More than 6 months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the global solidarity campaign has only escalated.
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Despite the crackdown, the global solidarity campaign with Palestine is only escalating (Illustrated by Mahdi Rtail; Al Mayadeen English)
If anyone was to predict, prior to October 7, that Ivy University Students would be launching relentless and bold protests throughout the United States and that a US active-duty airman would burn himself alive screaming “free Palestine”, they would’ve been deemed clinically insane. Yet, here we are, more than 6 months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the global solidarity campaign has only escalated.
Palestine solidarity movements have always existed throughout the West. While pro-Palestinian sentiments have been more vocal in the European continent than in North America, it is safe to say that public pressure on their regimes across the collective West has reached brand new heights.
On April 17, at around 4 am, students from Columbia University set up tents in the center of their campus, demanding that the university divest from companies that have ties to the Zionist regime. Although the authorities were set upon the students, in an attempt to end the encampment, resulting in around 100 arrests, the act of repression ended up triggering a series of events that only escalated the protest movement across the country and other Ivy League universities.
As expected, the US and Western corporate media have worked overtime in trying to prove that the protesters are “supporters of terrorism”, providing an example of “weaponized anti-semitism.” Some corporate media outlets even attempted to suggest that Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansar Allah were behind the student protests. Zionist extremists have attempted to play the victim, as usual, desperately grasping at the most ridiculous of examples to suggest that they feel persecuted as Jews. Yet, despite such tactics working in the past, these weak arguments, coming from supporters of Apartheid and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, have failed to deter demonstrators. It is clear to see that Jewish students are prominent in the protest movements across US college campuses and are even being arrested by the authorities for their stances against “Israel’s” war on Gaza.
What is quite remarkable is that these recent student protests and the even larger public demonstrations across the United States are not only continuous but in some cases escalating. The very idea that such large contingents, of mainly young people, could be so incredibly committed to protesting their governments’ support for war crimes overseas and that they would not just stop after a couple of months is indicative of a major shift.
Palestine has become the major moral challenge of this era and is being viewed by the younger generations as a test of our collective humanity. The way the people view the issue is that they are putting up a fight against the equivalent of chattel slavery. Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old active duty air force member who lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, had written the following on his Facebook account, prior to his death: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
What this demonstrates is a major shift in the thinking of younger people, specifically in the US, but also throughout the Western World. This, I believe, can be explained through a number of major changes that have had the greatest impact on younger people. The first and most obvious is the age of social media, making this genocide in Gaza the first ever to be essentially live-streamed to the entire world and hence rendering it undeniable. Also, social media have allowed for a major advancement in networking with people across the world and allowing for regular people in foreign countries to communicate their struggles and beliefs to all corners of the world, without the interference of any corporate publisher in between. In the case of Palestine advocacy, social media have played the most important role in educating and organizing in the West, which is why the US government is working to ban TikTok.
The second reason behind the shift in the thinking of younger people is the prospects they have for prosperity in their personal lives. Although the older generations did have to work to afford a living and the struggles of working people shouldn’t be undermined, the younger generations see that they don’t have a future of stability to strive for. The Western regimes have screwed their own citizens financially, as essentially every Western nation is gripped by a series of crippling cost-of-living crises. While the idea of the “American dream” of working hard and affording a house, car, holidays, and raising a family was at least plausible for a large portion of the people in countries like the US, this is no longer the case. Young people see the overwhelming prices of housing, often struggling to even pay rent on their apartments, while many of them are mired in debt that is associated with either a few unwise decisions or student loans.
On top of this, everything is only getting more expensive, inflation is hard to keep up with, interest rates are through the roof, and there is an intergenerational problem over the economic burdens placed upon the working class. Young people don’t feel like there is any hope, and they resent their corrupt leaders and are beginning to turn their attention more and more to why the governments that can’t grant them their basic needs domestically are involved in and using their tax revenue to fund endless wars.
Another part of this puzzle is the rise in sensitivity of younger people to issues of racism, discrimination, and the persecution of minority communities. Where the liberal establishment failed across the collective West is that it decided to play into this more inclusive and anti-racist trend among the young. It put great effort into building a base, in the case of the US Democratic Party, off of identity politics. The identity politics, while being devoid of any class element and specifically geared toward performative actions, with little room for creating tangible changes for the communities it advocates for, the like of the Democratic Party messed up with taking this approach.
The liberal establishment preached anti-racism and virtue signaled about how inclusive they were, believing that they could control the more revolutionary movements, which would rise as a result of such values. So, when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd, the Democratic Party, along with many of the West’s corporations and philanthropists, all took to weaponizing the genuine outrage that pushed the public to take to the streets, they believed that once the protests stopped, so too would the legitimate demands of the people. In this case, they succeeded in many ways and plastered Black Lives Matter over banks and throughout corporations, turning this phrase – of the movement itself – into a kind of statement that would work to benefit a culture war against the Right.
However, when the genocide in Gaza began, especially after the surge in awareness about Palestine during the 2021 Gaza war, this establishment strategy quickly fell apart. Suddenly, these young people who were being told their leaders were working toward equality and representation, people who were told that they were justified in their anti-discrimination stances, were confronted by an establishment that was now backing a racist settler-colonial apartheid regime to carry out a genocide of the indigenous people of Palestine. Evidently, those who had adopted the anti-racism approach of identity politics were suddenly confronted with moral outrage and jumped to oppose the mass murder of Palestinians by ethnic supremacists.
What has started as an anti-genocide movement, calling for a ceasefire and equal human rights for Palestinians, is now greatly scaring the US establishment. They are thinking to themselves at this time, if these young people are so committed to the Palestinian cause that they will risk arrest and potentially their future careers for this, what will they be willing to do if a movement forms in the future to make amendments at home? This is possibly the start of a revolutionary era, and it was the Palestinian people’s steadfastness that inspired it. In the Palestinian struggle for liberation, the young people express their own struggles, in a real show of solidarity.
