Although the USA is one of the worst bullies the world has ever known, at least in the past 2,000 years (but with the Romans, the British, the French, the Germans, Gengis Khan and Tamurlane not lagging far behind), there is no doubt that the American people can be highly creative when the stakes are as high as they are today (with the risk of what looks like an increasingly likely regional conflict possibly spiralling into a world conflagration).
On 9th November (which was the global day of action for Palestine), many rallies against the mass killings of Palestinians which are currently taking place in Gaza and in the West Bank were held both in the USA and throughout the world. New York, which is not only the USA’s financial centre but also the city where most of that country’s main news providers are headquartered, saw some interesting forms of what appears to my eyes to have been a mixture of ‘street performance activism’ (my coinage) and public shaming. For instance, some young New Yorkers (probably university students) gathered in the lobby of BlackRock to highlight the investments of the world’s largest asset manager in US manufacturers of weapons of mass destruction (namely Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman) which are probably all being used against the Gazans. After chanting in unison ‘BlackRock, you can hide but we charge you with genocide’, they unrolled a scroll some several metres long containing the names of most of the Palestinians killed (already obsolete at the time given that this list becomes at least a hundred people longer every day) since the Israeli government decided to punish the people of Gaza collectively by cutting off their supply of water and electricity, by restricting the flow of food, of medical supplies and of other forms of aid into this small strip of land and, much, much worse, by bombing Gazans’ homes, refugee camps, hospitals, schools, markets, bakeries, shops, etc. every day and, more recently, by sending ground troops into the enclave to fight the militants of Hamas who are hiding in their large network of tunnels many metres underground and are thus unlikely to be killed in such bombardments.
In the reception hall/atrium of the New York Times, which is the USA’s most prestigious newspaper, activists read out the names of the journalists killed whilst covering the conflict in Gaza as well as the names of the thousands of other Palestinians killed (starting from the youngest) whilst carrying a symbolic newspaper intended to stand for those who had not been given a voice in this newspaper and by shaming the New York Times for its biased coverage of the war by repeating together ‘shame on you’ in a quasi mantra fashion.
With the title of ‘“No More Business As Usual”: 300+ cities shut it down for Palestine in global day of action’, the clip of the event which was produced by BreakThrough News, a New York-based socialist and anti-imperialist independent online news outlet, ends with a call for boycott of US institutions which support the Israeli war effort as a voice-over spoken by Kei Pritsker (a reporter and video producer at BreakThrough News):
‘In total, there were 600 actions that took place worldwide in one day. In the last few weeks, I’ve heard a lot of people say they feel powerless to do anything about Israel’s massacre. But nothing could be further from the truth. Israel’s war machine relies entirely on a litany of institutions outside of its borders. It relies on banks and financial institutions that invest in it. It relies on media outlets echoing its lies. It relies on politicians that rubber stamp and unconditionally support its crimes. It relies on universities and schools that lie to their students about the situation. It even relies on restaurants and coffee shops and actors and musicians to give it cultural cover to make people think people actually support it. In other words, it relies on us. It relies on institutions we patronise; institutions we work for. And we can withdraw our support whenever we want. We can even stop them from functioning whenever we want. After all, how can a university continue to support Israel if all of its students support Palestine and won’t go to class or won’t pay tuition until the university supports Palestine? How can a media organisation continue to function if its reputation is synonymous with genocide denial and parroting war propaganda? How could a politician hope to get re-elected if they get heckled and mocked and laughed out of every room they step in? And that’s what this global day of action shows: that this is all completely in our hands and that when we all act together on the same day, in the same coordinated fashion, our fear melts away and the things we once thought were impossible no longer seem so far away. In many ways, it feels like this latest Israeli massacre has actually awoken a sleeping giant. The November 9th call to action was issued to disrupt business as usual and another day of action is already being planned for November 17th. The question of what happens next is no longer just in the hands of governments. The question of what happens next won’t be decided for us by some outside force. What happens next depends entirely on us and whether or not we finally decide that we’ve had enough with business as usual.’
[The words in green, bold or in yellow highlights are my emphasis, not Mr Pritsker’s.]
If the clip does not play in ‘picture-in-picture’ mode after a right click with your mouse, then click on https://sp.rmbl.ws/s8/2/N/b/3/7/Nb37n.caa.mp4.
Source: ‘No More Business As Usual’:
300+ cities shut it down for Palestine in global day of action,
BreakThrough News, 11 Nov. 2023, https://youtu.be/r0STyovb1y0
https://www.patreon.com/BreakThroughNews
https://twitter.com/KeiPritsker
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Breakthrough_News
https://www.patreon.com/BreakThroughNews
https://twitter.com/KeiPritsker
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Breakthrough_News
Lausanne, the above was
published on the twelfth day of the
eleventh month of the year two thousand
and twenty-three.
