The checkpoint assembled before our eyes. One second the workers’ cars were pouring out of the factory parking lot; the next they were forming a snaking line, windows lowering. The union stewards outside were amiable as they talked to their colleagues: How’s it going? Long day, huh? Yeah. So what’s all this? Oh, you know, just some rabble-rousers. Protesters, like the other day. Best to just drive right by. Will do, boss. See ya tomorrow.
Or so I imagined. I was trying to read lips from the sidewalk, but the distance was too great, and the December wind kept blowing my union members for peace sign into my face so violently that I couldn’t see or hear much. All I knew was that we were in hostile territory. Before this expedition, our small group of organizers had done enough Facebook stalking to ascertain that the weapons workers we were trying to appeal to were, most of them, true believers: patriots, veterans of American wars, doomsday preppers wrapped in flags in their profile pictures.
Still, they were fellow members of our union, even if they were part of a different local, even if they were working in a plant producing crates of ammo and armaments for mercenary export. The half dozen of us gathered on the sidewalk were not from the factory. We worked at universities, where we’d been organizing against the Gaza genocide since October 7; most of us were immigrants and people of color. That our union also represented weapons workers had been a horrifying but promising discovery. At this point, in late 2023, we believed that nothing mattered more than locating a strategic site in the ongoing massacre and finding a way to disrupt it. Perhaps we could organize our fellow union members to bring their factory to a halt.
There was a chill in the air when we showed up to the plant, flyers in hand, determined to make contact. We had packed our hand warmers. We had readied our talking points (The fruits of your labor are being used to slaughter innocents in the West Bank and Gaza). We had sent a scout the day before, who told us that the 3 pm shift change was an ideal time for a visit. Most importantly, we had assessed our collective comfort with entering a sensitive location where there were a lot of weapons around. The plan was to do an initial canvas, then keep coming back in hopes of talking to more workers. If we could identify allies on the shop floor, morally necessary outcomes — walkouts, strikes, even factory closure — might follow. Off the shop floor today, outside the supply chain tomorrow, we thought.
Not so simple. The weapons workers were guarded almost as fiercely as the ammo they made. The simple geography of the plant — a three-hundred-thousand-square-foot complex with a gated employee lot and only two exits — seemed designed to thwart us. We had imagined we would approach workers as they walked to their cars, but we now saw that doing so would require braving an enclosed lot ringed with no trespassing signs. In the howling wind, we debated our next move. Some of us wanted to enter the lot anyway: “The workers walk out of that door,” we said, pointing to the employee exit. “We have to intercept them before they get into their cars.” But others were less eager. They reminded the group that our action had not been established as high risk. The collective needed to honor the preferences of the most circumspect among us; even one or two people going into the lot would endanger everyone, including visa holders and others who could not afford to be arrested. “Maybe we should just stay on the sidewalk and catch them as they drive out?” one organizer suggested. Before anyone could disagree, another comrade spoke up: “I think the sidewalk is a good start; we can talk to any bystanders too.” A consensus was forming. The rest of the group, I knew, would follow.
“Mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution,” John Berger wrote in 1968, but this was beginning to feel less and less true as the months rolled on.
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I listened impassively behind my mask, then grabbed a sign from the trunk and found my solo spot on the sidewalk. Some minutes later, the local’s leaders descended, demanding to know who had sent us, refusing to believe we were free agents — “Just fellow workers, really!” — and muttering “Trots” at us under their breath. They had formed their checkpoint at record speed, and now the workers were driving through the narrow channel, slipping away, most with their eyes resolutely averted. One or two gestured to us to put our flyers on their windshields but would not open their windows to talk.
Seeing our expedition fail in real time, one comrade — young, white, sporting a side shave — tried to reason with the hulking shop steward closest to us. “We just want to talk,” they said, palms raised in conciliation. “We’re union workers, too.”
The steward’s reply was terse. “Step foot onto this property and I call the police.”
We lingered awhile on the sidewalk, then decided to go home.
In those early months, debates about militancy — how far to go, when to pull back — confounded Palestine organizers across the United States. After October 7, marches and rallies drew in massive crowds, blocking traffic, shutting down bridges, and chanting previously unspeakable words (“Palestine”) and positions (“Resistance is justified”). But despite big successes in mobilization — like the three-hundred-thousand-strong March on Washington in January 2024 — organizers had formed no consensus on a strategy for escalation. Where I lived, rallies avoided seriously targeting Zionist politicians or the logistical infrastructure of the genocide. Coalition leaders were locked into their thinking that protest militancy, or even efficacy, might come at the cost of turnout, and lost to the reality that turnout would soon dwindle anyway. “Mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution,” John Berger wrote in 1968, but this was beginning to feel less and less true as the months rolled on. Each rally ended with the call to show up to the next one; we were forever rehearsing rehearsal.
Other initiatives were similarly risk averse. Workers routed their anger into email campaigns rather than labor action; thousand-person gatherings circled closed consulates; phone zaps demanded ceasefire calls from reps who had been bought and paid for by AIPAC years ago. Fed up with this timidity, a minority of comrades in the Palestine solidarity movement undertook intense direct actions vandalizing weapons facilities. But lacking critical mass, they faced severe repression, and their attempts mostly ended in jail sentences that deterred others from trying something similar.
In this fragmented landscape, our weapons factory initiative felt, at its outset, like a sustainably “militant” choice, the kind of measure that could respond to current realities without occasioning an immediate campaign-ending crackdown. We knew that locutionary protests — what Erin Pineda has called the “politics of petition” — could bring out crowds but lacked leverage, while escalated actions could seize leverage without any long-term ability to maintain it. At its best, radical labor organizing could transcend this binary and offer a synthesis, an alchemical conversion of popular outrage into widespread disruption. This is what we dreamed of: a three-hundred-thousand-strong march on the weapons factory gates, organized by dissident workers from within.
The clarity of approach, however, did not spare us our own debates. Some members of our group contended that while unionized weapons plants were the right target, nothing could be gained from immediately trying to organize their rank and file. On an early planning call, a union veteran advised us to slow our roll. “There’s no point approaching these workers before you have a sector-wide plan for what to do about their jobs,” he told me. OK — so how would we get that plan? “Union leadership would have to make it.” And how could we get them to make it? “We’d have to convince them that most members support this.” And how could we do that without talking to members, getting their thoughts on record, moving them toward an anti-imperial consensus?
Shuffling along at a large camp-defense rally outside a university that spring, I felt the unfamiliar thrill of living for an instant inside the right pitch of militancy.
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Even those of us who agreed that we needed to reach the weapons workers now disagreed on how renegade our organizing should be. Should we start with a petition first, asking union leadership to officially sanction weapons-shop organizing? Perhaps we needed a teach-in or town hall to raise awareness? Or was it time to just show up to the plant and start one-on-ones right away? Behind these tactical questions were bigger, more strategic ones. Was the idea to build toward a slow, economy-wide demilitarization led by workers and community members, or did the urgency of genocide demand that we obstruct production here and now? If the latter, should we join organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America in picketing companies from outside, showing workers that they were complicit in genocide without relying on any pretense of intra-union solidarity? Was it best to name and shame the company and lobby to get it kicked out of the city, union jobs be damned?
The divides became especially stark once we entered the scary, militarized environs of the weapons town, where we were surrounded by barbed wire and the ever-present specter of local police. In this place, fear divided. Once-submerged identity lines surfaced and became decisive. Some comrades, mostly US citizens based thousands of miles away, coalesced into an “escalate” faction that asked the ground team to push harder: “Just barricade the gates already; what are we waiting for?” The ground team, mostly visa holders, tried to absorb this energy, but over time, the admonitions began to smack of disrespect. “They treat us like kids,” one comrade told me. “But we’ve fought the fascists back home, and we know that going all in without organizing is just inviting a prison sentence.”
There were struggles within the ground team, too. Every provisional agreement opened onto more disagreement, like some kind of matryoshka doll of militancy debates. We began flyering local fast-food places in hopes of finding factory contacts, but a gentle reproach from an employee had us packing up our cars — this wasn’t supposed to be a high-risk action, after all. Canvassing operations at gas stations, grocery stores, and smoke shops fared better, with business owners and workers agreeing that it was wrong to massacre Palestinian children with weapons made in their town. We gave them flyers to put up in their windows but then quickly cleared out, wary of pushing our luck. Most promising of all was when some Muslim comrades canvassed a local mosque, attending Friday prayers for a couple of weeks and asking around for any community members who worked at the factory. Soon enough, we had the holy grail: the phone number of a rank-and-file weapons worker. But the blue-collar immigrant on the other end of the line was terrified of getting fired; his family relied on the income. Partly out of respect for his risk preferences, partly thanks to our own strategic turmoil, we dropped the lead. Over the coming months, we found others — an F-35 engineer here, an ex-Caterpillar worker there. But the contacts amounted to nothing, because we couldn’t decide what risks to ask of them, or of anyone.
Driving back from the town one rainy afternoon in early 2024, I could feel that our campaign’s end was near. I was despondent, but older comrades counseled me to take the long view. Sure, we had failed, but down the line somebody else might crack the code and figure out how to escalate for Palestine with the right balance of caution and militancy. And couldn’t we also keep trying for that synthesis at other sites in the weapons supply chain? Why not go on experimenting until we found out what worked?
We could not have imagined the reality that was coming. Forget escalating: In a few months, even the little our crew had done before falling apart — the cold emails and messages to weapons workers; the community outreach with our masks lowered, for trust building; the signed petitions — would retroactively become dangerous, a cause for firings or disappearings.
A few weeks after the weapons campaign ended, pro-Palestine encampments began to pop up on campuses across the country. Suddenly, here was something like a synthesis: a widespread, high-turnout protest that was also extremely disruptive, all happening in a context where campaign-ending arrests were (I thought) unlikely. I was drawn in.
But inside these sites of rebellion, too, the debate about leverage and risk was far from resolved. I toured four encampments in their opening days, and the campers I spoke to were preoccupied mainly by one question: What did a win look like? The answer would determine how far to go before departing from the quads, and on what conditions to leave in the first place. These dilemmas pervaded nightly camp meetings and affiliated group chats; they appeared in the form of angry social media threads and a proliferation of zines.
The spectrum of options that emerged bore a striking resemblance to what I had observed in the pre-encampment left. On one end were prescriptions to escalate through building takeovers and blockades — a cycle of arrest, suspension, and (hopefully) re-encampment that would only work if it could go on until divestment. On the other end was the “pragmatic” stance, with its interest in leveraging camps to open negotiations with university administrations, and its focus on accumulating institutional wins (research center funding, new faculty positions, seemingly everything but divestment) without putting bodies at risk.
During the spring 2025 crackdown, I learned the gap between something and nothing was, from the perspective of power, minuscule.
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I’d seen versions of this debate gum up union and community campaigns before, and expected the camps to get stuck in a similar morass. But to my amazement, students across the country — even though seriously split on strategy — still continued to do the day-to-day work of bringing others in. That April, I went to an encampment rally that, like the citywide Palestine marches, attracted many nonactivist sympathizers. In this case, though, students closed not with the date of the next rally but the call to go defend the camp: “We need phone zappers, we need food donations, if you’re a campus ID holder we need help getting into dorms to store supplies; come meet us after.” Other students, taking to direct action, vandalized parts of campus, in one memorable case severing the American flag in front of a landmark and installing a Palestinian one. Instead of letting this spook the community, they managed to use the (live streamed) rush of cops to the scene to stoke outrage and participation.
As new supporters flooded in, campers set up ways to welcome and make use of them. They tracked risk tolerance: yellow for community members who could bring supplies and show up to safer actions; orange for patrollers who could defuse Zionist agitators and spy on police deployments; red for those ready to face arrest. Each level corresponded to its own Signal chat where work was coordinated. I began wondering if this kind of risk hierarchy couldn’t eventually serve as a ladder new recruits could climb — or, in labor parlance, a dartboard they could move inward on. I imagined yellow marchers gaining the confidence to become orange rally marshals, orange police liaisons eventually turning into red overnight campers.
Shuffling along at a large camp-defense rally outside a university that spring, I felt the unfamiliar thrill of living for an instant inside the right pitch of militancy. Unbidden, one flank of the crowd had poured onto a nearby busy road, closing it off without prior warning — and distracting the dozens of cops who had arrived expecting an orderly sidewalk march. Meanwhile, the other flank found itself face-to-face with the increasingly exhausted campers whom the administration had locked behind the school’s iron gates to separate them from “outside agitators.” For all the endowment’s billions, the gates were secured with a measly padlock. It was nothing a hard and sturdy object couldn’t take care of, perhaps one of the rocks I’d spotted next to a fenced tree on the sidewalk.
I let my imagination wander to a world where I — or more likely the tall, white, anarchist-looking comrade next to me — could pick up the rock. Gates breached, the rally-goers flood onto the tented lawns to loud cheers. The reinforcements bring fresh energy and immediately up the movement’s leverage by making the admin’s worst nightmare — that their private grounds are no longer private — come true. The president calls for a police sweep, but something delays it: maybe the sheer number of arrests necessary, or the scale of the imminent bad press, or some tactical innovation of the movement. In the meantime, as students and community members stand as one, the pressure for divestment builds and builds. It seemed like the only thing separating us from this hopeful timeline was one padlock, one person’s decision to risk a vandalism charge while trusting in the surrounding crowd to have their back. That other world felt so close. Were we there yet?
No one, including myself, broke the lock. The groundwork for that kind of risky spontaneity hadn’t been laid. Instead, the crowd snaked through the streets around campus and returned, surrounded by cops, back to the plaza where the march had begun, energized by its own unplanned defiance. Though it was latent, there was a feeling that the rehearsals were getting more serious, and soon we might be on to the main act.
The target was on our backs now, as large and indelible as if we had successfully shut down the university, or set fire to it.
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We did not get that chance. On April 30, a police wave crashed onto New York City, wiping out Columbia’s camp. More than a hundred students and community members were arrested, many more beaten and brutalized. The dominoes fell in an awful cascade: CUNY that same night, UCLA two days later, the rest to come. Across the country, supporters were being suspended, expelled, arrested, and charged with felonies, in a barrage too overwhelming to resist or reverse in the last remaining days of the term. By May Day, the camps that remained were talking almost exclusively about an exit plan. I overheard undergrads at one school wonder if they should set up an empty table near the administration building with the sign negotiate now, or chalk red arrows on the campus pavement to “show the pathway to an agreement.” They must have known they were out of options. A few days later, the camp voluntarily cleared in exchange for a promise of amnesty for the participants, a promise that the university did not keep.
As camps failed to regroup, I reached back for my comrades’ reassurances from the end of the weapons-factory campaign. We could always come back next term, right? Both negotiated wins and mass arrests could prompt a second wind; new points of leverage could come into view. But there would be no second wind. The summer of 2024 turned out to be the opening act in a long drama of McCarthyist crackdown and right-wing reaction, which would go on to include universities militarizing, police patrolling campuses, and scores of protesters facing trial and imprisonment.
By the fall, prospects looked grim. The genocide continued unabated, a dreaded, soul-sucking election was nearing, and far-right Zionist groups like Betar were surveilling and targeting protesters. It was all dwindling: the mass marches, the direct actions, the bird-dogging, the divestment resolutions, the weapons-shop organizing, and despite all our hopes, the student intifada. I spent depressed days taking stock of the many failed campaigns I had been part of; I joined endless postmortems. I also tried to be forward-looking, to find the next place to direct our collective energy. “What are you guys working on now?” I asked comrade after comrade. Picking up the pieces, it turned out. Dealing with DAs’ offices. Fighting with university disciplinary boards. Raising money for lawyers’ fees. At a conference, I ran into an old weapons-campaign friend, a grad-union leader and visa holder. “What are you guys working on now?” I asked her without much hope. “Over a hundred of us were arrested at our encampment,” she told me. “Now our parent union and university are both retaliating. We’re struggling to do the basics: collect dues, renegotiate our union contract.” No more weapons industry organizing, then; nothing more on the Palestine solidarity front? She gave a bitter laugh. “At this point, we’re fighting just to survive.”
The gentlest possible efforts were whipping up colossal backlash. At Harvard, a group of students were banned from the library simply for wearing their keffiyehs; the following week, their professors met with the same fate for displaying signs quoting from — wait for it — the school’s own free speech policy. Everywhere, it was the same: Actions that did not accomplish much were being treated like dangerous near revolutions. The target was on our backs now, as large and indelible as if we had successfully shut down the university, or set fire to it.
What happened after January 2025 is by now a familiar story. We had known that the repression would escalate under Trump, but we didn’t anticipate its speed or scope. Our adversaries were no longer a piecemeal assemblage of university administrators and city police forces mobilized by local Zionist outfits, only obliquely backed by congressional resolutions and presidential statements. They had built a vertically integrated system: Betar to Rubio. Rubio to Trump. Trump to DHS. DHS to ICE. ICE to your doorstep.
Before this onslaught, I used to believe that most people in the movement could stand to take more risks. We were overestimating how broadly severe punishments could be applied, and if we could muster the courage, we would find safety in numbers. Like many of my comrades skewing “militant,” I derided the energy lost in statement signing, fighting to get a tweet out, the “cultural wins.” The job was to disrupt the war machine, not just for a day but for weeks and months on end. If we weren’t doing that, I had thought, we might as well go home, because risking nothing was ultimately the same as doing nothing.
During the spring 2025 crackdown, I learned the gap between something and nothing was, from the perspective of power, minuscule. In fact, the Trump Administration seemed intent on obviating the difference entirely. ICE picked up protest leaders, but they also took bystanders who had once retweeted pro-Palestine content. They grabbed the building occupiers I had admired at “escalate” schools, as well as participants from “negotiate” schools, whose encampments I had found to be no more threatening than permitted campouts. They took Mahmoud Khalil, an encampment spokesperson whose relative prominence didn’t save him. They took Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts graduate student whose relative anonymity also didn’t save her. In the end it didn’t matter what type of action one had chosen to take. It mattered only that there were quotas that needed filling.
My own nights were given to worrying. After hours of watching unmarked cars from my window and keeping track of arrests in a handwritten spreadsheet (columns: Name, Location, Country of Origin, Visa Type, Offending Speech or Action?), certain memories caught me in the chill of their resurfacing: that time I tore down a hostage poster. Fights I’d picked with local Zionists on the neighborhood Facebook group, people who probably knew where I lived. Disquisitions on tactics that, keen to force a conversation, I had published on the internet. Screaming (masked, thankfully) at my Lockheed-funded congressperson at a fundraiser we’d infiltrated, and being escorted out by her security. Emails and texts I’d sent to weapons workers, to university administrators, to my state senator, all — what had I been thinking? — from my actual phone. Countless letters and petitions I’d signed with autofill, linking my full legal name with my cause. It will obviously do nothing in the world. But it can’t hurt. Done and forgotten.
Until now. In the weeks after Mahmoud’s and Rümeysa’s arrests, I stopped wearing my keffiyeh when going for walks outside. Then I stopped going outside altogether. As advised by a local ICE watch network, I watched my city’s anti-deportation rally online. I deleted dozens of incriminating-sounding chats and stopped writing under my name. In the months after this forced retreat from public life, I thought of my comrades who had defaced weapons plants, taken over roads and buildings, confronted cops with their bodies, and thought how ridiculous it was that a moderate risk-taker like me could ever be swept up in the same dragnet as them.
I also thought of the visa holders with whom I’d stood outside the weapons factory. They’d had a better sense of the coming repression than many of us, but no one had offered them anything in the way of collective defense. “What risks can you tolerate?” we often asked one another, but what we really meant was, Do you care enough, or don’t you, to risk it all for Palestine? At times, unspoken exemptions were made for immigrants, the undocumented, those with criminal records. But in a movement that was made up mainly of such people, many of whom did want to escalate, this “you do you” approach wasn’t much use.
What if, in the time we had spent measuring ourselves individually, we had instead asked what it meant to the movement as a whole to have people take risks? Was it worth the effort of setting up a preemptive bail fund, or the time it took to run a de-arrest training? Did we want the encampments to succeed badly enough to tell the students, Go nuts right now, we’ll fight to get your records expunged afterward? Enough to say to the anarchist-looking comrade outside the locked university gates — or even to me — Pick up that rock, and if they come for you, we will swarm you, we won’t let them take you; if they do, we will not rest until we get you back? Over the past two years, defensive measures have been taken, but in scattered ways, as part of a piecemeal, reactive mobilization rather than as an absolute strategic necessity from day one. What would have happened if this organizing infrastructure had existed from the jump? What greater risks could people have taken, what heartbreaking fractures could have been avoided, and, most importantly, who would still be here with us now — in the country, in the streets?
Today, that defensive muscle is at least stronger than it used to be. Rapid-response work and citywide rebellions have managed to challenge ICE and the deportation apparatus, and on one level, this movement is a miracle. It has sometimes achieved what the post–October 7 left tried to do: mass activation alongside leverage-bearing direct actions that keep the feds on their back foot.
Still, there’s something of a shrinking in this orientation. Our aspirations have moved from stopping the flow of weapons used for genocide — from altering a historically unjust world order — to simply keeping us all here. The weapons factory we failed to organize will soon be sending another shipment of arms to Israel, and it is unclear that we will be able to do anything about it. If we try, we will have to take on the steep costs and terrifying risks together. Perhaps escalating for Palestine demands nothing less.
