October 10, 2024
This week
thousands marched and protested throughout the United States to mark one year
of devastation and horror in Gaza.
Many of those
involved have been organizing and agitating to stop the genocide since last
October. Chanting, holding signs, blocking traffic, confronting politicians,
standing outside the entrances to corporations that are profiting off Israeli
war crimes, holding sit-ins at congressional offices, pitching tents on their
campuses, holding teach-ins, and interrupting the speeches of those who support
Israel’s brutality.
At a protest in
Washington, DC, last week, a photojournalist attempted to light himself on fire
outside of The White House.
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“It is we, the
American journalists, through lazy negligence at best or through corporate
influence at worst, created the environment, incubated, and carried to term the
tools that the leaders of our government would use to dismantle the truths of
the world in which we live,” Samuel Mena told a crowd of people before setting
fire to one his arms. “To the ten thousand children in Gaza that have lost a
limb in this conflict, I give my left arm to you. I pray my voice was able to
raise up yours, and that your smiles never disappear.”
Mena was the
fourth person to self-immolate over the war on Gaza.
Israel’s ongoing
assault, its widening war, and the waning interest of mainstream media might
lead some to forget that we are witnessing the largest antiwar protests in this
country in the last two decades.
“We saw big
protests in Chicago when Israel attacked Gaza in 2009 and when they bombed Gaza
in 2014. High thousands regularly, probably up to 10 or 15,000. We saw them
again in 2021,” U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) National Chair Hatem
Abudayyeh told Mondoweiss last October. “Nothing I’ve seen looks like this.
These have been the biggest I have seen since the Iraq War. The scope is bigger
than I’ve ever seen.”
One year later
Abudayyeh says the momentum hasn’t faded.
“Here in Chicago
we’ve had 55 protests organized by our main coalition since last October,” he
says. “If you count individual protests and protests organized by our partners,
we’re talking way more than 100 actions for Palestine. I think the energy and excitement
is still there. We know what the task is for the antiwar movement. Everybody is
primed, poised, and ready. There’s still a ton of energy.”
Abudayyeh
acknowledges that some of the crowds have thinned slightly and that it’s often
difficult to keep pushing in the face of unrelenting death and destruction.
“Even if the
protest numbers are a little smaller now, it’s been a year,” he explains.
“There aren’t many social movements that can sustain the kinds of numbers we
had last year. It’s not realistic to think you’re going to get those numbers
consistently. It’s still true that we’ve never seen this kind of intensity.”
“We’re watching
a genocide on our phones 24/7 and it’s incredible that people still have the
emotional and physical energy to go out and do this work,” adds Abudayyeh. “I
know it’s helping.”
Arab Resource
and Organizing Center (AROC) executive director Lara Kiswani identifies similar
organizing challenges.
“I think there
is a very major issue of fatigue and demoralization that we’re facing a year
into this genocide,” says Kiswani. “The long arc of history is a helpful
reminder. We may be looking back one day and thinking, ‘We lived through the
worst of Israeli colonial violence.’ We have to weather through it in order to
get to the other side, which is hard to do in the midst of our grief and our
trauma. We are grieving loved ones each day and facing repression everywhere.”
However,
activists like Abudayyeh and Kiswani also point out that, despite everything,
the Palestine movement is winning.
Abudayyeh points
to the progress that’s been made in the international sphere.
“Our work has
done what I’ve never seen in twenty-five years of organizing. It’s exposed
Israel as the racist, fascist, apartheid, settler-colonialist state that it
is,” he says. “It’s difficult to see over 42,000 people dead, tens of thousands
under the rubble and believe you’re winning, but that’s what we say and I think
the rest of the world believes it too. The Palestinians are winning and we are
winning because Israel has been exposed.”
“Broadly
speaking we have built the largest mass movement for Palestine in U.S. history.
That is major and can be leveraged for some real material gains,” says Kiswani.
“Things that were not on the table a year ago now are, including conversations
around an arms embargo. Questions around the U.S./Israel partnership are being
put to the test.”
Recent polling
backs up Kiswani’s point. A Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) poll
from March found that 52% of Americans wanted to force a ceasefire by halting
weapons shipments to Israel.
The numbers were
even higher in a CBS News poll from June, where 60% of the respondents said
weapons should be cut off. When broken down by political affiliation the survey
showed 80% of Democrats wanted the shipments to stop.
These numbers
aren’t entirely surprising as skepticism of the U.S./Israel relationship has
been building for years. A 2021 Chicago Council Survey found that 50% of
Americans supported conditioning military aid to Israel, including 62% among
Democrats. A 2021 Data for Progress shows 72% of Democrats support conditioning
military aid.
However, it’s
notable that such polling has remained consistent, and in some cases, the
numbers have grown since the October 7 attack. Contrast this with the early
days of the “War on Terror,” when 9/11 was exploited to manufacture consent
among the public for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. A mere 13% of
Americans told Gallup they sympathized with Palestinians in 2003. This number
wasn’t much higher among Democrats, with just 16% saying they did.
“One of the
striking things about the past year has been the dramatic shift in public
opinion, particularly among Democratic voters, in support of ending U.S.
complicity in the Israeli government’s actions,” JVP Action Political Director
Beth Miller told Mondoweiss. “I think that’s key for us to hold onto and
recognize because it will inform what happens in the future.”
“For so long
there was this idea that U.S. support for Israel would always been unwavering
and unshakeable and I think the mass popular support over the past year has
clearly shifted and moved,” she added. “Now we see a real break and disconnect
between what the U.S. government is doing and what Americans want to see.”
So far that
disconnect has not added up to discernible policy shifts, despite the efforts
of groups like the Uncommitted Movement to pressure politicians to oppose
Israel’s actions.
GOP presidential
nominee Donald Trump was a staunch supporter of Israel while in The White House
and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has repeatedly said she won’t stray from
Joe Biden’s murderous policies in the region. There is a group of Democratic House
members who have pushed legislation in support of Palestine in recent years,
but their numbers have remained small. What’s more, the extended “Squad” is
about to lose two members who lost their recent primaries, partly as a result
of outside spending from pro-Israel lobbying groups.
Palestinian
Youth Movement (PYM) organizer Lea Kayali says the past underscored the need to
build people power in order to enact change.
“A year into
this genocide I think people are realizing that they have to be the force that
stops the mechanics of a death factory that the U.S. is facilitating. We are
seeing that happen in mass,” she told Mondoweiss. “People are getting organized
in their communities. They are participating in direct actions.”
“Everyone from
organizers to people who hadn’t attended a protest before October 7 is really
intensifying their solidarity and beginning to understand that if we want to
get to a liberated future we are going to have to build it with our own hands,”
she continued. “If we want an arms embargo, if we want a free Palestine, we are
going to have to cut the U.S. complicity ourselves. That’s the shift I’m seeing
over the span of the year.”
Of course, there
will be moments of despair and anguish, but if we get lost in them, we’ll be
distracted from the fact we are winning.”
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