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The Weapons Manufacturer Next Door

It’s been six years since I began attending pro-Palestine demonstrations. The most recent campaign at the Brooklyn Navy Yard feels different.

April protests at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

On a warm Wednesday morning in early April, I stood with around two dozen masked protesters outside the entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial park on the New York City waterfront. I knew by now to bring earplugs, since the goal of this weekly demonstration was to make as much noise as possible. Beneath the screech of whistles, the blaring of an air horn, and the banging of pots and pans, activists waved Palestinian flags and handed out flyers to workers exiting the complex. The protesters were there because they had found evidence that companies operating out of the massive property were supplying the Israeli military, which for over two years had been carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

The protests, led by an autonomous group called Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard, targeted Easy Aerial, a drone manufacturer, and Crye Precision, which makes tactical gear. Because the Navy Yard sits on land owned by the city of New York, the DBNY picket extends to the complex as a whole, with the organizers arguing that military contractors should not receive tax breaks or be allowed to operate on public property. For over a year, they demanded that the two companies be evicted from the Navy Yard; after Easy Aerial’s lease expired in May (without being renewed), they focused their campaign on getting rid of Crye Precision.

These weekly protests ebbed and flowed as groups from around the city answered DBNY’s call to mobilize at the Navy Yard, and they sometimes escalated into more direct confrontations. Earlier on that April morning, a brief scuffle had broken out after a cop slapped a demonstrator blowing an air horn in his face. Toward the end of the demonstration, I watched as a protester in a hooded sweatshirt and green keffiyeh stood atop a picnic table and spoke into a megaphone.

“Politicians and international bodies have not stopped the genocide in Palestine, or of the oppressed masses of the world, and they were never willing to stop it,” the speaker declared, his voice partially muffled by the keffiyeh. “To fight US imperialism, we have to choke its flow of supplies.”

His sentiment reflected how I’d been feeling for months—as well as many others I knew who cared about Palestine. During Israel’s two-year genocidal campaign in Gaza, protests around the United States focused on stopping the daily bombardment and killing of Palestinian civilians. As the official death toll rose to more than 70,000 (likely a severe undercount), “Ceasefire now!” became the rallying cry of most major actions in cities like New York, alongside the more radical demands from student encampments, which called on their universities to divest from Israel.

But despite the ceasefire that was announced last October, the killings have not stopped. The United States continues to send weapons to Israel, which is still targeting Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, the latter flush with armed settlers. By 2025, the war for American popular opinion, it seemed, had been won: For the first time since polling began, more Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel than a favorable one. Meanwhile, aside from some major victories for pro-Palestine politicians in cities like New York and Washington, DC, this sentiment has not translated to a shift in policy. Logic and historical precedent both seemed to suggest that it was just a matter of time. But as with our planet in the climate crisis, Palestine was running out of time.

It was during this period of frustration over the United States’ continued material support for Israel, and the perceived ineffectiveness of mass protest, that I first came across Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard in August of last year. Rather than occupying a massive public space, such as Times Square, to express discontent and raise awareness on the issue, the DBNY campaign was doing something different: pushing for targeted actions at the local level to end the flow of weapons to Israel. Such protests have always been a part of pro-Palestine organizing, but in the nine months since the ceasefire was announced, I’ve seen them take on much more prominence, applying pressure to specific people and businesses with financial ties to the Israeli military.

There was something, too, in the fact that this was all........

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