By DAN BELLE and N. IRAZU
In over nine months of the global fight to end Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, college campuses have become critical sites of struggle in many countries—particularly the United States. Some of the most visible opposition to Israel’s offensive and the most focused efforts at repression have centered there. As the summer lull comes to an end and campuses begin to reopen, we will have an essential moment to learn from the last period and plan what to do next.
What has this movement accomplished? What obstacles does it face? What are the central tasks today and in the coming months?
World picture
The balance sheet today is highly contradictory, both globally and in the American theater. The outcome of the present phase cannot easily be projected. Neither defeatism nor triumphalism are warranted.
Without question, Israel’s offensive has been devastating. It has killed close to one in 50 residents of Gaza and injured at least one in 25. About 90% of those remaining are displaced. More than half have no physical home to return to. Imposed famine continues and infectious disease runs rampant. Satellite imagery shows more than half of Gaza’s vegetation land has been destroyed. The few remaining health facilities are hanging by a thread. All of the universities have been damaged or destroyed. Israel continues to murder, maim, terrorize, kidnap, imprison and torture Gaza’s residents. At the rate at which Gaza was able to rebuild from prior offensives, it will take 80 years to replace just the fully destroyed buildings.
The offensive in the West bank continues and expands. Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, plans to move toward formally annexing more than 60% of the West bank already controlled by Israel. Israel’s attacks in the territory escalate with air strikes.
All of this is accomplished with steady material and diplomatic support from the United States government—only briefly slowed. Biden’s threats to stop aid to Israel should it invade Rafah amounted to nothing when the moment came. Despite Biden’s periodic reassurances that a ceasefire deal is on the verge of realization, Netanyahu promises to continue the war without end. By appearances, nothing has changed.
At the same time, Israel’s steady progress toward full normalization with Arab states has been interrupted and its international isolation has grown to new heights. The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have passed major rulings against it. At least 11 countries have recalled ambassadors from Israel or cut ties completely.
As symbolic as these measures may be, they reflect less visible, but far more threatening developments around the world, undermining the authority of Israel’s allies as well.
In Egypt, for instance, actions against Israel have created openings to challenge the U.S.-backed al-Sisi government and its collaboration with Israel’s colonial war on Palestine—particularly its refusal to open the Rafah crossing for humanitarian supplies. In one instance, marchers disobeyed state orders to stay away from Tahrir Square and occupied that site drenched with the memory of the 2011 uprising that overthrew al-Sisi’s predecessor and fellow prop of U.S. imperialism, Hosni Mubarak.
It was precisely these kinds of actions in solidarity with the Intifada of 2001-2005 that made space for the movement that would burst onto the world stage in 2011 and stagger imperialism’s client regimes in the Arab world. In Jordan too, the movement in solidarity with Palestine menaces the United States’s loyal ally King Abdallah II. Protesters have faced police repression for marching on the Israeli embassy and on the border with Israel.
Signs of crisis can also be seen in public resignations of American diplomatic staff, such as that of Anelle Sheline, who complained that American isolation in the Arab world had made her job “almost impossible.”
None of this is eased by the regular economic disruption created by Houthi attacks on shipping, the rising tensions between Israel and Hezbollah, or military exchanges between Israel and Iran. The last of these exposed Israel’s reliance on a coalition of local and regional forces to defend itself and revealed Jordan’s direct military collaboration with the colonial settler state.
Israel itself has faced severe economic contraction (largely from losing the labor of about 180,000 Palestinians, calling up reserve troops, and dislocating part of the population). Some 20,000 soldiers have been wounded, more than 8000 have been permanently disabled, and 670 died. The deep schism between fundamentalist and secular Zionist society in Israel that receded after Oct. 7 has blown open again (though firmly within Zionist bounds) with marches and street fights over the question of continuing the war or negotiating for hostage releases and a ceasefire.
The more one looks at the world situation—the potential for today’s solidarity movement in the Arab world to break out into a wide-scale popular rebellion against the ruling agents of imperialism, Israel’s military fragility, its economic crisis, and its political crisis—the more stark is the importance of U.S. aid to Israel.
Balance sheet of the U.S. solidarity movement
While Biden has only inched beyond a few hollow threats to reduce Israel’s aid, the broader shifts over Palestine in the U.S. demand the attention of every political leader.
Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets over and over again in the U.S.—something that was inconceivable for this movement a few years ago. Polls consistently find that about two-thirds of Americans want an immediate ceasefire (even an immediate Israeli ceasefire). This has more or less been reflected in unions at the national level. More than half of U.S. union members now belong to a federation that has passed some kind of ceasefire resolution. To this is joined many local resolutions—sometimes far more politically clear than those of the federations—and statements from other organizations like the NAACP.
The student encampments helped bring visibility to the war’s opposition. We can see a growing commitment in students’ willingness to continue in the face of severe crackdowns and in the many efforts to defend them – including the recent vote by UAW local 4811 to strike in opposition to repression of the UCLA encampment.
The American ruling class does not take this political awakening lightly. It hopes to use segments of the Democratic Party to canalize and co-opt much of the movement, isolate it, and intensify the repression already prepared and rehearsed in recent months.
This approach is employed with different proportions, forms and timing in response to every serious movement: Following the 2014 and 2020 uprisings against police murder, the 2011 Occupy movement, the movements against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Vietnam antiwar movement, the Black power and civil rights movements, and the rise of organized labor in the 1930s and ’40s.
Our movement can beat back this dual offensive. To do so requires organizing broad political defense campaigns that build support for those under attack while broadening and strengthening support for Palestinian self-determination itself. Every defense campaign offers an opening into spaces where people are not quite ready to discuss the question of Palestine on its own, but do feel compelled to discuss whether or not to defend someone’s civil liberties.
Repression is only useful if it causes a movement to shrink. That’s why defense efforts which expand the ranks and popularity of a movement tend to quickly discourage crackdowns for a period.
Expanding and strengthening the movement to a point where it can stop U.S. aid to Israel, preventing its domestication by the Democratic Party, and defending itself from broad political offensives all require sharper political clarity. This means organizing ambitious education campaigns, and campuses are key places to start.
The movement against the war in Vietnam began with massive educational events. In its early phases—years before its peak—a single teach-in could draw thousands or even tens of thousands from a single campus. Certainly today’s technology makes it easier to be familiar with details of the genocide. But a movement cannot survive on a string of facts or a barrage of shocking video footage. Movements are fundamentally about ideas and values. They are about ways of seeing the world and ways of relating to the world.
Our movement must do more than establish facts. It must overturn narratives that millions of people use to make sense of facts, such as: the idea that “this is just what happens in other parts of the world,” that “both sides share blame,” that “it’s complicated,” that “what Israel does is awful, but Palestinians would do the same if given half the chance,” or even that “U.S. support to Israel enables it to moderate Netanyahu.”
The above ideas are very common. They are compatible with and often underpin calls for a U.S.-brokered ceasefire (which usually include explicit language that places blame and demands on Palestinians). They allow the holder to oppose violence and death while still equating Palestinian self-determination with genocide, and while identifying the U.S. as the most progressive force in the equation. And so they are also compatible with supporting U.S. aid to Israel.
At the same time, the movement has put basic support for Zionism into question like never before. The tens and maybe hundreds of thousands at the core of the movement routinely march under slogans that defend Palestinian self-determination and call for the defeat of the Zionist project.
Still, for millions, the prominence of such slogans only puts the question on the table, it doesn’t answer it. So it is a critical moment to provide explanations to questions like: What is a free Palestine from the river to the sea? Why is Israel an apartheid state? Why does the right of return matter? Why is the two-state solution a lie? What does it mean to defend the right to self-determination? Why does this movement matter to those in the United States? How is Zionism antisemitic? Why is the struggle for Palestinian self-determination a threat to imperialism? How does this matter to struggles against racism? If we don’t strive to help people answer these questions, Fox News and The New York Times will.
Halting U.S. aid to Israel
Even if every university divested from Israel tomorrow, the offensives on Gaza and the West Bank would continue without interruption. But every Israeli analyst knows their military is dependent on the U.S. As retired Israeli Major Yitzak Brick put it, “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
So while it might play an important tactical role, students can’t restrict themselves to fights or negotiations with the administration over university investments. They must concern themselves with the larger struggle to stop federal military aid.
It is also essential to understand that the U.S. does not back Israel to the hilt by a temporary fluke, or because pro-Israel lobbyists are very powerful, or even because there’s a strong domestic support base. The U.S. supports Israel because it serves fundamental strategic interests of U.S. imperialism: the geographical division of the Arab world and a state permanently hostile to Arab self-determination, with a broad base of support among its own citizenry that furnishes an ideologically committed military. Israeli defeat and Palestinian victory would undermine the authority of U.S. allies in the region and embolden anti-imperialist mass movements around the world.
For these reasons, it is not possible to simply lobby the government to drop aid for Israel. The entire U.S. capitalist class fears the rise of independent (let alone unified) Arab nations, and the loss of control over oil and key trade routes—particularly while facing increased competition with China and Russia and a variety of economic difficulties. There is no “friend” in the Democratic Party who is of any use in convincing or cajoling U.S. capital to give up competing on the world stage.
However, those same uprisings feared by the U.S. ruling class would transform the position of U.S. workers. Not only is it true that low standards of living for wage workers anywhere puts downward pressure on standards of living for workers everywhere (because jobs tend to move towards the lowest bidder).
It is also true that as prisoners of capital, workers can secure no way out for themselves and their children without ending the miserable conditions of the present social order. Every victory against oppression and exploitation promises a step in this direction. The Egyptian masses who overthrew Mubarak in 2011 inspired state workers in Wisconsin. They followed the example of the Egyptian occupation of Tahrir Square and occupied their own state capitol, chanting “fight like an Egyptian” while rallying to defeat a historic offensive on public sector unions.
At the same time, workers do not own the wealth of the world, but they do produce it. And so not only can they be won to the struggle to end U.S. aid to Israel, they are also necessary to realize its victory. Workers at ports, warehouses, trucking, and rail can stop shipments to Israel directly (as have Belgian and Spanish dockworkers). Workers in production can stop the manufacture of the weapons themselves. Those in any number of industries can create enough of an economic and political crisis that the bosses decide they need to cease arms sales to Israel.
The student movement can create the conditions for intervention in this struggle by broad layers of the working class. This requires not only mass education campaigns that spread throughout the society, but also the organization and mobilization of ever larger numbers to end U.S. aid to Israel. For without a mass movement of millions that actively understands and supports workers’ strikes against aid to Israel, no group of workers will be able to hold out on their own.
This work means breaking out of the bubbles of social media and the campus created by capital. On most—if not all—campuses, the student movement has yet to seriously reach out to even a significant minority of the student body. This might seem futile to some, but to many people in the early 1960s—the years following the Red Scare —it probably seemed futile to organize around the Vietnam War at all on campuses, especially when the issue was banned even from peace marches. Yet little more than five years later, a majority of the student body on hundreds of campuses engaged in university-wide strikes against the war, in which students turned their universities into schools of the antiwar movement.
In that movement students consciously reached out to active-duty GIs to recruit them to the opposition. They threw flyers over the fences at military bases, created coffee shops to meet soldiers off duty, found their way into barracks, helped organize marches and contingents with active-duty troops, organized defense campaigns for soldiers who resisted duty, and even helped organize antiwar entertainment for them.
The soldiers created antiwar newspapers, engaged in symbolic protest, refused orders, deserted their posts, gave false intelligence reports, and killed their officers. By 1971 the Pentagon leadership decided that if they didn’t end the war in Vietnam the military command structure would collapse.
In May 1968, French student protesters marched over to workers’ quarters at the right moment and won over so many so firmly that they nearly made a revolution.
In some ways, students in the present movement have already begun to make these connections, as union defense of students attests. And certainly, it makes sense for students to begin by reaching out to workers on their campuses and in their immediate communities. But it will get more difficult to win workers the closer they are to the core interests of capital (profit, basic industry, arms production for example). The further the movement goes towards this layer of workers, the more essential a large, conscious movement will be to provide the base to win.
Connecting with workers also means developing a collaborative relationship with them before contemplating demonstrations at their job site—especially actions that block access to work. To do otherwise will embolden the right wing in a workplace and isolate its left wing. Our mission is to do the opposite.
If the movement doesn’t have the strength to win over the workers on a site related to arms production or distribution, it is hard to see how it could have the strength to take on both the state and the workers long enough to stop production at a magnitude that noticeably impacts a war. In reality, such an action can do little but lend publicity to the group that organizes it.
Mass democratic organizing
To build the kind of mass movement that is possible and necessary today, leadership by cliques of friends or secret decision-making will not suffice. We need a movement made up of political organizers capable of thinking through problems and solving them, not a passive fan base capable of generating likes and content engagement.
We need organizations that people trust. This requires transparent and democratic organizing, so that all feel responsible for working out and carrying out the organizations’ decisions, and understand where decisions came from and what outcomes are expected. This means electing leaders and maintaining the nature of actions as voted on and advertised. This organizational form is also what protects the safety of an organization and its members.
The San Francisco State University encampment used this approach and not only organized some very significant actions, but won some of the more impressive sets of concessions from admin through public negotiations that involved and educated large layers of activists.
This kind of organization can be replicated in campuses and coalitions throughout the country. With the experiences students acquire there, they will be well equipped to organize state and regional conferences that can serve as recruitment, educational, and organizing hubs. Such conferences could hold large votes to determine the character of mass demonstrations. These experiences could enable students to organize the same type of conference at the national level.
Such conferences were central to the success of the Vietnam antiwar movement, and they organized debates not of hundreds, but thousands. Already this summer the Palestinian Youth Movement has shown that it is capable of bringing over 3000 activists to one multi-day conference (with 12 hours of panels a day!). If we imagine a similar conference—but with the space to propose, debate, and vote on national actions—we will begin to contemplate the real potential of this movement.
In the near-term, organizing for regional and then national days of action, called by student and youth groups, could provide the movement with important focal points that put the question of war back on the national stage. These activities will also provide important experiences of collaboration across regions and provide the opportunity to build a base for broad actions (especially through education and propaganda campaigns).
In this period we should organize with the goal of winning large majorities on campuses to the movement and to prepare the ground for real student strikes against U.S. aid to Israel— not symbolic walk-outs of dozens, but broad actions encompassing entire student bodies capable of closing campuses, or even better, turning them into schools of the movement for the broader society. Some campuses are surely much closer to such aims than others. But these are goal posts by which we can judge our effectiveness locally and as a national movement.
The 2024 Elections
Perhaps the greatest obstacles we will face in the coming months are the 2024 elections. Though the movement overall denounces Biden, its real political independence will be tested more forcefully every day we come closer to Nov. 5.
Politicians and political operatives in the Democratic Party itself litter the movement. The fortunes of every one of them are tied to the national party—not to mention U.S. imperialism as a whole—and the degree to which they prove useful. Funding for local districts, appointments, committee seats, favorable relations with business, campaign funding, the effects of a presidential race on local votes—all of these are at stake for even the lowliest local politician.
Connected to these are a multitude of organizations and individuals, from non-profits to unions to reformist socialist groups. As their political orientation depends upon winning favors from Democrats, they will find delivering a defeat to Biden deeply painful and frightening.
The recent debate and supreme court decision on presidential immunity suggest what is likely to come. Trump will probably continue to position himself to Biden’s right on Palestine (saying Biden is a Palestinian, suggesting he would let Israel “finish the job” etc.) and promise to more forcefully repress our movement. Meanwhile, partisans of the Democratic Party will increasingly raise the alarm about the meaning of Trump’s presidency (it will be the end of democracy, he will accelerate support to Israel etc.)
These perspectives will be used to persuade people to stop visibly exposing Biden in mass demonstrations (either by abandoning actions altogether or by dropping the crucial demand on aid for Israel in favor of demands that neither challenge Biden nor interrupt the war), and instead campaign for Democrats.
If such a campaign is successful, it could mean derailing the student movement until the spring or even later (because of where breaks and exams tend to fall). As campus groups lose about a quarter of their members every year (mainly their most experienced), the election question could deal a serious body blow. Especially if student leaders miseducate millions on the nature of their power and their enemies by orienting the movement to support its opponents.
The isolation of Israel’s backers is not our problem, it is theirs. That opposing aid to Israel clearly and openly sharpens their crisis only makes it a more powerful and necessary focal point for the struggle.
Building the kind of movement that is possible and necessary today thus means developing greater political clarity on the questions of the Democratic Party and class independence. This will not happen automatically. It is one reason among many why leaders who wish to succeed must organize an independent socialist party whose purpose is to create a new society led by working people, and not to prop up the murderous rule of their bosses.
