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BROOKLYN JAIL STOP WORK ORDER

Since NYC power brokers have decided that they would rather build jails to lock up New Yorkers than invest in our communities, we’ve decided to issue our own stop work order on the Brooklyn jail construction site.

We clogged the locks of construction site entrances with cement, smashed their card readers, and locked the gates at multiple locations operated by the jail’s concrete supplier, SRM.

The $3 billion Brooklyn jail is part of the city’s $16 billion borough-based jails plan. In addition to Brooklyn, new jails are being built in Manhattan, Queens, and The Bronx. The city is propagating the lie that in order to to close Rikers by 2027, it needs to open four new jails. Given that the city has already admitted that it can’t meet its legally mandated deadline, that the building plans for these new jails already anticipate overcrowding, and that the number of people arrested by the NYPD has doubled since 2020, we’re calling their bluff. More cages won’t close Rikers or make our communities safer. If they build it, we will burn it!

We act in solidarity with abolitionists inside and outside of prison walls, with those who riot against corrections officers and ICE, and with those trying to save their family members state-sanctioned premature death. Every struggle against racism, fascism, zionism, colonialism, xenophobia, and cisheteropatriarchy must also be a struggle against the carceral state.

To the city: decarcerate now, and build affordable housing instead. Do something that will actually benefit our communities.

To SRM Concrete: drop your contract for the borough-based jails now.

To our fellow New Yorkers: join us in action and make your voices heard. No new jails. No more deaths at the hands of the state.

Submitted anonymously.

THE BATTLE OF HIND’S HALL FROM OUR SIDE OF THE BARRICADES

A MESSAGE TO THE STUDENT INTIFADA:

Let us not dialogue with our persecutors.

In the words of Ghassan Kanafani, we must reject the “conversation between the sword and the neck.”

The footage you are viewing is contraband. It was smuggled out of Hind’s Hall and hidden from the NYPD in the band of a militant’s bra. Until now, the only footage to come out of the battle and raid was from the perspective of the pigs, but this footage is the worldview of the militant. We are releasing it in response to the latest wave of repression sweeping across amerika. The Student Intifada put the imperialist ruling class on its back foot. Echoes of 1968 and the threat of mother country militancy still loom over their heads—they remember the last time this kind of struggle erupted. They remember the last time youth in the metropole began to identify with the Third World guerrilla. The enemy is scared, and they should be. They’ve responded using every tactic of repression available to them, teetering on the edge of criminalizing all anti-zionist speech.

Yesterday, Columbia expelled another student for their alleged involvement in the Student Intifada. This is the first expulsion for alleged involvement in Hind’s Hall.

We send a message to our enemies:

We will not back down. We will resist you.

Continue reading “THE BATTLE OF HIND’S HALL FROM OUR SIDE OF THE BARRICADES”

Festivals of Resistance

A Call for Gatherings the Weekend Before Trump Takes Office

Along with others around the country, we invite you to join us in organizing festivals of resistance on the weekend of January 18, immediately before Donald Trump takes office. This is a crucial opportunity to engage in outreach, education, and action ahead of what it is sure to be a tumultuous time.

Once Trump takes power, it will only become more challenging to make connections with our neighbors, create the networks that we will need to face down his assaults, and share the skills we will need to survive his reign. Right now, we have a precious window of time in which to prepare. Let’s make the most of it.

When Donald Trump enters office on January 20, he will order mass deportations, escalate the repression of protesters, dismantle the few judicial and legislative provisions that still protect ordinary people, and consolidate a propaganda ecosystem intended to stupefy us all into obedience. The Democratic Party is willingly handing power to an autocrat they say will bring democracy to an end; the Democrats show every intention of continuing to ratchet their own politics to the right. Authoritarian leftist groups are simply treating this as a recruitment opportunity.

But from Texas to the West Bank, millions of people’s lives are about to get even harder. We owe it to each other to meet the second Trump era side by side in solidarity.

The chaos that will accompany the return of the Trump administration represents an opportunity as well as a challenge. This is a chance to assert an autonomous pole of organizing, carrying forward the lessons of 2020 and the movement against Cop City while continuing the fight against patriarchal violence, white supremacy, and colonialism.

By organizing ahead of Trump’s inauguration, we can seize the initiative and set our own timeline rather than being caught flat-footed and forced to react. We need to welcome new participants into these struggles and foster a revolutionary perspective that can orient us through the challenges ahead. No amount of internet activity could substitute for gathering face to face. The most important battles ahead will not be fought online, but in the streets of our communities.

January 18 is observed as the Day of the Forest Defender. It will be the two-year anniversary of the murder of Tortuguita in Weelaunee Forest. It is an important date to gather, honor the memory of the fallen, and pledge ourselves to resistance and to one another.

Continue reading “Festivals of Resistance”

Jews who Like to Fight: A Response to an Anti-fascist Proposal

Our group… called for active resistance. But public opinion was against us. The majority still thought such action provocative and maintained that if the required contingent of Jews could be delivered [to death camps], the remainder of the ghetto would be left in peace. The instinct for self-preservation finally drove the people into a state of mind permitting them to disregard the safety of others in order to save their own necks… the Germans had already succeeded in dividing the Jewish population into two distinct groups – those already condemned to die and those who still hoped to remain alive. Afterwards, step by step, the Germans will succeed in pitting these two groups against one another and cause some Jews to lead others to certain death in order to save their own skin.” – Marek Edelman, co-founder of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish Combat Organization, reflecting on July 1942, when armed Jewish uprising was initially rejected.

Jews, you are being deceived… Do not let them take you to death voluntarily. Resist! Fight tooth and nail… Fight for your lives!” – The illegal socialist bulletin, Storm, of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I started writing this in response to an article and booklet put out by Jewish anarchists called “Don’t Just Do Nothing to Counter Fascism.” It is now a more general proposal for Jews and non-Jews to see the need and outlines of aboveground and underground resistance.

The basis of what I am going to be saying comes from resonating moments of Jewish anti-fascism. These moments include the Warsaw Ghetto uprising where hundreds of Jews killed their Nazi guards and defended parts of the ghetto for weeks against a far better armed SS fighting force. Warsaw combatants had been preparing for years through underground combat organizations with different detachments and commanders elected in the ghetto. They met regularly, coordinated counter-espionage and intelligence, procured weapons and explosives, forged alliances, and operated an illegal printing press. This was all within the confines of an extremely surveilled open-air prison. After the war, the 43 group and 62 group formed, made up of anti-fascist Jews with boxing, martial arts, and military experience in Britain, using street fighting and deploying combative counter-protests at fascist speaking events from the 1940s until the 1970s. And although limited in their success, there are groups like the 2000s’ direct action Palestine-solidarity group, Anarchists Against the Wall, based within the borders of the state of Israel.

Growing up, being Jewish meant a connection to these parts of history. I know like many Jews coming from union families or working class backgrounds, my family took the most pride and found its roots in the historical figure of the Jewish activist, resistance member, labour organizer, holocaust survivor, and artist, rather than any religious or Zionist tradition. A family member had participated in guerilla warfare against the Nazi regime in France. All the other old timers were survivors who had gotten lucky owing largely to chance run-ins with underground resistance. I know I really deeply internalized a lot of these stories, particularly their incredible violence that, from a young age, made me afraid, angry, and want to fight. I have nothing but disgust or rage for the rabbis and collaborators who encouraged six million Jews to, without resistance, walk into gas chambers, die as slaves, and be slaughtered in the open streets.

Already, there is little resistance to the far-right’s platform of attacks on reproductive rights or the mass deportation and internment of migrants. We need to start looking at the places and times where fascism was actually defeated. This includes the historic guerrilla movements of Yugoslavia, France, or China. Today, the revolution in Rojava largely eradicated the fascist Islamic State within Syria in favour of a libertarian feminist society. What all of these projects have in common is armed militias or cells, and combative solidarity based in above-ground mass organizations such as unions, explicitly far-left political organizations, and neighbourhood and town council structures.

Many of the suggestions outlined in “Don’t Just Do Nothing to Counter Fascism” are important, emphasizing our need to rest, develop our skill sets, create collectives based on deep relationships, and practice direct action & mutual aid. I consider its writers comrades and have no intention but a friendly response. Reading their text, I cannot help but feel that a study of our actual Jewish anti-fascist history would have stressed different lessons. This history teaches us that there are uncomfortable risks that we will need to take going forward, that there are disruptions to our usual lifestyles that are required, a necessity of underground fighting groups and sabotage, and the need for organizational infrastructure that can have massive outreach and participation. It is not that the “care culture,” popular among the Jewish Left, is wrong, it is just misleading and an incomplete proposal if taken on its own – as it has been by many. In line with the conclusion of some Black anarchists following the George Floyd uprising, there continues to be a need for “networks of aboveground and underground self-organized resistance.”

In this vein, I would like to respond to the tendency of many Jewish radicals, leftists and anarchists who I feel do not want to fight because they would like to preserve their comfort for as long as they can, and turn their nose up at fighting as though we are not submerged in a dramatic confluence of violence, crises, and hierarchy: fascism or not. We know from the Holocaust that this instinct to not throw ourselves into battle, leads only to prolongation of suffering and attempts to find ourselves within the lucky few who are saved while we leave others behind to suffer. I know it is difficult because many of us have been raised by survivors and working class Jews who fought to survive and now pressure us to live the American Dream. The benefits of our labour union struggles and communalist culture have made many of us, but certainly not all, privileged. Yet, for young people, there is still that desire for revolt, a deep-felt solidarity, and spirit of autonomy that needs encouragement and support, not recuperation and sedating.

This failure of Jewish radicalism is reflected in the present state of Israel. There was never a serious drive by Jewish anarchists and socialists to destroy the Israeli state and capitalism. Even worse, there was no serious effort to prevent the state from forming. The Jewish working-class accepted, passively or actively, ethno-nationalism above all else, a compromise with the Jewish bourgeoisie and political class rather than a revolutionary struggle to overcome them. This is despite the attractive alliances available, not to mention basic obligations of solidarity, with Palestinian revolutionaries. It is impossible to speculate on such a dramatic imaginary turn in history, but had such an anarchist spirit existed and prevailed in executing a revolution in Palestine, there could have been self-organization, communalization of property and workplaces, and cooperative multi-racial communities in the place of government authority. This is a mistake by the Jewish left of historic proportions. I do not see how the suggestions listed in “Don’t Just Do Nothing to Counter Fascism” would materially undermine states like Israel or have changed the course of this history. There needs to be a greater emphasis on guerilla, mass movement, and other attacks that would be required to overthrow a government. And for this to exist, there must be the structure and group cultures that can bring this insurrection about. Unless we follow this path, we’re just speculating on ways to carve out our own comfortable activist lives within fascism as Israeli leftists have done.

It is worth studying the success of the 1904-1907 Yiddish anarchists in Poland’s industrial city of Bialystok. There, anarchism became the dominant political ideology among the working class. The Bialystok groups were taken up as a tendency across the Russian empire due to their success, including by the anarchists of Gulyai Pole who would later liberate a territory of up to seven million people. Anarchists created neighbourhoods within Bialystok which the police dared not enter, ensured the victory of strikes (typically through terrorizing bosses into accepting strikers’ demands), and when a pogrom started in the city, it was anarchists who led its armed defence and street patrols.

These Yiddish anarchists organized through groups, usually based on affinity, with different sections for technical, agitational, propaganda, Polish-language outreach, and weaponry work. All combined, the anarchist groups never had more than a few dozen members, most aged 15 to 20. One account of a meeting of a group, done in a cemetery, counts just four members in attendance. Connected to the groups were federations of hundreds of workers organized along an anarchist basis and divided by industry. Furthermore, the small groups created spaces within the city where crowds could gather for political discussions, debates, and the distribution of anarchist flyers and newspapers. In this way, these numerically small anarchist groups developed an outreach and influence across a broad population. The confidence in the group was so considerable that they developed an arbitration board, being overwhelmed with people, including petitioners from villages surrounding the city, coming to them to settle interpersonal disputes and issues of daily exploitation. Anarchists stockpiled weapons for the complete takeover of Bialystok and the development of an “industrial-military commune,” something for which workers were ready to launch a general strike, only to abandon the plans due to a lack of joint revolutionary action from other cities.

We need answers that can allow us to similarly confront the state and capitalism. Past generations of Jews have developed these responses before. Based on this, here are some additional recommendations for our fight. These recommendations are for everyone in and outside of the US, in rural and in urban areas. Whether fascism seems on the distant horizon or a close reality, the violence of oppression in our current society – call it fascism, colonialism, capitalism, or whatever you want – requires active preparation for a revolution:

1. Create or join underground resistance : This resistance can deploy industrial sabotage, military sabotage, attacks against private property, black blocs, surprise or “whisper” demonstrations, riots, conduct expropriations, looting, seize property (also known as “squats”), execute untraceable online activity, and other combative offensive and defensive moves. They can equally coordinate safehouses for migrants facing deportation or confinement – such as was done by many Polish and French people for us Jews – or perform clandestine abortions – as was done by the Lodz Ghetto survivor, Henry Morgantaler in Montreal.

This resistance can be based in small groups of people who work well together, assist each other in meeting each others’ needs, and develop a robust culture of secrecy and security. There needs to be a focus on propaganda work, onboarding, skill training, critical discussions on short/medium/long-term goals, confederation with other such groups, and connection to above-ground organizations and struggles. There is never a bad time for an underground resistance. It is never too soon. It is only ever too late. Anarchist news sites across the US regularly broadcast report-backs on nocturnal attacks against military facilities, extractive industries, and businesses being targeted by public movements. This resistance work needs to develop further structures (as was done by Bialystok anarchists), courage, affinity, skills, deeper revolutionary analysis, broader propaganda efforts, and synergy with aboveground groups to become a more serious threat.

2. Create or join radical mass organizations or movements : These organizations should be based on individual autonomy, confederation, combativeness, direct action, the elimination of internal hierarchy, mutual aid/education, and solidarity. Anarchist labour unions, tenant self-defence, neighbourhood and student assemblies, and anti-fascist fronts have all been examples employed by Jews from the women working in the Shmata Business, to the New York mothers leading rent strikes from 1918-1920, to the striking students fighting antisemitism at Aberdeen elementary school.

For those not yet ready for underground resistance, these mass organizations are a place to start and one in which most skills of any sort prove to be valuable. But do not mistake an NGO, political party, or your institutional student or workers’ union as such an organization. This is just a recipe for losing time.

3. Create or join a specifically anarchist aboveground group : Potentially modelled in the same way as the anarchist affinity group: unapologetic and vocally anarchist public facing activity is often necessary. Organizations of anarchists, such as Food Not Bombs, are interesting projects, but not a replacement for a specifically anarchist group, just like starting a breakfast program for kids is not a replacement for the Black Panther Party. Public anarchist activity should incorporate infrastructure for meeting peoples’ basic needs through direct action, mutual aid, and social centres where people can gather to build knowledge and relationships. People should be given skills to not just fight fascism, but its roots: the state, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and all other systems of oppression and authority. Aboveground anarchist activity, namely education, mutual aid, direct action, and social events, can be carried out by these groups.

“Murder us, tyrants, but new fighters will come and we will fight on and on, until the world is free.”

– In Kamf (In Struggle)

 

Questions and comments are warmly welcomed at Jewswholiketofight@proton.me

Submitted anonymously over email.

Bring the War Home – 17 October Protest @ Washington Square Park

17 October 2024 – Anonymous call to action:

FREE PALESTINE! STOP COP NATION! FREE THE PEOPLE! FREE THE LAND! BRING THE WAR HOME! 

After a year of the Zionist entity’s newest assault on Gaza, the struggling and free people within the belly of the beast specifically in amerika have been able to achieve no real material gains for the people of Palestine. We have protested, we have occupied space in our universities, and we have removed our occupations In hopes that our universities will divest without us forcing them to. It’s time we cast away all illusions.

We must recognize that the struggle for Palestinian liberation is intertwined with the struggle for the liberation of the occupied Black Nation within the heart of the beast known as amerika, we must act and move along this basis. The same occupation army that is responsible for the genocide of Palestinians is also responsible for the centuries-long genocide of Black people in amerika. We are sick and tired of getting beat by pigs, Mass arrested, and having nothing come from it. We are sick and tired of performative actions, which do nothing for the people of Palestine and the occupied Black Nation.

As the students of Birzeit Universit, Ghent and Amsterdam University, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Cal Poly Humbolt, and so many more bases of fighting and struggling students have shown us, real change can be made from within the belly of the beast. As the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, The Revolutionary Action Movement, and other organizations who took up the gun to free themselves, their people, and their land from amerikan occupation and racism have shown us, real change can be made from the belly of the beast.

But this change is only possible when we leap from a false sense of peace to the realization of the combative nature of our struggle. Show up at Washington Square Park on October 17th at 5 pm. Let your voice be heard, let your actions speak for themselves, and develop a genuine combative spirit capable of resisting empire from within.

Source: Unity of Fields

Call for Autonomous Acts of Rage Against Colonization Everywhere on monday october 14th 2024

“We will need each other to make sure that the flames, if they were to come, clear the area that we will live in together. We will need to clear it of the fuel that would end up repeating the problems we are currently having. We will need to make sure that the seeds, nutrients and soil are scattered beyond our ability to control.” Aragorn

We don’t just want a cease fire, we want the Right of Return for all Palestinian people, for water to flow, and the traditions to stay alive. We can’t get back the countless lives lost, but we can honor and avenge them. And we will.

For the end of the struggle that is settler colonialism everywhere. Where the land is stolen, consent violated, the old ways forgotten – let it burn.

We hope that every colonizer who robs the lives and dignity of the land and the people on it understands that their great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren’s children are not going to be here because of their violence and indeterminate destruction.

We will still be here fighting for the next seven generations, but we will never forget the slaughter, and we will remember to make sure those grandchildren stay afraid of all that is wild.

The united states government now “recognizes” indigenous people’s day alongside columbus day. we must make this impossible to reconcile. We will remain illegible to them, and unknowable to all but each other and the stars above, the water below, and all that of the earth fighting back. We call out to the brave and the humble – all that is striving towards life, while defying management, capture, and domestication with a strength they could never know.

find the connections, funders, manufacturers, advisors, politicians, gentrifiers, and all enemies of the people and the earth. you know who they are.

find some friends and haunt those motherfuckers ghosts

Submitted anonymously over email.

Montrose L Station Disabled

October 5, 2024

This morning, two weeks after the state-sanctioned execution* of Derrell Mickles and the shooting of several bystanders on the L train line, actionists in Brooklyn dismantled the border infrastructure at the Montrose Ave L Station: card readers were disabled with glue and tap screens were smashed to pieces, forcing the closure of the station’s only turnstiles and allowing all patrons to legally enter the station without paying.

We refuse to pay for subway fare in a city that gives millions of dollars to a violent, occupying police force rather than social services. We refuse to comply with arbitrary rules set by fascists that determine a man’s life is worth $2.90. We recognize that the same death cult that created and patrols the Southern border with México is the same death cult that creates and patrols borders in occupied Palestine and the West Bank is the same death cult that has now killed a man in Brooklyn. MURDERERS OFF THE MTA.

We call on all comrades in the 5 boroughs to join our free fare movement and join us in enforcing free fares throughout the system.

All borders imply the violence of their maintenance. The free fare movement lives. Free Palestine. Justice for Derrell Mickles.

Found on Social Media

*Admin note: No one was killed in the L train mass shooting. Derrell Mickles is alive and has been indicted on charges of assaulting an officer. The bystander who suffered brain damage also survived and is suing the NYPD for $80 million.

Call to Action: Oct 7 Week of Rage

LET the FLOOD of AL-AQSA DROWN the SETTLER EMPIRE!

Call for a Week of Rage from October 7–14: Direct action in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance and anti-colonial movements in Turtle Island.

To act alongside the Al-Quds Axis and ‘bring the war home’ requires nothing less than a revival of anti-colonial militancy in this occupied continent. Free Palestine means death to amerika.

In commemorating one year of Operation Toufan Al-Aqsa, this is a call to go beyond the routine stage-managed ‘protest’ parades; this is a call to organize and sustain attacks on all entities, institutions, and infrastructures of the genocidal u.s.-zionist settler-imperialist order. Strike fear into the hearts of the comfortable colonizers, unsettle the settlers, just as the Palestinian Mujahideen have done.

Honor the martyrs through action. From Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen, to the millions of Native and Afrikan peoples across these lands—carry on the fight of those who dared to resist the settler-invader hordes and their capitalist slaveocracy. Target the many politicians, pigs, and profiteers that uphold the amerikan settler empire and its zionist spawn.

Share this graphic online, print and disseminate this call to action at demos, gatherings, study groups. [PDF: AlAqsaWoR]

Organize a crew—at least three people—map out the terrain, assemble necessary tools, make a plan, and go on the offensive. For ideas, check out past actions and tactical resources on unityoffields.org, and submit a report back to the_unity_of_fields@proton.me.

As Al-Qassam urban guerrillas have demonstrated, a small dedicated cell can do untold damage upon the enemy. In the midst of total genocidal devastation, the Resistance is still able to obliterate the zionist entity’s tanks with just a few men. Let’s muster the courage and conviction so we too can learn from their revolutionary example.

GLORY to the MARTYRS
VICTORY to the RESISTANCE
WHAT IS COMING IS GREATER

Submitted anonymously over email.

FREE FARE: Bedford L train station smashed

Monday night at the Bedford Ave L train station in Brooklyn, we smashed 8 OMNY readers, 1 OMNY machine, and 2 MTA machines. We made the fare FREE because they had to open the emergency door to let people in. This is in direct response to the L train mass shooting committed by NYPD, when they shot Derrel Mickells and two bystanders over $2.90, in a Black neighborhood under militarized police occupation. New Yorkers say enough is enough and fuck your fare.

We live in a world in which the pig enforcers of racial capitalism can casually shoot us over a few dollars. All our lives especially Black lives are worth less than $2.90 to them. Whether it’s paying the pigs to menace Black and Brown communities and restrict movement, for funding genocide near and far, or creating technology to convenience the rich and confine the poor, capitalism is designed to kill.

This is a call to action. Anyone can do this. Gather info, plan well, be covered, be their nightmare. Let’s all smash! Puncture the walls of the techno-prison and see real light, breathe real air, and destory the fare!

Continue reading “FREE FARE: Bedford L train station smashed”

Redecorate the L Train!

Zine: Sabotage of ATMs, Fare Machines, and Parking Meters

[READ]                   [PRINT]

Hopping the turnstile isn’t enough. Likely you’ve already been hopping the turnstile for years and a call for a boycott is no change in your daily routine. But what if we cut off revenue for the most of the line? MTA and NYPD need to feel the heat.

Let’s redecorate all the L train stations. Make them free for everyone, and maybe leave some nice art on those annoying ads while we’re at it.

All you need is some superglue and giftcards to sabotage the card swipe. For OMNY I suggest something pointed like a pick, but I’m sure a hammer will do. Use your wrist. Bike locks for the emergency exits. I’m sure you know the drill. But in case anyone is unfamiliar or wants to jump in some newly radicalized comrades, here’s an old zine you can share around.

Submitted anonymously over email.