With the advancement of the Palestinian resistance, and the growing instability of the settler state, Palestine’s government officials are stating they’re certain that their people’s liberation cause is going to succeed. This unprecedented vulnerability in the Zionist power structure recently got further exposed when it was shown that the majority of U.S. Americans now oppose the military actions of “Israel.” Keeping narrative control within the USA has always been instrumental to the survival of the Zionist project, and now that this support has gone away, the White House is scrambling to get it back. It’s doing so by trying to convince the members of the professional management class, who still want to view themselves as upholders of social justice, that “Israel” can get reformed out of being a genocidal entity.
The way Palestine supporters should respond to this is by working to expand our movement beyond left-liberal circles. Not by making our organizations dependent on those circles. The Democratic Party wants us to fight this narrative battle on the same terms as the Democrats, and act like only the liberal base is what matters. By broadening our reach into all parts of the masses which share anti-imperialist impulses, we’ll be able to overwhelm liberal Zionism’s narrative manipulation machine. We’ll do so by creating what the U.S. empire fears the most: an anti-imperialist united front which has gained mass support.
By employing this strategy, we can take advantage of the fundamental weakness within the Democratic Party’s pro-Zionist propaganda campaign. This is that the propaganda is only designed to work on liberals, especially the PMC ones who make up the core of the Democrat base. Over the last couple decades, the members of the PMC have increasingly embraced a shallow conception of “wokeness,” wherein they cover up their pro-imperialist politics by signaling support for disenfranchised groups. And this has largely translated to them “opposing” the Gaza genocide, but only in the sense that they’re against the recent military action itself (or in that they think the action isn’t being done in the right way). They’re not committedly pro-Palestine, because they still argue on the terms of the Zionists when it comes to the question of anti-colonial revolution.
You’re not going to see them recognize that Hamas was in the right for carrying out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, nor that Hamas is the deserving leader of the Palestinian resistance. They prefer to distance themselves from the “bad” kinds of anti-colonialists, which translates to them taking the stance that “Israel” is fundamentally salvageable. That’s the sentiment which the Biden administration, and the liberal Zionists within “Israel” who are working with it, seek to appeal towards. As James Ray of Mondoweiss has observed, this supposedly virtuous camp within Zionism relies upon ignorance of what settler-colonialism is, and why Zionism is inseparable from it:
What they’ve settled on is regime change — to call for the ousting of Netanyahu and his cronies to give the appearance of change. That change, however, is largely aesthetic, and given the current reality of the project and its settler colonial roots, does not address the core problem so much as the worst excesses resulting from it. In essence, this new tactic shifts analysis from the project to a single leading government or official, absolving the project itself in an attempt to preserve its legitimacy. The core problem of Zionist colonialism is and always has been colonialism — the attempted replacement of Palestinians by a settler population in the effort to establish a distinctly different society atop stolen land. As Patrick Wolfe suggests, settler colonies like so-called Israel possess an inherent “logic of elimination” — one that attempts to foreclose any return by indigenous peoples to their land and ultimately eliminate them in all forms but nostalgia. There has not been a single ruling Israeli government or leading Zionist figure who has not in some way advocated for and advanced these core objectives.
As the genocide has progressed, and more have come to recognize Netanyahu as another Hitler, the White House has increasingly been doing oppositional diplomacy within “Israel.” It’s been meeting with the “Israeli” opposition leader Yair Lapid, who the media typically describes as a “centrist” even though he’s functionally on the far right. Lapid has publicly endorsed the idea of strengthening his political camp’s partnership with the U.S. government, and he’s made statements that are perfect for advancing the White House’s PMC-directed psyop. For example, last week Lapid said: “We need to make sure we do our best to avoid hurting the people of Gaza. We have no war with the children of Gaza. Children should not be hurt in grown-ups’ wars. On the other hand, you have to remember we are fighting a terrible terror organization that uses them as human shields.”
That’s the rhetorical tactic the liberal Zionists are using: swear that they would act humanely if they were in power, while effectively stating that their intention is to continue murdering children. The key is for them to keep repeating the narrative about “human shields,” or other such lies about the Palestinian resistance. And because the PMC are inclined to believe those lies, they’ll be able to overlook all the evidence that the liberal Zionists want to carry on the genocide.
Whether or not a liberal administration replaces Netanyahu, this illusory promise of a coming redemption for “Israel” is what the Democrats will keep presenting to the liberals base. And the PMC will accept this lie, as they have a material incentive to. Our great advantage is that the PMC are a small minority of the population. They, along with their counterparts in the pro-Netanyahu right, will continue to lose the narrative battle if we maneuver this situation properly. The PMC in the United States, along with the “Israeli” element that opposes the war while holding onto Zionism, make up enough of a social base for the Zionist project to momentarily continue. In the long term, though, it’s vulnerable to the united front that we’re building.
Today’s Iranian retaliation against “Israel” has shown that Iran, the Axis of Resistance, and the broader anti-imperialist forces hold vastly more leverage than the PMC in the United States is capable of having. Iran has brought about a great strategic loss for “Israel,” as it’s forced the settlers to shelter from the attack. This disruption of the daily functionings of the Zionist state has demonstrated that though it’s easy for the settlers to torment the Palestinian communities they occupy, they’re far from invincible. It’s discredited the idea that the iron dome, the “Israeli” nukes, or the settler state’s other macro-scale warfare tools are effective. And as this conflict escalates, we’ll further see the Zionist project be made untenable, whether economically, narratively, in its ability to secure a clear border, or in its internal social cohesion.
The occupiers are experiencing a chronic decline, one we can take advantage of. But to minimize the extent to which they can advance their genocide, or bring destruction to the region, we must stop acting within the political confines that the liberal Zionists have created. The PMC are a small minority, therefore we shouldn’t invest ourselves in the “leftist” spaces the PMC represents. We must work to unite the revolution-compatible majority in U.S. society with the global anti-imperialist forces, thereby isolating the Zionists both in the U.S. and worldwide.
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