Palestinian Resistance: Upsetting the U.S.-Israel Apple Cart

BY M. REZA BEHNAM

 MAY 10, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Students on campuses across the United States have “upset the U.S.-Israel military apartheid applecart” — a plan long in the making whose aim has been Israeli control over all of historic Palestine.  Israel’s plan to claim every inch of it is stated unequivocally in the Likud Party Platform of 1977.  It reads, “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

For challenging Israel’s brutal settler-colonial project and genocide in Gaza, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have felt the wrath of Israel’s supporters in government, education and corporate media. 

Administrators at distinguished universities like Columbia, Emory and the University of California, Los Angeles have resorted to force to suppress demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and for their universities to divest from companies with ties to Israel.  And at UCLA, administrators and law enforcement failed to act as counterprotestors violently attacked pro-Palestinian encampments.  

Students have experienced firsthand the repressive nature of the state when it wants to quash a message.  They have learned how practiced in domination the United States and Israel are.  

The Palestinian solidarity encampments have unnerved those who wield power because they are a symbol of unity and resistance against oppression.  It is interesting to note that the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally of 2017, as vile as it was, did not evoke the same heavy-handed response from administrators and police.    

On 11 August of that year, hundreds of white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus chanting Nazi and antisemitic slogans.  Although aware of the unsanctioned march, university officials and law enforcement took minimal action to prevent disorder and violence.  Very few arrests were made and just a handful of far-right protestors and counter-protestors were subsequently convicted on charges of assault or disorderly conduct.  

In contrast, more than 2,400 protestors on U.S. campuses have been arrested since the police crackdown at Columbia University on 18 April sparked a wave of student activism.  Ironically, some of the students arrested, who pay $67,264 a year in undergraduate tuition, were charged with “trespassing.” 

President Joe Biden’s response to the student protests is predictable.  America’s self-professed Zionist president has been more critical of U.S. students for protesting against genocide in Gaza than he has been of the perpetrator.  In his 2 May address on campus unrest, Biden never mentioned Gaza nor did he comment on Israel’s scorched earth campaign, the source of the “unrest.”  When asked if the protests have forced him to reconsider his policies, Biden brusquely stated “no.”  

Israeli bombs have killed 13,000 Palestinian children and orphaned 19,000.  Biden has been silent in the face of these atrocities.  He was not so mute after the 7 October Palestinian incursion into Israel.  Within a week he was on his way to Tel Aviv to hug Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reaffirm his commitment to protect Israel. 

The Palestinian solidarity movement has made it possible to finally tell and share the true story of Palestine in the United States.  For eight decades, Israel, inoculated by Washington, the corporate media and threats of being labeled antisemitic, have successfully kept the story of Palestine and its people from the American public. 

Aware that it has been losing control of its invented narrative, the Israeli regime has looked to its stakeholders in the United States and the West to suppress the message and messengers.  In a desperate attempt to quell the growing pro-Palestine protests, on 24 April 2024, Netanyahu publicly called on U.S. officials to use greater force to crackdown on American demonstrators, whom he compared to Nazis and described as “antisemitic mobs” who “have to be stopped.”  

Israel’s advocates at U.S. universities, government and media have responded to Netanyahu’s plea.  Using the decades-old Israeli playbook on how to discredit the opposition, justify violence and distract from the message, they have drowned out protestors’ demands by falsely portraying them as antisemitic, threats to safety, ill-informed and infiltrated by “outside agitators.”    

The events of the last six months make it absolutely clear that the United States cannot be an honest broker when it comes to Israel.  One example, among many, was the U.S. reaction to recent reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) might issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, over the regime’s atrocities in Gaza. A worried Netanyahu went so far as to  warn the White House that if the ICC issues arrest warrants, he will take retaliatory measures against the Palestinian Authority.  In 2021, Palestinian human rights organizations submitted their case regarding Israeli war crimes in Gaza to the Court.  

A number of Israel’s champions in the U.S. Congress (of both parties) have pressured the ICC not to act, threatening retaliation and drafting legislation should the Court go forward.  

Biden has stated that the United States does not support the ICC investigation, and has incorrectly claimed that the Court has no jurisdiction in this case.  Because of U.S. complicity in Israeli war crimes, the ICC could issue arrest warrants for American political leaders, diplomats and military personnel.   

Interestingly, although not a member of the ICC—established in the Hague in July 2002 to prosecute war criminals—the United States has made certain to protect itself and its allies from potential prosecution.  

In August 2002, for example, the U.S. Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002, nicknamed “The Hague Invasion Act.”  It is so named because it would allow the president to order the U.S. military to “rescue” American officials and military personnel, as well as allied officials, including Israel, being held in ICC custody in the Hague.  

In defense of Israel, the United States has been willing to violate its own laws, as well as international laws.  The Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act, for example, establish provisions governing military sales to foreign consumers and governments.

Section 502(B) of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits security assistance to “any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Despite Israel’s merciless onslaught in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, the United States has provided an additional $15 billion in unconditional military aid to Israel.  

Such U.S. practices have tarnished what remains of its international stature.  

In yet another effort to please the pro-Israel lobby, silence criticism of Israel and shutdown protests, Congress, on 30 April, passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which broadens the legal definition of antisemitism to include the “targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”  If signed into law, opposing Zionism and criticizing Israel would qualify as antisemitism.

According to 320 members of the House of Representatives who voted for H.R. 6090 (91 opposed), Israel alone is above criticism.  In addition, the proposed legislation would violate the right to free speech enshrined in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.   

Abetted by the United States, Israel’s sacrosanct logo emblazoned across the American political, economic and military landscape has allowed it to amass power, be absolved from judgment and to carry out, unimpeded, genocide in Gaza today. 

On the international stage, the United States has had a long history of providing absolution and cover for Israel’s crimes against humanity in Palestine.  Since 1972, it has cast its veto 53 times in the United Nations Security Council against resolutions or condemnations critical of Israel.  

In Washington’s latest move to dash Palestinian hopes for some semblance of self-determination, the United States, on 18 April 2024, vetoed a Security Council resolution recommending full membership in the United Nations for the State of Palestine.  The administration did so while concomitantly professing to be conducting diplomatic efforts to create a Palestinian state when the carnage ends.  

Unlike student protestors and their allies who know that there can be no business as usual as long as genocide in Gaza continues, the United States, however, presses on as though Israel, in its present form, has a future in the Middle East. 

Proponents of a “Free Palestine” are aware that their advocacy may come at an economic cost and a police record.  A price many are willing to pay especially when they have two worthy examples to draw on.

Rachel Corrie, a 23-year old college student from Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah on 16 March 2003.  

Corrie’s legacy has endured in Palestine.  Mothers and fathers have named their daughters after her and olive trees have been planted in her name.  Evergreen State College, where she was a student, is the first U.S. university to completely divest from Israel.  

Aaron Bushnell, an active duty member of the U.S. Air Force, was 25 years old when he self-immolated on 25 February 2024 outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.  His last words as the fire consumed him were “Free Palestine.” 

Before self-immolating, Bushnell said,  “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Officials in the Palestinian city of Jericho announced on 10 March 2024 that they had named a streetin his honor, as they had for Rachel Corrie in Ramallah in the West Bank.  

Nineteen Americans were awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Biden in  May 2024.  Even if they had lived, it is doubtful that Rachel Corrie and Aaron Bushnell would have been chosen.  Both gave their lives in order that Palestinians might finally live free. 

The desire to return and reclaim their homes have kept Palestinian hopes alive for 76 years.  For all that time they have had few allies.  They have now realized an ally in the worldwide Palestinian solidarity movement.  Through their actions, American students have demonstrated that they understand what many in positions of authority do not—that it is a duty, an obligation in and to democracy to resist unjust laws and unjust policies.

The Free Palestine Movement is Re-Defining the American Left

BY NICKY REID

 MAY 10, 2024
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Image by Hany Osman.

I grew up in the American far left and I’m really not exaggerating when I tell you that the movement saved my life. I discovered libertarian socialism and its various stateless subspecies at an age when I was feeling increasingly endangered as the last genderqueer kid on earth in the thick of rural Pennsylvania’s conservative Catholic pedophile country. I felt about as hopelessly ‘other’ as it gets until I discovered the Bush-era antiwar movement and began scraping the history books for other otherized voices like mine.

I found them buried about a mile beneath the bullshit in the lost chapter on another antiwar movement, the very distinctly ‘other’ antiwar movement of the sixties and seventies. Boldly countercultural voices like those of Michel Foucault, Fred Hampton, Paul Goodman, Huey Newton, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Russell Means gave me something to believe in when I didn’t even believe in myself. The fight against American imperialism at the bloody birth of the New American Century gave me a place to belong and a jihad to devote myself to long before I discovered that I wasn’t in fact the last genderqueer kid on earth, and I will remain grateful for this gift unto my dying breath.

But over the last several years I have found what passes for the left in this country, even the “far left”, to be disturbingly unrecognizable. I have seen an increasing willingness by so-called social anarchists to embrace downright authoritarian statism as the solution to nearly every social ill. I have seen seemingly lucid libertarian socialists galvanized behind the DNC’s elderly trojan horse, Bernie Sanders, and his chickenshit saplings in the Squad. I have seen these same so-called leftists lionize neoliberal darlings like the White Helmets and Volodymyr Zelensky while making excuses for sending bombs to their friends in Al-Nusra and the Azov Battalion. Meanwhile, I have seen more consistently antiwar voices, including my own, silenced, canceled, and removed from supposedly left-wing platforms.

I’ve been left with little other choice but to gasp in horror as the left that once inspired a weird teenager not to slit her wrists seems to have mutated into a censorious cult of Herbert Humphrey-style softcore social democrats willing to nail Rosa Luxemburg to the cross themselves as long as the Freikorps purge Trump from their ranks and hang a rainbow flag over the caskets of less compliant former comrades.

This grotesquely strange display of downright counterrevolutionary behavior has led me down some very strange roads in search of allies against empire. I’ve taken to self-identifying as a post-left anarchist and devoting myself entirely to the typically right libertarian principle of bottom unity while reaching out to other ideological heretics like so-called anarcho-capitalists, boogaloo boys, pan-Islamic nationalists, and heathen radical traditionalists. Meanwhile, I’ve also struggled to build a more tribal Queer identity that defies the left-right paradigm entirely and harkens back to a more primitive communal pagan consciousness.

But at the end of the day, my heart will always bleed left. I will always be that same pissed-off Yippie anarcho-transfeminist that the Catholic Church failed to gag, and this is why I look to YouTube footage of the anti-Zionist swarms now engulfing college campuses from coast to coast with a level of cautious hope that my broken bleeding heart hasn’t experienced in years.

Some call this the Free Palestine Movement, others call them Anti-Israel, but regardless of the labels, these kids have laid siege to hundreds of campuses across the country and across the globe, building nearly 80 encampments in the US alone in less than three weeks. They are jamming up traffic. They are occupying buildings. They are literally ruining parades by supergluing their bodies to the fucking blacktop. They are shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge. They are trolling Joe Biden on the campaign trail at every corner with jeers of “Genocide Joe!” They are relentless, furious, shameless, and absolutely fucking obnoxious and I couldn’t love them more if they were my own goddamn children.

All of this chaos is being raised not on behalf of some woke cause celebre, but on behalf of the most marginalized people on the planet, the 34,000+ Palestinians slaughtered in cold blood with American weapons by every liberal’s favorite racist apartheid state in Israel. And the lives of millions more hang in the balance as Benjamin Netanyahu attempts to starve the Gaza Strip into submission in an open plot to push those Arab refugees into the desert wastelands of the Sinai Peninsula.

The only reason why any politician or media personality is even paying lip service to the notion of a ceasefire to this holocaust is because these beautiful obnoxious brats have gotten up in their fucking faces and refused to behave until the adults in the room address the mass grave of bodies decomposing in the backyard. They have burned every bridge, crossed every Rubicon, and crushed the toes of every institution of power within stomping distance and the system is stomping back with every jackboot they can shove their bloody feet into.

Every single newspaper and network from left to right has baselessly slandered these kids as antisemites with both parties joining the synergistic corporate chorus of condemnation. The universities who rely on their student’s debt to turn a profit have teamed up with local police forces taking their marching orders directly from the Department of Homeland Security to brutally evict this anti-Zionist question by any means necessary. Batons, pepper spray, tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, everything south of cluster munitions seems to be on the table and I’m sure Tom Cotton is working on that.

Sadly, this story just seems to grow more sinister by the hour with each passing detail. In Ohio and Indiana, snipers have been photographed on the rooves of campus buildings with high-powered rifles trained on unarmed students and in Denver, CBS Colorado has reported that the state’s National Guard are already among the law enforcement presence, which is precisely what GOP chickenhawks like House Speaker Mike Johnson are quite openly calling for, a repeat of Kent State.

Democrats and their neocon allies however seem to prefer a more federal final solution. Joe Biden, a man whose own political rap sheet would make a grand wizard shout “goddamn!” like a Black Baptist in a white whorehouse, is calling to “aggressively implement the first ever national strategy to counter antisemitism” which would include “the full force of the federal government” to crack down on dangerous speech which that old bitch tells us has “no place on college campuses.”

Meanwhile, a bipartisan effort in the House of Representatives is being waged to send government “antisemitism monitors” to every college campus funded by the federal government as part of their College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigation and Accountability or COLUMBIA Act, which would essentially turn the Department of Education into a veritable police force in charge of stamping out anything certain racists like Joe Biden and Mike Johnson deem antisemitic.

This may all sound terrifying, but it is also the fruit of a job well done. We haven’t seen so many institutions of power gang up on teenagers like this since the age of the freaks who inspired me to spit in the Pope’s eye. What these kids need now is us, the scary veteran extremists who the news loves to label as outside actors, but what we really are is a sort of campus counter-police force, elders with guns and skills. We need to join these brave kids, listen to what they have to teach us and pay it forward with black blocks and AR toting militias. The left is finally coming back around again to a grade of anti-imperialism that even the Squad can’t seem to assimilate, and we should take this opportunity to welcome them home with loaded arms.

And to some of my new allies outside of the left who will bitch that the campus Free Palestine Movement is little more than a different strain of identity politics; I say so the fuck what. The culture war may have corrupted the antiwar movement, but the culture itself was never really the problem, the emphasis was. The truth is that it was the culture warriors of the Black Power Movement who radicalized the antiwar movement into something Nixon needed tin soldiers to put down and both the Chicano and Gay Liberation Movements were defined by their own indigenous oppositions to imperialism.

This is what the radical left really needs right now to become truly radical again, not politics, but a culture defined by resistance to colonialism. This is what turned me on and turned me dangerous because it made the fight for peace in far-off places deeply personal. To put another long rant short: if we can convince Generation Z that smashing the American Empire is woke, then Babylon is officially fucked. Maybe that’s a big ‘if’ but what else do we have to lose but bodies at this point?

We’ve got the momentum, freaky people, so let’s make it fucking happen. Let’s finally make the American left dangerous again.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.