This is an abridged version of Chapter 2 within the book that I’m writing, which will be titled “When Tears Can’t Save Them: How the pro-Palestine movement failed to stop a holocaust, & how it can still win.”On October 6, 2023, the conversation in the United States wasn’t focused on Palestine at all. For the better part of the last two years, Ukraine had been the big foreign policy issue within our discourse. The blacklash towards the Ukraine war had brought major gains for the anti-imperialist movement, with the conflict having turned many against NATO. People from across the ideological spectrum were coming together to oppose this war, and it was creating a real narrative threat towards the imperial project. But the anti-NATO movement has certain limitations, like the pro-Palestine movement does. And these limitations would be exposed when many of the same conservatives who’d been against the proxy war on Russia supported the genocidal assault on Gaza.
“Anti-establishment” Zionism, & its symbiotic relationship with the NGOs
This development was one of the first big setbacks that the pro-Palestine movement experienced after October 7. It was so costly because it prevented Palestine from transcending the left-right dichotomy, which is something that’s vital to the movement’s success. Stopping genocide should be something that unites people across cultural barriers; but the right has been able to portray Palestine as a “woke” cultural issue, and it’s done so largely with success. This is in spite of how most U.S. Americans now understand the actions of “Israel” haven’t been justified; by April 2024, over half of the USA’s people had come to oppose the “Israeli” Gaza operation, and this indicated a long-term consciousness shift. Yet because the pro-Palestine movement stopped being able to define the conversation, by default the anti-woke psyop has won for the moment, becoming the ideological trend with the most power over our discourse.
The bulk of the country’s people are against the genocide, but the bulk of them have also become alienated from the Obama-era wokeist neoliberalism; and the anti-woke psyop presents Trump’s agenda as an alternative to that old paradigm. This has made the ongoing genocide go overlooked within our discourse, treated as a secondary issue next to the culture war battles which Trump’s White House is fighting. And the left, which was supposed to lead the fight for Palestine, is unwilling to sufficiently emphasize the genocide; the left’s main focus is on building the “stop Trump” movement, which centers a political personality while de-centering Palestine.
Throughout those crucial first fifteen months after October 7, Palestine was successfully confined to the left, preventing a cross-ideological united front; and this would have long-term ramifications. It created an environment in which the NGOs could better co-opt the struggle, and thereby limit its tactics, strategies, and rhetoric in a way which let the state easily subdue it.
This counterinsurgency against the pro-Palestine struggle has been multifaceted, with many different psyops being employed at the same time. The NGOs were only one part of the sabotage effort; the other biggest culprits came from the American right. Specifically the elements of the American right that present themselves as being opposed to our imperialist deep state, and are opposed to it in certain ways, yet will always side with the Zionist entity. These two counterinsurgency tools–the “dissident” Zionists and the NGOs–mutually reinforce each other. They allow the ruling class to split the antiwar movement into left and right, diverting the struggle away from a united front.
During the post-October 7 moment, one of the most pivotal “anti-NATO, pro-Israel” figures was former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who’s now Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. In an October 2023 Fox News segment, Gabbard attacked the few members of Congress who were speaking out against the IOF’s crimes, and argued that the Palestinian resistance was the real perpetrator of genocide. Another one of these figures was representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who filed a resolution to censure representative Rashida Tlaib for “insurrection” after Tlaib participated in a DC pro-Palestine rally. Both of these political leaders had helped try to stop the empire’s war against Russia; yet when the colonization project in Palestine came under threat, they were some of the most aggressive defenders of the occupier’s extermination effort. And it was their anti-establishment reputation that made them more effective at selling the genocide, at least to the parts of the masses which take them seriously. Their role was to add credibility to the anti-Palestine arguments that came from the neocons, presenting these arguments in a way that seems transgressive.
The “anti-establishment” right’s abandonment of the antiwar movement after October 7 was cause for concern among those seeking to build an antiwar movement, as it represented an undoing of progress. The attacks from these “dissident” conservatives didn’t keep the protests against the genocide from being any less massive, though; nor did the other ways in which our ruling class tried to turn people against the pro-Palestine movement. And this gave the cause’s supporters confidence. Social media had ensured that the bulk of society would immediately see the crimes our government was committing, which guaranteed there would be gargantuan demonstrations right away.
This is the limitation on the pro-Zionist side’s narrative power: no matter what, there’s always going to be an element of the masses that wants to fight for the Palestinians. What happens when the struggle stays confined to this element, though? When the movement can’t expand beyond where support for the cause is easiest to find?
Having the masses on your side, yet out of your reach
When a movement has these weaknesses, it fails to bring its goals into being; and if those goals are realized, this will not be because of the movement but because of a different factor. That’s what happened with the ceasefire, which came because of the internal crises “Israel” was experiencing amid its futile effort to eliminate Hamas. The biggest progress we’ve seen since October 7 has come from the efforts of the Palestinians, not from the U.S. pro-Palestine movement.
This doesn’t mean there was never any hope for us to have an impact; quite the opposite. For a time during those first months of the extermination, we actually were starting to affect the events within Gaza. According to Dr. Norman Finkelstein, the U.S. pro-Palestine movement did save some lives; this was the conclusion that Finkelstein came to upon witnessing the campus civil disobedience actions from spring 2024, which led to “Israel” encountering restrictions on how far it could go. When Finkelstein gave this appraisal of the student protests, he likened the resoluteness of the students to that of the South African leadership, which has refused to let “Israel” commit these crimes unchallenged:
There was a new accumulation of limits being imposed on Israel. There was the limit—very minimal, but it was there—the U.S. was signaling that you cannot carry out a mass extermination in Rafah. The U.S. only indicated that because of the student uprisings in the United States. Anybody who thinks those student demonstrations had no effect have no understanding whatsoever of politics. Yes, there’s no direct effect, and it may not be as much as one wishes it would be, but if President Biden both publicly and privately communicated limits to Israel, it was because of those student demonstrations. And in the same way the South African persistence, not just its courage, not just its integrity, it’s their tenacity; they won’t let go. We will not let you exterminate the people of Gaza.
The problem was that we then stopped having this kind of impact, and failed to build upon our initial gains. This was because our movement depended on protests. Protests are a necessary part of political struggle, but problems arise when the struggle becomes centered around them. Protest movements have major vulnerabilities, both to repression and to co-optation; that’s why the NGOs tend to be more comfortable with protests than with any other tactic.
When protests are essentially all of your movement, the struggle will falter as soon as the demonstrations experience a lull, or face a crackdown. Even during moments when protests are happening, their effectiveness can be heavily diminished, because the media can choose to ignore them. All of these potential setbacks have befallen the pro-Palestine protest movement since October 7; and if the struggle had a stronger foundation, such obstacles wouldn’t have set back our progress. After the initial demonstrations died down, we would have been able to switch to alternative methods, and continue mounting more pressure upon our government. We were on the trajectory towards seriously disrupting the war machine’s operations; this was something that certain members of our ruling class admitted.
In May 2024, the CEO of Palantir Alex Karp warned about the impacts the demonstrations could have, saying: “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any armies in the west ever.” Karp is a weapons contractor; his company directly provides “Israel” with the tech it uses for committing genocide. And here he was showing fear that mass mobilizations would destabilize the system he relies on.
The student protests were effective, but they were limited in how long they could remain effective. So by mid-summer of 2024, the empire’s narrative managers became able to shift our discourse away from Palestine. With the end of the spring semester, there were no longer enough demonstrations, so the media could ignore Gaza. All the corporate news outlets needed now was a big distraction story; a topic that they could use as an excuse to start bringing up Gaza only rarely, if at all. According to Finkelstein, the event that these outlets used for this purpose was the nomination of Kamala Harris. Wrote Finkelstein in September: “Israel is ever attuned to the US news cycle. It has predictably escalated its genocide in Gaza as the Kamala Harris candidacy replaced Gaza as the top news story. The past few weeks have been particularly gruesome: another day, another massacre of innocents.”
The summer gave the universities time to impose severe restrictions on speech, and in the fall, there was no new wave of campus occupations. I don’t believe these rules were the reason for this, though; because it’s not like the occupiers had been deterred by any rules. Everyone who stayed in buildings until the cops dragged them out, or who camped on lawns at the risk of being arrested, was either unambiguously breaking the law or taking a big chance with the law; and they had already decided that getting in potentially serious trouble was worthwhile, as long as they could save even one Palestinian life in the process. The new rules were only a superficial show of power by the university administrators. What happened in the spring proved that when they really want to, protesters can easily shut down campuses or carry out other types of civil disobedience, regardless of how many rules the authorities make. Breaking rules is the point of this form of protest.
If our government decides to start enforcing these rules through more serious means than arresting people, and makes Kent State scenarios into the new normal, then everyone will truly become too afraid to protest. But our ruling class believes such a project would come with too much blowback for it to be worthwhile. Or at least the predominant elements of our ruling class believe this (for the time being). At this stage, massacring protesters is not something the imperial state sees as necessary, because it’s clear that the maximum level of force isn’t required to defeat a protest movement. All that’s needed is to make the supporters of a given cause feel like continuing their initial protest efforts wouldn’t make rational sense. This, I think, is what truly killed the campus occupation trend: the perception that putting together more occupations wasn’t worth the cost. That if more students were to carry out civil disobedience, and thereby bring long-term repercussions upon themselves, then their sacrifices wouldn’t be able to impact what happened in Gaza. Hope for saving lives was what drove the campus occupiers, and when that hope appeared to no longer be there, the momentum behind the occupations went away.
A new series of pro-Palestine actions would absolutely have made rational sense; except these actions would have needed to look different from the earlier ones, while being undertaken with the support and guidance of serious revolutionary organizations. Because such an institutional structure didn’t exist, it looked to the pro-Palestine students like there was no viable path towards replicating their initial successes. There were still Palestine protests in the fall, but there weren’t as many as in the spring, and they didn’t involve occupations. These marches provided people with hope, but not enough hope that they felt like staging new occupations would bring results.
My argument is not that the movement should have simply kept repeating its initial actions, because in many cases these actions were flawed. The occupations that involved disruption of campus activities were effective at keeping Gaza in the news cycle, but the aspect of shutting down campuses was not necessary; in fact, it was in certain ways counterproductive. When you sabotage the functioning of daily life, of working class life, this antagonizes many societal elements which could otherwise be won over to your cause. For tactics like campus shutdowns or road blockages to be productive, you first need to have the broad masses on the side of your organizations; and none of the left orgs which led the Palestine protests are connected to the bulk of the masses. In conditions such as ours, for civil disobedience to be productive it will need to be cautious about its methods; it makes sense for the actions to involve tactics like establishing encampments, but we must avoid adventuristic tactics that will alienate the masses who we’re seeking to win over.
I am not talking about the liberals who are sympathetic towards our cause in theory, while demanding we condemn Hamas and promoting a “both sides” view of the conflict. Those types tend to be from the professional managerial class, which is a tiny minority of the population and disproportionately benefits from empire. I’m talking about the working people who often already agree with our goals, but won’t participate in the pro-Palestine struggle until it becomes substantially connected to the proletarian struggle.
With these workers, it isn’t even necessarily a matter of whether they share our views; the broad masses of the USA see that what “Israel” has done to Gaza can’t be defended. The primary question is whether they can take part in this fight; whether the fight is being waged in a way that makes it accessible to them. When actions sabotage working people’s routines, and those behind these actions lack a relationship to the broad masses, this keeps the movement detached from the people. That’s what I’ve needed to learn as a communist: we can’t go ahead of the masses, or the masses won’t be able to join with us. The Bay Area Socialist Organizing Committee describes how this happens when a group engages in “adventurism,” and hastily pursues the most disruptive actions without building a strong foundation of power:
Adventurism has a high “burn-out” rate. Not only are adventurist practices demanding; they are rarely successful, frequently infiltrated, and invitations to repression. On the other hand, adventurism remains tempting when communist work moves slowly. Lenin pointed out in “Left-Wing” Communism that “it is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is at its height, when everybody is joining the revolution …. It is far more difficult–and of far greater value–to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist…among masses who are incapable of immediately appreciating the need for revolutionary methods of action.” Too many would-be revolutionaries project themselves into a fantasy of imminent revolution because they cannot sustain the slow process of building toward a real revolution.
There’s a reason why many of the protest leaders prohibited anyone from blocking doors, occupying buildings, or otherwise disrupting university functions: they didn’t want to go ahead of the masses. The pro-Palestine protests which did involve these tactics actually were successful, in that they helped bring pressure upon “Israel.” This means those who participated in these actions absolutely deserve credit; objectively, they did something heroic. I must make this view of mine absolutely clear. It’s also important for me to clarify that when I critique such tactics, I’m directing my criticism much more towards certain types of actions than towards others.
The road blockages in particular had counterproductive effects, because their primary function was to stop people from getting to work; something like this will have a highly alienating impact, at least under conditions like ours. However, the campus building occupations had much less of an impact on the workers within their communities, and they gave the protesters extremely powerful platforms; when students occupied Hamilton Hall, and renamed it after the murdered child Hindra Hind, this became iconic. During the stage of the struggle in which these demonstrators were operating, actions like this one served an important role, as they helped shift the discourse in Palestine’s favor. My point is that in the long term, the struggle will only be able to expand beyond the student element if we pivot towards activities which the workers will participate in.
The most disruptive tactics were effective at gaining attention for the cause, but so were the more regulated and restrained actions. And it’s these types of actions that have the most potential to bring in the broader masses, beyond the students and those within the preexisting activist circles. I’m not advocating for us to simply organize more protests, but of a different character; I’m also advocating for us to bring the pro-Palestine movement into worker organizing, and to fuse the Palestinian struggle with the proletarian struggle. Protests need to be just one of the tools we employ, and they need to serve the purpose of building up a serious proletarian force.
A worker is much less likely to participate in a sacrificial resistance action than a student is; or at least that’s the case at this stage, when the struggle is lacking in sufficient institutional support. It’s only when the workers have strong collective organization, capable of ensuring any sacrifices they make will be meaningful, that the pro-Palestine movement will gain an active base among the working masses. Even students don’t see a reason to pursue militancy when victory appears out of reach; we need to bring victory within the reach of the workers, thereby giving them a reason to join with us. This is how we can beat the anti-woke psyop, and all the other psyops against the pro-Palestine movement; these psyops only work as long as the masses are detached from the struggle, so we can win by getting the masses connected to our efforts.
That’s one of the big lessons I’ve learned by studying the pro-Palestine movement: this movement is capable of massively expanding its number of participants, and recruiting millions of proletarians who have the economic leverage to break capital. But until we apply this lesson, the imperial state will be able to keep getting away with what it’s been doing.
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