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IN THE 1960S AND THE 2020S, ANTIWAR MOVEMENTS CHANGE THE LANDSCAPE  
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Max Elbaum and Stephanie Luce
May 9, 2024
Convergence Magazine
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_ Difficult as the road to forcing the US out of Vietnam was, the
path to winning Palestinian self-determination and equal rights for
all in Israel-Palestine appears even more challenging. _

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_As the war on Gaza enters its seventh month of unrelenting
destruction, students around the world are setting up encampments and
occupying buildings to press their institutions to cut financial and
academic ties with Israel. Their peaceful and passionate protests are
bringing a new level of intensity to the multi-sided movement
supporting Palestine. They also recall and build on a living history
of similar student actions, from those demanding an end to the Vietnam
War in the late 1960s on. In this
series, _Convergence’s_ Stephanie Luce interviews people who have
been engaged in different generations of campus protests. They share
reflections on the organizing they were involved in and the lessons it
might offer for today. We begin with some thoughts and context
from _Convergence_ Editorial Board Chair Max Elbaum._

STEPHANIE LUCE: YOU HAVE BEEN ENGAGED IN ANTIWAR ORGANIZING FOR
DECADES, AND ARE A KEEN OBSERVER OF MOVEMENTS. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE
SOME OF THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE ANTI-VIETNAM WAR WORK IN THE
1960S/ EARLY 1970S AND WHAT WE ARE SEEING TODAY?

MAX ELBAUM: The movement to end the Vietnam War was a huge and
sustained upsurge that challenged a sacred cow in US
politics–anti-communism. Student activism and large-scale protests
on college campuses were a big part of it. The antiwar outpouring
transformed the country’s political and social landscape and many
people’s lives.

The movement for justice in Palestine today is not as huge yet, but it
is growing rapidly and is also challenging a sacred cow in US
politics: pro-Israel politics. And it too is transforming the
landscape. It has shifted sentiment toward sympathy and solidarity
with the Palestinian cause among youth, including Jewish youth, in the
labor movement, and in the base of the Democratic Party. It has dealt
a decisive blow to what has been termed PEP–the pattern of being
“Progressive Except Palestine.” It is laying the basis not just to
expand Palestine solidarity but to put internationalism and opposition
to US militarism back into the heart of the progressive agenda after a
period when it was in the background. It has gained unprecedented
influence in Congress via the Squad and other progressive
congressmembers. And it is transforming the lives of thousands of
young people who are likely to become lifelong activists.

Both movements built off previous movements. Back then, the antiwar
work was influenced and inspired by the spirit and tactics of the
Black-led Civil Rights Movement. Today, the movement builds on years
of efforts to build support for Palestinian rights and draws from the
energy of Occupy and Black Lives Matter. They are similar in combining
moral and political fervor.

And in both cases, there was, and is, repression from universities and
the state.

STEPHANIE LUCE: AND WHAT IS DIFFERENT TODAY?

MAX ELBAUM: In the 1960s, every activist personally knew someone in
the military–if we didn’t go to Vietnam ourselves–and we
didn’t want them to die. We sympathized with the Vietnamese and
watched them suffer and die on television, but we had almost no direct
contact with Vietnamese people. Only late in the war, after
1970-’71, did any number of US people (other than soldiers deployed
to Vietnam) interact directly with Vietnamese people at various
gatherings, mostly outside the US.

Today there is a stronger connection to the people targeted by US
militarism. There are large numbers of Palestinians, Arabs, and
Muslims here. Lots of students know Palestinians, people in Palestine,
or people who have been forced into exile. Or they are just one step
removed – they know someone who has a personal tie to Palestinians
living in Gaza or the West Bank. And there has been a big demographic
shift in racial composition of people on campuses. There are many more
Black, Latino, and Asian students (and faculty and staff!) than there
were in the 1960s.

A big difference between the periods is that while protesters in the
1960s were demonized, there was almost no one around who claimed to be
a direct victim of the people the US were fighting. There were Eastern
Europeans or people who had fled Cuba, saying they were victims of
communism. But these were small numbers, and they did not claim to be
direct victims of Vietnamese communists.

Today, many Jews, including thousands of Israelis living in the US,
claim that people protesting for Palestinian rights are a direct
threat to them. The political Right and the mainstream Jewish
establishment propagate this conflation of support for equality in
Israel-Palestine with anti-Semitism. They are weaponizing the charge
of anti-Semitism to take attention away from what Israel is doing in
Gaza and put it on the alleged threat to the safety of Jews in the US.
They ignore the fact that large numbers of Jews are active in the
movement for a ceasefire and Palestinian rights, and that all the
significant groups in that movement oppose anti-Semitism and condemn
incidents of anti-Semitic harassment or use of anti-Semitic language
no matter what the source.

Another important difference is in the global political picture. The
Vietnamese people had the sympathy of almost all of humanity, and
political and material support not just from socialist countries but
from the non-aligned movement and even a few western governments like
Sweden. And those leading the revolution were clearly part of a
progressive global movement. Even if vilified as communists, the
Vietnamese revolutionaries practiced an internationalism (“Our war
is with the US government, not the American people”) that spoke the
sentiments of millions and blunted a lot of the propaganda barrage.

Today the Palestinian cause has almost the same sympathy in the global
majority, though there are exceptions–Modi’s Hindu nationalist
movement in India and the mainstream establishments in world Jewry.
But overwhelmingly, global public opinion is horrified by genocide
taking place in Gaza and sees Israel and its main backer, the US, as
responsible.

But Palestinians have far less support from governments around the
world other than their votes at the UN. Perhaps the clearest example
of that is the stance of today’s Arab regimes compared to their
actions in that earlier period. In the wake of the 1973 war between
Israel and Egypt, the Arab regimes conducted an oil boycott against
the West because of its support for Israel, and at that time none of
the Arab regimes recognized Israel diplomatically.

Today, the Arab regimes are police states eager to fully normalize
their relationship with Israel and just want a fig leaf to present to
their populations, who overwhelmingly sympathize with the
Palestinians. Today, there is no socialist camp providing the kind of
aid to Palestinians that was provided to Vietnam. And the Palestinian
liberation movement itself is badly fragmented–largely but not
completely because of Israeli’s murderous campaign against it–and
has not yet developed unified leadership projecting an emancipatory
vision and operating with a strategy capable of winning Palestinian
freedom.

STEPHANIE LUCE: WHAT ABOUT DOMESTIC POLITICS? THE STUDENTS TODAY ARE
LOOKING AT TRYING TO STOP A WAR, HEADING INTO AN ELECTION YEAR IN
WHICH A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT IS WAGING WAR. IT HAS PARALLELS TO 1968!

MAX ELBAUM: The Biden Administration has made some important forward
steps on domestic issues but is sabotaging that progress as well as
its own political fortunes by waging this war. That’s like what we
saw with the Johnson Administration in 1968.

But there are differences too. There were congresspeople opposed to
the Vietnam War by 1968-’69, but none with the kind of organic ties
to progressive movements that the Squad and others have today. And the
anti-Vietnam war movement was not connected to the kind of progressive
electoral infrastructure that now exists and is fighting both to win a
ceasefire and to defeat a US-style fascist GOP in 2024. Nixon was a
right-wing war hawk, and his “southern strategy” was the initial
stage of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement and all the
other gains of the 1960s. But today that backlash is at its most
intense phase and the GOP has been transformed from a conservative
party into an authoritarian, US-style fascist party.

Another difference is that after Johnson was forced to withdraw from
the 1968 presidential race, just about everyone in the antiwar
movement believed correctly that it was only a matter of time until
the US would lose the war and withdraw from Vietnam. Even many outside
the antiwar movement recognized that. So even amid the intense
repression and outright murder of student protesters, there was
confidence that we were on the winning side.

It is more challenging today. The situation facing the Palestinians is
far less favorable. If Israel agreed to a ceasefire tomorrow, the path
from there to justice and equality in Palestine remains exceedingly
difficult and long-term. This fact, and the threat of a MAGA takeover
of the federal government which would bring down the full power of the
state against partisans of Palestinian rights, poses big strategic
challenges to a movement whose goal goes beyond stopping the killing
to completely changing US policy toward Israel-Palestine such that it
is possible to win full equality, justice and self-determination for
the Palestinian people.

For more from Max Elbaum on this topic, see “Has America Learned
Nothing? Lessons from Vietnam to Gaza,”
[[link removed]] on Francesca
Fiorentini’s podcast _The Bitchuation Room._

_Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board
and the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to
Lenin, Mao, and Che._

_Stephanie Luce is a professor at the City University of New York's
School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is the author of Labor
Movements: Global Perspectives (Wiley, 2014) and Fighting for a Living
Wage (Cornell University Press, 2004), a member of the Convergence
written content team and recent member of its Editorial Board. Her
writing can be found at [link removed]

_Convergence [[link removed]] is a magazine for
radical insights. We work with organizers and activists on the
frontlines of today’s most pressing struggles to produce articles,
videos and podcasts that sharpen our collective practice by lifting up
stories from the grassroots and making space for reflection and study.
Our community of readers, viewers, and content producers are united in
our purpose: winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic
economy._

* campus protest
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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