Will the Growing 'Pro-Palestine' Protests Become a Mass Movement that can WIN?

Yes, but only if their anti-Zionism participants stop fighting with one arm and one leg tied behind their back

Read the full Jacobin article here.

Demonstrations show to the participants and also to the general public how much active support there is for its demand. Often there is a snowball effect, as seems to be the case with “pro-Palestine” demonstrations today. How come?

Initial smaller demonstrations persuade people who did not join them to join a subsequent one. Why? Because the earlier demonstrations, though small, made them realize that more people than they had at first thought support its demand. This means there is a real possibility of a movement for the demand growing large enough to actually win, that it is not foolish to try to win its demand. And this means that it NOW makes sense to join the demonstrations. This is what happened with the anti-Jim Crow Civil Rights demonstrations and the Anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations in my lifetime, and I’m sure with others as well.

Demonstrations build world-changing movements because they let people see that they are not alone in wanting the change demanded by them. When the vast majority of people who want some anti-establishment reform—be it the 8 hour day, the abolition of Jim Crow, the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, U.S. Out of Vietnam—learn that far from being a small minority in wanting that reform they are in fact the vast majority, then their confidence and hopefulness rise to the point that they collectively do whatever it takes to win. When people learn that they are the vast majority in wanting to abolish class inequality—egalitarian revolution—then they will do whatever it takes to make THAT happen (by doing something like this, perhaps.)

The ruling class knows this perfectly. When the aim of increasingly large demonstrations starts to include not just a reform of class inequality but its abolition, the ruling class has to choose between using violent repression to stop the demonstrations (as it did to end Occupy Wall Street) or to grant the demanded reform in order to prevent the movement from continuing the process of growing larger and—the horror!—becoming an explicitly revolutionary one (which is why the racist LBJ and the racist members of Congress abolished Jim Crow, as I discuss here.)

Why do I put “pro-Palestine” in quotation marks?

I hope the “pro-Palestine” demonstrations keep growing larger and larger. But I worry they won’t grow large enough to win. Why? Because the anti-Zionism movement is currently crippled ideologically and hence is fighting with one arm and one leg tied behind its back, as I discuss here, where you can learn also why I put “pro-Palestine” in quotation marks.