A PhD Scholar in History based in the United States
Editor’s Note: This blog was written in the fall of 2024, amidst the US elections. The analytical insights raised here have become even more significant for the Palestine solidarity movement and for broader struggles toward a more democratic, equal, and just society in the aftermath of the elections—not only in the US, but globally.
In a translation of a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the title refers to “someone fleeing into death from hell.” One might imagine the poem was written yesterday but it was first published in the 1960s. Darwish’s words not only provide a clear sense of the horrors of the last year but also remind us of the “ongoing Nakba” experienced – and resisted – by Palestinians over the last seventy five years. And it is these visions of hell, largely whitewashed by the media in the United States, that have fueled a movement in solidarity with Palestinian people; the livestreaming of the destruction of homes, water infrastructure, farm fields, hospitals, transport channels, refugee camps, food and medical aid, universities and schools, archives and cultural artifacts – in a word, the livestreaming of genocide.
How to cognitively map this catastrophe and the movement against it? How to historicize from within the US, the global power providing the arms and vetoes to ensure the catastrophe continues? The United States is the prime example of a settler colonial nation, a land where the story of genocide against Indigenous peoples provides a shadow to both liberal visions of progress and the far-right fever dreams to “make America great again.” And settler colonialism – whether in the US or Israel – continues to be a remarkably impervious structure to movements oriented around decolonization and land justice.
A diversity of tactics has defined the movement for Palestine in the US; not just protests and encampments but mutual aid efforts, road blockades, legal work, boycotts, divestment campaigns, occupations (on and off campus), city-level ceasefire resolutions, electoral efforts like the Uncommitted Movement in the Democratic primaries, and even self-immolation.
Encampments on US campuses, especially the prestigious Ivy Leagues, have gathered the most attention in the media. The US university as a site of struggle is, of course, nothing new. Prior to the surge of student protests in the spring, labor struggles were a perennial feature of the post-pandemic university; not just a flurry of union drives across the country but also the largest strike of university workers in US history led by graduate students in California in 2022-23. The far-right has also revived its attacks on the university (considered a lost “battle” since the 1960s). Incoming Republican Vice President J.D. Vance, an Ivy League graduate, referred to the universities as “the enemy” in a keynote conference talk from 2020 (a direct throwback to President Richard Nixon and the GOP rage of the 1970s).
The goals of the student movement – the end of the genocide and the liberation of Palestine – would need to find realization beyond the campus. But student demands of universities to “disclose and divest” any financial connections to Israel’s war and occupation – far from a radical demand, and with historical precedents in US student protests against South Africa apartheid in the 1980s – mostly met the indifference of administrators. And, as students turned to militant tactics, the same administrators responded with repression such as the dismantling of encampments, arrests, suspensions, the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters and, in the exceptional case at the University of California-Los Angeles, allowing Zionist and white nationalist counter-protestors to violently attack an encampment for hours.
As Alberto Toscano notes, Israel’s war not only represents an attack on education in Gaza – the mass destruction of universities, the killing of students, and the targeting of intellectuals and scholars – but also an attack on education in the US through censorship, suspensions, and arrests:
Over the last four months, as Israel has ratcheted up its long-term attacks on Palestinian intellectual life, pro-Israel political actors in the United States have tied the silencing of Palestinian solidarity to ongoing campaigns against critical and progressive agendas in education. In so doing, they are also bringing together the political center and far Right in ways that trouble the narrative of a coming battle between a broad liberal front and a proto-fascist Trumpism.
Despite media narratives of political polarization, unbridgeable party chasms, and looming civil wars, Israel’s genocidal war and the repression of student protests have achieved that supposedly rare thing in contemporary US politics: “bipartisanship.”
The student protests should be placed in a wider context of struggles that have defined the period following the financial crisis of 2008: Occupy Wall Street and the occupation of Wisconsin state capitol (both inspired by the Arab Spring), Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, climate movements, the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020, and a re-energized labor movement more generally. Making sense of this new era of social struggle can only be touched on here, but Israel’s genocidal war has brought US imperialism into greater focus. A longer narrative arc would also note the important organizing groundwork laid by Arab and Muslim Americans (for example, the BDS movement in the US and SJP chapters on campuses), in addition to the growth of Jewish organizing channels critical of the Israeli occupation (for example, Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now).
Even before the spring encampments, at least 5,425 protests in support of Palestine occurred between October 7 and the end of February. These protests went beyond the campus and occurred in every single state in the country. The protests at Ivy League universities like Columbia and Harvard – along with the spectacle of university presidents questioned before Congressional committees – became the spotlight of the US media. But this neglects the geographical magnitude of the protests; like the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020, the landscape of revolt was not restricted to major urban centers and protests and encampments blossomed on the campuses of public universities across the country.
While liberal pundits and politicians have obsessed over the far-right revolt of January 6 for almost four years now, this misses out on the fact that the George Floyd Uprisings dwarfed the “insurrection” not only in scale but also duration. The uprisings were coast to coast, including street skirmishes with the police in major urban areas like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago but also in the small cities of the so-called “flyover states” (or “Trump Country,” as some would call it) like Des Moines, Iowa and Fargo, North Dakota. And it was, indeed, a long hot summer, from the spring burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis following the killing of George Floyd to the summer burning of the Department of Corrections building in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
While not reaching the same pitch of revolt, protests against US policing have not ended, best exemplified by the nationwide movement against Cop City, a massive police training facility currently being built out of the Weelaunee forest in Atlanta, Georgia. Here, too, we find a discrete connection between US policing, universities and the Israeli occupation. Georgia, a former heartland of Jim Crow apartheid in the US South, collaborates with Israeli police forces in an international police training program. Based out of Georgia State University, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) provides “peer-to-peer professional training” and allows US police officers to learn “counter-terrorism” and “community policing” from Israeli police forces. The boomerang of the US-Israeli relation goes beyond military aid as counterinsurgency and policing tactics circulate between the two states; Palestine becomes what Antony Loewenstein calls a “laboratory” for Israel to test and then export deadly and oppressive counter-insurgency tactics around the world. The tactics utilized to surveil, police, and repress Palestinians makes its way back to the belly of the US empire, put to use to police racialized populations in Georgia and beyond.
Whereas January 6 has provided endless electoral fodder for the Democratic Party, and the George Floyd Uprisings could at least be loosely co-opted in the elections of 2020, there was little room for the Palestine solidarity movement in the party’s “big tent.” This was clearly on display at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris may have invoked the right of Palestinians to “self-determination” on stage at the DNC – but her support of Israel’s right to “self-defense” (echoed in multiple statements after the convention) clearly overrode the former. The fact that Harris repeatedly claimed there would be no arms embargo under her presidency (or vice presidency for that matter) only gave material substance to the rhetoric; one cannot ceaselessly work for a ceasefire if one is ceaselessly arming the Israeli state. As a further snub to the movement, the DNC refused to let Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American state representative in Georgia, speak at the convention.
The Democratic Party establishment has yet to achieve any kind of lasting synthesis with the insurgent components of its base (beyond cooptation). The Uncommitted Movement – voters who cast their votes as “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries to signal to the Biden and then Harris campaigns disgust over US support for the war in Gaza – gained nearly 700,000 votes (over 4 percent of the Democratic primary vote). The full impact of the Uncommitted Movement on the November election may not be known but the loss of voters in the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan was clear; Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American serving in Congress, did nearly twice as well as Harris who lost the city to Trump.
Despite the surge of solidarity, the reality must be addressed: nothing has worked to pressure the US state to intervene and stop the crisis. From the militant to the electoral, nothing has worked. The death tolls rise, Israel’s war expands into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria, and the US arms continue to travel across the Atlantic to fuel it all. Palestinians continue fleeing from hell into death.
One tiny sprout of hope that might be found in all this fire, blood and rubble could be a revitalized internationalism, a cross borders solidarity. A number of college students who could not even find Gaza on a map a year ago have turned into activists who understand the genocide as a world historical event. Crisis – whether ecological, economic, imperial – is not going away, and where there is crisis we will continue to find struggle.