Anarchist orchestrated “economic blockade” is about more than Palestine

On April 15^th, as Americans across the country hurried to finish their federal tax returns, a series of deliberate disruptions took place in cities across the globe. In California, the Golden Gate Bridge was jammed by protestors in vehicles and at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, travelers were forced to abandon their vehicles, and run to try and make flights after protestors shut down traffic to the airport. Similar blockading protests also took place globally, targeting major roadways, ports and airports ranging from Australia, Spain, and Ireland.

The front organizing the multi-city blockade efforts, known as A15 Action consists of little more than a website, first established March 22^nd and some social media accounts. Despite the international participation, there’s reason to believe the effort was primarily focused on the United States, given the timing, which clearly deliberately coincides with the U.S. federal income tax deadline.

The site called for “escalating” actions to “identify and blockade major choke points in the economy, focusing on points of production and circulation with the aim of causing the most economic impact…”

The site references the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a U.S-based former Communist Party USA front which provides law services to radical protestors and even terrorists. The site also directs supporters to provide donations to the self-described prison abolitionist organization the  Community Justice Exchange (a project of the Tides Center) utilizing the Democrat Party aligned charity crowd funder ActBlue. It was reported in October that the Tides Center had served as a pass through for George Soros’ Open Society Foundation to provide some $15 million to pro-Hamas protestor groups, according to the New York Post.

The site uses language common to the anarchist, autonomous Marxist or prison and police abolitionist organizing methods of the 2020 BLM riots, and the call for action on April 15^th was widely shared in anarchist organizing circles, including on the sites AnarchistFederation.net and ItsGoingDown. The A15 naming convention is comparable to similar anarchist-led direct action events, such as Disrupt J20, which targeted the Inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Organizations closely associated with support for the Palestinian cause in the United States issued their own statement calling for an April 15^th “National Strike for Gaza” on their site Strike4Gaza.org, which they produced on April 2^nd, almost a week after the A15 Action announcement.

The groups behind Strike4Gaza included those with links to Palestinian terrorist groups the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Hamas including: Al-Awda, The Palestinian Youth Movement, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), as well as allied groups including ANSWER Coalition, a group tied to the radical Party for Socialism and Liberation, which routinely helps facilitate radical protests for a variety of causes.

This is a reverse of the previous pattern in which Palestinian-led organizations have promoted protests, which have then been amplified and supported by anarchist and Antifa elements, as occurred in 2023 with the Sheikh Jarrah protests.

Within Our Lifetime (WOL), which has been a major organizer of recent Pro-Hamas protests, can be seen as a link between the two organizing elements, as they utilized both the A15 Action and Strike4Gaza language in their post promoting both events, produced April 8^th.

While in some cases A15 targets were at least tangentially related to the Israel-Hamas conflict, such as targeting specific defense contractors, in other cases there was no specific symbolic meaning to the disrupted target.

Both the timing and the targeting suggests that rather than autonomous direct-action disruptions intended to amplify and draw attention to the efforts of the larger and more established groups –as is often the case– the blockade of roads, ports and airports was instead the point of the exercise.

Instead of disruption as a tactic to draw attention, disruption was itself the goal. The ability to conduct multiple simultaneously disruptive actions against specific economic “chokepoints” both nationally and internationally, on less than 30 days’ notice should be regarded as a significant demonstration of capability. While the resonance of the Palestinian cause internationally shouldn’t be disregarded, the fact that the initial orchestrators of the A15 Action do not appear to have been part of the existing Palestinian support structure, suggests that this capability can be freely utilized on a variety of topics.

Especially given the demonstrated links between A15 and U.S. domestic bail funds –which played an outsized role in facilitating BLM riots in the lead up to the presidential election in 2020– it is reasonable to conclude that these protests should be viewed, at least in part, as preparation for the 2024 presidential elections.