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PALESTINE HAS MOBILIZED A GLOBAL MOVEMENT. FOR IT TO LAST WE MUST GET
ORGANIZED.  
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James Kilgore
August 11, 2024
Truthout
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_ Past solidarity movements teach us that organization is just as
important as mobilization. For Palestine solidarity activists it could
be useful to look more deeply at the history of international
solidarity, particularly in the last three decades. _

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, holding a banner saying ''Free
Palestine'' gather, to protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza and
show solidarity with Palestinians as they march with Palestinian flags
and banners in Utrecht, Netherlands, on August 10, 2024, Photo: Selman
Aksunger / Anadolu // Truthout

 

In the weeks after October 7, abolitionist and civil rights activist
Angela Davis offered some pointed advice to people on the left during
an _Al Jazeera_ interview
[[link removed]]: “If we are not
prepared to think critically about what’s happening in Gaza, the
West Bank and East Jerusalem … we will not only be unprepared to
understand and address the issues emanating from the current crisis;
we won’t be able to understand the world around us [and] the many
struggles for justice and freedom all over the globe.” She went on
to add that, “Our relation to Palestine says a great deal about our
capacity to respond to complex, contemporary issues, whether we’re
talking about imperialism, settler colonialism, transphobia,
homophobia, the climate crisis.”

For Palestine solidarity activists in the United States, it could be
useful to look more deeply at the history of international solidarity
in U.S. movements, particularly in the last three decades. At various
points mass mobilizations on global issues have gained a high profile:
the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle
[[link removed]] and
beyond in 1999-2000, participation in the semi-annual World Social
Forums
[[link removed]] beginning in
2001, the anti-Iraq war movement in the early 2000s, the support for
the pro-democracy Arab Spring
[[link removed]] of
2010, and a series of international responses to austerity budgets and
increasing inequality that eventually exploded into Occupy Wall
Street
[[link removed]] in
2011.

Subsequently, the 2010s erupted in reaction to the police-perpetrated
killings of Michael Brown
[[link removed]], Eric Garner
[[link removed]], Samuel
DuBose
[[link removed]],
and dozens of other Black people. Mobilizations in response to these
murderous police actions precipitated the formation of Black Lives
Matter [[link removed]] and culminated in the global
reaction
[[link removed]] to
the murder of George Floyd, where 40 countries
[[link removed]] on
every continent except Antarctica took to the streets.

All of this built networks of personal relationships at the grassroots
level and left permanent marks in the consciousness of millions, in
some cases impacting the agendas of elected officials like “The
Squad.” 
[[link removed]]Still,
it left a remarkably small residue of organizational infrastructure on
which to grow a movement informed by internationalism. Instead,
without an organizational center, we face the rise of far right and
fascist formations across the globe coupled with the spiritual
withering of center-left
[[link removed]] parties
in France, Germany, Britain and of course the Democratic Party in the
U.S.

Even more disorienting has been the fall from grace of national
liberation movements. The degeneration of the organized global
majority
[[link removed]] countries,
in particular the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement
[[link removed]] with its New International Economic
Order,
[[link removed]] has
left an enormous void. National movements and states that people on
the left revered in the past, such as the Sandinistas
[[link removed]] of
Nicaragua, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
[[link removed]] (FMLN)
in El Salvador, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique
[[link removed]],
the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front
[[link removed]] (EPLF)
and the African National Congress
[[link removed]] (ANC) of South Africa have either
descended into webs of corruption, eschewed progressive policies for
neoliberal and repressive paradigms, or both.

But the present actions in support of Palestinian liberation have
reestablished hope in the possibilities of global solidarity. The
hundreds of thousands of people coming onto the streets and social
media are a clearcut indicator of belief in the power of collective
action and imagination to make change regardless of how overwhelming
the odds. While college campuses have been on the forefront of these
actions, they have also included a considerable nonstudent cohort,
including many Black and Brown people. Moreover, unlike in most
U.S.-based campaigns of international solidarity, those directly
impacted, namely Palestinians living in the U.S., have played an
important leadership role in crafting this movement.

As the struggle continues, we need to contemplate the obvious: “What
next?” In doing so, several key questions emerge. The most urgent,
of course, is how to bring a halt to the mass murder and, once there
is a permanent ceasefire, how to rebuild Gaza, East Jerusalem, and
other areas devastated by murderous Zionist offensives. But there is
also a need to ask more strategic questions: What have we learned from
this situation that can steer us down a liberatory path rather than
simply resting until the next eruption? We need a strategy to avoid
the decline of activism that has ensued after each of the previous
mobilizations.

Over the past few months, I have interviewed several activists who
have been involved in prior campaigns of international solidarity. The
cohort was intergenerational, though the majority were involved in the
anti-Vietnam War movement or the Black liberation struggle during the
‘60s and ‘70s. I asked them to focus on their own experiences and,
in particular, offer explanations for the decline of international
solidarity within left movements and the failure of more recent
mobilizations to gain a permanent foothold.

In our discussions, organizers mentioned five main factors that
affected the capacity to sustain internationalism in left movements.
Perhaps most frequently noted were the organizational forms that
emerged during these protests. These comments fell into two
categories: the professionalization of political struggle and the lack
of structure and leadership.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s largely relied on building a
grassroots political base. In some cases, members paid dues, while
leaders typically received modest pay or none at all. Puerto Rican
independence fighter Alfredo Lopez contended that foundations —
Ford, Rockefeller, McArthur, Soros — entered the movement space,
relabeled it “social justice” and put forward a more moderate
agenda. In the words of Chicago activist leader and historian Barbara
Ransby, “Social justice becomes a job … where people are under the
surveillance of philanthropy.” According to Lopez, these foundations
“steered us away from international consciousness.”

Illinois youth development practitioner Posey described this process
to _Truthout_ as a “movement capture” which stresses
“navigating the 501(c)(3) bureaucracy, not looking at how we connect
with others people’s battles against U.S. imperialism.”

Cory Greene is co-founder and healing justice/NTA organizer
of H.O.L.L.A [[link removed]]., a New York-based
community specific and healing justice focused “grassroots
youth/community” program. He professes that his organization
“stands on the legacy of the Black liberation movement.” He
stressed the need for “institutional memory, to know how to pull on
your lineages to heal.” He argues that the state and the nonprofit
industrial complex
[[link removed]] has
colonized these precious legacies or seriously diluted them.

By the same token, several organizers also believed that the absence
of a clear-cut structure often undermined the potential continuity of
these movements. Vincent Bevins, in his overview of mass protests in
the 2010s, _If We Burn_
[[link removed]],
argues that the model adopted by most organizations, based on
nonhierarchy, consensus decision-making, spontaneity, and large
meetings in public spaces such as Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park,
obstructed the pathway to creating the type of structures,
relationship-building and planning required to sustain a movement.
Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz summed it up
for _Truthout_ like this: “For the last 30 years I get my hopes up
that something is going to happen, and the only thing happening is a
sort of anarchism but they didn’t have a program. [They] just talked
about getting rid of the state.”

A second, frequently forgotten factor in the decline of international
solidarity was the demise of the Soviet Union and the “communist
bloc.” While the class nature and political practice
[[link removed]] of the Soviet Union were
often controversial
[[link removed]] within
the left [[link removed]], the existence
of a counter pole to Western imperialism was a constant reminder that
building a global political power with an anti-capitalist agenda was
possible. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and its allies
included the building of a global solidarity network of
nations, funding and political support
[[link removed]] for
left-wing national liberation movements in southern Africa and Central
America as well as backing for liberation support work in the U.S. and
Europe.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was the continued Soviet
backing of a Cuban Revolution that faced an intensive embargo
[[link removed]] by the U.S. Support
from the USSR included
[[link removed]] $1.7 billion to
retool Cuban industrial infrastructure from 1976-80 and military
assistance of $4 billion in the mid-1980s. The Cubans themselves, with
Soviet support, initiated their own solidarity efforts in southern
Africa in the 1970s, sending thousands of troops
[[link removed]] to
Angola to help successfully repel a major offensive of the South
African military against Angolan freedom fighters.

Dunbar-Ortiz told _Truthout_ she recalled that the fall of the
Soviet Union “scared me to death.” She said some of her leftist
friends were overjoyed, but she had worked in international structures
like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization
[[link removed]] where she saw the concrete assistance
the Soviet Union was giving to freedom fighters in the global majority
countries. In hindsight she added, “I think it had a bigger impact
than any of us ever analyzed.”

Thirdly, the U.S. state restructured its domestic and international
strategy. Through counterinsurgency programs like COINTELPRO
[[link removed]], the government targeted key activists
who advanced a radical internationalist agenda with a variety of
tactics: assassinations such as the 1969 murder of Chicago Black
Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, infiltration of
movement organizations such as the American Indian Movement
[[link removed]], Students
for a Democratic Society [[link removed]] and the Puerto
Rican independence movement,
[[link removed]] and
the “legal” framing of political activists like Leonard Peltier
[[link removed]] and Mumia
Abu Jamal [[link removed]].

They also shifted their strategy for imperialist intervention. As
former political prisoner David Gilbert highlighted to _Truthout_,
the U.S. opted for a “hybrid” model in which the U.S. supplied
weapons and other hardware, but the bulk of the troops in places like
Gaza or Iraq come from partner countries in the region. This reduced
the extent to which the U.S. population felt the pain of war and
quelled desires to protest its continuation. A byproduct of this was a
shifting of the international political attention of the left away
from the military-industrial complex and the quest for peace. The fall
of the Soviet Union instilled false confidence among many activists
that the threat of world war would disappear with the weakening of the
U.S.’s main enemy.

The fourth issue mentioned was the ideological triumph of a technology
driven culture of neoliberalism and individualism. We live in the age
of the new robber barons — Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and
private equity funds that control much of global society with capital
flows, surveillance and consumerist technology. This is reinforced by
narratives that encourage the worship of wealth and increased power
for internationalized capitalist firms. The media and often our
cultural icons promote the narratives of the rich and superrich.
Collective and cooperative efforts are seen as unrealistic or futile.

Migrant rights activist Maru Mora-Villalpando stressed
to _Truthout_ that the development of free trade agreements and
their institutionalization in global bodies like the World Trade
Organization promoted and advanced this ideology. In Mexico, for
example, the installation of a free market in land ownership via
the North American Free Trade Agreement
[[link removed]] has opened up
ownership of Mexican agribusiness to U.S. transnational
corporations, undermining
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power.

Intimately linked to the advance of the neoliberal model has been the
demobilization of organized labor. While we are seeing a resurgence in
quarters such as with Amazon, Starbucks and the United Auto Workers,
the percent of the U.S. private sector labor force that is unionized
plummeted from 20 percent in 1983 to just over 11 percent in 2023.
[[link removed],(See%20table%201.)] Unions
can become important vehicles of internationalism. Most belong
to global federations [[link removed]], which in key
industries can create structural links that facilitate solidarity
actions around boycotts, sanctions and labor issues.

Though certainly all unions do not take such stances, these
international ties were highly active during the anti-apartheid
movement, with workers often refusing
[[link removed]] to
unload goods coming from or going to South Africa. They also played an
important role during Occupy and the general strike
[[link removed]] in
Oakland, California, and even today we see the longshore
unions refusing
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load and unload ships connected to Israel.

Lastly, interviewees stressed the complexity of solidarity. Ransby
noted the importance of asking what “a liberation movement is for,
not just what it is against” as well as avoiding the liberal view
that “it is their struggle.”

New York attorney and organizer Jindu Obiofuma noted the importance
for activists in the U.S. to recognize their positionality. She
stressed that solidarity “begins with humility.” For her, in the
U.S. this means “decentering what it means to be in the belly of the
beast.” She noted a tendency for folks in the West to act as if they
are “telling people fighting for liberation in other countries how
best to fight for their lives based on principles rooted in their own
analyses and experiences.” She stressed that for Western activists,
especially white people, solidarity requires setting aside notions of
white supremacy and American exceptionalism and “stepping back from
yourself, doing what it is that the people you’re in solidarity with
tell you to do and understanding that might come with some risks.”

Ultimately, witnessing the genocide in Palestine has forced many on
the left to view the global political economy through another set of
lenses. Activists are connecting dots of the military-industrial and
prison-industrial complex, white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, settler
colonialism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity — connections that had
often disappeared behind the pressure of the system to isolate
struggles and sectors of the oppressed population into silos.

The powers that be strive to push all left history, including that of
international solidarity, off the map and replace it with the
triumphalist narrative of the “Google world.” Poet June Jordan
once said [[link removed]] that
how we respond to the Palestinian struggle is a “litmus test for
morality.” Learning from the past is key to passing that test.

_[JAMES KILGORE is a father, partner, activist and writer based in
Urbana, Illinois. He is a Building Community Power Fellow at Community
Justice Exchange and director of advocacy and outreach for
FirstFollowers Reentry Program. He is the author of seven books,
including Understanding Mass Incarceration and Understanding
E-Carceration, four of which were drafted during his six-and-half
years in prison. His latest is co-authored with Vic Liu, The
Warehouse: A Visual Primer on Mass Incarceration
[[link removed]].]_

_Copyright © Truthout [[link removed]]. Reprinted with
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