Brooklyn Public Library, Passover, 4/23/2024 Photo by Jennifer Jager
I was asked by some current students today at SUNY Stony Brook for a message of solidarity for those taking action today in support of Palestine. Here is the statement I just sent, with help from other former students at Stony Brook and Red Balloon Collective members. Feel free to forward.
I want to express my solidarity as a student and member of the radical Red Balloon Collective at SUNY Stony Brook from 50 years ago, and the solidarity with you all by most of the remaining Red Balloonistas and Stony Brook activists.
We send greetings from the many protests we are still engaged in — we never stopped, despite the corporate media’s false portrayals. And we all participate against the overwhelmingly brutal and immoral Israeli bombardment of Gaza — of hospitals, schools, peoples homes, sanitation facilities, infrastructure … along with thousands of individual civilians whom Israel treats like vermin and kills with impunity.
Many of us protesting Israel’s colonization of Gaza and bombardment are Jewish. Israel does not speak for us. Far from falling under the spell of some sort of religious or tribal unity, we stand with those who choose to uphold humanity and oppose genocide and mass murder.
From the beginning Israel’s ruling class has been interested in seizing Gaza. As Naomi Klein has brilliantly pointed out, Israeli mass ideology always had the seeds of Nakba in it, but today Zionism has morphed into something exceedingly ugly. From the beginning, however, Israel was predicated on the “expulsion” of the indigenous Arab population from Gaza and “ethnically cleansing” it and the rest of the Occupied territories, expelling Palestinians from Palestine to finish the “task” of 1948.
That has from the start been Israel’s ideological basis, in softer or harder versions.
That is why a faction of Israel’s rulers headed by Netanyahu supported and funded the origin of what today is Hamas. In a widely circulated video (since scrubbed from the internet), Netanyahu himself “explained” that Israel’s secret support for the early Hamas was a ruse to split Palestinian support from the Palestine Authority and Liberation Organization, to prevent a “two-state solution” from gaining support among Palestinians!
There have even been very recent calls within the Israeli government to exploit Gaza’s resources.
We say NO, not in our name, and not in anyone’s name!
Stony Brook has a long history of occupations and tent cities for all sorts of issues. We occupied buildings to oppose war-related research and recruitment, over which many Stony Brook students, including me, were arrested and thrown into prison. We occupied to free political prisoners.
We took over buildings in solidarity with revolutions in Nicaragua and in opposition to fascists in El Salvador.
We fought Stony Brook’s connections to apartheid in South Africa and also to fascist Chile, with whom Stony Brook had made marine biology joint research compacts, seeking to break an international boycott against Pinochet.
We broke into and stole secret files in 1968 and published them in a newspaper “The Open File: Project Themis”, a precursor to this era of Israel’s “Lavender” Artificial Intelligence murders.
One of the largest tent cities came — and this is very funny in this context, looking back — to protest the huge amount of mud on campus!
We took over buildings against budget cuts but instead of shutting them down in protest we opened them up for public use!
We are so glad to see the current wave of students reaching out to those who came before and taking action on behalf of all of humanity. What a glimmer of hope, a continuity from one political generation to the next!
Don’t be fooled by the “mainstream” corporate media attempts to distort who we are, our history, and their smear campaign against us. In opposing Israel, we are not “Anti-Semites” but Anti-Colonialists and anti-Fascists.
The corporate media twists our motives and distorts the meaning of our movements. But we are clear: we are NOT anti-Jewish but anti-fascist.
For many years we had to fight within our own movements to support self-determination for the Palestinian people. Many groups running the big antiwar organizations wouldn’t touch this issue. But this current wave of young people has made it clear what we are doing and why. We hold human freedom and dignity to be sacrosanct, and will not allow Israel’s murders of tens of thousands of Palestinians to be rationalized by labeling us anti-Semites. We’re not. (And for the record, Palestinians are “Semites” too!)
It is a wonderful thing that “you have decided not to be silent and decided to speak out against the repression that you see with your own eyes.” That’s how Mumia abu-Jamal put it last week. Mumia is a former Black Panther imprisoned his entire adult life in Pennsylvania’s state prisons. “You are part of something massive, and you are part of something that is on the right side of history.
“You’re against a colonial regime that steals the land from the people who are Indigenous to that area. I urge you to speak out against the terrorism that is afflicted upon Gaza with all of your might, all of your will and all of your strength. Do not bow to those who want you to be silent.
“This is the moment to be heard and shake the earth so that the people of Gaza, the people of Rafah, the people of the West Bank, the people of Palestine can feel your solidarity with them.ﾔ
We refuse to allow ourselves to be divided into “in groups” and “others”. That categorizing is a ploy designed to defeat us. We are in this ongoing fight against colonialism, fascism, capitalism and imperialism rolled into one. Putting that understanding into action takes courage, just as it did for John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X.
We once forced Stony Brook to divest from South Africa and to cut ties with companies supporting the apartheid regime. We need to do the same today, to cut off all U.S. funding for the Israeli military, and Stony Brook University’s part in it.
Our tradition is universal, and joins with those who’ve fought that battle before. The struggle continues over the decades. It didn’t end with the 60’s, nor with the 80s. As Dr. Martin Luther King observed in 1968, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
With your courage and commitment, Justice shall prevail.
Freedom for Palestine, and for all.
Mitchel Cohen
Red Balloon Collective
Stony Brook, 1970 thru 1994.
