Localizing the Conflict

“The fight against genocide is in our own backyards” — Two of the “Merrimack 4” reflect on their decision to take direct action against Elbit facilities near them. Second of two parts.

Part one of this story is here.

By Corinna G. Barnard
Special to Consortium News

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.

[See: Gaza Assault Left 400,000 Without Regular Access to Clean Water]

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.” 

“In this county, our second largest employer is the military industrial giant General Dynamics,”  she said, referring to a weapons facility about 20 miles north in Pittsfield, her hometown.  

Pittsfield General Dynamics’ website boasts about its employment appeal at the top of its homepage:  

“Working at our Pittsfield facility provides the opportunity to make your mark by engineering technology used on the world’s most advanced ships and submarines. You would have a chance to do work that matters, and then log off to enjoy all the outdoor activities.” 

Belanger was out to refute that pleasant message. 

“General Dynamics is not a job creator here in the Berkshires,” she told the rally in Great Barrington,

“it is a corporation that funnels the life of our community into the destruction of others. Take a look at General Dynamics’ stock value and how it has shot up in the past few days. War is profitable. Genocide is profitable. Wealth is built on the back of human suffering.”

Two days later, Belanger was up in Pittsfield, outside  General Dynamics. Once again she was yelling. 

“The fight against genocide is in our own backyards,” she began her Oct. 12, 2023, speech. “I will say it again. The fight against genocide is in our own backyards.”

Specific Targets

Belanger wanted to harness public outrage over the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and aim it at specific targets for specific objectives; a weapons facility, in order to scar its social acceptability; a university administration, in order to get it to divest its huge opaque endowment from Israeli companies benefiting from Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.  

She doubted that broadly focused street demonstrations aimed at changing the positions of the White House and lawmakers in Congress would do much; at least not on their own.

For years, the politicians running the country had proven themselves impervious to the injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Trying to persuade them to help stop Israeli war crimes in Gaza, in her view, was like appealing to the morality of a criminal enterprise.

She believed that tactically speaking, a strict reliance on lawful street protests would sap vital energy from other necessary forms of protest, such as direct action. 

Walsh was in full agreement a year ago. 

They still see it that way now, if not more so.  

“Zionism and its U.S. support will not be defeated at the ballot box, the police-permitted parade, the performative die-in, the hummus aisle, or through petty vandalism,” says Walsh. “Of course a diversity of tactics ranging from boycotts to mass rallies to clandestine militancy is necessary.” 

Belanger, Walsh and two others, Sophie Ross and Bridget Shergalis, are the so-called Merrimack 4. 

On Nov. 14 they will begin a 60-day sentence for a direct action they took on Nov. 20, 2023, against a building in Merrimack, New Hampshire, that houses a U.S. subsidiary of leading Israeli weapons maker Elbit Systems.

In the aftermath of their plea agreement reached in September, Belanger and Walsh reflected on the Elbit Merrimack action in emails with Consortium News.

Walsh — who in June was the subject of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “The Making of an American Radical” — criticizes some in the leadership of the pro-Palestine movement for disavowing militancy “in favor of liberal reformism as the only ‘correct’ tactic.”

By contrast, she praises the college encampments last spring that took more militant actions and called on universities to divest from investments in Israeli companies. 

“The surge of militancy during the encampments showed how the self-appointed movement leadership is tailing the masses in terms of how ready they are to escalate,” she says.

Lost Illusions 

Walsh, now 20, was already jaded about electoral politics in high-school. 

After heady success with an online re-election effort for Ed Markey (D-MA) as a sophomore (she talks about that “stan” campaign here)  she realized something about the U.S. senator after he was back in office. She didn’t like his votes on Palestine/Israel. And there was no way to get him to shift, despite all the effort she had poured into his campaign. 

Markey’s ultimate allegiance, she wrote in Mondoweiss, was to the “Massachusetts Democratic establishment and the pro-Israel lobby.” Working for him, she came to feel, had made her complicit in Israel’s oppression of Palestine. 

She concluded that essay by saying: 

“History shows us that direct action, protest, and internationalist solidarity are far more effective strategies than appealing to the morality of elected officials who are in the pocket of the military-industrial complex.”

Appealing to elected officials was over. 

Belanger’s path to direct action, in a sense, begins with a book.

In 2013, Belanger graduated from Hobart and William Smith, a private liberal arts college in Geneva, New York, where she completed a double major in history and international relations and a minor in German. She says she was poised for a career in diplomacy or the NGO sphere. 

“I had always identified as some sort of Marxist, but I was profoundly radicalized in my senior year of college after reading Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, which really opened my eyes to the realities of imperialism and neo-colonialism in a way that I hadn’t understood before, having studied Marxism mostly in its historical context in Europe.” 

The political career she had envisioned suddenly appeared to “serve the interests of U.S. imperialism, and that academia, the NGO sphere, and the world of U.S. diplomacy were all dead ends that could never be revolutionary.” 

Not knowing what to do, she says she “wound up waitressing and bartending throughout her twenties instead of pursuing a career.” During that time she lived in California. 

In 2020, Belanger moved back home to her hometown, Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts, where she met James Cox Chambers Jr, aka Fergie Chambers, the estranged member of the family that owns the privately held, Atlanta-based global conglomerate Cox Enterprises.

Belanger and Chambers began working on political projects and looking for ways to advance a revolutionary movement.  

Now living in Tunisia, Chambers has been funding the Merrimack 4’s defense, says Belanger, after he “promised very publicly to pay all legal fees of anyone who chose to take direct action against Elbit.”    

Punishment by Other Means 

The 60-day sentence that lies ahead in Valley Street Jail in Manchester, New Hampshire, represents the official portion of the Merrimack 4’s punishment, which also includes “a 24-month suspended sentence for three years, and a stay-away order from every Elbit Systems facility, among other conditions.” 

It follows what seems like a nearly  year-long punishment by other means. 

“State repression” is the phrase Calla Walsh uses for it.

“The process was the punishment,” Walsh says. “The hardest part was all the months of waiting, isolation, and fear of a lifetime in prison, which is over now. Every day in jail I know I’ll be a day closer to getting back in the streets with the movement.”

Belanger says their first  impulse after the initial arrests of the first three, on Nov. 20, 2023, was to politicize the case.  

“I remember saying that the legal system had become our new battleground. This perception was immediately shattered. The nature of the state repression forced our silence.  It was incredibly frustrating.” 

At the time of Belanger’s belated arrest in January, two months after the action, she was in a Nashua, New Hampshire, courthouse. She had traveled there from her home in Massachusetts to provide court support to the other three during a hearing. She had no idea that she would wind up in the cross-hairs.

“I was never notified of a warrant,” she says, “and I had been to that court before and not encountered any issues. I’ve since learned that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to see if you have an open warrant. You basically need to be arrested to find out.”

“I was taken from there to a holding cell at the courthouse, then to the police station where my arrest was processed, and then held overnight on preventative detention. The bail commissioner explained to me that, since I lived out of state and they were only able to arrest me because I had showed up in New Hampshire, that I posed a flight risk, and his own job was on the line if I weren’t to show up to court, so he had no choice but to have me held in jail overnight.

I had a hearing the next day, which I did from Zoom in the jail. There was a conflict of interest with every available public defender, as they had represented the three others in their bail hearings, so I had to represent myself at the hearing. 

The prosecution initially posed a $20k bail for me, but I was able to argue it down to $5k. Had it been $20k, I would have had to remain in prison for much longer as that money was gathered, because New Hampshire has a cash-only bail policy and no bail bonds, so you have to post the full amount in cash to be bailed out.” 

For a while Walsh’s passport — her only form of identification since she doesn’t drive — was confiscated. So was her phone, she says, as the New Hampshire Department of Justice tried, but ultimately failed, to get permission to search it. 

For months, a no-contact order set as a bail condition prevented co-defendants from seeing each other. 

“No-contact orders are typically only used when there is a threat of witness intimidation or violence, which obviously there was not,” says Walsh. “Our lawyers worked together to get the orders dropped, which happened at the end of May 2024. We’ve also seen no-contact orders used in the political repression in Atlanta, where defendants have been vaguely banned from contact with anyone associated with the ‘Defend the Atlanta Forest’ movement.” 

Belanger adds: “It made it so we could not be there for each other as we went through a difficult shared experience. When our no-contact order dropped, Calla and I reunited within hours.”

Two months later, in July, Belanger discovered that police in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were looking for her. They had a warrant for her arrest. It was an error, tied to the old warrant in New Hampshire, from which she had already been freed on bail. Nonetheless, Belanger became a temporary fugitive as she tried to find a lawyer to resolve the mixup between authorities in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.  

“I was in a visceral state of fight or flight throughout this whole experience. I felt like I could be visited by police and taken to jail at every second,” says Belanger. “Even just driving, I would think about being pulled over for some other reason and then taken into custody, and not being able to tell anyone that it was happening.”

Looking back on the Elbit Merrimack action, Belanger says she 

“wanted desperately to try and make a material impact to stop the genocide I was watching intensify by the day. I felt and still do feel that people in the imperial core need to put their own bodies on the line to open a front against imperialism here at home, although I have definitely learned some very important lessons about how that should be done from engaging in struggle the way that I did and dealing with the fallout of it.” 

Walsh says that while they are in Valley Street Jail they can only receive books sent from Amazon or Barnes and Nobles, “so we will be sharing our Amazon wish lists.” 

The list of writers on Walsh’s list are Samir Amin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Gerald Horne. Also, “Soviet fiction, and a lot of works about the Irish Revolution.” 

Belanger says she’s “trying not to fill my reading list exclusively with dense political non-fiction, although I do have some books I’ve been meaning to get to about Marx’s concept of alienation.” 

Belanger is studying herbalism and while incarcerated she plans to read some “herbalism books so I can still feel connected to the Earth while I’m locked away in concrete.”

Corinna Barnard, deputy editor of Consortium News, formerly worked in editing capacities for Women’s eNews, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. At the start of her career she was managing editor for the magazine Nuclear Times, which covered the 1980s anti-nuclear war movement.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.