Yesterday, a flood of protesters - over 100,000 of them - coursed over the lower deck of the Brooklyn Bridge - a wave of chants, drums, flags and kuffiyehs. Jiddos and jiddis from Palestine marched shoulder-to-shoulder with esoteric Bushwick bisexuals. Signs bore slogans professing solidarity from the Philippines, through Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria and Morocco, all the way to Puerto Rico, Colombia and Chile. Many protestors carried signs which proudly reconciled their Jewish faith with their anti-Zionism. Many Black Americans’ signs quoted Malcolm X - particularly on how the media can trick you into loving your oppressors. For some indigenous Americans, maps showing the steady dwindling of Palestinian territories made a sufficiently poignant statement. I doubt any political candidate could ever assemble such a multi-ethnic, transgenerational and inclusive coalition - certainly not Joe Biden, judging from the sentiments expressed by many of the protesters. Passers-by overwhelmingly greeted them with smiles, raised fists of solidarity, or supportive honks. They danced to our rhythms, chanted along with them, and threw up enthusiastic victory signs. Many thousands dropped what they were doing and joined along the way. Hecklers, generally, were rare, if vocal. But most were presumably humbled by a sense of awe.

The situation was no different in most major cities in the West - Chicago, Los Angeles, London and Madrid have all seen huge demonstrations, and even the outright banning of pro-Palestinian protests in France and Germany failed to quell the passions there. Pro-Palestinian sentiment in the West seems to be reaching unprecedented levels. Despite minimal media coverage, the marches seem to keep getting bigger.
The obvious point of comparison for the latest wave of protests would be the 2020 George Floyd protests. Both movements aim to redress the plight of a marginalized people, both movements are of similar size and scope, both are capable of spreading across the US fairly quickly - penetrating even into the country’s heartland. As both movements unfolded, it seemed that they would both transform the political discussion in meaningful ways. However, the 2020 protests were soon co-opted, as concrete demands about centuries of systemic racism and police militarization gave way to much less substantive (and therefore less difficult) issues such as land acknowledgements, ethnic representation in the media and other questions of optics.

The Palestinian solidarity movement has the potential to be immune to similar co-opting and being defanged, for a crucial reason: anti-racist rhetoric bears a social benefit, whereas pro-Palestinian rhetoric bears a social cost. To be ‘anti-racist’ holds a social benefit in the mainstream of US political discourse - even if that term holds no concrete definition and can easily be divorced from action and reduced to rhetoric. To be pro-Palestinian demands vocal and visible support for concrete geopolitical outcomes which are fundamentally at odds with the structures that govern us. At the height of the 2020 protests, companies and brands scrambled to signal their virtue, to make their messaging match what they believed to be the ‘woke’ zeitgeist of the new decade. Even the most white-bread of middle-class towns held kneeling vigils for George Floyd in front of their local police stations. And soon, every middle-manager and CPA across the country was appending diversity statements to their resumes and attending company wide DEI training that simply implored people to ‘keep learning.’. To be rhetorically ‘anti-racist’ afforded many enough social benefit so as to get away without doing the actual work (or defining posting on Instagram as the sumtotal of The Work). In the extreme, the rhetoric was so socially beneficial that it was translated into actual market value, as a boom emerged in corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consulting - in other words, training people how to reproduce precisely that kind of rhetoric. And between Oct 7th and Oct 10th, in one fell swoop, that entire industry’s beds were decisively soiled. Diversity and inclusion language was not prepared to handle decolonizing and land back movements unfolding in real time. Land acknowledgements are precious little defense against the repeated bombing of hospitals.

That immediacy makes Palestine different. Not only does opposing US foreign policy interests, or even being generally pro-Palestinian hold no social benefit in this country, it’s now been shown that it holds a social cost. The spate of firings and disciplinary actions in the wake of the siege on Gaza have targeted a broad swath of high-profile professions - from academia, through law, entertainment, publishing and journalism. Nor is this kind of blacklisting new, by any means. Rather, the victims of this subtle but persistent new McCarthyism have doubtless been seeing this dynamic play out as their thoughts and positions around the issue of Palestine coalesced. Of course, this silencing and blacklisting of those with views unpalatable to the US State Department should be condemned as yet another of the many pieces of rubble flaking off this country’s crumbling liberal façade. But there is an important dialectical inversion at play here - namely, that it is precisely this social cost that keeps in only that segment of the US Left most committed to action, and keeps out the clout chasers and discourse junkies. It’s hard to make an infographic about decolonizing Palestine go viral– not in small part because Meta has been caught shadowbanning pro-Palestine content anyway. There’s certainly no burgeoning Palestine corporate consulting industry. 

Like so much of modern politics, a pro-Palestinian meme making the rounds sums the situation up well. “When they tell me I’ll lose endorsements and followers for speaking about Palestine,” the caption reads, as an Office-era Steve Carell climbs a desk chair, holding a loudspeaker above his head. As he does, the chorus of Ana Dammi Falastini by Mohammad Assaf starts blaring. This defiance is the prevalent attitude on the ground. The most vocal segment of the movement for solidarity in Palestine in the US embraces the fact that their government sees these protests as a threat, that the right-wing press can’t find enough slanderous accusations to throw at them, that their actions ruffle the feathers of those they, probably rightfully, perceive to be their enemies. The more slander thrown at the protesters, the bigger the protests get. 

Unlike BLM, the underlying motivation for the vast majority of these protesters risking arrest and defamation is not merely reforms - however concrete - to the US power structure. The movement’s rejection of Israel represents the rejection of a Dorian Gray-style mirror of US imperialism. It is a wholesale rejection of a presidential administration that promises $106 billion to fund its global ambitions - including the present ethnic cleansing in Gaza - while gradually narrowing its student debt relief plans to a point. It is a wholesale rejection of a Senate that votes unanimously (that is, including Bernie Sanders, the last politician many of these youth ever trusted) to condemn their expressions of free speech and assembly as ‘repugnant.’ It is a wholesale rejection of the very idea of ‘US foreign policy interests abroad,’ a retroactive collective repentance for Korea, for Guatemala, for Iran, for Indonesia, for Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is, perhaps, the beginning of the end of Pax Americana, a moniker as ironic and blood-drenched as its Roman or British counterparts. 

The fact that this rejection of Pax Americana is channeled through solidarity for Palestine and criticism of Zionism is yet another key to understanding the nature of these protests. The effect is almost Brechtian. Bertold Brecht, the German radical poet and playwright, elaborated his theory of alienation as a means of distancing a character or characters from the audience in such a way as to prevent identification with the character, thus placing any moral judgment the audience makes on the conscious level. The Israeli regime is one level - but only one level - removed from the United States. While many of these youth have approached their current positions from a gradual, internalized sense of unease with respect to their own country’s politics, seeing the full force of US economic and foreign policy interest projected onto that Israeli regime shines a harsh, disfiguring spotlight on the issue that forces a conscious grappling with the morality of the issue. As grotesque and brutal as the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan may have been, the sense of disgust for many US citizens was still a subconscious one. The IDF’s actions in the past three weeks have sparked a moment of Brechtian alienation which may continue to shine for decades to come. US citizens have started to grapple with the picture of Dorian Gray consciously, and the recognition that the image is indeed one of themselves is dawning. The narrative the United States wants the world to see is so removed from the actual footage in Gaza that the suspension of disbelief dissolves in the face of so much cognitive dissonance. 

“We won’t free Palestine, Palestine will free us” is a slogan that has become prominent in the last few weeks. Once again, there is a dialectical inversion at play here. Naturally, as important a statement of public support as it is, youth pouring into the street will not by itself free Palestine. Rather, the current historical juncture has given us countless opportunities to expand the depth and breadth of our struggle against the US-dominated world order. A movement led by Palestinians, for the benefit of Palestinians, forces us to put the identitarian labels that divide us apart and form broad-based coalitions. As the slogan goes, none of us are free until all of us are free. The steep social cost of the movement filters out those who see Palestine as a trend and keeps in only those who are willing to pay that cost. The role of the Israeli state as a Western neocolonial surrogate lends us the clarity to better critique and interrogate this nation’s complicity in maintaining an unjust global order. 

Of course, none of this is automatic, and mass street protests are just the first step. Our task will soon move past merely providing visibility and striking out against Palestinian erasure and will require us to understand just how deeply the tendrils of US economic and foreign policy interests pervade every aspect of our lives, and to organize against that many-headed hydra in tactical, precise and profound ways. Protests do not change the world by themselves, we do. We must allow Palestine to free us.