“Rebel, against the war they sell 
Rebel, against the lies they tell 
Rebel, and we must do it right—  
Rebel for the people of Palestine.”

I raised my voice and sang alongside hundreds of others, as we sat on the ground and blocked the entrance to the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, October 14 in a stunning action organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). I was surrounded by a beautiful mass of red t-shirts with “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel” and “Not In Our Name.” Five hundred people gathered, mostly Jewish people, and I was among the 200 arrested in the largest civil disobedience in the history of the NY Stock Exchange—the “epicenter of global capital” as JVP put it. We demanded an immediate end to this genocide. (Online there’s lots of video where people can watch this right from the start.)

Sitting next to me, people talked about how throughout this whole year, with Israel’s massive bombing—all enabled by the U.S.—you keep thinking that it can’t get worse in Gaza, and then… it does. Just the night before, the Israeli military hit Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in northern Gaza, bombed the tents surrounding the hospital and already images of people being burned alive were circulating on social media. It’s these images that people had in our minds as we chanted: “Stop the Genocide, Let Gaza Live!” 

You could feel in your bones people’s determination to stand against how Israel with U.S. backing is carrying out this genocide under the “moral cover” of “safety” for Jews. A leader in JVP said later, “As Jews, we reject this myth with every fiber of our beings. Together, with tens of thousands of American Jews who have spent the last year protesting for an end to the slaughter, we refuse to let our histories, identities and traditions be used as the justification to massacre Palestinians.” It was this sense of a particular responsibility to act—as Jews, and especially as people in the U.S.—that motivated so many of us to be part of this. “It’s our government doing this…so we must not be silent.” It was this moral clarity that was so inspiring to me and reverberated throughout.  

At the same time there were problems in the political understanding and demand of the protest. A major theme of this action was focused on the skyrocketing stock price of individual corporations, like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin. “Gaza Bombed, Wall Street Booms,” read one of the big banners. Are these weapons manufacturers profiting from genocide? Certainly. People are right to be sickened, outraged and stand against this. But what’s driving things is not "U.S. corporate profits." As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has brought out repeatedly, unwavering U.S. support for Israel from all sections of U.S. rulers is the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism, i.e., because “Israel plays a ‘special role’ as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the ‘Middle East’). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.” It’s this system of capitalism-imperialism which is the problem. It’s this system which has to go. 

“Free, free Palestine! Let Gaza Live!” people chanted over and over, even as we were handcuffed, and some carried off by police. But along with this righteous stand was a whole series of demands like “Fund FEMA, Not Genocide” “Fund Healthcare, Not Genocide,” “Fund Teachers, Not Genocide,” “Fund Climate, Not Genocide”—fund this or that… not genocide. So during the hours together in jail, I was able to have conversation with a few people about this. Is it right to demand more of the wealth that the U.S. capitalist-imperialists have gotten from exploiting people all over the world? People do need decent healthcare, education, housing, an end to the climate catastrophe and a sustainable economy. But let’s get real about the only way this could be possible—a revolution to bring a whole different economic and political system into being. And how right now, people really need to dig into @BobAvakianOfficial. Some were dismissive, a few were intrigued. 

After we were released from jail and as all the news coverage began to circulate, I kept getting text messages with links to articles about hundreds of “Pro-Palestine Jews” and “Anti-Zionist Jews” were arrested protesting at the NY Stock Exchange. This was not only all over mainstream news in the U.S., Canada and Europe, but also all over Al-Jazeera, Hindustan Times, The Tribune in Pakistan, and throughout the world. Bob Avakian spoke the searing truth when he said, “After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.” So it’s significant, especially in the Middle East, when news spread which can help lead people to understand it’s U.S. imperialism and the Zionist state of Israel that’s the problem, and not Jewish people. 

I was raised on the myth that "Israel was a just homeland for Jews." But we were so criminally ignorant about the actual history and nature of the state of Israel. We were fed lies and pride of "hardy Jewish pioneers building socialist communes and making the desert bloom." The truth—which I came to understand in the 1960s—is that Israel is a vicious settler-colonial, Jewish-supremacist state based on the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.

And I have always felt particular anger at how the oppression of Jewish people, especially through the Holocaust, has been twisted to justify the oppression of whole other peoples. I was especially proud to make loud and clear that Never Again MUST mean Never Again for Anyone!