A ringing gong signaled a breakaway from the thousands-strong rally (swelled by student walkouts earlier in the day) on the steps of Manhattan’s iconic public library to the offices of the failing New York Times.
A sizable crowd gathered outside in support of those who had already established themselves in the plate glass lobby, cacophanously reciting from a freshly printed newspaper titled THE NEW YORK WAR CRIMES: listing the names of murdered Palestinian journalists and youth (beginning at age 0 and reaching 17) reappropriating the authoritative papers’ manner of eulogizing mass death, usually reserved for the citizens of empire. The occupiers read their names aloud and also individually called out the members of the editorial board – “Blood on your hands!” The self-published WAR CRIMES, printed by the thousands, covered the floor and, when held up, protected the crowd from surveillance.
For an action of writers, the crowd outside kept the words succinct:
A chant of “NYPD / IDF / Both of them mean fucking death!”
A litany of names of the dead
A banner reading simply: Lies
A strained voice still mustering Allahu Akbar!
Before long, the neighboring Starbucks and an NYPD vehicle became canvases for the scribes. That vehicle lost its back window and the air from its tires in an opportune moment. Pure fucking poetry!
Once the cue was taken, others swiftly followed suit. Another NYPD van was spotted around the corner from the first, also emblazoned with the words “Free Gaza”
An unaffiliated passerby enjoying an evening walk could be seen retrieving a souvenir from the shattered back window (with one hand, and reportedly a bottle of henny in the other.)
Scrawls illuminated the bond between the IDF and NYPD, likening both to the KKK, the American epitome of white supremacist terror. Semi-civilian military forces, which train in tandem, the IDF and the NYPD, kill with impunity, abet mass incarceration, and enforce strategies of ghettoization which the Nazis admired in the US and which Israel now applies to Palestinians through forceful cognitive dissonance.
These actions were sparked and rooted in inexpressible grief and rage. Those lost were entire universes, not to be calculated, measured, or forgotten.
Breaking away from a larger demonstration, with its slow marching in circles, ruptured the expected formula of protest, injecting the crowd with confidence, a slight step ahead of the police. Perhaps in part to avoid the optics of censorship, no arrests were made.
After weeks of desensitized brutality, feelings of futility and complicity here in the belly of the beast, we welcomed this opportunity for another type of action. Armed with imagination, we find possibility. May it grow!
Find your friends!
Fight where you are!
INTIFADA!
-NYC union of book thieves, plagiarists, and ranters