Peace Activists Try and Block Arms Supplies to Israel
[Source: Photo courtesy of David Solnit]
Originally published at CovertAction Magazine
David Hartsough is a legendary peace activist who first amassed an FBI file in the mid 1950s at the age of 15 when he organized a vigil outside a Nike missile plant where he grew up near West Chester, Pennsylvania.
On November 20, Hartsough was one of 75 protesters who tried to block weapons shipments to Israel from the Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, an hour north of San Francisco.
Sponsored by CODEPINK, WORLD BEYOND WAR, Veterans for Peace and 21 other peace groups, the protest was timed for “World Children’s Day,” which was appropriate since more than 12,000 children—and 700 infants—have been confirmed killed by Israel in the war in Gaza.
Twenty-eight of the protesters were arrested after forming a “human blockade” across all four entrances into Travis Air Force Base to to “interrupt” the flow of U.S. weapons that are being transported from Travis AFB to Israel.
These weapons are being used in Gaza by Israel to carry out its ongoing military campaign against Palestine, considered by many experts to be a genocide.
The November 20 Travis Air Force Base protest (see video here) was modeled after actions that Hartsough had participated in during the 1980s to block weapons shipments to the Nicaraguan Contras, counter-revolutionaries supported by remnants of the deposed Somoza dictatorship trained by the CIA to overthrow Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government.[1]
In an interview on November 23, Hartsough told me that the protesters targeted Travis Air Force Base because it is the “largest U.S. military base in the U.S.” and that, “every day, plane loads of bombs are being sent to the Israelis to be dropped on Gaza. These bombs are killing innocents and destroying schools, homes, libraries, mosques, refugee camps and so much else.”
Hartsough continued: “The majority of the American people want to stop sending weapons to Israel [as polls have shown] but the President and Congress are not listening. We feel a responsibility to try to do something to stop the madness; to put our bodies between these bombs and the children of Gaza by blocking workers loading these bombs onto planes headed to Israel.”
Born in the small town of Glenmont, Ohio, Hartsough’s father, Ray, was a Quaker who worked with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and United Nations.
In 1955, Ralph Abernathy, a top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed in his home and encouraged his father to bring his kids down to Montgomery, Alabama, to experience the Montgomery bus boycott protesting segregation during Spring Break. There he met with Dr. King.[2]
Hartsough subsequently participated in sit-ins for civil rights in Maryland and Virginia that were confronted by members of the American Nazi Party; organized a peace walk from Philadelphia to UN headquarters in New York to protest nuclear testing; and met with President John F. Kennedy to urge him to challenge the Soviets to adopt a peace race instead of an arms race.
A leader in the anti-Vietnam War movement who used his body to block Navy ships bound for Vietnam, Hartsough founded an organization in the early 2000s called Nonviolent Peaceforce that provides protection to vulnerable civilians in war-zones, including West Bank residents at risk of having their homes bulldozed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).[3]
Hartsough told me that his consciousness about the injustices meted out to the Palestinians was instilled in him from a young age because his father had told him as a child about his time in Gaza in 1949 working with the Quakers and the UN office in charge of Palestinian refugee resettlement.
The Palestinian refugees were victims of the Nakba, having been driven from their homes by the Israeli army during Israel’s war for independence.
My interview with Hartsough was carried out with two other members of the “Travis 28,” Toby Blomé and Wynd Kaufmyn.[4]
They both discussed the strategizing that went on before the protests and decisions to advertise the action in advance so as to try to attract more protesters.
When they met with the town police chief months beforehand to address aggressive and unnecessary police violence witnessed in protests earlier in the year, they found him to be unprofessional and rude.
However, in this latest action at Travis, the police were more consistently professional and some police officers appeared to be sympathetic and seemed to understand that the protesters were trying to stop the murder of children.
A resident of the East Bay area of California outside of San Francisco, Blomé, 69, has worked with CodePink, is part of Ban Killer Drones, and was featured in a July 2024 article in CovertAction Magazine about a group of activists who were arrested for trying to block the entrance to a U.S. Air Force base in Holloman, New Mexico, where drone pilots are trained.
Noting with disappointment that California’s two senators, Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler, opposed a measure proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders to cut off arms supplies to Israel, Blomé said that “some experts estimate the actual death toll in Gaza to be nearing 200,000, with most bodies still under the rubble; 70% are women and children. Our conscience calls us to act to halt the worst humanitarian horrors of the 21st century.”
Like Blomé, Kaufmyn is a long-time peace activist residing in Berkeley, California.
She told me that she is a Jewish girl from Detroit who left her insular Jewish community in 1979 to do graduate work at UC Berkeley (in mechanical engineering) and never went back.
She said that, at Berkeley, she “experienced a religious conversion by which she realized that injustice was not something that could comfortably be ignored”; she has been a lifelong peace activist ever since.
Working as an engineering instructor at City College of San Francisco for more than four decades, Kaufmyn’s activism took her to Nicaragua in the 1980s with Witness for Peace and, after 9/11, to Israel and the West Bank where she witnessed first-hand the devastation inflicted by the IDF at the Jenin refugee camp during the Second Intifada.
In 2012, Kaufmyn received a ten-year ban from Israel, which to her was heartbreaking because of the friendships she had forged in the country and the beauty of the land, which she loved visiting.
On October 7, 2023, Kaufmyn was ironically flying back to Israel with her daughter since her ban had expired, but her flight was diverted because of the Hamas attacks.
Back in what she termed the “belly of the beast,” she has vowed to do whatever she can to try to stop the Israeli genocide, including through her participation in the “human blockade” outside the Travis Air Force Base.
Kaufmyn and Blomé specified that the deep U.S. complicity in Israeli war crimes was exemplified by the fact that U.S. drones have been flying over Gaza helping Israel as it was dropping U.S. bombs on the people.
It was a disgrace that the U.S. Congress agreed to send $20 billion more in arms to Israel after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were issued arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
These warrants should extend to Joe Biden and his ruling circle, Blomé, Kaufmyn and Hartsough believe, and to arms manufacturers like General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin that supply the bombs to Israel through Travis Air Force Base.
The November 20 protest was preceded by other blockades, including ones at Travis Air Force Base in December, February, March and April, and Blomé and Kaufmyn said that others were being planned for the future. (Kaufmyn said “mark my words, we’ll be back, we ain’t going away.”)
Blomé and Kaufmyn are encouraged by the fact that many young people are involved in protests on university campuses and elsewhere and that there is growing diversity in the peace movement.
Even though they were arrested, they said it is likely the charges against them will be dropped.
In the past, they have had to show up on assigned court dates only to learn that the charges had been dismissed, though this time, Blomé said that a woman within the Fairfield Police Department told her that she could call in advance and they would tell her if that was the case so she and others would not have to drive and waste their time coming to court for nothing.
This gives an indication, Blomé believes, that the protesters are winning more and more “hearts and minds” even among conservative segments of society, and that there is some hope for the future in spite of the bleak political landscape.
Hartsough participated in efforts to block trains possessing weapons destined for the Contras with S. Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran from upstate New York who was run over by one of the trains, resulting in amputations of both legs and other serious injuries. See S. Brian Willson, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011). ↑
Hartsough was then in high-school. ↑
See David Hartsough with Joyce Hollyday, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014). Hartsough later founded the global “World Beyond War” organization. ↑
With Hartsough, Blomé and Kaufmyn are co-organizers of the new Travis campaign referred to as “The People’s Arms Embargo.” ↑