If You Want the Pro-Palestine Demonstrators to Win, then Share This Article's Viewpoint With Them
It's about what they must start to do in order to win
Anyone paying attention to events in the United States knows that the student Pro-Palestine movement protesting U.S. support for Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza is growing larger and larger every day. I say Bravo! to these students.
The Pro-Palestine students, far from being silenced, are spurred on by anger at the increasingly strong repressive measures against them taken by college administrations using or threatening to use police or even National Guard violence to arrest the protesting students and anybody who supports them even if they are only camping on a college campus.
These repressive measures are accompanied by pro-Zionists attempting to persuade the general public, contrary to the truth, that the protesting students are wittingly or unwittingly evil: that they are “pro-Hamas” and hence in support of killing noncombatant Israeli Jews and driving them into the sea, which these pro-Zionists insist is the real meaning of the protesters chant of “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free.” The pro-Zionists, in other words, say that only antisemitism explains the motivation of the pro-Palestine protesters. The pro-Zionists look for any example of a pro-Zionism Jewish student being upset or inconvenienced or angered or harmed by the demonstrators and play it up for all it is worth, exaggerating when necessary, to convince the public that the demonstrators are simply antisemites, even violent antisemites.
The fact is, of course, that the demonstrators are not antisemites, not at all. Many of them are Jews. They are not angry at Jews; they are angry at the unjust genocidal violence of the Israeli government and especially angry that the U.S. (and most U.S. colleges) support the Israeli government. This is why they are demanding that their colleges divest from Israel, and why they’re demonstrating against corporations that provide weapons or other services to the Israeli government, and why they’re furious at President Biden who supplies bombs and other weapons to Israel while it uses them to commit genocide.
When the demonstrators chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” they are saying that all of Palestine (including the part of it now called Israel) should be free in the sense that all the people living there—Jews and non-Jews alike—should be equal under the law without the current apartheid laws against non-Jews. The notion that this phrase means they want to push the Jews into the sea is a lie that was first expressed by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion in 1961, with zero evidence, for the purpose of ensuring that ordinary Israeli Jews would be maximally frightened by Palestinians.
The pro-Palestine demonstrators are morally right, and their critics who defend Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians are morally wrong.
But being morally right is not enough to win the day
The problem, however, is that the pro-Palestine demonstrators are not succeeding in persuading the general U.S. public that they are not antisemites. The pro-Zionism accusation against the demonstrators is that because they are protesting against Israeli violence that is (supposedly!) for the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe from Hamas antisemitic violence, therefore the demonstrators are, in effect if not intent, antisemitic.
This accusation of antisemitism is extremely powerful for two reasons:
It is highly emotional because many Americans know about and are horrified by the Holocaust and for that reason—to their credit—they do not want to take the side in the conflict that they believe (wrongly, as it turns out, but they don’t know this) is opposed to what Israel must do to make Israeli Jews safe from antisemitic violence.
The pro-Palestine demonstrators never explain the KEY FACT—the ONLY fact—that would persuasively refute the pro-Zionism accusation of antisemitism. This KEY FACT is that Israeli violence against Palestinians (more than seven decades of violent ethnic cleansing and humiliating military occupation and apartheid laws) was not and is NOT in any way whatsoever for the purpose of making Jews safe. Its purpose, to the contrary, is and has for decades been to make Palestinians a frightening bogeyman enemy that the billionaire Israeli ruling class pretends to protect ordinary Israeli Jews from and thereby gets away with severely economically oppressing and getting rich off of those Jews, as I prove here (regarding the present) and here (regarding the years of the Holocaust and subsequently) and here (regarding why Israel funded Hamas and worked to keep it in power).
The only response that the pro-Palestine demonstrators make to the accusation of antisemitism is not persuasive because it avoids expressing the KEY FACT. The demonstrators say, “Look, some of us are Jews.” But so what? Misguided Jews (as the pro-Zionists think of them) who oppose what Israel does to make Jews safe are still IN EFFECT IF NOT INTENT antisemitic. The demonstrators say, “We don’t support Hamas.” Well, unfortunately some of them say things that sound pretty damn close to supporting Hamas; for example some of them refer to October 7 as justified resistance. What such demonstrators fail to grasp is that Hamas is, tacitly in effect, AN AGENT of the Israeli government and not at all a force resisting or threatening Zionism, which is why Israel has for decades funded Hamas and worked to keep it in power (as I prove in the above linked article here again for your convenience.) Hamas commits unjustifiable and counter-productive terrorist violence (not justifiable and productive class war violence) deliberately aimed at non-combatant Israeli civilians, which HELPS the Zionist rulers of Israel. Class war violence would DEFEAT the Zionist rulers of Israel. The demonstrators don’t understand this and that is why they are losing the fight to stop the U.S. government from supporting Israel, as explained further below.
To Actually WIN the pro-Palestine demonstrators must start refuting the chief Zionist lie
Because the pro-Palestine demonstrators never refute the chief Zionist lie—that Israeli violence is for the purpose of making Jews safe—the accusation of antisemitism succeeds in persuading very many good and decent American. The result is unfortunately—tragically!—that U.S. public support for Israel (apparently still a majority) remains great enough to permit the U.S. ruling class to ignore the pro-Palestine demonstrators and continue to support Israel, even while Israel is engaged in committing genocide. Sure, many Americans who support Israel have great misgivings about the current genocidal violence in Gaza, but because they view Israel positively as a force protecting Jews from antisemitic violence they are not about to seriously oppose the U.S. government’s support of Israel during what they view as a crisis for Israelis such as the current period.
This is in sharp contrast to how the American public forced the U.S. ruling class to do a 180 and switch from supporting apartheid in South Africa to condemning it when the vast majority of the American public, after learning the truth about this apartheid, was appalled by it.
The reason that it was possible for the anti-South-Africa-apartheid movement to prevail is because all it had to do was educate the public about the fact of apartheid. Since there was no persuasive (for Americans) narrative about this apartheid that defended it as morally just, as soon as Americans learned about the mere existence of this apartheid they opposed it. In contrast, there is a very powerful narrative about Israeli violence and apartheid against Palestinians—that it is necessary to make Jews safe—that makes many Americans believe that this violence and apartheid is morally just.
The failure of the pro-Palestine demonstrators to refute the Zionist lie (that Israeli violence is necessary to make Jews safe) is thus the sole reason why the pro-Palestine demonstrators do not get sufficient support from the general public to force the U.S. government to do a 180 and switch from supporting Israeli violence against Palestinians (by providing the weapons even if it rhetorically expresses mild misgivings about it) to condemning it unconditionally.
If you have any influence with any pro-Palestine demonstrators, please share this article with them. Without this understanding of what it takes to win, they will lose.
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to unite all of the have-nots against the haves who use Zionist violence and oppress the have-nots in countless ways everyday.
Further reading:
Somewhat new reader of yours here. Is there a concise way that the university students can convey that message? It's been a tactic of minders and other such thought police to throw out such accusations in order to derail discussion of the topic at hand. i.e. as we see on social media anti-establishment views are met with accusations of being secretly Russian affiliated, being sexist, being racist, being a [insert political affiliation here], and so on. Posters that respond to these claims usually wind up on the back foot, discussing that instead of the topic that lead to their accusations, so I was under the impression that the protestors had it right to focus on the message of stopping the genocide.