Boston
Over 200 demonstrators gathered Oct. 2 at Faneuil Hall, the hub of tourism, to demand “No Votes for Genocide!” and a ban on U.S. arms sales to the genocidal Israeli state. The choice of location is apt: The hall bears the name of Peter Faneuil, a Boston merchant who trafficked enslaved Africans.
Boston, Nov. 2, 2024. (Photo credit: Stevan Kirschbaum)
Changing the name of Faneuil Hall remains a key demand of Indigenous and Black activists, which was recently highlighted by Reverend Kevin Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition, at October’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day rally and march.
This rally was the latest in a series of successful actions in Boston undertaken in support of ongoing Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian and Yemani resistance to Zionist genocide. On Oct. 6, thousands of people turned out for a massive march to Israel’s consulate that shut down traffic and outran squads of riot police.
Demonstrators again surrounded the consulate Oct. 29, promising “No Justice, No Peace!” while the imperialist-backed Zionist state continues to bomb, starve and massacre thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese women, children and men, including the elderly.
Nov. 2, 1917: Imperialist Balfour Declaration
Ahmad Kawash, co-leader of the Palestinian House of New England, noted that Nov. 2 is the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, an imperialist hangman who had previously orchestrated a campaign of colonial repression in Ireland, approved Zionist schemes to colonize Palestine.
Kawash said: “The massacres began from that time until these days. And what we see in Gaza is a continuation of this criminal project against our people, who are still fighting and offering martyr after martyr in order to live with dignity on their land. Long live the unity of Palestine and Lebanon! Long live the struggle!”
As speakers at Saturday’s rally emphasized, it is only the Palestinian liberation struggle and the worldwide solidarity movement that can end the Zionist terror campaign. Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidential elections, the speakers said, the U.S. settler empire will continue to enable the genocide being carried out by its Zionist crony.
As Saleh, a Palestine Youth Movement (PYM) organizer put it: “It doesn’t matter who sits in that office in that heart of empire. The results, as we’ve seen, are always the same.” Saleh went on to stress that the wealth and resources that could have gone toward Land Back for Indigenous nations, and health care, housing and living wages for workers, instead go to support settler-colonial genocide and imperialist aggression. This is an indictment of the depraved priorities that structure nation-states in the world capitalist system.
Aya, the action’s emcee and a PYM leader declared: “There will be no business as usual and no election cycle as usual while genocide continues! … We will not be bullied or fearmongered into voting for any candidate who will continue to turn a blind eye to peoples’ suffering.”
As Aya and other speakers rejected the obscene false dichotomy offered by bourgeois electoral politics, protesters unfurled a banner emblazoned with the words: “No Votes for Genocide.”
Marchers chanted: ‘Viva, viva Palestina!’
From Faneuil Hall, protesters took over the streets of downtown Boston, shutting down traffic and defying the phalanx of cop cars that menaced the crowd. Many of them waved Palestinian, Lebanese and Congolese flags. As they marched to raucous drumming, demonstrators chanted: “From the South to Beirut, all our martyrs we salute!; Viva, viva Palestina!; There is only one solution: Intifada revolution!”
The march ended in front of South Station, where activists projected footage of the genocidal destruction of Gaza, along with montages of the global protests against it. Speakers vowed to continue organizing in the U.S imperial core to support the Palestinian struggle for liberation by any means necessary.
Mohamed, a Yemeni recent graduate of the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid, evoked the resilience of Palestinians in North Gaza, who continue to resist Zionist death squads: “They will remain on their land even if it means death. So it teaches us something in this moment in the movement when we sometimes feel there might be an ebb. It teaches us that as long as we remain persistent, as long as we remain steadfast and principled to the people in Gaza, we are heading in the right direction, despite whatever the electors say, despite whoever gets elected.”
He continued: “When people tell us that we should vote for this candidate or that candidate and it is the ‘lesser of two evils,’ we will respond back that we will not take this evil! We all know the phrase that ‘the arc of history bends towards justice,’ but that only means something if millions of us remain at a single pressure point at the forefront of that arc and make sure we bend it toward justice! And even when it feels like there’s not enough of us on this steel beam of history that seems unmovable, it is our duty to remain there, to recruit people, to bring them into the movement, because one day there will be enough of us. And there is!”
Closing the rally, Fawaz Abusharkh, co-leader of the Palestinian House of New England, urged demonstrators to keep turning out in support of Palestinian resistance: “We need to say: we are not going to be silent, and we refuse to be silenced! If they kill all the flowers and roses, they’re not going to stop the spring from coming. Israel will guarantee that a free world will start with a free Palestine.”
The protest was organized by the Boston Coalition for Palestine; its member organizations include the Palestinian House of New England, Palestine Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston South Asian Coalition, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Workers Party of Massachusetts, Workers World Party Boston, Mass. Peace Action and over 40 more.