On the legality of resistance - 11/17/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for this week’s community kaddish where we grieve all of those who have been killed in the past 407 days in Palestine and Lebanon. There have been between 45,000 and 300,000 people killed in Gaza alone, an additional 794 in the Occupied West Bank, and over 3,000 who have been killed in Lebanon. These are people who were killed for being Palestinian or Lebanese and they stand in the way of Zionist hegemony. We know that this has never been about Zionist safety, or the IOF would not be targeting children in the ways that they have been - it is about erasure and genocide. I grieve for these people whose names I will never know, whose faces I cannot picture and whose stories I do not know. 

Yesterday, I was part of a group whose job was to get between men’s rights protesters - aka christo fascists - and counter protesters. Our team was specifically set to push up against the fascists to turn them around so that they could not continue to wreak havoc in the streets of Boston. At first, we were successful. We pushed, we held our ground, they had to retreat.

But then came the extremely heavily armed police force. Dozens of riot cops decked out in full armor, carrying canisters of tear gas, holding massive battens, and strapped to the teeth. These cops proceeded to push us out of the way, they brutally arrested over a dozen people, and cleared a path for the cristo-fascists to walk over a mile to the Boston Commons.

Of course this police response did not surprise me in the least. We live in a country where christo-fascists and those undeterred by them, just won the presidency and both chambers of congress. Police have gladly supported and protected these people not just in 2024, but since the very advent of policing. And many of them have likely participated in training from the IOF directly, which is why their tactics have so many similarities to what we see in Palestine. Boston has a long history of direct collaboration with the Zionist entity and protesters have not been able to put an end to it, at least as far as I know. 

We live in a world where true resistance to fascism has been and continues to be illegal. There might be some tolerance for peaceful protest, but liberals want the oppressed to be the perfect victims and sit docile and accept their fate. When talking about Palestine and this current moment, many liberal zionists will bemoan Palestinian tactics of resistance, yet, do they remember 2018 at all?

During the Great March of Retum, Palestinians demonstrated near the Gaza border each Friday from March 20th 2018 - December 27th 2019 to protest an end to the blockade. The Israeli government had been controlling every aspect of life in Gaza, which of course they still do today. They were and are limiting how much food could go across the border, and banned things like guitar strings, chocolate and sewing machine parts to name a few, from entering all together. It is estimated that 30,000 Palestinains took part in the first demonstration with thousands more participating over the year plus. These were most often peaceful protests and in the end, the IOF killed over 200 people, and injured around 29,000 people. The demonstrators did not act violently, but those who controlled the law and controlled every aspect of Palestinian life did. Just as they have been for over a century. 

And, as we have seen, nothing changed back in 2018/2019. The Zionists did not lift the blockade or end their indiscriminate bombings. 

So what do we do when resistance is made to be illegal? What do we do when demanding that people should have basic human rights is met with violence? Unfortunately, for the course of human history, there have been so many instances where Empires have won, and as resistance escalates, so does the violent repression. I think that even in the past year, crackdowns on the Palestine solidarity movement have gotten more violent. In the US and across the world. It feels like I see a new protest violently oppressed every single day with the goal that our fear will make us submissive and will make us back down. And it works and is not new. 

In all of this despair, in a long history of violent suppression of resistance and liberation movements, we have to remember that not only have there been wins and moments of liberation, and also in moments where it feels impossible to conceive of things changing, there is still a duty to resist. 

The talmud talks about this a number of time, but I want to read a quote from the Maharal of Prague, a rabbi who lived in the 1500’s - a time of great antisemitism  said this: While a person may be individually pious, such good will pale in the face of sin of not protesting against an emerging communal evil. Such a pious person will be accountable for having been able to prevent it and did not. 

We all have an obligation to ward off communal evil - which today can mean so many things. It means fighting things like Zionism, christo-fascism, climate collapse, etc. All things that are and have been protested and met with violence in one form or another. It also means a commitment to one another. It means showing up big and small ways to ward off emerging communal evil. It can mean anything from making a meal for someone who needs it, to helping someone move, to donating time or money to local mutual aids, to making calls to congress, to fighting fascists in the streets. Fighting communal evil takes all of us, in all of our tactics.