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Month: August 2024

“We must be discussing different forms of ownership”

Interview with Linda Holmes, tenant lawyer from Brooklyn


31/08/2024

Hello Linda. Could you start by introducing yourself?

I’m Linda Holmes. I am a lifelong New Yorker, and I live in Brooklyn. I professionally represent tenants in court, preventing evictions and bringing cases against the landlord about necessary repairs. 

Outside of my work, I work with New York City Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in their tenant organizing work. We are working to have a city wide tenant’s group and setting up local groups in different parts of New York. I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and we have a DSA chapter there. 

I also work with a couple of  autonomous tenant unions which don’t have any paid staff. I do trainings, give advice and do some organizing. One group I work with is Brooklyn Eviction Defense, and I’m wearing their t-shirt today (see cover photo).

Can you say something about the state of renting in Brooklyn at the moment? Has it changed in the last few years?

There’s a constant pressure of rising rents and displacement. New York has rent stabilization, which means that there are limits on how much rents can be increased for some. But rules for protected tenants have been increasingly cut back, and fewer and fewer tenants are protected by rent stabilization. 

There is a movement called Good Cause Eviction, which is trying to limit how much landlords can raise the rent for tenants who are not protected by rent stabilization. We fought for five years, and have just succeeded. In April, we won Good Cause Eviction to cover more tenants. 

But there are a lot of exceptions to this new rule. Many tenants are still not covered. A lot of exceptions for smaller landlords were built into the law.

Brooklyn used to be known as the part of New York for people who couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan. Who lives in Brooklyn at the moment?

I was born and raised in Manhattan. I’m now 54 years old. When I was growing up, Manhattan was by far the most expensive, and, if you couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan, you would live in one of the outer boroughs: Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, or Staten Island.  In my lifetime, Brooklyn has completely exploded, and rents have increased dramatically. 

There has been decades of pressure to displace older tenants, poorer tenants, tenants who are Black and Brown, tenants who are immigrants. There’s been immense displacement pressures around long standing tenants, and it really varies by neighborhood. 

Brooklyn is an enormous borough. It has neighborhoods like Williamsburg, which has insane, hyper gentrification. And on the other side, neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York, where the gentrification pressures were not as significant. These neighborhoods remain relatively poor. They also experience displacement and rent increases, but not as great.

I live in Flatbush, which is somewhere in between. Flatbush is a very interesting neighborhood. It is where Bernie Sanders came from. In the time when Bernie was growing up, it was predominantly a Jewish-American neighborhood. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, a lot of people came from the Caribbean, and so there is a strong Caribbean-Haitian-Jamaican influence. 

In the 2000s a lot of young, new renters came to Flatbush because they couldn’t afford other places, so there is pressure to move out the older Caribbean neighbors. Landlords want to rent to people who can pay more money. 

How much do you think there’s a racial element to the evictions? Is it simply that Black and Brown people tend to be poorer, or is it more than that?

I think it is a bit of both. If you own an apartment building, the more white tenants you have, the more white tenants you are going to attract. So social racism plays a role.

Most landlords don’t really care who is living in the building. It’s really about the money. They want to charge the highest rents. But the money is tied to larger issues of class and race in New York and in Brooklyn. It’s pretty intense.

We’ve talked about the bad things. What are you doing to try and change them for the better?

I have been doing a series of tenant trainings, because a lot of tenants are covered by rent stabilization, but not told about the new laws. Many do not understand the importance of these protections. Rent stabilization means that the rent can only be raised a certain amount, and landlords are required to offer a renewal lease. 

A lot of tenants are afraid that if they complain, they will be evicted. We explain how a landlord cannot just raise your rent to any amount if you complain, or if they don’t like you, or if they just want more money. 

We also explain how to make complaints, which is a very complicated process in New York City. We have a single phone number to call for all city services, whether it’s a parking ticket or a leak in your roof. If you want to complain that there’s garbage or rats, or even if a street light is out, there’s one number.  And they do keep records of what’s happening, which is also good.

But once a complaint has been made, there are problems. An inspector is sent out either from the buildings or the housing tenant agency. If the inspector comes and nobody happens to be there because there’s no appointment, the case is closed, and that’s the end of it. That’s problem one. 

Problem two is that inspectors are not very well paid, and there’s been a lot of turnover. We are living in New York City under an austerity mayor. We have been fighting budget cutbacks in every area. There are big fights around cutting back libraries and schools, but there is not such a big fight around cutting back the agencies that do these inspections. And the inspections are only a small part of what the agencies do. So even funding the agency wouldn’t necessarily result in more inspections.

This means that sometimes the inspector isn’t very well prepared to find out what all the problems are in an apartment, or even to address the problems that the tenant has called about. There’s a disconnect there between the complaints and the actual finding of violations. 

Landlords also sometimes pay off inspectors because their salaries are not very good. That’s a third problem. And a fourth problem comes when a violation is issued. There is no real punishment for that. There are technically fines, but the city does not collect them. I cannot explain why.

If a tenant wants to take the next step, they can go to court. If you are successful in your court case, the court will order the landlord to make repairs. But landlords ignore the court order because there is no fine, and you have to go back to court again and say the landlord is in contempt for failing to make these repairs.

One thing you can do is withhold your rent and ask for the court to find that you are not required to pay the entire amount based on the conditions In the apartment. Even then, the penalties are often insufficient if you win, which means you have a trial, days of court that you have to take off from work if you win, and what is called an abatement where you don’t have to pay all of the rent. 

But even if you have no hot water, this is not sufficient for a full abatement. You still will have to pay some of your rent. To me, you should not have to pay any rent if you have no heat and no hot water.

Who is organizing the help for tenants going through this horrible process? Is it just individual lawyers, or is there some sort of organization behind it?

There are a number of nonprofits in New York City that have done this work for decades, primarily preventing evictions. Getting repairs made can be unfulfilling, as it’s a great deal of effort for very little reward, and we are paid by the city for each case we do. This means that the organization I work for has an interest in successful results that aren’t that time consuming. There is constant pressure on the funding in New York City. 

A few years ago, the city passed a law saying that everyone should get a lawyer, but then they didn’t fund it sufficiently. And then the pandemic happened, which had a gigantic effect in New York. We had an eviction moratorium for years where there were no evictions at all. So there wasn’t a lot of need for the law at first. But then there was a flood of eviction cases.

There is also a tenant organizing movement in NYC that has been gaining strength. Tenants are learning to work together to help support one another and develop a sense of solidarity against their common nemesis: the landlord. NYC has a rich tradition of tenant organizing dating back over a hundred years. But, there was a period that tenant organizing was not nearly as strong as it should have been. The last 5-10 years has seen an incredible surge of interest in tenant organizing and developing tenant power. 

So it sounds like winning legal arguments is only a small part of what you’re having to do. You’re also having to put pressure on governments.

When I started, there were maybe 100-200 attorneys in the city who did the work I do. Now, I’m guessing it’s probably 10 times that. There’s been a substantial increase, which is good, but the bulk of the work that we do actually relates to a different problem. 

In New York City, our welfare system provides an extremely minimal amount of funding for housing. So if you are eligible for welfare, you get $450 for a family of four people. That’s insane, and that amount hasn’t changed in 30 years. Twenty years ago, my organization started a lawsuit, and the upshot of it is that if you are facing eviction, you can get a higher amount, but only if you’re facing eviction. 

So you can’t just start looking for an apartment. You have to have an apartment that you’re going to lose. This means that at least 50% of the work that we do is trying to get the money from the welfare system to pay for people’s arrears and to sometimes help them get continued money in the future.

What’s your relationship to social movements which might be making similar demands from a non-legal perspective?

There are limits on what my organization can do in terms of their advocacy. My organization does advocate for improvements to tenant protections, but I think for the most part, they’re just not aligned with social movements.

Most of my coworkers have a very high caseload, and it’s very traumatic because our work is almost entirely with families who are facing eviction. We are constantly talking with families who are frightened they are going to lose their home. That is the bulk of our work. For many people, it’s all they can handle to be doing their day job. 

For me, I couldn’t do it any longer if I wasn’t engaged in trying to figure out how it could be different and better.

In your spare time, you’re a member of the DSA. In Europe, we haven’t heard much from the DSA in the last couple of years. How is the DSA doing, and what’s its contribution to the housing movements?

I can’t speak at all for the national DSA, but I’m pretty involved with it here in New York City, and I’m very involved with my local chapter. In New York City, the DSA has been an important part of the coalition that started doing a bunch of legislative work around making rent stabilization stronger, getting the Good Cause Eviction passed, and the right to an attorney. 

Probably everywhere and in every social movement, there is a disconnect between the people who do work on the ground and those who are doing larger legislative advocacy. That has been a real struggle in the New York City DSA for a few years now, where folks who are engaged in tenant organizing on the ground are more aligned with abolition of private property and landlords. They are activists, and are therefore critical of some of the compromises that folks who are working on the policy side feel like they have to make.

Do you think that the coming election is going to affect housing rights in the States and in Brooklyn?

One of the very interesting things is that, right before Biden decided not to run again, he sort of proposed the possibility of starting to have some nationwide rent controls. To me, Brooklyn is the harbinger of what has now happened nationwide. There is a problem of homelessness and a lack of affordable housing, so people are paying such a substantial portion of their income on rent. 

Kamala Harris has re-enunciated that she is in support of rent control, but is it going to happen? I don’t know, but if we have a President Trump again, it is definitely not going to be on the table. It is not insignificant that Trump is a New York City landlord and comes from a New York City landlord family. 

In really important ways, the landlords in New York City think that private property is freedom to do whatever you want. But in actuality, Donald Trump, like any other landlord, benefited immensely from government contracts and the basic things that a state provides: sewage and roads and so forth. 

He also specifically benefited from state permissions to have housing and to build housing. It’s connections with people in the state that make it possible to do those things. So deep down, Donald Trump knows that it’s very important to have the state support for the money he wants to make.

Is there anything else we haven’t covered that you want to tell our readers?

I was very excited to hear about the potential of expropriation in Berlin, and I think more and more that we have to be talking about expropriation in America, and especially in New York City. Sometimes I am surprised that even conservative people will agree that if a landlord is not doing a good job, the building shouldn’t be in their possession anymore. 

In New York City and nationwide, we must be discussing different forms of ownership, like community land trusts. This means that the property is owned in common, and there is a limit on how much any individual can profit from leaving their apartment if they want somebody else to have it. 

This expands a little bit the idea of how private property can be organized. It is so painful to me in the United States that the hope that private property will gain more value is the stopgap against our lack of a social welfare system. If you don’t have private property, you can’t pay for your children’s college, or your retirement, or health care that isn’t covered by your insurance.

These are things which wouldn’t be as great a concern in a different society. I am hoping that someday we may realize the dream of having such a society in the United States and in New York especially, because I’m devoted to New York.

Intentional Provocation

Report from the parliamentary observer of the rally “Beats against genocide”


30/08/2024

The event “Beats against genocide” was organised to raise awareness among young people and the hip-hop scene about the situation in Gaza and Palestine, and of German participation in war crimes. It ended up on the almost endless list of attacks in Berlin against the freedom to assemble around the subject of Palestine.

The planned rally was a thorn in the side of the so-called security authorities from the moment that it was first registered. This can be seen in the dispute around the venue. The organisers had planned Hermannplatz, which has great meaning for the Palestinian community and people who stand in solidarity with them. Regular demonstrations against war and occupation have taken place there, and repression has often been strongest there.

In the first talks about the concert the police questioned the venue, using the shabby justification that there was not enough space. While the organisers reckoned with 300 participants, the police allegedly expected 1,000 and signaled that the public authorities would not allow Hermannplatz. Furthermore, the police argued that traffic would be obstructed, which, according to the organisers, should never be used to justify limiting the right to assembly. Protest is by its nature a disruption of the normal state of things.

As an act of goodwill, the organisers then suggested Reuterplatz. Finally the authorities allocated Südstern. The available space there is significantly smaller than at Hermannplatz. Accessibility is enormously limited by the U-Bahn station and by the several busy roads which meet there. But the police no longer showed any interest in the stated reasons of limited space and traffic safety.

Permission to assembly came with many pages of justification showing that Hermannplatz had been not allowed for political reasons because of its physical proximity to Sonnenallee. As the organisers naturally wanted their event to happen, this change of venue at very short notice was accepted and advertised.

At the event itself, it became quickly clear that the police were making changes which were not part of the previous discussions or the permission to assembly. Among these changes were the unannounced video surveillance from the beginning of the event.

As with every assembly related to Palestine, at the beginning of the event there had to be an announcement of restrictions, including the ban of burning flags and puppets. These acts are already banned, but it was implied that the attendees would be expected to do this anyway.

Only a few minutes after the beginning of the event, as the first music act appeared, the police escalated the situation. After a phrase was used from the stage which the police considered to be “criminally relevant”, several police stormed the area around the stage immediately and without any warning. They brutally arrested the suspect and injured several bystanders. The usual milder methods of protecting the right to assembly of all participants was thus ignored.

Following the violent intervention by the police, the sound system, mixer, and the microphone were no longer useable. This also resulted in the event organisers being no longer able to adequately address the provoked and enraged participants.

In the escalated situation after the police intervention, three or four people chanted “Takbir” and “Hamas, Hamas”. I also described this as problematic to the press, adding that at the same time this was drowned out by the clear majority of the gathering chanting “Free, Free Palestine”.

In order to calm down the situation, the main organiser, in consultation with other organisers, attempted to convince the police not to break up the meeting before the arrival of a replacement music system. The police were only prepared to use their own loudspeaker van to set the conditions for the continuation of the event after waiting twenty minutes.

In the intervening period, people were time and again brutally removed from the event and arrested, inclusing a woman wearing a hijab. As a reaction to the aggressive behaviour of the police, plastic bottles were thrown from the protest. I did not see any of the glass bottles which were reported by the police.

Under these aggravated conditions, the organisers found a megaphone and speaker as quickly as they could and carried out the event in a very slimmed-down form until its end around 9pm.

The trouble didn’t end here. Just before the end of the event, the police announced that participants were not allowed to leave the meeting in the direction of Hermannplatz. It was therefore only practically possible to leave Südstern and go towards Mehringdamm and Urbanstraße. At the same time there was the demand that people do not leave in large groups. The police made a peaceful dissolution more difficult, as people were not able to go home without a great detour.

The heated atmosphere between demonstrators and police has been built up over recent months through brutal police actions and demonstration bans. The right to assembly must apply to all and must not be sabotaged by the behaviour of the police.

This statement first appeared in German on Ferat Koçak’s website. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permisson.

How Germany tries to ban the slogan “From the river to the Sea”

German police have carried out a wave of unprecedented repression against Palestine solidarity, and they are focusing on one sentence in particular


29/08/2024

In the last year, Berlin has seen an unprecedented wave of repression against the Palestine solidarity movement. Police actions range from the horrific – such as violent assaults on underage demonstrators – to the downright bizarre, including bans on speaking Irish and Hebrew. One slogan in particular has been forbidden by law since November 2023, since the German government interprets that as the complete annihilation of Israel: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Just last Friday, police stopped the Beats for Gaza solidarity concert after a rapper used this phrase.

In a country that supposedly guarantees freedom of expression, what is the legal basis for banning a sentence not banned in any other country, including Israel? Last November, Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser decreed that the slogan was a symbol of Hamas, a prohibited organization. You don’t need to be a lawyer to realize this is ridiculous. How can a slogan that was widespread in the 1970s and is used by countless Palestinian factions be a unique marker of a group that was only founded in 1987?

With the same logic, I could say that the German national anthem was used by the Nazis, and therefore everyone singing about the “Vaterland” at a football match is declaring loyalty to the NSDAP. A court in Mannheim pointed out that the sentence can be interpreted in myriad ways, and is protected by the constitutional right to free expression. Not all German courts agree, however.

On August 6, the 22-year-old Berlin activist Ava M. was sentenced to a 600 euro fine for chanting about rivers and seas. M., who comes from a family of exiled Iranian communists, made clear at trial that her goal is a democratic Palestine with equal rights for all people living there. Since it would be a bit too silly to accuse her of loyalty to Hamas, prosecutors tried a completely different accusation: “condoning a crime”, prohibited by paragraph 140 of the criminal code. According to the judge, this slogan implies support for every action by Palestinian militants on October 7. This is even more absurd, as the phrase was in use decades before the events it is supposedly referencing.

A second criminal trial, scheduled for August 22, was postponed. Numerous supporters outside the court were detained for – what else? – chanting “from the river to the sea”.

Police have additionally been using a third charge, Volksverhetzung, officially translated as “incitement to hatred”. Paragraph 130 originally banned “incitement to class hatred” and was used to persecute socialists. At the moment, in theory, it could be used against racists. Yet the German state has declared that Nazis shouting “Ausländer raus!” (foreigners out!) are using protected speech – while anyone calling for equal rights for all people in Israel / Palestine is guilty of a hate crime.

Without any evidence, politicians claim the slogan is calling for the expulsion of Jewish people. So what happens when supporters of Israel use the exact same phrase to negate any kind of Palestinian sovereignty? When far-right supporters of Israel called for sole Israeli rule “from the river to the sea”, Berlin police decided this was fine. The founding charter of the Likud party declares “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. Applying the law consistently, Berlin police would need to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

It might seem like all of Germany is solidly behind Israel’s war. While virtually all parties profess their unlimited support for apartheid, this is not true of Germany’s population. According to the semi-official Deutschlandtrend survey, 68 percent do not think Germany should be sending weapons to Israel. The same number think that Israel’s military actions are not justified when Gaza’s civilians are affected. These numbers are astounding given a one-sided media coverage and the manipulative questions in the survey itself.

This is what the judge who sentenced Ava M. meant when she said that German Staatsräson outweighs freedom of expression. As defined by the Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, the “reason of state” refers to a “disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations” when the interests of the state itself are at stake. In other words, this is an explicitly anti-democratic concept – and that is why it is being enforced with such blatant violations of democratic rights.

This is a mirror of Nathaniel’s Red Flag column, published in Neues Deutschland. Reproduced with permission

Crossing the Border into the West Bank

Travelling through the infrastructure of Israeli apartheid from Jordan to the West Bank.


28/08/2024

For most Palestinians, the sole route in and out of the West Bank is through a border crossing located about an hour’s drive from the Jordanian capital Amman. This crossing is known by several names: the Jordanians refer to it as King Hussein Bridge, named after King Hussein of Jordan, who is not well-regarded among Palestinians. The Israelis call it Allenby Bridge, named after the British officer who led the Palestine campaign against the Ottomans in World War 1 and rebuilt the bridge. Palestinians, however, call it Al-Karameh Bridge, named in honor of a battle in the nearby town of Karameh – meaning ‘dignity’ in Arabic – where Palestinian fighters claimed a partial victory against Israeli forces in 1968. Meanwhile everyday people simply call it The Bridge.

The Bridge has three sides: a Jordanian, an Israeli and a Palestinian.

The Jordanian side

Traveling from Jordan (or overseas) this is the side you will get to first, it’s about an hour drive from the capital, Amman, or its airport and is located just outside a small border town. The area looks underdeveloped: small bumpy roads and no proper taxi drop off area or a large parking space. The walls from the outside look old and rusty and it feels very much like you are entering an abandoned area that is being swarmed with people.

Once you get off the taxi the first step is to buy a ticket for the bus that will take you to the Israeli side. There are three windows that sell tickets (a newly opened fourth in a separate area), the windows are in the middle, separated by a tall thick metal fence that makes you feel you are in a cage. On both sides are the doors that will lead you to the next step after the tickets. This place is covered from the sun (as it is outdoors) and has a dozen or so fans, half of which had not been working, judging from the cobwebs, for a long time. There is little respect for queuing while buying tickets, and lots of shouting and pushing as people – with their luggage- move forward. In their defense the place does look as if it is designed for such a thing, or – more likely – not designed for anything. There is an empty VIP lane (a fast-track lane but it’s called VIP) that you can use for an extra fee to skip this queue and subsequent ones. Another common way to skip queues is to know someone, usually a security guard, who will escort you ahead of everyone. Next to the ticket windows there is a large sign in Arabic warning you that photography is prohibited at the crossing, and a smaller sign, in English, that says ‘’No Drones Allowed’.

After the tickets you need to wait for any of the two doors to open once the employees inside open them for a brief time to let people in so that it’s not crowded inside. When it’s crowded outside (which is common) you are more likely to be pushed through the doors than walk by yourself. Inside there is a small room in which you’re separated from your luggage (you will pick it up later on) with the usual luggage scanner that you see in airports next to a single metal detector door. Passing them leads to the Jordanian departure hall, where you need to fill a departure card (known as the white card) with basic personal info, then walk (and queue) to one of the several booths (similar to airport immigration ones) with your passport and the departure card, the officer then checks the documents and passes them through a small hole on their right to another officer servicing another booth and asks you to queue on that booth (most of the trip is spent queuing). The other officer stamps the white departure cards with half a dozen stamps before giving it back to you then you are out.

The next area is a considerably smaller hall that is roughly 100 square meters in size and has a duty-free zone, the zone primarily sells cigarettes and can get extremely crowded and chaotic as people ‘queue’ to buy the maximum allowed packs (two large boxes per person); cigarettes are extremely expensive in the West Bank compared to Jordan (three times the price when duty free) so buying here then selling it later at home will cover the trip costs and leave you with a small profit. Some people buy more than what is allowed and look for strangers who didn’t buy to carry it for them, others are professional ‘smugglers’ who seem to know what they are doing when hiding the cigarette packs in their hand bags.

Leaving that area you are outdoors again and you need to look for your luggage that was thrown in some corner and then get on the bus (less queuing here and more pushing). The buses come one by one and leave one by one whenever the Israeli side allows. Once on the bus and before it moves an officer gets on board to check your ticket and take the bottom half of the white departure card leaving you with the top half. The (manual) gate then opens and the bus takes a short drive to a nearby rest area where it parks till it gets a signal to move again, then passes a sign in Arabic with the odd message: “We are the closest to the crisis in Palestine”. After 10 minutes it continues its trip through a narrow road interrupted by a crossing herd of sheeps then it stops at a checkpoint next to the Military Liaison Office where an officer – still Jordanian – gets on board and takes the remaining top half of the white departure card. After a short drive, the bus crosses the actual bridge where the water has long since dried up and is now just dry grass. A plaque displaying the Japanese flag and the words “From the Japanese People” is placed on the left side. From this point on, the area looks drastically different with large modern roads bearing a new flag and language. 

The Israeli side

Right after crossing the bridge the bus stops at an automated gate like those in parking lots. A few cleaning staff are the only people visible. Once the gate opens the bus drives through artificial small hills with machine gun nests before coming to its final stop in a few hundred meters, everyone then disembarks to pick up their luggage that was just recklessly unloaded from a trolley attached to the back of the bus and checks it into the Israeli area after another queue and more pushing. Inside the Israeli departure hall there is a queue to go through the one sole metal detector door servicing thousands of travellers a day – on average twenty five thousand pass through this door a week. In the event that the metal detector beeps you are asked to go through the adjacent 360 X-Ray scanner, the scanner is there to ensure you have a safe and pleasant trip (or so the sign says). In front of these scanners there are two glass booths with two visibly bored frowning Israelis who don’t say much, but give hand gestures when something beeps to try again or try the other door. There are a number of Palestinian workers to guide you through the scanners and interpret the gestures of the frowning, bored Israelis. After clearing the security area there is one short queue followed by another longer one; in the first booth the Israeli takes your passport and asks a couple of questions and gives it back to you with a small paper that you take to the next booth. The next Israeli officer, the first who isn’t frowning, though still bored, takes the passport and the small paper again, scans and returns them and you are off to pick up your luggage, passing the customs area with more frowning Israelis yelling four or five Arabic words that they know at frustrated travellers (bag!, here!, passport!, come!, etc..).

Outside there is another bus ticket window where you need to buy a ticket to the Palestinian side to get on the bus, sometimes there is queuing here but not this time.

The Palestinian side

After a short drive the bus leaves the Israeli area and enters the Palestinian city of Jericho where the Palestinian side is. You get off the bus and pass a short queue at the immigration booth, then a tiny customs area where the officers are likely to ask you to open your luggage looking for hidden cigarettes then you are done. The surroundings outside looks way more developed than the Jordanian counterpart with proper parking lots for public transport and private cars, a small cafeteria and better overall buildings and roads as well as free WiFi (something the previous sides lacked). From here you can take a shuttle van or a bus to your destination or a short walk into Jericho downtown. 

It’s worth mentioning that even though crossing The Bridge is an annoying and time consuming process; two and half hours on quiet days and five plus hours when it’s busy; aside from 20 minute bus rides, the trip is spent queuing. It has gotten much better over the past decade. Previously, luggage was transported in separate trucks, causing long waits on the Israeli side if you arrived before your bag. Working hours were more limited but now (before October 7th) it operates 24 hours for a day or two; the rest of the days it varies from 8 am till 4.30 pm or 12 pm and closes on Saturdays. There were far more Israeli officers and armed soldiers, some used to get on the bus before its final stop to check everyone’s ID. The changes were most likely not made to facilitate travel for Palestinians but to alleviate the boredom of the Israeli authorities monitoring them. Nowadays the staff at the Israeli side are from private security companies and throughout the whole trip two (female) soldiers could be seen carrying their lunch in the Israeli side before they went into their office.

Disarm Kiel – Sink the War Industry

Antimilitarist camp in Kiel between the 3rd and 8th September


Resistance against the daily reality of armament, militarisation, war, flight, displacement and suffering worldwide. With hundreds of activists we will gather in the Werftpark of the northern German city of Kiel, a hotspot of the arms industry and military. There we will discuss our strategies against the global regimes of war and imperialism together with our international friends and comrades and engage in direct action against the war industry.

Our camp will be a space of solidarity, discussion, mutual learning and fighting. Our extensive programme informs about wars (for example in Palestine, Sudan and Kurdistan) struggles worldwide, as well as antimilitaristic history (of Kiel and it’s workers and sailors role in the 1918 revolution), fighting strategies and means of organizing ourselves. Feminist critique and action against war and militarism is one of our main issues, so there will be a programme and actions by the autonomous feminist group of Rheinmetall Entwaffnen during the camp. There will also be an anti-militarist cultural programme.

We do our best to minimize barriers and make the camp accessible for everyone who wants to join. Information on how to reach our camp and what to bring for it’s duration can be found here. If you have any other questions regarding the camp feel free to contact us at: rheinmetall-entwaffnen@riseup.net

Our alliance, “Rheinmetall Entwaffnen” is an association of anti-capitalist, internationalist, feminist and antimilitarist groups. We got together protesting the German arms industry’s involvement in the Turkish aggression against Afrin and Kurdistan. The Leopard-2 tanks used by the Turkish army in that invasion are partly a product of Germanys largest arms producer, Rheinmetall, which is why we took as our name and goal to disarm this war-profiting company. Since then, we have engaged in direct action, blockades and protest against the German arms industry and organized camps, for exmaple Unterlüß and Kassel. This year, we are getting active in Kiel, hoping to rekindle its revolutionary history in which the sailors and workers of Kiel helped end the first world war and toppled the monarchy in 1918.