Nora Barrows-Friedman, Senior Producer and co-host of the excellent Flashpoints Radio, on direct action across the international spectrum (I am one of the people mentioned in this article). This article first published in Arabic in al-Haq al-Awda.
Linking arms through metal tubes and jamming the doorways with steel bicycle locks, dozens of pro-justice activists blocked the entrance to the Israeli consulate in downtown San Francisco on January 15th — Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday — at the height of Israel’s siege on Gaza, on a day when its military killed at least forty Palestinian men, women and children in a series of attacks that also decimated several mosques, schools and an UNRWA building. 24 hours before, in Los Angeles, protesters chained themselves to their local Israeli consulate and unfurled a banner reading “The Israeli consulate has been closed for war crimes.”
As Israel’s destruction of Gaza raged on, carried out by the Middle East’s only nuclear superpower against an entrapped, occupied and virtually defenseless population, so did countless actions across the world. Protests, marches and demonstrations were called by the usual peace and justice organizations — hundreds of thousands came to express their dissent in major international cities — but smaller, more direct actions were being taken with little to no media fanfare. And some of these quieter operations, activists say, have begun to make an impact.
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