By: Anya Chen
On November 12, activists mobilized in Livingston, New Jersey to protest the presence of Yoav Gallant, former Minister of Defense for Israel. Six activists were arrested in the protest, with videos of police attacking and brutalizing activists being widely circulated online.
Gallant may not be as recognizable in the U.S. as other Israeli State figures, but he remains deeply involved in the Zionist project of genocide. He infamously issued the order to execute the “Hannibal Directive” on October 7, 2023, ordering IDF troops to kill Israeli hostages along with innocent Palestinians. Gallant, having overseen over a year of the genocide in Gaza and played a major role in the military deployment, is a foremost enemy of the people of the world.
With both Israeli Mossad and local police working in tandem, Gallant was well-protected by the reactionary State who wantonly attacked community members showing up to protest the war criminal. One activist with Trenton MAKES, a local community organization, described their arrest to The Partisan: “for my arrest, my foot was just slightly over the line of the synagogue’s driveway, about two inches over.” Others, as pictured in videos online, were simply chanting in the crosswalk when they were tackled and arrested by the police. It is clear that the actions of police were aimed to put down any justified rebellion against Israel and US imperialism.
This repression comes as part of the growing tendency of fascistization in the United States. On September 22, Trump officially designated “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization, and 3 days later, he proclaimed the founding of a National Joint Terrorism Task Force aimed at destroying the progressive movement and the pro-Palestine solidarity movement in particular. These decisions were preceded by a series of deportations, arrests, and expulsions of dozens of pro-Palestine college students, as well as the terror-tagging of leading Palestinian solidarity organizations such as Samidoun. The same terrorist tactics employed against the immigrant masses are more and more being used to suppress domestic dissent. The incident at Livingston is just the latest example of the bourgeoisie’s increased blatant attack on the growing people’s movement.
With the arrests, three people were charged with misdemeanors and three others were charged with felonies. In one person’s case, they were charged with 17 total charges, ranging from “improper behavior” to “resisting arrest” to “refusal to submit to fingerprinting.” While all those arrested have now been released from jail, they continue to face severe repression from the Old State and potentially years in prison, as they are urgently in need of material support for their legal defense.
Speaking on both the difficulties they face and the necessity to continue the struggle, one arrested activist remarked with determination:
We all need to be united, and everyone has their own struggle. Us in our organization we’re watching out for our own people. It’s really clear that you don’t need to “be somebody” to start something. All you have to do is get some of your friends together, and talk to people wherever you’re at whether that’s at school or at work or on the street, and many of those people are going to join your organization. It’s really just about talking to people, and as long as you go directly to the people your organization is just going to grow. Even though our organization is still small, I think that everyone out there needs to organize. If we organize in our own communities, or join local organizations, we can start to think about fighting back against fascistization.
Donate to the jail fund here: https://account.venmo.com/u/JerseyLawyerFund
