Resistance is a choice made with a knife at the throat. Beneath every question of historical agency, concrete conditions, organizational capacity, or theoretical acuity there’s this: a choice. Poised on the precipice before which is passivity in the face of totalizing death, despair, destruction and beyond which is struggle against it, to make this choice is to offer a slight chance within the continuous history of an ending world in order to end it. This choice—resistance—is not one made lightly, nor is it made once, for once you make it you must constantly remake it, holding steadfast to the horizon against all the repression in the world that seeks to vanquish all revolt.
The horror we feel each waking day about the us/zionist-led genocide in Palestine ensues not from the sheer extent of death, the magnitude of the massacres, and the breadth of annihilation to which we bear witness. Rather, this terror emerges from the stains in our souls, we who continue to live (if you can call this a life) only because it is us who allowed this to happen, who continue to allow this to happen, who haven’t collectively brought this to an end. The horror we feel each waking day arises from the foreclosure of the brief glimpses of the dreams of rebellion that have vanished, disappeared, or dissolved. When we forget that resistance is still possible we are doomed, we disappear.
The mass movements comprising the Palestine solidarity movement in amerika have failed. From the so-called “student Intifada” of proliferating campus occupations to the mass “non-violent” blockades of A15, from interminable peace-policed marches to nowhere to the “organized left’s” commitment to legitimacy and legality, isolating militants to protect themselves—all of these brief glimpses of mass resistance to genocide have failed—decisively. What their failure reveals is how deeply embedded this genocide is with the amerikan project of imperial domination, thus also revealing how all institutions that remain engaged in amerikan state-building (non-profit, student, progressive, and electoral organizations) will be compromised from the start.
Repression works in two ways—with all the violence of the world (massacres, concentration camps, prisons, and police) and with fear and forgetting through which we repress ourselves. Each time the solidarity movement came upon the choice of resistance and chose passivity instead of struggle, each time the solidarity movement came upon the choice of resistance and chose safety, legitimacy, and stability instead of struggle, each time the solidarity movement condemned the resistance to protect themselves—fear took the place of guns and forgetting took the place of cages. So repression prevailed, recuperating struggle in the name of imperial domination.
Yet, we must remember that this “we” is not all of “us.” Resistance continues daily in clandestine flames, in underground shadows, in secret. Resistance continues daily amidst the ruins of an annihilated Gaza. As long as the resistance isn’t defeated (and maybe even then), fedayeen continue to tunnel through the rubble to attack the zionist forces of devastation, even when the ground trembles and the sky shakes. Resistance continues daily behind the walls of all the prisons in the world. For even when it seems that life is impossible, that the dreams of rebellion have disappeared, that the desire to revolt has vanished, we must remember that as long as we still have prisoners, nothing is ever over. When asked how we know that resistance is still possible, we respond with the example of our prisoners. We remember them. We carry on their fight. To forget them is fatal, for they are our memory.
To combat amnesia, we must remember that we are at war, “seeking conflict with those responsible for the genocide, our bare hands around their throats.” Repression must breed resistance.
These words are from one of the many communiqués published below in political prisoner Casey Goonan’s “Timeline of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment Wave & Campus Flood at U.C. Berkeley.” Published under the varying signatures of “some anarchists,” “Sacred Black & Red,” “Leila’s Daughters,” “Safiya’s Daughters,” “Marilyn’s Daughters,” or “Blessed Is the Flame,” each speak to the necessity of resistance and its enduring possibility in an invitation to all of us on the precipice of the choice we have not yet made to join them. Casey’s timeline is itself an act of revolutionary memory against amnesia, revealing under the totalizing inertia of inaction those slight chances for revolt, those slim possibilities of rebellion we can still pursue. Casey’s timeline is also an act of counter-repression, counter-history, revealing the creative militancy of our not-yet cohered but still cohering underground.
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Casey is the only political prisoner from the 2024 wave of encampments and campus flood for the liberation of Palestine. They are an abolitionist and anarchist who has dedicated themselves to all struggles for liberation and who for years has been deeply involved with and committed to prisoner support work and direct engagement with incarcerated comrades. They’ve always pushed to ensure an understanding of Black struggle and revolt as central to their abolitionist work and through this understanding the importance of anti-police and anti-prison struggles in any and all efforts towards liberation.
In June 2024, they were arrested by a task force comprised of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in connection with an alleged direct action which took place in solidarity with the uc berkeley encampments which had been brutalized by police and zionists earlier that year. Casey insisted on taking a non-cooperating plea deal in which they plead guilty to one charge to allow additional charges to be dropped, not including any information or testimony against anyone else. Though Casey has received a great amount of support from decentralized and autonomous movements, the pro-Palestine movement as a whole and all other autonomous liberation struggles need to publicly and actively support them.
As the call for action “#FreeCaseyNow: On Casey Goonan and the Abandonment of Political Prisoners in the Pro-Palestine Movement” articulated, “despite vague assertions of the interconnectedness of repression and struggles between the amerikan policing and prison apparatuses to that of israel, there has been little material manifestation from that understanding within the us pro-Palestine movement. Meanwhile, coordinated struggle between prisoners and outside militants has been a key point of success for Palestinian liberation.”
Beyond the bare minimum of supporting those facing repression, the call to action continues, “any revolutionary horizons with teeth require long term prisoner support. This practice is key to the current struggle that led to the Al-Aqsa Flood as exhibited by the rich history of organizing within prisons and the ongoing liberation of those being held hostage by israel. Those of us living under a plantation economy already have our own reasons to ensure incarceration is a central site of struggle. But if one does insist upon taking guidance from elsewhere and if one intends to ‘bring the Intifada home’ or ‘escalate for Gaza,’ Palestinians have provided plenty of methods for how carcerality can be attacked.”
“Casey understood this prior to their incarceration and there’s no doubt this knowledge influenced their own political horizons. If the pro-Palestine movement wants to also tote itself as an intifada they should take note of the militant organizing and support infrastructure within and between prison walls that occurs in Palestine. Abandonment of prisoners is where revolutionary ideals die.”
State repression must be met with expanding our community resources to reach those inside. Bravery must be met with support.
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Our prisoners are the compass of any of antagonistic movement for liberation, since it is from them that we can learn how to make the choice of resistance and hold fast to the slight chance of a future it trespasses into the world of death and despair. As “Sacred Black & Red” articulate below, “Resistance is our historical and spiritual duty. To not hold this as truth is to give up and accept defeat, hoping someone else will do what it takes to disrupt the flow of capital into the settler-colonial project. We must bring the war home.”
For the children of Gaza
For all the martyrs
With eternal revolutionary spirit
Let us break open the prison gates at last
Blessed is the flame that burns down the settler-plantation
Free Casey Now
submitted anonymously