resources and chilling solidarity efforts, only to be dropped or reduced over time, as in the Merrimack case. 

“We initially were facing these extreme charges, 37 years with five felonies. And the plea that we’ve agreed to at this point is no felonies, pleading guilty only to misdemeanors and 60 days in jail,” said Walsh. “I look at our plea as a huge victory and want to impart that to everybody: We face this kind of repression, but they weren’t successful in that tactic in putting us in jail for decades.”

No effort by the Palestine solidarity movement has so far been successful in ending the Israeli assault on Palestinian and Lebanese people, but militant direct action has not been attempted in great numbers. This is no time to leave tactics on the table.

“Petty vandalism is obviously not a means to an end,” Walsh noted. “I think the goal of any action is to create the next level of action that is possible.”

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