Doing Time for Palestine

Corinna Barnard interviews two of the “Merrimack 4,” activists facing jail on Nov. 14 for their direct action on a U.S. subsidiary of Israeli weapons supplier Elbit.  First of two parts.

By Corinna G. Barnard
Special to Consortium News

Almost a year ago a photograph of two figures standing on a rooftop of a building in Merrimack, New Hampshire, attracted interest in the social-media sphere attentive to the Palestine-Israel conflict. 

The people in the photograph were wearing masks and holding greenish smoky flares over their heads.  

Beneath them was a sign, “Elbit Systems of America.” 

That’s a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems.

The parent, Haifa-based company is a leading supplier of weaponry — military drones, artillery, munitions and electronic warfare systems — that the Israeli military, for over a year, has needed to destroy the built-and-natural environment of Palestinians while slaughtering them at a historic rate in modern warfare.  

In the photo, an American flag drooped on the left side of the Elbit facility, frames the image. The sky had the delicate pastels of a nice November morning. 

But who were the people on the Elbit Merrimack roof? And why were they up there? 

For much of the past year a variety of people — prosecutors, politicians and reporters — have been providing the answers. 

Now Calla Walsh, the one in the blue jacket on the left side of the photo, is responding to email questions from Consortium News. So is Paige Belanger.  

Walsh, Belanger and two other young women — Sophie Ross, then 22, and Bridget Shergalis, then 27 — are the Merrimack 4. 

On Nov. 20, 2023, they led a direct action against Elbit Merrimack. 

Almost a year later, on Nov. 14 they are scheduled to begin a 60-day sentence in Hillsborough County House of Corrections,  also known as the Valley Street Jail, in Manchester, New Hampshire, for their role in that action. 

“Whatever the conditions are, they will be much better than those faced by Palestinians in Zionist concentration camps,” says Belanger, in an email to ConsortiumNews.

Until now, the Merrimack 4 have refrained from speaking publicly about their experience while their case was being adjudicated.  

“It’s only now, after coming to plea agreements and knowing what our sentences will look like, that we feel we are able to begin speaking about our case and reclaiming our voices more generally,” Belanger says.

(Over the past year, I got to know Walsh and Belanger after following their initial political activities in October and November 2023, before the Merrimack action). 

Arrested on the Roof

Walsh and two others, on the morning of that photo, had climbed ladders to reach the roof of the Elbit building in Merrimack. 

Earlier, while a support team was blocking the driveway to the building, a core group broke windows, sprayed red paint and graffiti on the front of the building and barred a door with a bicycle lock. 

Holding the smoke flares on the roof and creating an iconic photo-op was a triumphant gesture. 

Shortly after that photograph was taken, local police arrested Walsh, then 19, along with Sophie Ross and Bridget Shergalis — the original “Merrimack 3” — on the roof. 

Merrimack police involved the F.B.I. in its investigation of the incident to find any “co-conspirators.”  

Two months later, in January, Belanger, then 32, was also arrested, making it the “Merrimack 4.”  

Palestine Action 

The Merrimack Elbit action followed the lead of Palestine Action, the U.K. campaign that has defaced and damaged Elbit and other military-linked facilities in that country under the mission statement: “Take Direct Action Against Israel’s Arms Trade in Britain.” 

Walsh and Belanger helped form a U.S. branch of Palestine Action after Oct. 7 and the group began an Elbit-targeting spree. 

They disturbed an Elbit recruitment event at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston; defaced an Elbit office in Arlington, Virginia, with red-paint graffiti: “War criminals work here.”  

Between Oct. 7 and Nov. 20, the Elbit office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was targeted several times, including on Oct. 30, when both Calla Walsh and Sophie Ross got arrested, one year ago today. 

Then came Merrimack. 

Felonies Dropped 

In September, the Merrimack 4 defense team negotiated the 60-day sentence for two misdemeanors in a legal mediation with a judge. 

That outcome is a major reduction of initial felony charges that Hillsborough, New Hampshire, county prosecutors brought against them for riot, sabotage, criminal mischief, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. The charges had hung the chilling prospect of decades in jail over the co-defendants. 

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

Walsh and Sophie Ross have charges pending from their arrests at the Cambridge, Mass., Elbit facility. As a consequence of those arrests, their bail for the Merrimack action the following month was set higher, at $20,000 each, compared with $5,000 for Shergalis.

Walsh and Ross are both still in legal trouble in Massachusetts. But unlike New Hampshire, it is their home state. And Walsh, while now only 20, already has a political chapter behind her in Massachusetts, as a politically precocious teen who helped bring in the youth vote for Democratic U.S. Sen. Ed Markey. That may have earned her some political goodwill. 

Neighboring New Hampshire is different. 

Walsh knew that she and the others on the roof might get arrested, as they had been in Cambridge. But she didn’t expect the state to come down so hard. 

“I was brought out into the courtroom in shackles and an orange jumpsuit, and when I saw my mother and familiar faces of comrades in the court stands, I knew I was in way deeper trouble than I realized,” says Walsh. 

Based on her experience, she has advice for people considering a similar form of protest: “Always avoid arrest and maximize material impact and propaganda effect.”

In January, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella took over the case from the prosecutors with the Hillsborough County Attorney’s Office who brought the original charges. 

“Originally we were all charged under New Hampshire’s sabotage statute (649:2), for hindering the U.S. or its allies’ defense capacity, a Class-A felony that carried a minimum one year in prison,” says Walsh. “No one had ever been charged with this statute before, but the state had to drop the charge because they realized it could only be used during a declared state of emergency.”

In January, Formella announced that a grand jury indicted three of them — Walsh, Ross and Shergalis — for four Class-B felonies: riot; conspiracy to commit criminal mischief; burglary; and conspiracy to commit falsifying physical evidence for climbing onto the company’s roof. Each charge carried a sentence of between three-and-a-half and seven years in prison. 

A matching indictment came against Belanger in May.

It was “somewhat shocking,” says Belanger, “to experience such draconian charges for an action so morally righteous.”

By July, however, it began to look like their case might not go to trial. 

In September, the state dropped all the felony charges.

Fergie Chambers 

James Cox Chambers Jr, aka Fergie Chambers, has been funding the Merrimack 4 legal defense. 

Chambers is an estranged member of the Cox family, which owns the privately held, Atlanta-based global conglomerate Cox Enterprises. Forbes ranks it as the 10th richest family in the U.S. 

In addition to paying their legal bills, including bail, Chambers was also a “comrade”: He helped Belanger and Walsh found Palestine Action US and participated in some of their actions. 

But since the Merrimack action he’s been out of the country, in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. 

A Rolling Stone profile of Chambers in March delves into his lifestyle: sex, drugs, spiritual quests, tormented family relations and his disastrous bankrolling of communal-living experiments. 

But it also discusses his interest in overthrowing the U.S. for the good of the world. The problem with all that, Chambers has concluded, is the unwelcome attention it attracts from U.S. law enforcement.

Two months after that Rolling Stone profile, in May, the NH Record reported that Chambers is under an active F.B.I. investigation. 

“Fergie left the country a few days after the Merrimack action, after seeing the kinds of charges being leveraged against the three girls arrested on the roof,” says Belanger.

A lot about the U.S. cultural scene generated by the Washington-backed Israeli war on Gaza recalls the period of political and social upheaval in the early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. That includes Chambers. He seems like an emanation from the ranks of the “radical chic” as the writer Tom Wolfe coined it. In today’s slang, post Occupy Wall Street, he’s a 1-percenter with revolutionary politics. 

Chambers has generated a media whirlpool around himself. In addition to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and The New York Post have run their own profiles of him. 

Belanger says his notoriety didn’t help the Merrimack 4. 

While Chambers’ legal support has been critical, his connection to the case otherwise  

“created an opening for us to be easily dismissed or maligned. We faced rumors of being groomed and indoctrinated into a sex cult, comparisons to the Symbionese Liberation Army  and Patti Hearst story, and assertions that we had otherwise been led astray by an unbalanced power dynamic with an ultra-wealthy man who encouraged and enabled us to put our bodies on the line for his own platforming and political reputation.” 

Both Belanger and Walsh deny all of that. 

Belanger says she came across Chambers in 2020, when he was running his latest communal experiment on acreage in Alford, Massachusetts, a village about 20 miles south of her home town in Pittsfield. Since his move to Tunisia, Chambers has been selling that property off. 

“He asked me to come live on the land and work towards creating a revolutionary project,” Belanger writes. 

“There were not really clear parameters of what that project might entail, just that we would be aligned on a political line and seek to become a presence in the Berkshires with some political aim. There were a lot of iterations of that project in the years I lived there. My role throughout was mostly political education. I immersed myself fully into learning and teaching Communist theory and trying to figure out ways to most meaningfully put it into practice within the specific conditions of the Berkshires.”

(One local person familiar with the set-up in Alford, who did not wish to be identified, noted that Chambers’ provision of living quarters is a huge factor for young people struggling to find affordable housing in an area where rents have gotten out of the reach of many.) 

Prosecutors’ Pressure Play 

Meanwhile, Belanger considers the initial charges a pressure play by the state to crack the co-defendants. But it didn’t work, she says. The state “failed to intimidate someone into collaborating with them.” 

Mark Moody, a New York City litigator, says that harsh prosecutorial overreach is a common tactic designed to coerce guilty pleas from those confronted by the criminal justice system. 

But he sees “political flavor” in New Hampshire Attorney General Formella’s statement, quoted in his office’s announcement of the indictment, regarding the “important civil rights and public protection interests involved.”  

“It looks like an attempt to criminalize conscientious opposition to the manufacture of weapons on American soil that will be used by foreign governments to indiscriminately slaughter human beings on foreign soil,” Moody said in an email. 

By Nov. 20, 2023, the date of the Merrimack action, Israeli war crimes in Gaza were mounting. 

On Oct. 13, 2023, Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal was already calling Israel’s assault on Gaza a “textbook case of genocide” in an article in Jewish Currents. 

“Gaza death toll tops 10,000; UN calls it a children’s graveyard,” read a Reuters headline on Nov. 10.  

Ghassan Abu Sittah, a physician who had worked at two hospitals that had been struck by Israeli forces, was depicting the attack on the health sector as “part of a military strategy that aims to wipe out Palestinians.” 

“What has been different in this war than all the other wars I have been at – not just in Gaza, but all around the region, in Yemen, Iraq and Syria – is that the destruction of the healthcare system has been the main thrust of the [Israeli] military strategy,” Abu Sittah was quoted by  Al Jazeera.

Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, who worked at both Gaza's Al-Shifa and Al-Alhi Baptist hospitals, tells Al Jazeera Israel's destruction of Gaza's health sector is part of a military strategy to wipe out Palestinians from the besieged enclave ?? pic.twitter.com/2paYX0lBxC

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) November 20, 2023

The existence of an expanding genocide in Gaza drew little recognition from the Granite State’s attorney general, local politicians or press in their various responses to the Merrimack 4’s action.

Chorus of Condemnation 

New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, smited the incident as anti-Semitic. He urged prosecutors to charge ahead, in a comment quoted by the NH Journal: 

“The antisemitism, hate, and significant damage brought to Elbit America’s campus yesterday has no place in NH and will not be tolerated. I am confident law enforcement will work to bring those responsible for this vile act of hate to swift justice.” 

The antisemitism, hate, and significant damage brought to Elbit America’s campus yesterday has no place in NH and will not be tolerated. I am confident law enforcement will work to bring those responsible for this vile act of hate to swift justice.https://t.co/53fp7K6f2E

— Chris Sununu (@GovChrisSununu) November 21, 2023

A bipartisan chorus of condemnations from local politicians followed Sununu’s opening salvo. 

The NH Journal enthusiastically adopted Sununu’s “anti-Semitic” term. This is their lead on a Nov. 21 article: 

“If the antisemitic activists of Palestine Action US were hoping to rally support in the Granite State with their attack on an Israeli-based defense contractor in Merrimack, it appears they miscalculated.”

The smoke flares the demonstrators were holding on the roof in that photo are theatrical pyrotechnics commonly used in pro-Palestine demonstrations. Unlike “incendiary devices,” they are not weapons designed to start fires. 

But for authorities steeped in post-9/11 anti-terrorism furor, masked people on a roof with smoking objects were not to be taken lightly.   

After Merrimack Police Chief Brian Levesque initially described the flares as “incendiary devices,” the term stuck in the press, along with references to “smoke bombs” and “billowing smoke” from the flares.  

With that kind of hyperbole, it was quite reasonable for members of the local community to assume that the young women on the top of the local Elbit building were making more than a political gesture. Did they perhaps want to blow up the building? The whole town? 

By both restricting the evidence of Israel’s genocidal violence from the story and deploying inflammatory terminology, the press conjured the Merrimack 4 into young women who went around “commiting siege and riot” for no apparent reason.

They just liked smashing glass and splattering red paint. They seemed possessed. New Hampshire, after all, is in New England, home of the colonial-era witch trials.

Canary Mission 

All in all, the legal, political and media response to the case might as well have been orchestrated by Canary Mission,  the heavily-funded Israel-run website that tracks and smears advocates of Palestine in the U.S. through a network of anonymous informants. 

James Bamford, an American journalist who specializes in U.S. intelligence agencies, describes the doxxing site as a key asset for the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, a “ highly secretive intelligence organization that is largely focused on the United States, and the Shin Bet security service.” 

In The Nation last December, Bamford recommended a federal investigation of Canary Mission’s funders for assisting agents of a foreign government.

Canary Mission had already blacklisted Calla Walsh before the Merrimack action for her open support of the armed Palestinian resistance and her BDS — boycott, divest and sanction — work against Israeli companies.

The site said she worked on The Mapping Project, which identifies “local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine” in Boston and its surrounding areas. Walsh says that’s untrue; all she ever did was tweet support for it.

“That’s what I was doxxed for. I would never want to take credit for those anonymous people’s work, but Zionist think tanks claimed I was an Iranian agent masterminding the entire project,” she said.

Walsh believes her Canary Mission profile affected the tenor of their prosecution. 

“At my arraignment, using information that appeared to be taken from my Canary Mission page, the prosecutor portrayed me as a vicious anti-Semitic communist hooligan who was running around the country committing crimes and calling cops ‘pigs,’ ” she told CN. 

All of the Merrimack 4 now have Canary Mission profiles. 

Errors & Victories 

Looking back on the Merrimack action, Belanger acknowledges that it may have been precipitous. 

“Operating with an extreme sense of urgency,” says Belanger,  “I think we bypassed a lot of grassroots development and community-building requisite for creating a powerful movement that could withstand state repression.” 

The prosecution’s felony charges, meanwhile, may have worked to halt the outbreak of attacks on Elbit. 

“Our initial charges for the Merrimack action were five felonies that could amount to 37 years in prison,” says Belanger.

“Especially from the vantage of hindsight, with our sentence totalling 60 days and pleading only to misdemeanors, we can see how trumped-up these charges were. The state wanted to quell these types of actions, and certainly used us as an example against engaging in militant action at a pivotal point in the escalation of the genocide.” 

At the same time, both Belanger and Walsh are heartened by some of the results of the direct-action approach they adopted. 

Anti-Elbit actions slowed down after the Merrimack felony charges in November 2023, but they did not stop. 

In March, other demonstrators resumed actions outside Merrimack Elbit. 

Pro-Palestinian protesters are shutting down Elbit Systems in Merrimack, NH. #ShutElbitDown #ShutItDown #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/m4G6dlMGuz

— HCW 4P (@HCW4P_ME) March 22, 2024

“Some of the protesters chained themselves to tires filled with cement and other materials to block the driveway in and out of the property of the Israel-based international defense electronics company,” ABC affiliate WMUR-TV reported.

As of early October, eight of them were found guilty of criminal trespass and awaiting sentencing. 

Seven protesters are locked in and blocking Elbit Systems in Merrimack, NH. They have held the entrance for 4 hours with almost 20 supporters holding signs and cheering them on. #ShutElbitDown #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/gN9AlGSUNQ

— HCW 4P (@HCW4P_ME) March 22, 2024

And last August, the Elbit Cambridge office where some of them had demonstrated in October 2023  decided to move to a “more suitable location.” That decision followed a year-long campaign of demonstrations outside the building that began in August of 2023.

Walsh ranks the closure of Elbit’s Cambridge office as one of the few material wins for the BDS movement in the U.S. in recent years.

“Ultimately the resolution of our case, defeating felonies and prison time, is a win against counterinsurgency,” she says. 

“I hope it makes people more willing to take militant anti-imperialist action, and to do it more effectively. Part of the goal of any action is to make possible the next, greater level of action. We did not take ‘shut it down’ to be a metaphor, and permanently closing the Elbit in Cambridge is one of the few material wins we’ve had in the U.S. in recent years.”

Responding to Genocide 

“What did you do during the genocide?” 

It’s a question that people of conscience have been having to ask themselves since Oct. 7, 2023, 

Matt Nelson answered it with his life on Sept. 11 by setting himself on fire near the Israeli Consulate in Boston. He did not kill himself immediately. It took four days. 

“Free Palestine,” Nelson said at the end of a statement he posted to social media beforehand. 

According to two close friends of his, Matt Nelson succumbed to his injuries Sunday afternoon at Mass General. Several of his organs were donated to families on transplant waitlists.

“Hopefully he can help improve the lives of others even though he’s gone,” one friend told me. https://t.co/6nvmnIIZlX pic.twitter.com/rId6Mm1tsa

— Talia Jane ???? (@taliaotg) September 16, 2024

Nelson joined two others in acts of extreme self-destruction. 

U.S. active-duty Airman Aaron Bushnell killed himself on Feb. 25 outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to avoid complicity in the genocide. 

Before then, on Dec. 1, 2023, a person not identified self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.

Nelson expressed a world view that seems compatible with that of Belanger and Walsh. 

“We are slaves to capitalism and the military-industrial complex. Most of us are too apathetic to care. The protest I’m about to engage in is a call to our government to stop supplying Israel with the money and weapons it uses to imprison and murder innocent Palestinians,” he said in his statement on social media. 

And then he set himself on fire. 

Four young women in New England took a different approach. Instead of turning their anguish inward, the Merrimack 4 took action. 

“I didn’t want to serve time in jail,” Belanger says, “but I have no regrets about being incarcerated for materially disrupting the flow of weapons to Palestine, and  I will forever be proud that I took a stand against genocide, especially because it meant putting my own freedom on the line. Standing by and doing nothing simply wasn’t an option.”

This is the first of a story in two parts. 

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.

—Gov. Chris Sununu’s title has been corrected from U.S. senator to governor.