[Only urgent action that targets roots causes can prevent more
deaths, injuries, trauma, and grief. The violence can end only with an
immediate ceasefire and rapid steps toward equal rights for all. ]
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END ISRAELI APARTHEID TO GIVE PEACE A CHANCE  
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Max Elbaum
October 12, 2023
Convergence Magazine
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_ Only urgent action that targets roots causes can prevent more
deaths, injuries, trauma, and grief. The violence can end only with an
immediate ceasefire and rapid steps toward equal rights for all. _

Stop Israel's Apartheid Wall, by humbleslave (CC BY 2.0)

 

When I was a kid, every television station portrayed Native Americans
as savages. Those who took their land using “guns, germs, and
steel” were depicted as peace-loving bearers of civilization itself.

When I was a youth, I watched footage of General William Westmoreland,
commander of the US military forces terrorizing Vietnam, saying with a
straight face: “Orientals don’t place the same value on human life
that we do.”

In the years since I’ve seen the same kind of dehumanization
deployed against people resisting dispossession and structural
violence from South Africa to South America and dozens of other places
in between.

And always against Palestinians, when their existence was acknowledged
at all.

Consolidated core and broader support

Amid the explosion of violence over the last week, a host of voices
cut through the racist blather typified by the latest from Israel’s
Defense Minister: “We are fighting against human animals.”
[[link removed]] These
clear voices explained what is really going on: the root of violence
is oppression. Among them were Arab Resource and Organizing Center
[[link removed]] (AROC), Jewish
Voice for Peace
[[link removed]], The
U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights
[[link removed]],
left-wing Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif
[[link removed]],
and co-founder of the Progressive International Yanis Varoufakis
[[link removed]].

These statements and the numerous demonstrations across the US
[[link removed]] bringing
their message into the streets indicate the gains made by the
Palestine solidarity movement over the past several decades. The ranks
of those who have cut through all the attempts to obscure the real
history of Palestine to target Israeli settler colonialism,
the Israeli apartheid system
[[link removed]],
and the ideology of Zionism
[[link removed]] that supports
it have grown substantially.

Yet pro-Palestine activists have built support beyond this political
core. A far broader layer of the population has been won to sympathize
with the Palestinians as the oppressed underdog in the
Israel-Palestine relationship even if they are not yet fully convinced
of anti-Zionist politics. Exposure of the ever-more-blatant racism of
successive Israeli governments—the current one is particularly
nightmarish—and the settlers (that is, ethnic cleansers) on the West
Bank has led to a surge of identification with the Palestinians among
US people of color, especially African Americans
[[link removed]].
Sentiment among young people of all backgrounds has shifted: a slight
plurality of millennials (42%) sympathize with Palestinians more than
Israelis (40%). Sentiment among Democrats
[[link removed]] shifted
in 2021 – 23 for the first time to favor Palestinians over Israelis,
49% to 38%.

Champions of Palestinian rights like Rashida Tlaib
[[link removed]] and Cori Bush now sit in
Congress. And a broader layer of congresspeople and other elected
officials speak out to varying degrees against Israeli brutality
and sponsor legislation
[[link removed]] on
that issue in ways that were off the table even just a decade ago. .

9/11 moment: “With us or with the terrorists”

All of these gains have been made on the unfavorable terrain of US
politics, where support for Israel has been promoted as a moral and
political imperative by the guardians of imperial foreign policy, the
powerful Israel lobby, and the fanatical, MAGA-linked
[[link removed]] Christian
Zionist movement.  But now the hard-won progress is being rolled back
by attacks that will likely intensify in the coming weeks and months.

One establishment pundit after another has embraced the notion of
“Israel’s 9/11
[[link removed]].” 
So once again the “with us or with the terrorists” barrage is
being deployed against anyone who criticizes US Middle East policy or
supports Palestinian rights. Every public figure who does so—from
media personalities to college professors, and from celebrities to
elected officials—can expect to face charges of anti-Semitism and
“siding with terrorism.” Attacks will intensify against frontline
activist groups like AROC, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and
Students for Justice In Palestine, who have long been targeted with
smears, sting operations, and phony legal campaigns
[[link removed]].  

Elected officials who don’t toe the pro-Israel line are already
being targeted. In the last election cycle the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) poured millions of dollars
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efforts to defeat not just strong Palestine supporters but even those
who seemed inclined to move in that direction. AIPAC recognizes that
shifting sentiment around Israel-Palestine in the Democratic Party’s
progressive wing poses the threat of support for Israel losing its
current status as a “bipartisan” principle, which would be a huge
blow to US complicity in Israeli apartheid.

The upwelling of support for Israel in this moment poses serious
political challenges for building Palestine solidarity, for defeating
an authoritarian right that wants to use support for Israel as one of
its battering rams to gain total power, and for contending with
Biden’s terrible foreign policy. Republicans are Iran-baiting Biden
and the Democrats; centrist Democrats are seizing another means of
marginalizing progressives and Leftists; the progressive movement has
long split over support for Palestinian rights. The fever of war is
fueling religious nationalism at home and abroad.

Palestinians will bear the brunt

Meanwhile the threat of even greater bloodletting looms, with more
dead to mourn and wounded to care for on all sides, The Israeli
government has already declared war, announced a total siege of Gaza,
and is threatening massive military action. Palestinian civilians, who
have borne the brunt of violence for more than 75 years, will once
more be treated as either explicit targets or irrelevant collateral
damage.  

So this time for us in the US to stand firm and go broad. Sustain the
momentum of street actions and full-spectrum media messaging that
targets the underlying cause of the current crisis. Defend every group
and individual that gets attacked for criticizing Israel’s
brutality—continuing to remind people that outrage against that
brutality is not the same as anti-Semitism. Stay in or get in every
public space no matter how uncomfortable where a voice speaking
against racist dehumanization can find even a toehold. Engage with
those progressives who equivocate whether out of simple backwardness
or fear of Zionist bullying while building on whatever positive
impulses they display.

The immediate days ahead are likely to be very tough. The most
strident Israel supporters claim to be moved by the death of
civilians, but they reveal their true colors in declaring this a
moment of “great opportunity
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to gain more power. But they have no program for the Israel-Palestine
conflict except more killing and more subjugation.

The demands for an immediate ceasefire
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for an end to US military aid and overall blank-check support for
Israel, for equal rights for all to replace apartheid—these light
the road to peace with justice. Many who are not ready to support
those demands today can be convinced to change their minds tomorrow;
just as many who support these views today did not do so five, ten or
twenty years ago.

_Max Elbaum [[link removed]] is a
member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board and the author
of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and
Che 
[[link removed]](Verso
Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New
Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is
also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power
Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections 
[[link removed]](OR Books, 2022)._

_Convergence [[link removed]] is a magazine for radical
insights. We work with organizers and activists on the frontlines of
today’s most pressing struggles to produce articles, videos and
podcasts that sharpen our collective practice, lift up stories from
the grassroots, and promote strategic debate. Our goal is to create
the shared strategy needed to change our society and the world. Our
community of readers, viewers, and content producers are united in our
purpose: winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic
economy._

_Today, our movements continue to grow, but so too does the threat
from the racist, authoritarian right. We believe we can defeat them,
dismantle racial capitalism, and win the change we need by building a
new governing majority that is driven by a convergence of grassroots
social movements, labor movements, socialists, and progressives._

_Join us._

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* Palestinians
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