by Farrukh Abadi
A pro-Palestine protester was arrested on Friday in Nassau County, NY and charged with violating the county’s new mask ban for wearing a keffiyeh covering his face. The law was recently put into place allegedly to curb “antisemitic incidents”, a claim that has been used to attack anyone defending Palestinian national liberation and opposing the state of Israel and Zionism. The arrest occurred at a protest opposing the sale of Palestinian land to settlers near the New York City borough of Queens, outside the Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst, a pro-Israel organization that claims to be “committed to the philosophy of religious Zionism.”
The mask ban was signed into effect in mid-August and carries a misdemeanor charge punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine for anyone wearing a face covering to hide their identity in the county. It came shortly after Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul said she was considering implementing a mask ban on NYC’s subway system in June. Hochul had previously sent the national guard to the subway in March during a high-point of pro-Palestine protests in the city under the guise of fighting crime. The former police commissioner and now mayor of the city, Eric Adams, who led and organized the assault on the democratic rights of pro-Palestine students in close collusion with imperialists, also supports a mask ban in the city, both in the subway and at protests.
During the pandemic, Hochul had mandated that everyone must wear a mask, showing that the recent move to ban masks while Covid-19 is still being transmitted is politically motivated.
Mask bans have a long history in New York aimed at suppressing mass movements. In 1845, the state of New York issued a ban on masks in response to the Anti-Rent War in upstate New York, coming decisively in favor of the big landlords in a desperate but doomed attempt to maintain the decomposing feudal mode of production. While the system of lifetime leases—essentially shackling small farmers to the land and forcing them to pay in the crops they produced—would be defeated, the mask ban would survive until the pandemic of 2020, when masks became mandatory.
Though masks are not sure protection from observation and monitoring, the ban provides more pretense for state repression and politically-motivated selective enforcement, further curbing the already deeply-undermined democratic rights of free speech and assembly.
