On Friday, Berkshire County activists took part in a statewide action by hanging a banner reading “Hands Off Yemen” over the Mass Pike in West Stockbridge. The group behind the effort is Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, which has organized protests in support of Palestine and condemned U.S. support for Israel during the war in Gaza. Organizer Lillian Volat of Great Barrington says the collective’s goal is to amplify opposition to the Biden administration’s decision to order missile strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen. The Shia Islamist group, now reclassified by the U.S. State Department as a terror group, has disrupted shipping in the Red Sea in retaliation as the Gaza death toll rises over 25,000. Volat explained to WAMC how Berkshire County is connected to the conflicts.
VOLAT: Berkshire County has a very large military industrial complex. We received $350 million in weapons contracts in Berkshire County last year from the federal government, and we received $45 million from the federal government for housing, education, and health care combined. So, we are against our federal dollars being sent across the world to demolish infrastructure there when they should be building infrastructure here. We also know that Yemen is being targeted because it is disrupting the Red Sea navigation lanes, and Israel and the United States have a vested interest in controlling those navigation lanes for their economic interests. Yemen has not been committing a genocide against another population. It has been receiving the brunt of the US and Saudi-led violence for the past 15 years. They're standing in solidarity with Palestinians who are facing a genocide right now, and we are at the position that they are in the right and the United States is not.
WAMC: Now, your group has also been holding regular demonstrations in support of Palestine. How does that tie into this effort to inform folks or draw attention to what's going on in Yemen?
They're very much connected. Israel and the US are basically part of the same military project that is spanning close to 900 military bases around the world. Israel is a military outpost of the United States and its efforts to dominate the Middle East, and there's a lot of resistance against that. And we’ve, over the past decade, have been taking out anybody in the Middle East – we as the United States government – have been taking out anybody in the Middle East who is not serving the interests of the capitalist ruling classes in the United States. We've been going to war with any country, whether it's Libya, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan, any counterpower – Iran as well – that is standing up against US imperialism, the United States government is fighting them. And so, there are two fronts there, and Palestine is part of that.
Can you tell us what it was like on Friday to hang the banner? Did you get a response from drivers on the pike? What was the scene like?
It was actually a really wonderful event. We had a lot of people come out and help us hold the banner. We had probably six or seven people in our shift. We held it from 8 a.m. to around 11, and then another group came in the afternoon and held it. The main traffic were truckers. They were pounding their horns the whole time, so that was really encouraging, and people that were passing on the local street through West Stockbridge that we were standing on on the overpass, they were also very encouraging and rolled down their windows, said their support. They saw- they didn't see the sign, they saw more the Palestinian flags. But yeah, they were- Generally, it was encouraging and we didn't have any harassment or any counternarrative, anybody who was kind of against what we were saying or trying to spread the message of. So that was good.
What else is your group working on this winter in Berkshire County?
We're developing a few educational courses. One of them is designed to help people sift through the different narratives that are coming out of the mainstream media, and understand what mainstream publications, what kind of political ideologies they uphold. So, we're doing a workshop where people will learn about the different political economic systems that are represented in the US media and the different media that espouses that narrative. And also, then critiquing how each political and economic category will talk about Yemen, because I feel like a lot of what we experienced from the Palestine actions that we did is people are confused about what's happening, and there's so many different narratives to try to sift through that without having a clear understanding of the political ideologies that underpin them, it's easy to get lost in the sauce. So, one of those workshops is coming up next Sunday. It's open to the public. And we have another course that we're developing with the Center for Popular Economics at UMass that's called “Economics for Emancipation” and that will be taking place in March.
