“The fight against genocide is in our own backyards”
Paige Belanger stood with a megaphone on the bed of a white pickup truck outside the town hall in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at a Palestine-solidarity rally on Oct. 10, 2023.
A few dozen people had gathered with Palestine flags, flaunting keffiyehs and holding up signs saying: “When People Are Occupied, Resistance is Justified,” and “End Aid to Israel.” They chanted: “From Iraq to Palestine, Occupation Is a Crime.”
Great Barrington has a population of about 7,000. Smithsonian Magazine honored it in 2012 as “the best small town in America.”
Across the street a small counter-protest group formed, holding Israeli flags.
Many of those on one side of the street knew someone on the other. Some of the people in the facing groups were long standing members of the same community. Some had gone to the same synagogue.
A few from the Israeli side crossed the street to argue with those on the Palestinian side.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” a member of the Palestine faction told an envoy from the Israel camp. “But apartheid is apartheid.”
In 2021 a similar protest and counter protest occurred in Great Barrington at that same place during a surge of Israeli violence against Gaza that May.
The street had been divided in the same way; Palestine supporters on one side, Israel supporters on the other. There was arguing and taunting then. But this time, two years later, the hostility was more intense.
Some from the pro-Israel contingent mingled in an aggressive manner, filming people in the Palestine rally, where Paige Belanger spoke.
A photo of Belanger from that day now appears on her profile on Canary Mission, the Israeli-intelligence-run doxxing site. (In March the Israeli Cabinet abolished the ministry that was reportedly in charge of Canary Mission and moved its functions to the Prime Minister’s Office.)
“All of us here know that Palestine has been under an illegal and genocidal occupation for over 75 years,” Belanger yelled into her megaphone.
While expressing “great revolutionary love for the people of Palestine,” Belanger went on to devote her speech to the presence of a major weapons company there where she stood, in Berkshire County, and its connection to “human suffering.” (more...)
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