In mid-November, four young women will start two-month jail sentences for an action attempting to halt operations last November at a weapons factory in Merrimack, New Hampshire, operated by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer.

It could have been far worse for the Merrimack 4, as the women are called by fellow activists. New Hampshire prosecutors had originally charged them with multiple felonies carrying sentences up to 37 years — an extreme overreach given that the defendants were alleged to have engaged in trespass and minor property damage at the facility.

After a drawn out process, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office eventually dropped the felony charges and the co-defendants pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief and criminal trespass. Alongside jail time, they received a 24-month suspended sentence and a stay-away order from every Elbit Systems facility, including 6 factories.

The Merrimack 4 are not worried about 60 days in jail. Or, as two of them told me, they keep their situation in perspective.

“I’ve talked with friends from Palestine who’ve been arrested and interrogated and tortured in prisons,” said Calla Walsh, 20, a co-founder of Palestine Action U.S. She contrasted her own sentence with the Israeli practice of detaining Palestinians indefinitely in “administrative detention” without trial: “At least we know how long we’ll be in for.”

The activists’ concern, rather, is that the wrong lessons will be taken from their cases. What they don’t want is for movement participants to look at their sentences and shy away from escalation and direct action. There remains, they said, an urgent need to shut down the production and circulation of arms deployed in the ongoing atrocities against Palestine and Lebanon.

The action in November last year, less than two months after Israel’s war on Gaza started, was part of a campaign, under the banner of Palestine Action U.S., where autonomous groups around the country targeted Elbit for demonstrations. In Merrimack, activists blockaded the road leading to the Elbit facility, threw red paint on the building’s facade, broke several........

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