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This common protest chant embraces a profound reality that we live in dire times when all of us must, in some sense, struggle for our collective survival, existence and liberation alongside the people of Palestine. The simple rhyme poetically links us in a shared identity that recognizes the key position of the struggle for Palestinian liberation within a global process of revolution.
We have seen the Palestinian solidarity movement unite a wide variety of sections of society. In Chicago, we have seen a large Palestinian-led coalition work with allies of all kinds, including a sizable Jewish coalition that has grown in numbers as well as in its pluralism of communal forms and political expressions. These include several organizations that focus on political action such as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Never Again Action and others, as well as religious groups such as Tzedek Chicago, the world’s first explicitly anti-Zionist synagogue. We have also seen the rapid growth of a coalition of worker organizations in solidarity with Palestine, including both unions and informal worker collectives. And we have witnessed the explosive energy of the coalition led by students and their allies in the academic community.
Each student encampment in the Chicago area also mobilized hundreds of protestors and forced administrations to engage in discussions around divestment and other demands after years (in some cases, decades) of bad-faith negotiations between those same institutions and student advocates for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, led by groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine. In most cases, the process has resulted in encampments being raided by police, exposing the hypocrisy of these institutions of “higher learning” that publicly profess liberal values while violently cracking down on free speech in and outside the classroom that challenges their investments in war and the Zionist state.
It is hard to miss the visual similarities between Gaza solidarity encampments and the other kind of encampments that have become common in Chicago and all major U.S. cities where communities of people experience homelessness. Add to that a growing emergency in which more migrants arrive in the United States seeking asylum and refuge and must struggle to access housing, healthcare, and other necessities. Our ruling class continues to allow tent encampments to grow without addressing the root causes of the crisis.
Meanwhile, our government funds and protects the genocidal assault on the people of Gaza, using billions of tax dollars to pay for weapons used by the Israeli armed forces against Palestinians. While thousands of Chicagoans, mostly on the city’s South and West sides, live in neighborhoods where adequate food has become hard to find, the State of Israel blatantly uses starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza, and the United States engages in the political theater of sending meals by air and sea. In this context, all forms of tent encampments, whether refugee camps, houseless communities, or protest camps, visibilize the growing masses of people who are in some way or another being “pushed out” of society.
SEE CLEARLY
While we must remain clear-headed about the imminent threat of full-blown fascism represented by Trump and Project 2025, revolutionaries must also remain clear in our assessment of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, which has proven itself to be untrustworthy through its foreign policy of facilitating a genocide of Palestinians, as well as its cooperation with the ongoing corporate takeover of government. With the Democratic National Convention coming to Chicago this summer, the struggle for political clarity within our movements is crucial.
We are witnessing the inevitable splitting of the Democratic Party as the majority of its leaders fail completely to address the demands of the people for the recognition of basic humanity and our responsibility to intervene in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. We are also witnessing a split in the Republican party between the most reactionary elements calling for outright fascism through Christian ethno-nationalism on the one hand and a more traditional “center-right” strategy on the other. In these conditions, a major reorganization of the U.S. political system is likely on a scale unlike anything seen since the Civil War.
These shifting party structures reflect the instability of society caused by the economic dispossession that the majority of people are facing in the age of automation. This is what gives rise to new 21st-century forms of fascism. The outcome is not yet clear, but the 2024 elections are ushering in a stage of struggle in which new political expressions (in and out of the electoral arena) will emerge to focus, organize and consolidate this rising energy of the betrayed, disillusioned and indignant masses who are in a sense being pushed out of the two-party system. We have seen how, through the increasing use of vote-withholding tactics such as voting “uncommitted” during the Michigan primary, the pro-Palestinian, anti-imperialist movement is striking at the heart of the capitalist system and the two-party framework that upholds it in the United States.
Revolutionaries have important roles to play inside and outside the convention walls. We must raise loudly and clearly the life-or-death demands of the people: divestment from genocide, militarism, mass incarceration, militarized police, etc.; investment in universal healthcare, accessible housing, guaranteed basic income and serious policy responses to the climate catastrophe. We need to stop sending bombs to be dropped on homes and hospitals in Gaza and improve homes and hospitals here. By centering this message at the Democratic National Convention, we can make clear the realities behind the slogan “we are all Palestinians” and contribute to an organized political expression of the world’s dispossessed.
Let us face the dangers ahead with the courage and clarity. Let us honor the martyrs of Palestine by dismantling capitalism and its war machine that terrorizes, slaughters and displaces people by the millions. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! From every river to every sea, land and people must be free!
Published on June 27, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
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