The era we’ve reached in the anti-Zionist struggle is one where disillusionment and despair have risen to unprecedented levels, yet a new upswell is inevitable. The actions of Elias Rodriguez, who assassinated two embassy employees of the Zionist entity last month, were an indicator of how badly the established left orgs have failed. These groups have not been able to stop this holocaust through their protests, so people are increasingly turning to adventurism. Alternatively, they’re becoming apathetic. This is a problem, but it also represents a vacuum within our politics; one that we can fill, if we take a leadership role amid the next outbreaks of pro-Palestine activity.
Our ruling class is trying to use this burnout and discouragement to its advantage; not just by fueling the perceptions of hopelessness, but also by giving those desperate for hope false assurance that they actually don’t need to do anything for Palestine. This is part of what motivates the Trump White House when it makes its real or supposed conflicts with Netanyahu public, fueling beliefs about Trump intending to hold the Zionist entity accountable. It’s also why European leaders are posturing as pro-Palestine, and why so many corporate media commentators have acted as if they’ve undergone a change on this issue; the goal is to placate those who care about the genocide, creating the illusion that a serious shift on Palestine is about to come from the top-down political forces.
The more of the people are influenced by this trick, the more confused and reduced the next pro-Palestine actions will be, letting the empire better co-opt the struggle while distracting from Palestine. We can overcome this scheme, though, if we give the fight’s next stage the direction it needs.
The country’s masses are largely already on the right side of this fight. A majority of them became on the right side a while ago, at least as of last spring; that was when surveys began showing most Americans were now against military action in Gaza. This is one stage in a trend towards the USA’s people gaining a profound consciousness on the Palestinian reality; among twenty-somethings, almost half have become not just pro-Palestine in a general sense, but also pro-resistance. Eventually, the majority of Americans will come to oppose the action in Gaza not just because they don’t like war, but because they see that this “operation” is really a genocide. So many within Gen Z have become this radical because they internalized that knowledge early.
Surveys aren’t the only way that this shift can be measured; the emergence of the popular online statement “I support military intervention to stop the genocide in Gaza” is effectively a mass declaration of support for the resistance fighters. For a growing number of people, the establishment’s logic about needing to “condemn Hamas” does not make sense. They see no justification for this kind of moralistic concern over Hamas when Hamas is fighting against extermination forces. This is what our media and governmental figures are reacting to when they suddenly pretend to be Palestine-friendly; they see how much momentum the cause has been gaining, and they’re trying to mitigate the backlash that’s about to come upon them.
With the images and stories that we’ve seen in this last week alone, a massive new amount of fuel has been added to the movement. The world has just witnessed a small child running through a burning building, unable to escape without getting enormous burns on her face. Everyone has also seen gargantuan crowds of people being forced to walk inside small, fenced off enclosures, desperately trying to get tiny amounts of aid at the end of their long journeys. We’ve found out about more massacres where the occupiers have lured people through aid and then shot at them without provocation, mirroring the “flour massacre” from last year.
It’s these realities, and whatever atrocities we’ll soon witness next, that are going to bring a lot of people who’ve become disheartened back into the struggle. For many, this discouragement isn’t enough to make them stay apathetic; they know that we have no choice but to involve ourselves, or we’ll be knowingly complicit in everything that we’re looking at within Palestine.
This unkillable desire to intervene on behalf of the victims is an extremely powerful motivator, and it will play an instrumental part in Zionism’s defeat. It’s not all that we’ll need, though. The other thing we’ll require in order to rectify the movement’s failures, and carry out a mass struggle that’s truly sustainable, is the presence of a real organizational force. Of a project that doesn’t just mobilize its participants, but creates deep ties with the communities where it exists, cultivating a solid core of members who aren’t going to leave the network. If we construct such a force, we’ll be able to give the movement’s participants what they’ll need in the long term, which is objective proof that their efforts are worthwhile. That this next work they’ll do will go towards manifesting ever-greater power for the Palestinian cause, with the struggle’s previous gains not going to waste.
This kind of effort is consistent with the idea of a vanguard party, which is a crucial part of why I chose to become a Marxist-Leninist. Most people won’t become communists, and communists are aware of this; our goal is not to bring the majority into the vanguard, but to make the aspiring vanguard prove itself as deserving of leadership. An organization must give the people’s struggle what it needs before it can truly assume leadership status, which is why the established left orgs have failed so deeply in these last couple years: they’ve not given the pro-Palestine movement the sustainability it requires. Groups like PSL will continue trying to capture the movement, and to keep it within the sphere of NGO control; but they’ve now shown their own counterproductive nature enough that the movement is going to grow far beyond them.
As communists and anti-imperialists who’ve escaped that insular model of activism, we have clarity about which path will let us keep building upon our past gains. About what we can do to see our progress keep leading to more wins, rather than having that progress get set back. We know that to have this kind of sustainability, your goal cannot be to run the protest cage, like PSL and these other groups seek to do. Your goal needs to be to construct an organ of dedicated participants in the cause, one that utilizes a wide range of tactics to weaken the pro-imperialist forces.
A crucial part of this is building ties with organized labor, as well as building independent worker institutions that can let the proletariat stand on its own. The refusal by the established orgs to be proactive about these tasks is a key part of how they’ve undermined the pro-Palestine movement; when a group feels it can rely on NGO support, it won’t have the will to take the revolutionary steps which we truly need.
The party that I’ve gravitated towards in response to these problems is the ACP, in large part because ACP is doing the worker organizing that these liberal tailist orgs don’t want to do. Not everyone who’s taking part in this new stage of pro-Palestine work wants to join the ACP, but we within the ACP can and must ally with them. In terms of whether somebody is having a positive impact on this cause, the important thing is that they’re advancing the project to build real, collective mass power. The NGO-tied orgs have led many sincere individuals down a path which hurts this goal, but the trend is towards the emergence of an alternative current within the struggle. A current that has a clear idea of what it means to organize, and how to bring the popular masses into our efforts.
For their new movement sabotage plans to work, our enemies are counting on us to fail in this project. The crucial thing is that we don’t lose focus, and that we stay on the path which can bring us towards victory. Our route to success has become clearer than ever, and whether we’ll succeed depends on how reliably we carry the mission forward.
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