Newsletter #95: Gaza and US politics

By Ben Mabie

We are about eight months into Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and eight months into the powerful solidarity movement that has curbed — though totally failed to stop — the development of a second and now live-streamed nakba. Open debate within the movement has generally been muted for understandable reasons: the need for practical unity in the face of Israel’s eliminationist project; the severity of repression mounted against the solidarity movement in the United States; and the emotional charge of bearing such textured and abundant witness to ethnic cleansing, which has understandably cast a pall on public political and analytical discussion. 

But as the war develops, a series of debates have begun to break through with a little more clarity. Activists on campus and within movement organizations have traded arguments for and against the strategic (or more frequently moral) basis of valorizing Palestinian resistance. Others have tackled a related question of how to theorize the Israeli-American relationship: Is Israel “the fifty-first state” whose settler-colonial project is organically linked to a larger imperial project headquartered in Washington, DC, or is Israel the tail that wags the dog — whose outstanding support received from the United States is a product of the distortions of the Israel lobby that has captured parts of American media and academia, the legislature, and executive office? 

The latest episode of The Dig on how Israel and Gaza are transforming politics in the United States is not quite a debate, though Waleed Shahid and Dylan Saba elaborate alternative conceptual frameworks for making sense of the conjuncture that are sometimes in tension. Shahid is a cofounder of the recent Uncommitted campaign, but spent six years as the spokesperson for the Justice Democrats, where he mainlined the Green New Deal campaign into left-of-center electoral and legislative work. He has also worked within the campaign offices of better-known social democratic tribunes in Washington, including Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman. Saba, a staff attorney for Palestine Legal, which has long advised and supported students facing off against McCarthyism on college campuses, brings a perspective beyond the beltway. Over the last few years, Saba has been one of the most prolific and well-circulating writers in the North American wing of the solidarity movement, through which he’s articulated an anti-colonial analysis that sutures together considerations on geopolitics, protest reportage and analysis, immigration and the domestic scene, and personal essays on the meaning of “decolonization” (rooted not in essence, he says, but relation: “May we return, then, to the origin of no origins not to solve the problem of exile but to destroy it for good”). 

The episode is, among other things, a perfect snapshot of the united front: two varying political problematics, speaking in different idioms and perhaps with divergent long-range strategies for liberation, who nevertheless arrive at a similar set of short- and medium-run political prescriptions. 

Where Shahid turns to voting patterns, conversations in donor networks, the prevailing mood in precincts dominated by immigrant communities, and the breakthroughs for Palestine on the House and Senate floors, Saba turns to geopolitical constraints, the military defeat of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, and the political recomposition of Palestinian diasporic politics in the North Atlantic. These differences in part reflect the debate on the relationship between the American empire and zionism. If support for Israel exists in excess of its contribution to US designs, then conversion of Palestinian liberation into a partisan litmus test could sever the link between Tel Aviv and Washington, DC. But if Israel is a ballast for America’s hegemonic strategy, then the path runs instead through a much more dramatic shakeup of US interest projection, both through soft- and hard-power exercises within the Middle East, disruptive movement action that is politically and perhaps economically exacting, and the dramatic (long-term?) connection, at a mass level, of homegrown progressive concerns with a stubborn domestic opposition to the maintenance of American hegemony. 

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What makes this discussion unique, and what makes The Dig something of an outlier in discussions on the Anglophone left, is the degree to which it probes the mechanics of movement organizing or the specific strategic pathways that such a movement might take. (There is conversation about how student organizers are trained, for instance, and about how an uncommitted campaign reached the constituents that it did.) This is atypical: rarely are movements discussed in any real detail — movement qua movement — rather than invoked as a occasion to culture-war squabbles, taken as tea leaves to the electoral coalitions of the future, or staged as some reenactment of another historical moment, most usually the summer of 1968. Movements are constantly referenced as an occasion for historical or theoretical polemic, providing a backdrop to stage other extraneous political arguments. 

And yet even on the Left, almost never are the mechanics of the movement discussed, or the organizational practice of politics within the movement substantiated, elaborated, or clarified. As Marxists, our critique of politics is supposed to reveal this alternative practice of politics, which has to appraise the movements not merely as a stage, or canvass, for more mainstream concerns, but a worthy subject, agent, and of politics in its own right, and the worthy object of critical thinking and analysis. 

But probing the organizational practice of movements is not just intrinsically valuable. It also might provide a test for hypotheses around strategy. Or even answer the question of what strategy the movement has implicitly endorsed through the last eight feverish months of activity. 

It is certainly the most “formally” organized protest wave I’ve experienced in my adult life, and relatedly, the movement is mostly not leaping out of nowhere; it tends to be most dynamic specifically in the places where the organized bases of the socialist and labor movements have been activated, and particularly in places where they have linked up with the overlapping reservoirs of energy, institutional support, resilience, and resources of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian immigrant communities. The strength of the movement relies on this fecund combination of the hotspots of recent left-wing organizing alongside the networks and institutional resources of religious and immigrant communities, and its hotspots reflect the basic areas of strength — like the University of California strike, which started in Santa Cruz, where academic workers have already struck three times in the last five years. (I would be curious to what degree the movement has been able to consolidate this encounter between the immigrant communities and the Left into something durable, or to what degree it is a passing feature of this moment; that would depend in part on how much the encounter is mediated up top by leaders who are steering coalitions and calling for marches, or to what degree there are robust community- and individual-level relationships being forged among everyday participants in the movement.)

But what has the movement done? What is it comprised of? It would be difficult to assemble an exhaustive list of all the tactics and fronts of the movement, but it has, broadly, centered on a handful of evolving mimetic practices and campaign fronts that have shifted somewhat as the war has run on. 

• Most commonly, it has taken the form of large demonstrations, in cities, towns, and most notably at the US Capitol. This is typically the domain of the movement’s principal protest coalition, spearheaded by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), although the tactic has been deployed by countless groups across the country. The meaning of the demonstrations themselves are ambiguous: is it to demonstrate the political consequence of aiding a genocide, to assemble the people who will perhaps boycott your election? Or are they meant to demonstrate something less to politicians so much as to participants — that, as John Berger put it, “mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution,” which subjectively reinforce the power of a crowd primarily to the crowd? In practice, if the itinerary of these protests are any indication, some clearly also consider their chief function the projection of political authority and prestige: to reinforce particular slogans, as well as creating a chance to solidify the coalition through ample speaking time at the rally, but also to, in front of a captive audience, establish the militancy, commitment, and attraction of the primary organizers.
• Then there are more spectacular instances of civil disobedience, anchored by a range of groups, although not uncommonly Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and sometimes also the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The tactical toolkit is a fairly well-worn one in the United States, and so has practitioners far beyond those groups, including PYM and PSL. Usually, the civil disobedience has targeted a transit hub for the purposes of maximum media coverage and disruption (think of New York City’s Grand Central Station, the entrance to a bridge, or a highway intersection) but have also targeted specific politicians, the offices of the Democratic Party in DC, and regional “federal buildings,” as well as financial institutions like BlackRock.
• Campaigning for cease-fire resolutions, aimed at any and all institutions, though unions and city councils seem to be the two prominent places where these victories have been secured.
• Relatedly, smaller though consistent demonstrations targeting politicians’ offices to support a call for cease-fire were held throughout the long winter this year. In New York, these demonstrations targeted progressive House members in districts where the movement groups were concentrated. Usually, they were organized by a coalition involving DSA, JVP, and Adalah Justice Project, though groups like Crown Heights Tenant Union also joined in or organized their own.
• There were more rarely instances of blockading, picketing, or protesting outside of arms manufacturers. Connecticut DSA targeted a Colt Factory; Palestinian Action organized direct actions at Merrimack Elbit Systems facility in New Hampshire.
• There has been a flurry of protests in cultural and media institutions that reproduce and normalize zionism. Smaller independent groups have pushed their leadership to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). In a more subterranean key, in media workplaces digital and legacy there are skirmishes concerning editorial line, recognizing, as one worker put it, “that the struggle over language, over editorial decisions, is a struggle against management.”
• Writers Against the War on Gaza has combined spectacular and well-cited media criticism with disruptive anti-logistical action — we could describe them as joining barricades with bibliographies. Their focus has been on the New York Times, which may now employ nearly half of the newspaper workforce in the country. Their roster of actions has included direct actions at the paper’s office, calls for a boycott, and blockades at one of its print distribution facilities in Queens, New York.
• The Uncommitted campaign has collected union and movement group endorsements on its way to solid performances in a number of states, sending a signal that core primary voting constituencies may sit out the election absent a change in President Joe Biden’s position vis-à-vis Israel.
• Student protests, encampments and walkouts brought the struggle onto campuses, helping catalyze other layers of workers on campus — and adjacent to campus — into labor-based action, as was the case among workers in the City University of New York system, which organized a minority wildcat strike in response to student repression.
• Most recently, and perhaps decisively, is a political strike launched for divestment and disclosure at the University of California. (We discussed the strike in our last newsletter here).

With all this tactical diversity, it’s hard to know what the overarching strategy is — or what our most powerful forms of leverage are, or what tactics are even effective. Still, as this list might indicate, it has been difficult for the movement to land on effective, sustainable, disruptive action, since the immediate levers of policy-making are so far away: Even dock workers who want to disrupt arms shipments are finding that munitions and weapons are typically not seaborne. 

For instance, boycotts and divestment are the predominant non-cease-fire demands of the moment: are these measures aimed at symbolic isolation of Israel, or are they intended to attack the project economically? The same could be asked of the cultural boycott in particular: are these indirect means of producing a different political situation in Washington, DC, or are they targeting something essential in the cultural exchange and normalization of the occupation? At the level of strategy, does the fight against Zionism concentrate on the American state and its foreign policy — which means it’s about moving people in order to pressure the foreign-policy establishment? Or is the fight broader than that, extending to various institutions of all sorts that play a role in shoring up Israel dollar by dollar or through small acts of normalization and support? Is the struggle concentrated at the commanding heights of White House and the Pentagon, only traveling through other institutions like unions, workplaces and arms manufacturers, media and universities, on the way up to these privileged, primary targets? Or is the fight to dislodge Zionism a more distributed struggle, which sees the isolation of Israel as a project that has to be fought out inch by inch in a long march through the trenches of leading institutions in American life? 

It may not need to be an either-or scenario, particularly if we are clearer about the functions of a modern capitalist state — one that does not have a perfect reflexive understanding of its interests, and that may not even be bound to a single strategy. It is typically the domain of competing strategies, fought out in struggles that traverse the terrain of the state. In a way, these movements working at the level of universities and media and within other nonfederal state institutions help shift the balance of forces for Zionism within the state as a whole, dislodging local institutions from one particular strategic configuration, and transforming the content of the state if not its deeper material apparatuses. Such a perspective recognizes that Zionism is not a matter of state capture, but state structure, while also avoiding the fatalism of imagining a total state transformation would be necessary to effect a change on the terrain of US strategy with respect to Israel.