Boston Coalition for Palestine shuts down highway, joins striking hotel workers, targets Zionist consulate

Some 5,000 protesters turned out Oct. 6 on Boston Common in a massive show of support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to the genocidal Zionist state and its U.S. sponsor. 

Organized by the Boston Coalition for Palestine — whose 45 member organizations include Palestinian House of New England, Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace and Workers World Party — Sunday’s action observed the one-year anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Flood, when Hamas fighters broke out of besieged Gaza and attacked Israeli settlements on October 7, 2023. 

On that day, rally emcee Lea Kayali of the Palestinian Youth Movement explained the people of Gaza “broke down the prison doors” and exposed the weakness and complacency of the Zionist apartheid regime. 

Over the past year, the Zionist state has escalated its genocide of the Palestinian people, begun by the 1948 Nakba, to unprecedented levels of depravity. IOF terror-bombing, massacres, and mass starvation have likely murdered over 119,000 Palestinian men, women, and children, and have disabled and displaced many hundreds of thousands more. Devi Sridhar, a public health expert at the University of Edinburgh, estimates that the death toll could already be as high as 335,500. (tinyurl.com/bdcsjav2)

In the West Bank, Zionist authorities and settler death squads have killed over 700 Palestinians since October 7. (tinyurl.com/2rhazdre) 

“For 365 days our people of Gaza, the people of Palestine and the people of our region who have dared to resist colonialism have been paying the ultimate price for resistance,” said Kayali.

 As speakers at the rally noted, the anniversary of October 7 also marks a new phase in the global struggle against Zionist genocide and aggression. Intent on spreading such death and displacement across the region, the Zionist state preceded its invasion of Lebanon with air strikes. 

Connecting settler colonialism globally

Jean-Luc Pierite, president of the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB), emphasized that the fight for a free Palestine is part of the worldwide struggle of all Indigenous nations against ongoing settler-colonial genocide. 

Rejecting the sham choices for president offered by the upcoming bourgeois elections, Pierite stressed that only the mass mobilization of working, Indigenous and other oppressed peoples could overthrow settler colonialism from Palestine to the stolen lands claimed by the U.S. and Canada. 

An organizer with Salem State Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) detailed the Zionist state’s extensive involvement in imperialism, genocide and racial oppression around the globe. Throughout its history, she explained, Israel has trafficked weapons to fellow U.S clients, including to Rios Montt’s 1980s military dictatorship in Guatemala, which massacred over 130,000 Mayans. 

Today, Israel continues to train the racist killer cops who repress Native, Black and Latine communities and provides technologies used to surveil and terrorize migrants at the U.S southern border. 

The SJP speaker continued: “This is why our solidarity must be global We must stand with the people of Gaza, Myanmar, Lebanon, with the Indigenous communities across Latin America, with Sudan, the Black and Brown communities fighting against police brutality here in the U.S., because their struggle is our struggle. Their freedom is intertwined with our freedom. That is why we stand here today and continue to do so until we see a free Palestine!”

Ziad Almadi, a seventh-grade student activist, called attention to the terror and trauma that millions of children in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria are experiencing: “Let’s hear their voices, let’s stand together to give them hope and bring peace and make Gaza free.” 

Marchers escalate, shutting down Storrow Drive

Other speakers highlighted the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s campaign targeting Israeli weapons maker Elbit Systems and other companies, universities and institutions that support the Zionist genocide.

Students, workers and other oppressed peoples in the U.S. imperial core, they stressed, must organize to end the funding and weapons shipments that make the Zionist campaign of genocide and regional aggression possible. 

From the back of a sound truck, Kayali urged the crowd: “We’re going to have to come together and start intensifying our solidarity. We’re going to have to take space and escalate, so that the whole world knows that Gaza does not stand alone! Because we are done pleading for sympathy; we are demanding solidarity. We are demanding it with our bodies, we are demanding it with our voices, and we are demanding it with our collective power.”

From Boston Common demonstrators flooded the streets, outmaneuvered police bike squads and marched onto Storrow Drive, shutting down traffic for half an hour on that major city highway, the first time in living memory that protesters succeeded in such a disruption. 

Many waved Palestinian and Lebanese flags, beat drums and danced to blaring Palestinian anthems as they marched past the cafes and boutiques of posh Beacon Hill, a notorious bourgeois haunt and seat of government. 

Organizers led the crowd in chants from the back of a sound truck — built and secured by members of Workers Party of Massachusetts and Workers World Party-Boston — including “From the belly of the beast, hands off the Middle East”; “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” and “Israel, Israel, what do you say? How many kids have you killed today?”

Solidarity with striking hotel workers

At the fancy Hilton Park Plaza Hotel, the march stopped to show solidarity with the hotel workers of UNITE HERE Local 26, who are striking to demand higher wages and expanded benefits that management has long denied them. Many anti-war activists joined the picket line outside the hotel as the crowd chanted, “The workers united will never be defeated!”

The march ended at the Israeli Consulate — a tenant of the same struck Hilton hotel — with a rally where protesters faced off with the Boston cops guarding the entrance. Marchers demanded that the Zionist headquarters be evicted from the building and the city for its crimes of genocide.

Ed Childs, a decades-long Workers World Party member and Local 26 cook, told the crowd: “Workers and oppressed people worldwide have a common enemy: the ruling class, which is the ultimate beneficiary of the genocidal imperialist and settler-colonialist extraction that sustains the capitalist world-system. Let us get together for the fight!” 

Closing the action, Fawaz Abusharkh, a co-founder of Palestinian House of New England and Boston Coalition For Palestine, stressed that the genocidal Zionist onslaught is only strengthening Palestinian resilience and resistance. Zionist bombs, Abusharkh promised, would only “spread the seeds” of the liberation of Palestine.