By Will Hodgkinson
May 22, 2025
Boston
The Boston Coalition For Palestine (BCFP) commemorated Nakba Day on May 15 with daylong Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) actions that targeted the Israeli consulate and the global transportation company Maersk. The actions marked the 77th anniversary of the 1948 catastrophe, when Zionist settler militias razed 400 villages, killed over 15,000 Palestinians and drove at least 750,000 others off their lands. The Palestinian lands stolen by the Zionist forces in 1948 comprise the core (pre-1967) territory claimed by the colonial State of Israel.
Nakba 77 picket outside Israeli consulate in Boston, May 15, 2025.
Evict Israeli war criminals
Chanting “Evict Israeli war criminals!” BCFP protesters picketed the downtown offices of the Israeli consulate during its morning open hours. This nest of internationally “wanted” war criminals has been hidden, signless for decades among other high-end tenants on upper floors of a plush Saunders Real Estate Group building at 20 Park Plaza, adjacent to the swank Park Plaza Hotel.
Protesters demanded that responsible parties — the consulate’s landlord and rich neighbors, Boston’s mayor, city council, police department and chamber of commerce — put the Zionists’ consulate harboring fugitives from the International Criminal Court’s warrants on notice to “get out of Boston now.” They vowed to return — as they have every Tuesday at noon for the past seven months — to ensure that settler genociders have no place and no peace in the city.
“Israel, Israel, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” rang out to the apparent anger of consulate staff, security guards and assorted screaming fascists but to the raised fists and honks of solidarity from many passersby, including hotel workers.
Mask Off Maersk
BCFP demonstrators regrouped in the hundreds in the afternoon outside the Kendall Square/MIT subway station in Cambridge to demand that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) end its collaboration with Danish international shipping giant Maersk. Maersk has shipped millions of tons of military cargo to Israel in support of its brutal genocide in Palestine.
Despite a months-long campaign by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), the BDS Movement and the MIT Coalition for Palestine to take the Mask Off Maersk, MIT has refused to sever ties with this enabler of genocide in Palestine. Instead MIT featured the corporation at its Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) May 15 conference.
“This Nakba of 77 years ago did not stop,” said Ahmad Kawash, an elder co-leader of Palestinian House of New England who opened the rally. “We see the Nakba almost every day in Gaza, in Lebanon. And all these massacres happened before, and it’s happening now too.”
PYM leader Lea Kayali read a statement of support from the MIT Indigenous Peoples’ Center. As Kayali noted, MIT — like many other U.S. research universities, including Virginia Tech, Cornell and Texas A&M — relied on “grants” of stolen Indigenous lands provided by the 1862 Morrill Act. MIT’s campus, like the rest of Cambridge, occupies the territories of the Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuc and Abenaki nations.
The statement read: “We acknowledge that the legacy of extractivism and epistemic violence the Institute has perpetuated, and we must highlight the years of student-led initiatives and efforts by Indigenous students to reclaim space, scholarship and community in an ongoing effort to Indigenize MIT.”
U.S. universities like MIT, organizers stressed, are actively enabling the genocidal settler colonization of Palestine. Known as “Pentagon East,” MIT has been a hub of research and development for the military-industrial complex since the 1940s. During the 1960s, MIT research and technocratic expertise helped the U.S. carry out its imperialist genocide in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that killed over three million people. Today, the Institute continues this murderous legacy by partnering with weapons contractors and big tech companies that make billions in blood money profits from bombs, missiles and surveillance algorithms. (mapliberation.org)
After a years-long campaign by BDS-Boston, MIT ended its partnership with Israeli-based weapons maker Elbit Systems. Energized by this victory, MIT students, workers and their allies continue to demand the university divest from all companies complicit in the Zionist genocide.
Maersk — owned by the billionaire Møller family and backed by Wall Street finance capital — transports the U.S.-made tanks, artillery and aircraft the Israel Occupation Forces are using to carry out genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. As speakers explained, tech billionaires are using the AI algorithms the MIT CTL is developing for Maersk to support imperialist mass murder overseas and exploit and immiserate working people in the U.S. (maskoffmaersk.com)
Protestors took over the streets of Cambridge, shutting down traffic. “What do we want? Land Back!” and “Maersk, Maersk, You can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!” resounded, drowning out the blare of car horns. The march also targeted the Royal Sonesta Hotel where MIT’s CTL was holding its Annual Stakeholders’ Conference featuring Maersk, ExxonMobil, Dell, Uber Freight and Walmart. Demonstrators took over the sidewalk in front of the hotel, defying a phalanx of Cambridge, state and mercenary cops who guarded the entrance.
“All of the people convening at this conference right now are guilty of genocide!” declared Mairaid Skehan Gillis, a Workers World Party organizer, “[They are] capitalizing off of the siege, surveillance and mass killing of Palestinians, putting money in the pockets of billionaires and Wall Street investors while they simultaneously gut social programs for workers and oppressed people here at home. Shame!”
A representative of the MIT Graduate Student Union (UE Local 256) read a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. “The labor struggle is not separate from the liberation struggle,” the statement read. “It is the liberation struggle. Our labor is extracted for genocide, for greed, for the destruction to fuel imperialism.
“But we are at an historic turning point,” the MIT GSU statement continued. “Just as the civil rights movement once converged with labor, we are now witnessing a new convergence between the workers of the world and the struggle for Palestine. Workers are rejecting the moral injury of genocide. We are rising to reclaim the institutions that have used our labors to fuel death, when we know we can build life.” The organizer praised the example of dock workers in Morocco and Spain who have refused to load weapons bound for the Zionist state.
As armed CTL and hotel security guards were evacuating panicked conferees through police and picket lines, Fawaz Abusharkh, co-leader of the Palestinian House of New England, urged onlookers to join the movement in solidarity with Palestine. “We’re going to keep pushing, keep protesting,” Abusharkh vowed to the protesters’ cheers. “We’re going to do everything necessary for a free world, starting with a free Palestine!”
Steve Gillis contributed to this report.
