Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Palestine (see also Israel) →
Beit Sahour & intifada, 1988–92 →
Elias Rishmawi
, I mentioned the tax resistance movement that started in in the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.
Recently, someone forwarded me links to more information on that protest:
Here’s the transcript of a talk by Elias Rishmawi, one of the tax resistance movement’s leaders, that gives a good overview of the tactics behind the movement and the response of Israel’s occupation to its threat.
Another article (Palestinians Debate “Polite” Resistance to Occupation) discusses some of the reasons why there is less support among Palestinians for tax resistance, boycotts and other forms of strategic nonviolent conflict now than there was .
Beit Sahour, West Bank — Kamal Abu Saada lost his supermarket, his car and most of his money because he refused to pay taxes to Israeli authorities occupying the West Bank.
Taxmen flanked by soldiers seized his property, forcing his eldest son to drop out of school to help feed the family.
But Abu Saada and 90 Palestinian businessmen like him have had enough of what they call the militarized tax system Israel applies to people in the occupied territories.
In a rare move, they have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to find out why they pay more than Israelis and where the money goes.
The Palestinians also are protesting at the use of force in tax collection.
“They ask us to pay heavy taxes, even more than the Israelis pay, yet we do not see anything in return,” said Elias Rishmawi, a Beit Sahour pharmacist who is the main petitioner in the suit.
“We want to know what do they do with our money,” he added.
The lawsuit is the first legal challenge to the Israeli tax system in the occupied territories since Palestinians in Beit Sahour openly defied the authorities in .
Israel cracked down hard on the tax revolt.
Soldiers besieged the town for 40 days and confiscated millions of dollars worth of property.
Today, even Palestinians who keep records and pay taxes complain of harassment.
Taxmen with army escorts regularly raid stores, seize property at gunpoint and threaten those who refuse to pay with military trials or imprisonment.
Palestinians say the taxmen pull assessment figures out of the air, forcing people to try to bargain their taxes down.
The army-run Civil Administration says West Bank taxation is based on Jordanian laws.
Israel captured the territory from Jordan in .
Sometimes the decisive turn in a tax resistance campaign has come when the resisters have coalesced into a formal group with the authority to organize and coordinate resistance actions.
Today I’ll give some examples of this.
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia formed in the to fight taxes associated with a recently-enacted Road Act, and, once organized, the League was successful in its fight.
Organizer Jonathan Norman remarked to a meeting of the League in : “They had before them an example of what might be achieved by union.
In everything they had been victorious; the dray-tax. which from time to time was threatened to be enforced, was ultimately abandoned altogether.
The various memorials from the different hundreds, backed by the memorial of the united delegates, had caused the Government to introduce an amended Act, which promised almost everything they desired.”
When Charles Ⅹ and his ministers threatened to bypass the elected legislature and start taxing and spending on their own initiative in , French liberals declared that since such actions violated the constitution, the people were under no obligation to pay for them with their taxes.
Taxed landholders in Brittany formed the “Breton Association” to coordinate their resistance.
This Association had a two-fold object.
They proposed, in the first place, to refuse to pay any illegal tax, and in the second place to raise by contribution a common fund for indemnifying any subscriber, whose property or person might suffer by reason of his refusal.
The members subscribed each ten francs.
In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes.
The association enacted a trigger mechanism for an organized tax strike and a process for collecting and distributing a mutual insurance fund.
In this way they were able to present a credible threat to the planned royal usurpation — so much so that the newspapers that dared to print the Association’s charter were prosecuted and their editors imprisoned.
This only served to fuel the movement: “The associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers.”
The Rebeccaites formed Farmers Unions which met in secret to discuss the same sort of grievances that, in disguise, Rebecca and her sisters would address vigilante-style, and which corresponded with each other in a regional network.
One farmer said: “This Union among us is a very excellent thing if all join.
When they elect members of Parliament they do just as they please, and we have no voice, but here we have.
There is no way of putting things to rights till we get up this Union, and then we can do as we please and think best.
If we had had this Union many years ago we should be better off than we are now!”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League formed in when about twenty women from existing suffrage groups came together in London “with the single-minded aim of starting ‘an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance.’ ” League organizer Margaret Kineton Parkes explained that it “included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes” because “[t]he isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue home to them.”
Elias Rishmawi was among those who organized tax resistance in Beit Sahour during the first intifada.
He remembers how important it was to have formed a network of committees so as to distribute communication and decision-making in anticipation of Israeli military disruption by means of curfews and arrests of the resistance leadership.
Direct action-oriented pacifists in the United States came together in to form Peacemakers.
“[T]his is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee,” they announced.
By the group had about 2,000 members, about 150 of which were resisting taxes.
A second group, War Tax Resistance, promoted the tactic within the anti-Vietnam War activist community.
In , the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee formed to help a variety of groups that included war tax resistance as part of their work to coordinate and share resources and expertise.
During the Great Depression in the United States, taxpayers’ leagues, some of which organized property tax strikes, proliferated in the thousands.
Such groups “spring up like mushrooms,” one critic complained, “every time you go out in the morning, you find more of them.”
These leagues attacked the taxes on multiple fronts — not only organizing tax strikes but also coordinating legal suits and pressuring political figures.
A proposed sales tax boycott in Ottawa in
was boosted by the group Human Action to Limit Taxes.
“As individuals we are lost,” one resister said.
“But as a group we would have some impact.”
In the Birmingham Political Union of the Middle and Lower Classes formed.
It would play a strong role — and would advocate tax resistance — in the battle to pass the Reform Act of .
But it also began as a war tax resistance group, asking its members to sign the following oath:
That in the event of the present ministers so misconducting the affairs of the country as to make it probable we shall be involved in a Continental war [with Belgium], we will consider the propriety of checking so mischievous an event by withholding the means as far as may lay in our power, and will then consider whether or not refusing to pay direct taxes may not be advisable.
Similarly, the Catalonian “National Union” began life as a committee to direct a tax resistance action in and grew into the organizing party for an ambitious reform movement: “its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments.”
A variety of local groups, with independent organizations, were key to the victory of the Anti-Poll Tax movement.
In Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion, he stresses how important it was for the success of the campaign that people formed and ran their own small-scale, neighborhood resistance groups, rather than ceding control of the movement to the various established left-wing partisan and labor-union groups who wanted to use the movement to their own ends but were also afraid to identify themselves too closely with the law-breaking resisters.
Prior to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, many people’s only experience of politics was a traditional Labour Party or trade union meeting — the sort of meeting where the top table takes up 90% of the discussion; where the only items discussed are those decided by the executive committee; where half the meeting time is spent discussing procedural motions or the order of words in a resolution; where political factions throw rhetoric across the room in angry and unproductive exchanges.
Essentially, boring meetings which stretch long into the night.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been to these meetings just once and never returned.
To engage people in a mass campaign, the Anti-Poll Tax Unions had to challenge this culture of organisation.
They had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role.… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren’t patronised by those who had political experience.
In the local groups, people didn’t need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going.
People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective.
Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings.
…most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development.
Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important.
Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to coordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature.
However, he also notes:
…it was sometimes in the places where the Anti-Poll Tax Unions were weakest that resistance was strongest.
For example, St. Pauls was almost the only area in Bristol which couldn’t sustain an Anti-Poll Tax group.
Local people didn’t feel the need to set up new groups because, as in many inner city areas, they already had strong networks of solidarity, and there was already a high level of general hostility to officials of any sort.
… By the end of , three times as many people had turned up to court to contest their cases from St. Pauls than any other area.
White supremacists in Louisiana met in
to form “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” to coordinate their resistance to state and city taxes enacted by the reconstruction government there, and to provide legal support for resisters.
Property owners of Silver Lake Assembly met in to decide how to respond to a property tax they felt was being illegally put over on them by a government with no authority to do so.
They decided to respond as a group, “and perfected an organization for the purpose,” issuing a resolution saying that they “individually and collectively will resist the payment of the so-called taxes.”
an early tax form, from when paperwork was fired in clay
Tax agencies live by bureaucracy and paperwork.
Many of the earliest examples of writing in the worlds’ museums are tax records.
But some mischievous tax resisters have discovered that this is a vulnerability that can be targeted.
For example, , a video blogger going by the name “StormCloudsGathering” considered the idea of “filling out thousands of random tax returns with nonexistent names and numbers… so suddenly they get flooded with a bunch of returns that don’t make sense…”:
What’s even more brilliant about [this] option is that even non-U.S. citizens — people living in other countries — could participate.
You could send in hundreds of tax returns even if you’re an Indonesian.
You know: Americans can live in Indonesia, and they’re required to file taxes… there’s no way for them to be sure, just because it’s coming from Indonesia, that it’s not a valid tax return.
They would have to do the investigation, and that costs resources.
He recommends filing in the name of particular, offensive, multinational corporations, but I think the average person would have a difficult time filing a sufficiently complex return to serve as a convincing decoy in such a case.
Another option would be to file corporate returns for nonexistent corporations, or individual returns for phantom (or dead) people.
War tax resister Ed Hedemann has already made plans for what he calls “zombie war tax resistance” — filling in years of tax returns ahead of time and putting them in pre-stamped envelopes so that his survivors can continue to file (but, of course, refuse to pay!) after he’s gone.
“Why give the government a break from having to deal with your resistance when you die?”
he asks.
Hedemann also makes a point of periodically filing Freedom of Information Act requests for any information the IRS and other government agencies have been collecting about his activities — hundreds of pages — and he’s put together a guide for other tax resisters to follow in making their own requests.
Currently in the U.S. there is an epidemic of tax fraud in which the fraudsters file for phony tax refunds in the names (and taxpayer identification numbers) of other, real people.
This often causes the tax collection bureaucracy to swing into action against the victims of the identity theft, which is both a waste of resources and a way of further alienating the population from the government and its tax bureaucracy — potentially a model that a tax resistance campaign could benefit from.
The IRS has made a big shift in recent years from processing paper income tax returns, filled out by hand, to electronic filing.
This is more efficient for the agency, as it no longer has to hire as many people to laboriously transcribe the numbers from paper returns into its computer databases.
The agency estimated that it cost about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper return.
This suggests that one way to make a minor dent in the agency’s budget and efficiency is simply to file paper returns rather than file electronically (this is still a legal option for individual filers, even those who go to professional tax preparers).
But if this became a strategy of a mass-campaign it could even cripple the tax collecting bureaucracy.
George Jakabcin, IRS assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration, said in that the agency “would be in a world of hurt” if even half of the people who had switched to electronic filing at that time decided to switch back.
“We no longer have the capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually.
We no longer have the facilities, we don’t have the IT infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some would argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
The IRS has tried to crack down on people who send them paperwork just to waste their time.
They have come up with something called the “frivolous filing penalty” and can use this to ding you $5,000 each time you file any sort of paperwork with them that takes a position they consider to be “frivolous.”
They can do this immediately and on the whim of whichever bureaucrat is handling your forms, without going to court, and you are only allowed to appeal your fine before a judge if you pay it first!
War tax resister Karl Meyer wasn’t about to let the IRS think it could intimidate him with such tactics.
So in , when the “Cabbage Patch Kids” dolls (each one slightly different) had become ubiquitous, he invented when he called “cabbage patch resistance” — filing a different, blatantly “frivolous” tax return every day.
He was assessed $140,000 in penalties in alone (though the penalty was only $500 back then).
The IRS never collected the money though.
The best it could manage was to seize and sell his car, for a little over $1,000.
“Constitutionalist” and “sovereign citizen”-style tax protest groups in the U.S. are fond of harassing tax officials and other government employees with lawsuits, liens, bogus quasi-official court filings, and so forth.
In one example, Eddie Kahn’s “Guiding Light of God Ministries,” filed some 2,000 misconduct complaints against IRS agents.
A newspaper article about a subsequent legal case against the group noted that:
Some agents have said that their supervisors ordered them to back off from audits or collection efforts in the face of [such] threats, just to avoid investigations by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
Some paperwork tricks are more like “hacking” in that they treat the IRS as a system that processes input and produces output, and note that certain examples of pathological input can result in output unanticipated by the system designers.
For example, the IRS gave out $20 million dollars in the filing season when people figured out that if they substantially overpaid a tax return with a bad check, the IRS would cut them a hefty refund check before they noticed they’d been had.
Here are some more examples of paperwork hacks being used against the tax collecting bureaucracy:
South Carolina’s state government recently passed a law that required all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee.
A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (which probably qualifies, at least in its more ambitious moments) decided to register, but with a twist:
When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order.
Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration.
I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government.
… P.S. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization.
Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.
Prussian farmers in used the bureaucracy against itself.
A New York Times report noted:
[T]he big agrarians… are determined to resort to sabotage of all the tax laws…
[A correspondent in East Prussia says] “They have all filed protests and demanded that they be relieved from paying the tax until the protests are settled.
That means a delay of at least three years in collecting the taxes, and it is said that the Provincial Treasury is inclined to grant this request.
The big agrarians declared that they would do the same thing with all the tax laws.
In Berlin the people might decree what pleased them, they (the agrarians) would not pay the taxes or subscribe to the compulsory loans.
They want to sabotage the whole taxation system that they hate, and consequently they want to make so much work for the Treasury officers that the latter don’t know which way to turn.”
During the Beit Sahour tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Elias Rishmawi worked to get a suit challenging the legality of the tax accepted by Israel’s court system.
He remembers: “I had never had an illusion that the Israeli supreme court would give any justice to Palestinians.
… [T]he appeal formed the legal coverage by which I and others were able to continue resisting from one side not paying taxes, since there is a case in court and they cannot force me pay until the case is solved they cannot take any actions against us since we have this case, and we kept challenging the system through different means.… This was impossible to achieve without the legal coverage of the supreme court.
Because then, I and the others, would have been considered as inciters and then might be imprisoned for ten years.
That’s why we needed that coverage.”
An early form of resistance to Thatcher’s Poll Tax was called the “send it back” campaign.
The idea was that people would register for the tax, as required, but would accompany their registration with questions that would require further manual processing by the individual councils that were processing the tax:
Government regulations state: “…if for any reason you consider that you are not a ‘responsible person’ please let me know and return the form to me without completing it.”
Stop It wants people to take up this offer by writing to ask if they should be the “responsible person” and suggests they ask who will have access to the information supplied and why the authorities require exact dates of birth.
The implementation of the tax was dependent on an accurate register and the protest campaign could make the register “wildly inaccurate,”… Labour MP Brian Wilson, chairman of [the anti-poll tax campaign called] Stop It, said: “It is a campaign of obstruction within the law that does not lead people to incur the substantial penalties that are built into the legislation.”
The aim was to have the legislation amended or abandoned.
For this and other reasons, the councils were inundated with paperwork, for which they were unprepared.
“Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work,” wrote campaign historian Danny Burns.
He quotes from the Poll Tax Legal Group:
The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse.
Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.
Kate Harvey, a tax resister for women’ suffrage in 1913, once wrote: “I have just received the first demand note for this year’s taxes.
I have torn it up, put it in the envelope in which it came, and re-posted it to the Tax Collector.
I suppose it is now reposing in his rubbish basket.”
The Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in Chicago during the Great Depression led tens of thousands of property owners to demand reassessments of their property, which effectively swamped the Board of Review and allowed the property owners to legally delay tax payment.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Mentions of war tax resistance and differing approaches to the dilemma of paying war taxes continued to appear in some of the issues of the Friends Journal in .
The issue included a review of the book A Persistent Voice: Marian Franz and Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation.
It was a collection of essays by and about Franz and about Peace Tax Fund activism, with some supplemental material about the U.S. versions of Peace Tax Fund scheme legislation that Franz had championed.
The issue included Harrison & Marilyn Roper telling the story of their war tax resistance.
Excerpts:
In the contradiction of “praying for peace and paying for war” overwhelmed us.
We needed to try to live under the taxable level (supplemented by tax-free investments) so that we no longer would be supporting monetarily what we deplored spiritually.
In an open letter to fellow Friends at Haverford (Pa.) Meeting… we wrote:
Along with raising our family and “just living,” we have been trying in our own ways to contribute to a more just and peaceful society.
While doing this, we have both had jobs and paid federal taxes.
For the last three years we have not paid that portion of our federal income tax (approximately one-third) that goes to the Pentagon.
However, IRS has eventually taken the funds, with penalties and interest, by placing a lien on Harry’s salary at West Chester State College.
Thus, we are purchasers and part owners (along with you) of numerous H-bombs and other weapons of death.
We ask ourselves if the potential damage we are doing is not more than outweighing any benefits to society we might be making.
They wrote that they were hoping for the passage of Peace Tax Fund legislation with which they “could have continued in our present occupations and continued to pay our income taxes.”
But meanwhile, they decided to simplify their lives and reorient their finances with a goal to getting under the tax line.
They shared some of the details of how they went about this:
After our younger son had graduated from high school, we were able, at ages 49 and 47, to move to northern Maine and live a simpler life.
Louis Green… taught us what we needed to know about tax-free municipal bonds and helped us invest the cushion we received from selling our home in Haverford and buying a very low-cost one in Houlton, Maine.
Our older son was about to enter his senior year at University of Maine and we would be able to pay the much-reduced in-state tuition.
We… installed an on-grid photovoltaic electrical system and have solar pre-heating of hot water.
We also live within walking distance of stores, which reduces our need to travel and helps us live in an environmentally friendly manner.
Our home is heated by wood from dead and diseased trees that we harvest ourselves from our woodlot.
…a wonderful new life of volunteering, composing, conducting, and living closer to nature opened up.… Despite all the details of our peace witness through federal tax avoidance being aired on the front page of our Houlton paper soon after our arrival, in we were honored with the “Good Samaritans of Houlton” award for our volunteer work and in we each received a Paul Harris Award from the local Rotary Club for our peace efforts.…
For those who share our concern about not paying for war or preparations for war, tax-free municipal bonds are the legal tickets.
Those who purchase them are financing voter-approved and life-enhancing projects in our country such as better sewers, schools, and hospitals.
The modest interest on these state and/or municipal bonds is not taxable by the federal government.
We file a 1040 every year, but most years we owe nothing or very little.
If we think we may “go over,” we give more money away that year to tax-exempt organizations.…
Thanks to understanding parents, most of our inheritance has been in the form of tax-free municipal bonds.
When a bond comes due, we always reinvest the capital by purchasing another tax-free municipal bond at face value (i.e. at par) so that there is no capital gain when the bond comes due or is called.
Although we do not know how long we will live or what dire situations might eat up our principal, we do hope to be able to continue to live very simply on the interest from our tax-free municipal bonds and pass on some of the capital to our children and grandchildren… We really love the kind of life we’re living; we didn’t make this commitment in order to be miserable.
And we sleep better at night knowing that we are not paying for war as we pray for peace.
That issue also reprinted a “declaration of conscience” that came out of a group associated with the Quakers from the New York Yearly Meeting who had been working to try to get legal accommodation for conscientious objection to military spending.
Excerpts:
The government of the United States violates freedom of conscience rights by forcing us to pay for war.
…In paying federal income taxes we contribute personally and directly to such expenditure, in violation of our consciences.
We have responded in various ways.
Some of us have taken steps to reduce or eliminate our income tax liability.
Some have paid under protest.
Some have withheld all or part of the taxes due, redirecting the sums involved to nonviolent and humanitarian purposes, or have deposited the money in escrow for any nonmilitary governmental use.
Some have challenged federal agencies in the courts.
Some have petitioned and campaigned for legislative accommodation.
We stress that we are willing to contribute our full share to the expenses of civil society.
We simply seek to ensure that the taxes we pay are not used to finance warmaking or preparations for war.
As a result of this conscientious objection we have variously suffered financial hardships, administrative and court fines, garnishment of wages, seizures of bank accounts or other property, deductions from our social security pension payments, and even imprisonment.
However, the substance of our remonstrance is that we are all ultimately compelled to pay taxes used for military purposes, and that we have a continuing liability to do so in the future.
We have thus been obliged, and are being obliged, in direct violation of our consciences, to be complicit in the funding and waging of war.
…Written expressions of conscientious objection to military taxation are classified as “frivolous” by the government and subject to punitive fines amounting to thousands of dollars.
Our freedom of conscience claims have never been fully reviewed at any level of administrative or judicial consideration, nor are we aware of any case in which this has occurred.
Accompanying this was a sidebar from Elizabeth Boardman in which she shared “the following queries [which] are in use at local meetings in College Park Quartely Meeting:”
What deeply held spiritual values or concerns make the issue of war tax resistance difficult for me to consider?
How can we as Friends, regardless of our perspective, overcome our reticence to discuss the issues with one another?
What are the personal or family needs I would need to address before I could become a tax resister?
Do I feel a need to further engage the war machine by not paying my war taxes in some form, either fully or symbolically?
What are my major fears and joys about challenging the government in this way?
What are the personal or family needs I would need to address before I could become a tax resister?
How can I engage my beloved spiritual community in supporting me as I take my next step on this complex issue?
Naomi Paz Greenberg, in a letter-to-the-editor that responded to critics of war tax resistance whose writings had been published in earlier issues (I’ve included other excerpts from this letter in Picket Line entries covering those writings, on and ), wrote, in response to people who believe that “conscientious war tax resistance is borne to bring about consequences”:
I knew for all of my adult life that I should not be paying taxes for war, and for most of that time I knew that I did not have the courage to bear this witness.
The energy that supports my commitment now has little to do with consequences.
I am simply unable to cooperate in murder, in war crimes.
As soon as I was able to make that commitment, I began to understand that I will probably pay more rather than less as a consequence of my refusal to pay for war.
It matters very little to me whether the hundreds or the thousands of dollars that I may someday “owe” remain pure and pacifistic or not.
As a U.S. citizen I have been taught that this is a government of, by, and for the people, so in some sense every dollar in the government’s coffers is my responsibility and not one of those dollars should be spent to kill another human being.
This is what direct experience of God teaches me.
Paul Sheldon noted, in a letter-to-the-editor in the issue, that he had “made a donation to the non-partisan Disabled American Veterans organization” and included a letter in which he had “mentioned that this particular contribution was the redirection of war tax money that I had publicly refused to pay the U.S. government (as a pacifist tax resister).”
A letter-to-the-editor from Peg Morton in the issue forcefully encouraged Friends to resist their war taxes: “It is beyond a doubt, in my opinion, that it is time — now!
— to withdraw from paying the United States federal government the war taxes it demands… to voluntarily pay war taxes to our current federal government is an immoral act.… When policies and actions of a government become immoral, it becomes immoral to support them.”
An obituary notice for Gordon Mervin Browne in the issue noted that “they [Gordon and his wife Edith Carlton Browne] were military tax resisters in .”
A book review in the issue summarized the use of tax resistance in the First Intifada this way:
[Maxine] Kaufman-Lacusta [author of Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation] looks in depth at a tax strike in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour during the First Intifada (), a time of popular activism.
This strike was based on the fact that taxes collected by Israelis were not being used to serve the needs of the Palestinian population, but to finance the occupation itself.
Elias Rishmawi, a major player in Beit Sahour, said that the villagers “found out that Israel was profiting dramatically from occupying the Palestinian land — from direct taxes, indirect taxes, taxes on the workers inside Israel, taxes on imports, taxes on people leaving the country, using Palestinian land, using Palestinian resources.”
Palestinians viewed the strike, which they ended in , as a success because a strong and violent reaction from the Israeli government failed to suppress it.
