Maeve Higgins: The crowd called the police to drag me off the stage

A US taxpayer, Maeve Higgins reveals how she and fellow New Yorkers have been trying to get their politicians’ attention to protest against American support for the Israeli military in Gaza

Members of NY-10 neighbors at the office of Dan Goldman.

Perhaps you heard about the footage this week of five-year-old Sally Abu Laila moments after Israeli soldiers shot her in the head. The child’s mother, Sabreen, told CNN that her daughter was in her arms as she and her four other children were crossing a checkpoint in Gaza. It seems unbelievable, doesn’t it? Yet, Unicef reports that Israeli forces, funded by billions of dollars from the US, are killing or injuring one Palestinian child every 10 minutes in Gaza. What they did to Sally has become devastatingly routine.

Still, that particular child’s shooting struck me with a personal sense of outrage. In early March, I spoke up at a church near where I live in Brooklyn. There was a community meeting there featuring New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and just before it was scheduled to start I took the podium to call her out for her complicity in the ongoing genocide. I told the people gathered there that American doctors were reporting from Gaza that Israeli soldiers were shooting small children in the head. The crowd jeered at me, and called the police to drag me off the stage and escort me out of the building.

Let me rewind. In mid-October, I saw a photo of a family killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza and my lower back went into spasms for two days. When it eased up, I felt a different type of paralysis. As nightmarish images flooded my phone — more babies, more children, more women and men, all killed in attacks that grew more brutal by the day — I felt a frantic need to stop it but couldn’t think how. That emotional paralysis lasted weeks and was compounded by the fact that, as a US taxpayer, I was directly involved. Israel was doing the killing, but the US was paying for it.

Maeve Higgins is removed from the scene by police after speaking out at an event in New York.

Living in a liberal place like New York City, we are typically told to make sure to vote, and if there’s any problem, to call your representatives. My district is NY-10, so my Congressman is Dan Goldman and my senators are Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. You can make any number of phone calls to each of them where an employee or intern will dutifully write down your concerns, but nobody ever calls you back. I’ve emailed, too, but if my representatives’ names ever do pop up in my inbox, it’s to ask for money.

As well as calls and emails, I sent postcards, texted radio shows, and left comments on their social media. As the death toll mounted, I was shaken by the impossibility of reaching my representatives.

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I went to the streets to protest and they were packed; many other New Yorkers were equally desperate for our government to stop funding the killing. Each protest I went to was surrounded by more and more police. Even on afternoon marches with elderly people and families pushing strollers, the police loomed over us in full riot gear with dozens of zipties dangling near their guns. We chanted: “Israel bombs, USA pays, how many kids did we kill today?” We got our answer — by March 13, Unicef would put the number of children killed at around 13,000.

Israel, with financial, military and moral support from the US has killed at least 39,000 people in Gaza and injured more than 70,000 others. The scale and intensity of the violence is repulsive. And there is nothing I can do to stop it, even as I pay for it. The question, of course, is why? Why am I, a US taxpayer, forced to fund an apartheid state thousands of miles away, one that has shifted gears into a full-blown genocide, and is now provoking a wider war across the Middle East? Whatever Israel wants from the US government, Israel gets. What do I get? I called, emailed, wrote and texted my representatives again. No response, just more killing.

In February at my local park, there was a small vigil for Hind Rajab, the day after her body was discovered. She was a six-year-old girl whose voice was heard pleading for help on an emergency call to the Red Crescent as an Israeli tank closed in on her and her family. 

There were candles, flowers, and kids colouring with crayons. Someone handed me a leaflet about a community group called NY-10 Neighbors. They are a multifaith, multiracial group of volunteers from Congressional District 10 that formed in late October. Listed among their goals was to pressure our representatives into ending US weapons aid to Israel. I joined immediately and asked in the first Zoom meeting how I could speak to our representatives and where I could find Dan Goldman. There was a laugh, not unkind, and they said that they had spent months trying to do just that, but he was avoiding all of his constituents.

Then one day, a member of NY-10 Neighbors heard that Goldman had turned up at our local subway station, collecting signatures for his re-election campaign. She spread the word and I rushed to the subway stop, meeting four other women from NY-10 Neighbors who also happened to be close by. 

Palestinians hold photographs of prisoners jailed in Israel and posters depicting Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden during a rally marking the annual prisoners' day in the West Bank city of Nablus, last week. Picture: AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed

One had just collected her six-year-old from school, and he stood wide-eyed eating a cookie as we made a plan. I wanted to tell Goldman to stop making me complicit in genocide. One woman felt too nervous to speak to him but was happy to record our exchange. Another wanted to confront him about the forced starvation; she said every time she feeds her own baby she thinks about the starving children in Gaza. Then she started weeping, and I said I’d go first.

Myself and my neighbour swiped through the turnstile and went down the steps. At first, thinking we were supporters, Goldman smiled. His face fell when I asked him about restoring funding to UNRWA.

It was strange, he seemed completely unprepared for speaking to the public. He was irritated when I asked where he stands on a permanent ceasefire, responding: “I think that’s a good question and I think you should ask Hamas for a ceasefire.” I said he was my representative which was why I was asking him. He walked away from me, but I don’t think he was familiar with the subway system since he headed toward a dead end.

I asked him why he was blocking aid to Palestinians but insisting on sending military aid to Israel even though I’m his constituent and I don’t want my tax dollars spent that way. He said: “Israel is a democracy in an area surrounded by terrorists.”

I said these are not terrorists — these are men, women and children in Palestine. He said he meant Hamas and Hezbollah. It went downhill from there, as you can imagine. When my neighbour mentioned the death toll, he questioned it, which is not even something Benjamin Netanyahu does. I’m still glad I managed to speak to him face to face, because I see now just how rare an opportunity that is.

In the church the night of the Gillibrand event, I did not get to speak to her directly. Some people from NY-10 Neighbors did address her from the pews after I had been escorted out, and they were also removed.

Dan Goldman: Seemed unprepared for speaking to the public. Picture: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

All we did was state exactly what US-backed Israeli forces are doing in Gaza. The crowd, made up of nice liberal people, treated us as if we were dangerous. These are the people who say they worry about fascism coming to America, even as they lean right into it. I mean, the police marched past an LGBTQ flag to stop me from merely talking about a genocide we are all paying for. Gillibrand hammers her Republican colleagues for denying healthcare to American women, but does everything in her power to support the decimation of every hospital in Gaza.

I would wager most of my neighbours seated in the pews are proud of their democratic ideals, but they cheered as the police led out peaceful protesters.

They treated us as if we were the violent ones, when actually it’s the other way around, they are the violent ones.

This is not about me obviously, but I can say with 100% certainty now that Gillibrand and that particular church full of people can never say they didn’t know. I told them that Israeli snipers were shooting small children in the head, using our money. 

While they were angry at me for stating that fact, clearly they were fine with the fact itself, because on it goes - right up to this week when those soldiers shot five-year-old Sally Abu Laila.

Nothing has shaken my faith in American democracy more than our government’s whole-hearted support of this mass murder in Gaza. It is demented.

All peaceful means to be heard on this literal matter of life and death — voting, protesting, boycotting, writing — materially do nothing and mean nothing. Another insurrection, another Trump presidency, another onslaught on reproductive rights — these threats that the Democrats talk about constantly — pale in comparison to our reality today; a Democratic-led government rolling over their own people’s will just to continue standing with Israel.

For what? To bomb, starve and shoot innocent people every day for six months now. I cannot accept this; that’s what I have been trying to tell them, that’s what they are refusing to hear.