Anarchists Sabotage Train Lines in N California in Solidarity with Palestine

From indybay.org

On the morning of December 2nd at 5:00am we sabotaged various strategically located train lines in Northern California: in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Niles, Bahia, and Lodi. We used a tactic shared by natives and accomplices of the Wet'Suwet'en tribe in so called Canada. We took large gauge copper wire and wrapped it around both rails of the same train track. Doing this completed the low voltage current running thru the rails notifying the train operator that the track is occupied and cannot be used until the obstruction is found and removed. This method for stopping train traffic yields the lowest possibility for derailment, and thus the least likely to cause harm to human or animal life. We did this in solidarity with the ongoing resistance to genocide being waged against Palestinians by the so called state of Israel.

As anarchists we refuse to beg the masters of war for a ceasefire. We took it upon ourselves to sabotage the ability of so called Israel to commit genocide, by sabotaging the flow of capital in the US, and thus the machinery for war abroad. We know that the refined oil, the modems,computer parts, semi conductors, and all other commodities traveling out of California along Union Pacific and BNSF train lines everyday for export around the world, facilitates the massacre of Palestinians. The so called state of Israel necessitates the smooth flow of US tax dollars and direct material support of all kinds to carry out a genocide of this scale. Every shipyard, train line, warehouse, and trucking facility needs to operate efficiently for the death machine to be seamless.

The genocide happening in Gaza is part of a much larger project serving the West's deteriorating hegemonic rule over international trade. The blockage of the Suez Canal for six days in March of 2021 highlighted how precarious this trade infrastructure is. It also revealed how politically dangerous it is for the US, due to Egypt's alliance with Russia, to control such a linchpin in the global economy.

Biden and Netanyahu seek to bypass the Suez Canal by constructing their own ship route across occupied Palestine. The Ben Gurion canal project, as it is called, named after the founder of Israel, seeks to connect the Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba, with it's northern port of entry in Gaza. Palestinian liberation stands alone as an obstacle against this furthering of western hegemony. We refuse to be complicit in forcing Palestinian people to pay the ultimate price for imperialist greed.

In targeting the infrastructure of global trade we recognize the implications on this genocide. As insurgents in the heart of empire we have an essential role to play. We have access to the inner workings of the war machine, and we are uniquely placed to clog it's arteries. The flow of global capital is incredibly fragile-all it takes is creativity and a willingness to act. We encourage others to sabotage the logistics infrastructure of capital as a means of disrupting business as usual. Bring the war home!

There are 30 Comments

i genuinely can't tell if this is earnestly serious or unintentional self-parody or actual parody -- it's that good at mimicking left activist-speak. plus there's no way to independently confirm the story. either way, it's hilarious! keep up the hilarity, comrades!

seriously though, the question remains: why use the war against Palestinians as an excuse for this? every day is a good day to interrupt the smooth flow of capital, ffs. doing this action half-way around the world where nobody is going to notice it anyway and having the gall to claim it in solidarity with no anarchist actions in Gaza is pretty crass virtue signaling, trying to claim some kind of righteousness through the publicizing of other people's struggles. and non-anarchist struggles at that! this reads like typical "north american anti-imperialist" (that is, white) sub-maoist feelgoodism; if this so-called communique actually represents a real action, it's typical first world superficial so-called solidarity. declaring that BNSF freight cars facilitate the massacre of Palestinians is tenuous at best, and the authors would need to make a far more cogent case for the connection. but it's still funny.

i like trains too, dawg. i dont think you are saying anything though.

Leftism is the preferred religion of NPCs, largely because it thrives on forced conformity and leftist ideology has so many holes in it that no one with enough neurons to be capable of self-awareness would ever believe it.

you cannot be real. It is impossible to be so insufferable without playing a character so i guess congrats?

I stand by what I said. Post-left anarchy discourse needs to be rejecting leftist identitarian psychological Maoism and its adjacent operations harder than the world is rejecting Israel right now. Purge and cleanse.

None of that actually exists. Get the fuck off the anews comments and go outside. Go for a walk. Meet some people. Idk who you are but you sound pathetic. Just being honest.

Ted K was right about you hyper-alienated, oversocialized ghouls. One dissenting opinion, and you go into a frenzy, you chuck whatever insults your fellow social animals spam on the internet.

Ted K quite literally moved outdoors.

You are angry because people sabotaged train lines not for the wrong reasons, but they didn't clearly reject Maoists at the same time. You can't even deduce that this kind of illegal action scares the people who you are clearly obsessed with off more than anything else.

Specially more than a written text that would never make someone like you happy. Dude. You are jaded and sound like Murray Bookchin before he croaked. Go do something.

Well akchewally...
I'm amused by the fact that the alleged saboteurs needed an excuse. I'm further amused by the fact the the ostensible excuse was to express some kind of solidarity with a non-specific resistance in and around Palestine. I'm amused by the leftist Anti-Imperialist language of the statement. But perhaps my greatest amusement comes from the fact that there's absolutely no way to corroborate that anything more than a scowl was directed at any railway line.
So: general sub-maoist virtue signaling, tenuous -- if any -- connection between the railway company and Israeli war crimes, and a likely imaginary action... yeah, what possible problems could there be there for anarchists? smh

Imagine using Ted K as your measuring stick. Seethe more and follow your leader, bro

Ted K didn't actually seeth with ressentiment, he was envious of no one, He WAS angry though at the mass pursuit of tech based status within society. He only lived his own authentic lifestyle and followed no leader. However, this frustration WAS exacerbated by his own sexual related issues which fomented into a violent ejaculation of IEDs.

I don't really know if we can reasonably claim TK was "sexually frustrated". AFAIK he never talked about this in his letters or maybe nobody asked him, but also they used to say random infamous people were trans (like they did with TK) in the 90s as a way to dismiss them as crazy one-offs.

Maybe the movie Ted K has perverted my interpretation of his reactions and daydreams about women. His awkwardness when interacting with women reminded me of my own shyness as a teenager and how that affected my moods and often led to rage against my mother and sister, and ultimately society as a whole, which led to my own incarceration for lesser crimes which harmed no one physically. Maybe I am projecting my own memories of adolescence and the delicate psychodramatic consequences of suppressing the orgasm which I gleaned from my readings of Reich. Bad shit happens if orgasms are not available, just consider the Incel mindset and the hatred it spawns.

"He only lived his own authentic lifestyle and followed no leader."

Tell us you've never been incarcerated and have no idea about how incarceration works without explicitly saying so.

There is no lifestyle more INauthentic than that forced upon the convict.

Put that in your theoretical pipe and seethe it.

"the question remains: why use the war against Palestinians as an excuse for this? "

Because PALESTIIIINE! And don't you fucking question our narrative ever again, uuuuu imperialist zionist. We anarchist coz we sed so.

You are the same commenter above. Nobody is fooled bro. Again, go outside.

"why use the war against Palestinians as an excuse for this" - the massacres in Palestine are backed by the US

"As anarchists we refuse to beg the masters of war for a ceasefire."

Okay! We reject the annoying cries to detached oligarchs because pausing freight trains is anarchist-approved direct action. Clearly folks are not emphasizing multiplicity of tacts very well.

"...by sabotaging the flow of capital in the US, and thus the machinery for war abroad."

The "flow of capital", so if i went into any random store and smacked around people who were trying to shop and by stuff, then it would "disrupt the flow of capital", and somehow threaten the commission of genocides and war crimes. I gotta admit, anarchist megalomania is a pretty damn funny type of megalomania, it really reminds me of my college activism and my "discovery of individualist activism". Maybe my life would be better if I just didn't feel guilty or ashamed about anything at all.

INB4 mass-shootings in North America become endorsed by the Paleswine "anarchist" decolonization crowd, coz fuck "Purism" and nonviolent actions aren't effective enough.

"Paleswine"
Pale swine
White cops
Kill kill kill
Agreed

So basically all we needed for anarchist insurgency to kick out (again?) in the US was... Palestine. But like on any day when Gaza or the West Bank aren't being attacked by Misrael, the US is all cool and let's just enjoy hipsterism in its many variants.

I like how the mods here let this same dude turn every comment section related to the war into absolute nonsense (clearly purposefully) but won't let people talk shit about actual shit throwing liberals.

Is the Ben Gurion Canal Project even a real factor?

I’d really like to say “good job” about this because direct action and stuff, but I’m pretty pessimistic about American actions that could potentially impact Israel’s war. To put that in some perspective though, I’m pretty pessimistic about American actions that could potentially impact any war, even one America is itself waging.

Help me see the light here comrades… where is the real opportunity?

I’ll admit that I haven’t looked into this a lot, but intuitively it seems like daily, weekly, even annually Israel doesn’t depend on US finance or technology to carry out the operations we’re seeing since October. If the United States cut funding to Israel, production of weapons and other war technologies, blocked shipments of said technologies and such would Israel ever actually be impaired by this to the point of relenting? And if there is some conceivable point, how long would it take to reach it if US support or enablement were stopped? Who has done the math on this?

That’s the big question. The smaller questions relate to how anarchists could contribute to such an outcome. Anarchists can’t, alone, do much of anything of consequence. So that raises the scale to one that requires a much larger and/or more powerful force that anarchists can only add something to. In the context now, that force is the broader pro-Palestine or at least anti-war movement here and elsewhere. Like other anti-war movements, it’s ideologically diverse. Libertarians, Communists, Progressives, Palestinian Nationalists, Islamists, the list goes on. What is the minimal impact even this movement can have? When is the next vote on aid to Israel? What would it take to move Biden from conditioning aid to Israel is “worth a thought” to “ok no more aid to Israel until it stops its war on Palestine”? What potential is there for legislation to change on all this and how popular would the anti-war movement need to be for that to happen - if that’s even how you think it works!

or the people who committed this action, really can:

"Help me see the light here comrades… where is the real opportunity?"

I personally agree with your meta-analysis, that these are pretty huge and distant conflicts, and that's ultimately why the U.S. has slowly shifted to proxy wars instead of direct ones like with Iraq. With direct wars, it's easier to sabotage "your country" and enrage dissidents, but Ukraine and Israel are basically just an extension of what the U.S. military has been doing since pretty early on in the the 20th century: influence and demoralize, but don't conquer. This approach tends to reduce competition for American capitalism, and doesn't use as many resources as a full-scale invasion does.

It was interesting to learn that the U.S. gov budget allocates a lot more resources towards bolstering Ukraine instead of Israel...that probably has to do with the long-standing conflict with Russia as a competing super power. Israel IMO has more ideological significance to the US, as there are a lot of conservative jews that live here, and fundamentalist christians tend to be more sympathetic to judaism and "israel" than islam and "the middle east".

Yeah I know I’m fishing for tuna in a lake…

I’m not quite following what you’re saying though. Do you see Israel-Gaza as a proxy war between the US and someone else?

Assuming that you do, I don’t think it is. In general, Israel has geopolitical significance that the United States is interested in getting the most it can out of, sure. But in this specific case I think it’s much less a proxy war than a popular war in Israel. America can benefit either way, because pew-pew bang-bang money-money, but that doesn’t make any war Israel engages in a proxy for American national interests. I don’t think Hamas is super valuable to Iran, but maybe I’m wrong on that. If Gaza and the West Bank didn’t exist, it doesn’t seem to me like it would make a huge difference in the larger geopolitical game for the United States. If Israel didn’t exist, that would be a bigger difference.

I don’t know anything about the Ukraine-Russia situation, so no comment there…

An example of a proxy war that the United States was involved in recently was Rojava vs. ISIS, right? That has a clear example of a belligerent party that the United States was very interested in fighting. I don’t know how interested the United States really is in fighting Hamas. I’d think the politics are much more based on maintaining good relations with Israel for the other military reasons the United States supports Israel.

Regarding the ideological interests of civilians… I don’t know how much that even matters. These conflicts cause plenty of civilian discord, but is the United States military really responsive to that? Maybe when the rich start getting upset and losing money, but otherwise it doesn’t seem like the United States military gives a shit if the population supports its objectives. It’s a volunteer military that relies heavily on private sector security firms. Economically, those security firms aren’t making money from civilians and the military isn’t getting dinged on revenue …ever. I honestly don’t know what insane situation it would take to cause any impact on what the US military(-industrial complex) does.

Interconnected, and these wars are proxy wars because they relate to strategic positions and allies (ukraine and israel) instead of direct invasions by the us.

As far as the ideology/politics thing is concerned, its a little baffling to me as well, but i do know that each president has a lot of influence over how the US military is used (in some ways, secretively), and the choice to back israel and ukraine with military $$$ has to do with history and religion. For example, all the hateful american nut jobs shooting/bullying middle eastern people on the east coast...the islamaphobia still exists. Jews have also been targeted, yet it is worth noting that for presidents they are an interest group to appease. Biden is a lot more appeasing to them than trump, and it's going to be interesting to see how this changes with a regime change, but it will be ugly.

I think there’s a lot of evidence for thinking that US concern with Israel is based on religion and other cultural things, but I also think it’s a smokescreen for more practical power politics. In a country that has barely been able to elect a Catholic, I just flat out don’t believe that support for Jews is much more than rhetoric. Yeah, this country has the second largest (or maybe even the largest) Jewish population, but it’s still only 2-3% and no matter how wealthy that percentage is, that’s pretty insignificant. On the other hand, we absolutely know that the United States cares a lot about oil in the Middle-East. Add to that natural gas that is in the region and I think there is way more evidence that what the United States wants from its relationship with Israel is resource access. That and a frontline when it comes to nuclear arms development in Iran and shit like that.

I think it’s really a big mistake to assume that the US military, the intelligence systems, etc. are super ideological in the way that the civilian population is. The US is allied with Islamic countries, afterall. I would love to understand the segregation of popular culture from military culture, the intelligence community from academia, and other such things. There is at least some segregation. Like when you read shit from RAND corporation, does that seem to you like it’s coming from people with the popular cultural biases we see in our everyday lives? To me it seems like another fucking world of people. Without calling it the Deep State, there is at least an infrastructure of education and command that is very distinct from civilian life. People talk about Jewish schools, what about West Point: https://www.westpoint.edu/ ? What about the distinct way that career military families live, migrate, etc.? These aren’t the man on the street…

If I’m wrong, well then our problems are easier to solve. All we need is more cultural acceptance of middle-eastern cultures. This sounds like just another market to me though. More movies and shows and college programs dedicated to the familiarization of the populace with the middle-east. Great. I mean, it’d be awesome and I’d love for people to know the difference between Arabic and Farsi, or whatever. But I think that ultimately what that would be is an alignment of popular culture with military objectives. It will happen if it serves greater geopolitical interests.

The thing with American Jews is that Jews didn’t merely assimilate, they have been prominent in the construction of American culture. However you think Jews were able to do that, it’s what happened. Imagining contemporary United States without Jews is almost to imagine a totally different country. But does that actually change how the United States would be positioned geopolitically? Would a United States without Jews just avoid the Middle-East or something? See what I’m saying? There is motivation with or without Jews for the United States to establish itself in the Middle-East.

the research. The interest in having a proxy nation state in the middle east (Israel, for clarity). I didn't even know that the jewish population here was so small, even though I never have subscribed to the "jewish bankers" bullshit as it's clear that the wealthiest people in the world are pretty multi-cultural (even though it seems like a large percentage of them have some sort of norther european descent like me, see banking culture of that region...).

I just basically assumed the ideological/religious aspect had more importance than it did because Christians and Jews have a really loud voice here, You have demonstrated the issue with watching the news, I definitely appreciate having a fact based conversation with someone here for a change!

Religion/ideology definetly has a major influece over the way people think, but I agree that the U.S. military as an organization is just about "protecting american interests", that is not cynicism. The islamaphobia in the U.S. is pretty big (i'd say at least 10% of americans fear muslims), but it probably has nothing to do with with strategic support for Israel. It's nice when I actually learn something!

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