Police arrest Jewish Voice for Peace protestors at Philly arms manufacturer
Jewish protestors was arrested by Philadelphia police on Wednesday morning while occupying lobby of Day & Zimmermann, a major supplier of 120mm rounds used by Israeli military tanks against Gazans.
“Police are arresting protesters with Jewish Voice for Peace Philly, dragging people out of the lobby of D&Z where we gathered to say: NO PROFIT FROM GENOCIDE,” wrote the advocacy organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Philly on Wednesday morning.
A security guard for the building from Allied Universal confirmed the arrests but could not distinguish the Jewish advocacy organization from the Philadelphia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has loudly called attention to Day & Zimmermann’s provision of artillery shells to the Israeli military for the past five Tuesday mornings. Roughly 6:30 - 8:30 a.m. each Tuesday, protestors have repeatedly chanted “Quit your job!” while beating makeshift Home Depot-bucket drums and shaking tamberines as workers walked through the back entrance of Day & Zimmermann’s Philadelphia headquarters at 1500 Spring Garden St.
Much of the controversy surrounding Day & Zimmermann stems from its alleged production of 120mm M830A1 High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds used by an Israeli Merkava battle tank in the January 29, 2024 killing of the five-year-old Paleestinian girl Hind Rajab and her six family members. According to an investigation from the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1947, “The serial number on an exploded round found inside the ambulance sent to rescue Rajab suggests that it was manufactured at the [Iowa Army Ammunition Plant] by [Day & Zimmermann subsidiary] Mason & Hanger in November 1996.”
Day & Zimmermann’s Virginia-based private security subsidiary SOC previously listed former CIA special activities division chief Philip F. Reilly as a member of its government advisory board. Reilly has been of intense public interest since January, when he became the CEO of the secretive private security firm Safe Reach Solutions, which partnered with the North Carolina-based private military company UG Solutions to lead vehicle inspections along Gaza’s Netzarim corridor. Reilly has come under further scrutiny since the launch of the Israeli-backed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which the U.S. State Department recently awarded $30 million dollars as part of a longstanding Israeli effort to sideline United Nations-affiliated aid.
Beyond reports from JVP itself, Wednesday’s arrests in Day & Zimmermann’s lobby were documented through the controversial neighborhood monitoring application Citizen, which reported the arrests to have begun shortly after 10:00 a.m.
Over the past month, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Audio Visual Unit has aggressively filmed the Tuesday morning protests organized by SJP and the Philly Palestine Coalition. The most prominent cameraman has been Public Information Officer Ritchie, whose badge number of 9452 is visible in a video recorded by this publication on June 24. Ritchie can be seen placing his camera directly in the faces of both this journalist and the student protestors. SJP has reason for concern with the filming, as the organization has been continually legally targeted by the Trump administration and ‘lawfare’ organizations such as the Israel-based Shurat HaDin, which has boasted of its deep partnership with Israel’s foreign intelligence service, known as the Mossad.
This publication on June 17 filed an Act 22 request for copies of the surveillance footage of the student protests collected by PIO Ritchie. While official Philadelphia Police directives have restricted their usage of facial recognition software to the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Facial Recognition Software (JFRS), the department admitted to testing the controversial facial recognition tool Clearview AI in 2020.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, foreign students speaking out regarding the Israeli military’s ongoing mass murder of Gazan women and children have been aggressively targeted with facial recognition, with the explicit aim of submitting their names for deportation to a receptive U.S. State Department led by former U.S. Senator Marco Rubio.
Two counterprotestors appeared at yesterday morning’s protest, one waving an Israeli flag and the other stating that they were born in Israel, and then confronted an unmasked schoolteacher who was willing to publicly provide his first name, Daniel. Throughout many of the calls for employees of Day & Zimmermann to quit their jobs, Daniel accentuated the chants by blowing on a small bugle borrowed from his three-year-old son.
According to Daniel’s account of the extended interaction, the Israeli counterprotestor “said that if white people like me started opposing Israel, that’s what worried him.” Daniel further added that the counterprotestor was concerned that, “if your country doesn’t sell arms to Israel, we are going to cease to exist.”
“We will be here every Tuesday morning,” proclaimed one of the protest leaders through a bullhorn at the close of Tuesday morning’s protest, before asking, “How would you feel to be woken up by a bomb every single morning, like the men, women, and children of Gaza?”
Gazan health authorities reported last week that the Israeli military’s post-October 7 invasion of Gaza had crossed the threshold of 56,000 deaths, roughly half of whom are women and children.
In perhaps the most controversial moment of the protests so far, an organizer ended Tuesday’s event with the statement, “Death to Day & Zimmermann! Death to Israel! Death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]! And all glory to the resistance!”
Day & Zimmermann did not immediately return a request for comment.