A militant crowd organized by the Boston Coalition for Palestine faced off against a phalanx of cops guarding a Capital One Café and shut down the streets of Harvard Square in Cambridge, for nearly two hours during the sweltering afternoon heat of Aug. 10. The action was in response to a violent attack by Cambridge police a week earlier at the same storefront on activists with BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) – Boston.

Capital One Café — the target of a month-long campaign by BDS – Boston — is run by the ninth largest bank in the U.S. Besides luring people like students into its credit card debt trap through gimmicks like “cafés,” the otherwise online-only Capital One Financial has amassed much of its $490.6 billion in assets by extending lines of credit to the military-industrial complex.

One of Capital One’s clients is Israel-based Elbit Systems, maker of cluster bombs, drones, helicopters and assorted high-tech killing machines that have been slaughtering Palestinians and other peoples throughout West Asia. Capital One, in a consortium with five other banks, has given over $500 million in credit to Elbit Systems. (middleeasteye.net, July 29)

BDS – Boston waged a successful, year-long, direct action campaign to force Elbit Systems’ eviction from its Cambridge offices. (workers.org/2024/07/79533/) But Harvard and the Cambridge Police Department have been given the green light from the White House to smash pro-Palestine protests on campuses and surrounding neighborhoods.

When BDS – Boston activists came out for their third peaceful picket of Harvard Square’s Capital One Café on Aug. 3, they were surprise attacked by baton- swinging cops — cheered on by a few screaming Zionists. Dozens of people were injured by chemical weapon spray, and three were thrown to the ground, beaten and arrested by Cambridge police.

Though CPD came again to the café looking to bust heads on Aug. 10 — with metal barricades, arrest wagons and a platoon of armed, black-gloved special-ops forces with wrist-ties hanging from their gunbelts — the large crowd banging pots, waving Palestinian flags, blowing whistles and chanting through two blasting sound systems backed the cops off their plans. The only customers inside the bank’s high-priced coffee shop were three cowardly Zionists with a ripped Israeli flag.

Chanting “Capital One, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!” the crowd swelled, doubling in size and filling the street, joined by dozens of passersby outside the café who wanted it known which side they’re on.

A student organizer from University of Massachusetts Amherst described the previous week’s vicious assault by CPD. These assaults, the organizer stressed, fit a longstanding pattern of brutality by Cambridge police, including the racist murder by police firing squad of Arif Sayed Faisal on Jan. 4, 2023, while the Bangladeshi youth was experiencing a health crisis. (workers.org/2023/01/68535/)

On Aug. 2, the day before the BDS arrests, Cambridge cops tear-gassed a whole apartment complex while responding to a mental health crisis, forcing residents to evacuate in the middle of the night. The speaker reminded the protesters that U.S. police have learned many of the tactics they use to terrorize internally-colonized Indigenous, Black, Brown and immigrant communities in the U.S from Israeli training programs.

Action escalates the struggle

Earlier, protesters rallied on Cambridge Common demanding an end to all U.S support for the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine. Speakers represented constituents of the Boston Coalition for Palestine. This coalition, formed in October 2023, includes over 40 organizations ranging from Palestinian House of New England and Palestinian Youth Movement to BDS – Boston, Jewish Voice for Peace, Mass Action for Peace, Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Workers World Party (WWP), Democratic Socialists of America and various campus and town-based justice for Palestine groups.

The Aug. 10 direct action escalates the BCFP’s struggle against Zionist and imperialist institutions in Boston while the Zionist state, backed by the U.S. settler empire it serves, expands the extermination campaign in Gaza. Orchestrated by Zionist authorities, terrorist famine tactics have reportedly killed over 200 people, including nearly 100 children. Horrific as this figure is, the actual death toll is almost certainly far higher and continues to rise as Israel Occupation Forces cut off supplies of food, clean water and medicine.

Instead of actual humanitarian aid, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), a U.S-sponsored group cooked up by the Boston Consulting Group, promises grossly insufficient rations to lure starving Palestinians to killing fields where IOF troops and GHF-hired soldiers of fortune have massacred over 1,000 aid-seekers. (Al Jazeera, Aug. 9; The Guardian, July 31)

Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet approved plans to colonize Gaza and expel the population of Gaza City, making explicit what has been the core mission of the genocidal Zionist state since its founding in 1948.

Speakers at Sunday’s action emphasised that as this Zionist genocide intensifies, so too must solidarity with the Palestine Resistance in the imperial core. “We’re in a dire moment,” the emcee — Kojo Acheampong of PSL — declared when opening the rally. “We’re seeing starvation. We’re hearing word of the annexation of Gaza. … We’re in a dire situation, because people here are suffering while the U.S perpetuates death in Gaza. … This government was made for an elite class, for a billionaire class who wants to profit above everything else — even if it means a genocide.”

A youth organizer with BDS – Boston emphasized unconditional support for resistance in Palestine. “It is important to remember why we are here,” she said. “As the escalation against our own community increases, we must remember that the heart and compass of our struggle must remain steadfastly in Gaza. … We gather here today not only to declare our moral commitment to continue resistance against all those who contribute to the oppression of Gaza but to condemn the Zionist machinations that seep into the streets of Boston.”

She pointed out that the Hamas-led resistance in Palestine continues to sharpen: “Even in cities that have been completely leveled to the ground, the resistance lives on!”

The organizer went on to read a message from a friend in Gaza: “We don’t ask for pity. We don’t ask for sadness. We only ask that you stay with us, that you raise your voices when ours are silenced. That you boycott those who profit from our blood. That you expose those who justify the killing of our children. … Your solidarity is a true form of resistance. From Gaza, we send you love, and we ask that you be an extension of our steadfastness. Don’t forget us.”

Palestinians and Harvard kitchen workers have same enemy

Standing alongside a fellow Local 26 Harvard dining hall worker, Ed Childs, a 50-year WWP leader and Unite Here! Local 26 union organizer upped the crowd by connecting the war for liberation in Palestine to the working-class struggles at home. These struggles, Childs stressed, “share a common enemy.”

Investment giants like Capital One, BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity own both hotels and university endowment portfolios, determining the minimum wages and benefits of millions of workers, including Local 26 members. They invest their superprofits in the drones, weapons and surveillance tech that Israel is using to carry out its genocide. Childs explained that universities such as Harvard and MIT, themselves “major capitalist profit-centers in Cambridge,” are “full participants in the military-industrial complex that powers U.S. imperialism.”

Childs declared: “We know who our enemy is! Workers and Palestinians have the same boss! We have the same struggle. … United we can win; divided we fail. We have the ability to do like the Palestinians, to fight to the death for a world that is free and just. Free Palestine!” Cheers and applause punctuated Childs’ speech.

At a closing rally on Cambridge Common, Fawaz Abusharkh, co-leader of Palestine House of New England, urged the crowd to continue to show their material support for the Palestinian Resistance and for Palestinian liberation by any means necessary. He vowed to keep coming back for as long as Capital One funds Zionist blood money.

“Let’s keep the movement going,” Abusharkh said to cheers. “We are going to take over, and we are going to win, from Harvard Square to Palestine!”

Steve Gillis contributed to this article.