Protesters demand end to Israeli arms shipments at Washington State weapons depot

Tim Wheeler / People's World

PORT TOWNSEND, Wash.—An estimated 150 protesters gathered in a county park across the road from the Indian Island Naval Magazine on Sunday, Sept. 22, to demand a halt to the delivery of U.S. bombs and missiles used in Israel’s war on Gaza that has killed an estimated 41,000 unarmed Palestinians including 16,000 children.

The crowd was grieving the Palestinians but also the assassination, Sept. 6 by an Israeli army sniper, of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi during a prayer service in the West Bank town of Beita. A resident of Seattle, Eygi, 26, was a University of Washington graduate with dual U.S.-Turkish citizenship.

The crowd was swelled by anti-war protesters from Jefferson, Clallam, and Kitsap counties, and by carloads who took ferries across from Whidbey Island, Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia for the action on the North Olympic Peninsula.

Among the rally speakers was Doug Milholland of Port Townsend. The crowd, he said, “made a strategically good choice to come to this specific place. This is the only conventional weapons depot on the West Coast.” It has supplied tons of lethal weapons, responsible for “the great numbers of people killed on this planet, not only in Gaza but in 20 years of the war on terror.”

The most recent vessel to be rearmed with high-explosive munitions at Indian Island Naval Magazine was the USS Nimitz nuclear aircraft carrier.

Milholland said that, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry, the U.S. has delivered 50,000 tons of weaponry to Israel since last Oct. 7, the date of the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. It was delivered aboard 107 cargo ships and 500 transport planes “crucial for sustaining the Israel Defense Force’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war,” the ministry declared.

It was paid for with a $17 billion U.S. appropriation approved last April on top of the $3.8 billion in U.S. assistance to Israel each year. The State Department recently approved an additional $20 billion in U.S. military assistance to Israel, including a fleet of new F-15 fighter jets.

Milholland told People’s World he and other friends stand vigil at the Indian Island Naval Magazine every Father’s Day to protest the U.S. delivery of weapons of mass death around the world, this year in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Milholland was arrested in nonviolent civil disobedience against the Gaza war.

Marney Kittredge, a participant in the Father’s Day vigil, staged a “die-in” lying down along the road leading into the Naval Magazine. She was holding an effigy of a dead Palestinian child wrapped in white cotton in her arms.

Macy Jones, a Sequim peace activist placed on the park fairway two plastic bags with a placard explaining that in the “Fajr Massacre” Israel struck a crowded mosque with three missiles. The dead were so hideously dismembered that doctors were forced to give the families “bags containing 70 kilos of body parts, 16 kilos for children.”

Jones also brought to the rally a 649-page book published by the Palestinian health authority listing the names, ages, gender, and identity of the 34,344 dead who have been identified so far, with several thousand more victims yet to be added.

University of Washington Professor Aria Fani, who teaches in the Middle Eastern Culture and Languages program at UW, told the crowd that the martyr Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was one of his students.

In a lifetime of teaching, Fani said, only a handful of students are memorable. Aysenur Eygi, he said, had the power to move people toward transformative change, to turn them against war and hate, and to embrace peace, justice, and love.

“I taught her once; she will teach me forever,” he said.

Her murder brought back memories of Rachel Corrie, a student at Evergreen College near Olympia killed Mar. 16, 2003. Corrie had sat down in front of an Israeli bulldozer in the West Bank to block the machine from destroying the home of a Palestinian family. The bulldozer ran over her, killing her, then bulldozed the Palestinian home.

Sequim musician Steve Koehler, on his guitar, led the crowd in singing “Down By the Riverside” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” in memory of Eygi, Corrie, and the Palestinians who have died.

Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington State sent a letter to President Joe Biden co-signed by 102 of his colleagues demanding an independent investigation of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi’s murder.

Smith noted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims her shooting was “unintentional” and took place during a “riot.” In his letter, Smith said credible eyewitnesses charge that the shooting was “intentional, without provocation.” Refusal by the U.S. to investigate gives Israel “license to act with impunity,” he said.

Milholland said the war in Gaza is escalating, threatening to spread into a regional or even world war. “We are one bad judgment away from a major nuclear war,” he said. The heavy Israeli bombing of Lebanon which has occurred subsequent to the rally shows the prescience of the warning.

Many of the protesters had come ready to engage in civil disobedience, and dozens of the activists walked across the road, stepping over the blue property line, thus “trespassing” on Pentagon property. U.S. Navy Shore Patrol officers were present as well as Washington State Patrol officers, yet no arrests were made.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Tim Wheeler

Tim Wheeler has written over 10,000 news reports, exposés, op-eds, and commentaries in his half-century as a journalist for the Worker, Daily World, and People’s World. Tim also served as editor of the People’s Weekly World newspaper.  His book News for the 99% is a selection of his writings over the last 50 years representing a history of the nation and the world from a working-class point of view. After residing in Baltimore for many years, Tim now lives in Sequim, Wash.