The state’s effort to manage the pro-Palestine movement, & the united front that can rescue it from this

There’s a battle going on over which direction the pro-Palestine movement is going to take next. On one side, there are the organic, popular elements; the earnest individuals who are willing to do whatever it takes to end this extermination campaign. On the other side, there are the NGOs, from which all the other problems within the movement are downstream. The impulse to de-center Palestine in favor of culture war issues, anti-Trumpism, or causes that are best focused on outside of pro-Palestine rallies; the dependence on donations from sources that are tied to the Democratic Party, or to the State Department itself; the lack of awareness about the practicalities of organizing, which leads to poorly disciplined protests where agent provocateurs can operate freely. All these weaknesses come from how the USA’s pro-Palestine cause is dominated by the organized left, which today is effectively an appendage for the NGOs.

This country’s communist and otherwise revolutionary organizations were mostly dismantled decades ago. Some of the authentic orgs from the earlier era, like the African People’s Socialist Party, have survived uncorrupted; but they’re the exception, existing in an environment where popular movements can easily be co-opted and sabotaged. The PSL, the primary “communist” org that’s taken on a role of facilitating the protests, has consistently backstabbed APSP and the other groups which challenge its organizing monopoly. At this point, the goal of PSL’s faction is to build an anti-Trump movement, which effectively negates the anti-Zionist aspect; and it’s because of this that the left made itself essentially irrelevant some time ago.

When I discuss the left now, it’s only for the sake of pointing out how orgs like PSL are undermining the pro-Palestine struggle; there is no mass momentum behind them anymore, which is precisely why the state prefers for them to run the movement. When there’s a self-interested clique that’s attacking crucial allies within the struggle, and inserting Trump derangement syndrome into the conversation, that acts to blunt the movement’s momentum. And when no particular left org is able to co-opt a given protest, the state’s counterinsurgency can take advantage in a different way, sending in its agents to sabotage protests with impunity. The goal is to make street actions as adventurist as possible, inviting protesters to commit crimes that range from throwing paint on buildings to physically assaulting people.

PSL also does adventurism; it’s blocked roads, which within our conditions only has the effect of alienating the masses. Such actions are only productive when the org behind them has already gained widespread popular connections, which PSL certainly has not. Road blockages were what PSL was doing a year ago, when the struggle against the genocide still had enough of its initial energy that it could survive being damaged in this way. Since campuses imposed severe new speech rules, though, and the media successfully took Gaza out of the regular discourse, the movement has been crippled. There are new attempts to revive it, but it can’t afford to be harmed by unwise or malicious actors. There's a path towards sustained mass solidarity, and therefore victory against the genocidal war machine; but there are many forces working to lead us away from this path.

Because of how effective the imperial state has been at destroying our revolutionary institutions, there’s little that can stop it from employing the standard wrecking tactics at protests. The fact is that many of the Palestine events you’ll come across are going to either be NGO-tied, or ill-thought-out projects by people who don’t know how to recognize federal saboteurs. (Or both at the same time.) However, this doesn’t mean we can’t connect with the many good-faith people who these events attract, or build an alternative to the NGO-run groups. In fact, because of how much the left has isolated itself, we’re now in a better place than ever to construct such a force.

This force needs to look like the Rage Against the War Machine coalition, the united front between communists, Libertarians, MAGA people, and others who aren’t tied to the left. Because of its independence from the leftist “protest cage,” RAWM has played an important part in pressuring Trump to halt most foreign aid for 90 days. If not for the organizers who prioritized fighting NATO when Ukraine was the main issue, the Ukrainiacs would have been able to operate essentially unchallenged. Now they’ve experienced a partial defeat; though the aid suspension doesn’t cover weapons shipments, development aid has been halted to all countries except for “Israel” and Egypt. Which is proof that what we do as U.S. Americans can impact how our government’s wars go; if we build upon these gains, the wars themselves will start being disrupted. The war machine depends on narrative control, and we’ve already largely taken away this control.

We’ve only been able to achieve this once we’ve broken from the established activist orgs. The organized left hasn’t been willing to take Ukraine seriously; the only socialist orgs that supported Russia’s anti-fascist operation were the ones which either joined the RAWM coalition, or refused to participate in the smears against the coalition. PSL effectively took a neutral position on Ukraine; it opposed Russia’s operation out of desire to appeal to liberals, and to appease the NGOs. Conceding to the Ukrainiacs on this point had the effect of weakening the entire anti-imperialist movement; but then a united front appeared that wasn’t held back by the NGOs, and that in turn could gain momentum.

In the new Trump era, when over a year of genocide has profoundly changed U.S. politics, our united front can only succeed when we’ve accounted for all the ways the conditions have evolved. Since RAWM’s big rally two years ago, we’ve seen certain developments that have worked to our advantage, and others that have worked to our disadvantage. The narrative managers have been using a combination of psyops to try to kill all future interest in an antiwar movement on the right. They’ve portrayed Palestine as a “woke” issue; and for the conservatives who are anti-Zionist, they’ve propagated narratives about the “Jewish question.” These manipulations have worked, insofar as they’ve prevented another anti-imperialist rally like the original RAWM event from happening again; there have certainly been huge anti-imperialist rallies in the last year or so, but they haven’t had RAWM’s message or ideological makeup.

In a post-October 7 world, Palestine is the antiwar issue that’s most capable of gaining attention; that this has come at such an expense for the anti-NATO movement, and that conservatives have almost totally been alienated from the pro-Palestine movement, is the product of deliberate social engineering. The orgs that run the protests have exclusively tried to appeal to the left, trying to cover a myriad of left-wing issues at once; this has both limited their appeal, and reduced how much attention the genocide has gotten. The anti-woke grifters have pointed to this rhetoric—along with foolish individual actions like flag burning—and used this to discredit the Palestinian cause in the eyes of their audiences.

Just because these manipulations have largely been effective so far, doesn’t mean there won’t come about new opportunities for our movement to gain mass participation. Such an opening has just appeared, in the form of the backlash towards Trump’s refusal to halt any aid to “Israel.” There is a certain part of the MAGA base which has been consistently getting upset about Trump’s pro-establishment actions since the election; once he won, he no longer had any perceived excuse. They haven’t liked how he’s picked neocons for his cabinet, or how he’s backed H-1B, or how he’s blatantly given “Israel” special treatment.

This element of MAGA is not acting like how the QAnon crowd did, and rationalizing everything he does by saying it’s all part of a secret plan. There are many who’ve gone down a path of disillusionment over Trump, and this has made them quite advanced in their revolutionary consciousness. Many of the people who are communists today became so after getting alienated from Bernie Sanders, and something similar has the potential to happen with MAGA.

Our ruling class sees where this trend is headed, so it’s employing the old bourgeois tactic of anti-Jewish conspiracism. How effective this tactic will be depends on how well we combat the JQ psyop, and how effectively we can argue for class struggle. We have real potential to bring the most advanced among the conservatives into our united front, as well as connect with the tens of millions of independents who share a proto-revolutionary consciousness. The pro-imperialist arguments, put forth by the liberals and the Ben Shapiro rightists, are not capable of persuading most U.S. Americans. The prevailing attitude is that the wars must end, and our society should instead work to solve its profound living standards crisis. The idea behind RAWM was that if we work to transcend the old ideological barriers, we’ll be able to unify the people around these goals. Whether the primary force that advances this mission is RAWM itself, or another entity, this idea will be what brings us to victory.

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