Ten protesters were arrested for blocking the entrance to a Pratt & Whitney facility in Middletown the morning of April 15. Videos circulating social media show keffiyeh-wearing protesters chained to the entrance gate chanting “From the bombs on Gaza’s children, CEOs make their billions!” and singing “For Palestine together, we shall not be moved,” an alteration of a spiritual hymn of a similar name sung by enslaved people in the 1800s.
The protest was in opposition to the engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney’s role the State of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, which has killed nearly 34,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023 and was ruled by the International Court of Justice as plausibly constituting an act of genocide in January. Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of the weapons conglomerate RTX, signed a 15-year contract to supply the Israeli military with fighter jet engines in 2015, to which the protesters called for an early end. F-15, F-16 and F-35 fighter jets are all currently deployed in the Israeli Air Force, and a stymied effort by Congress to approve an $18 billion F-15 sale to Israel threatens to provide more firepower for the devastation and slaughter in Gaza.
The Middletown protest was one of dozens of direct actions taking place in conjunction with “A15 Action,” a “coordinated economic blockade in over 30 cities around the world” to end American military support for Israel, according to an Instagram post by the Connecticut chapter of Dissenters, a U.S.-based anti-imperialist organization. In Philadelphia, A15-aligned protesters blocked rush hour traffic and held a car procession through I-95, which resulted in the arrest of at least 67 people by city police and state troopers, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Protesters in Chicago shut down traffic entering O’Hare International Airport, and traffic stopped for hours in San Francisco when protesters blocked Golden Gate Bridge.
Although the economic value of stopping “business as usual” isn’t likely to be calculated any time soon, an emphatic headline from the Hindustan Times credited the protesters with stoking “travel chaos,” speaking to the local and international perception of Monday’s stoppages.
It’s hard to imagine that the goal of the arrested protesters is to draw attention to their well-being; instead, they’d probably ask us to direct our attention and outrage to the ongoing massacres in Gaza. However, I can’t help but think about all the people who were willing to put their bodies on the line to oppose the U.S. and Israeli war machines. Spending a few hours in the back of a police cruiser or the night in a jail cell is nothing compared to being one of the 76,000 Palestinians who’ve been injured in bomb blasts or under a collapsing building, nor does it hold a candle to being one of several Palestinians who’ve been crushed to death by falling aid packages while the region faces systematic starvation. But these relatively tame legal penalties are something that the majority of people claiming “solidarity” with Palestinians have not experienced, and probably never will pending drastic cultural shifts in how we show up for oppressed people.
As a college student, I understand that there are a multitude of personal circumstances that might make getting arrested undesirable. It seems like there isn’t enough time to get everything done that needs to get done — case in point, this article will be about an hour late as of writing this because I had other school commitments that I scrambled to finish. For a lot of students, getting arrested is probably the last block that would topple their precarious Jenga tower of academic commitments.
But the crucial thing is that, among the hundreds, if not thousands of people who got arrested at an action Monday, many of them were probably students sacrificing school commitments to stand with Palestine. Many arrestees likely had disabilities (and this certainly wouldn’t be the first time people with disabilities got arrested for activism). Numerous arrestees may have been queer or trans, and concerned about the conditions of jail, where they may be more vulnerable for how they present and identify — but need I repeat the classic aphorism that the first Pride was a riot? Many arrestees were probably elderly people, low-income workers and people with a precarious immigration status. These people had their own situations to worry about, but they showed up for Palestine anyway.
An even more important point here is that Palestinians have disabilities. There are queer Palestinians, despite what the chauvinistic screeds of “pinkwashers” tell you. There are Palestinian students, who no longer have any universities left standing in Gaza to invigorate their thirst for knowledge and advancement. These groups are suffering under occupation and genocide, but they are also resisting. What good are our excuses?
I’m sure many of the people who were arrested at an action were spurred to mobilize through social media. But we’re past the paltry goals of spreading awareness in “solidarity.” Solidarity requires sacrifice, now more than ever, and the more we normalize putting the collective needs of humanity first, the more meaningful that solidarity will be. To repurpose a phrase and make thousands of Cold Warriors turn in their graves, freedom isn’t free. The cost isn’t to the imperialist U.S. military or any of that jingoistic nonsense. It’s to people experiencing and resisting extraordinary oppression, and to those who are willing to put aside their daily concerns to end it in the belly of the beast.
so many nonsense words in this article, clearly you have no idea what caused this war.
the trigger was the terror attack of hamas on isreal,
how do you call it a genocide if the gaze population has been increased for more than 2 million civillians?
not even a single word about the hostages that keep getting sexual assualts and many of them have been murdered,
starting a war and losing it doesnt make you victim.
shame on you
Hamas attack was not a trigger if the poor treatment of the Palestinians being forced into an apartheid. Palestinians are resisting. It is a resistance movement. The terrorism is Israel killing thousands of people including an obscene amount of children, that is not even justifiable for Israel to claim self defense. Be for real man, the sexual assaults and children being killed by Hamas has already been disproven many times. Israel has posted so much fake propaganda which they have been proved to also generate through AI. Google is free, Hamas wasn’t the trigger, Israel pulled the trigger for more than 70 years.
This writer seems to not even know who they are in “solidarity” with. My close friend worked in an Underground Railroad which would sneak queer people out of the Palestinian Territories and into Israel where they were safe from so-called honor killings. I guess my friend is a “pink washing chauvinist”? The wild claims in this article obscure the legitimate support for innocents in that war zone. Innocent victims would be better served if this writer spoke out against Hamas- the horrific terrorist organization who committed so many atrocities which started the current war.