Building the Palestine Solidarity Movement

Palestine has become the Vietnam of our epoch. Its people’s struggle for national liberation from the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel has garnered unprecedented solidarity in every corner of the world, including inside Tel Aviv’s main imperial sponsor, the US. In this interview, Palestinian intellectual and activist, Eman Abdelhadi takes stock of the solidarity movement, its development, strategies, tactics, and the tasks it must take up as the war enters its second year.

Since October 2023, the Palestine solidarity movement in the US has continued its struggle, experimenting with various tactics and strategies: mass protest, civil disobedience, and campus encampments, among others. Could you talk about the different waves of struggle in the solidarity movement in the US? What have been the biggest takeaways and lessons learned? What strategic decisions have helped push the movement forward?

For a long time, the movement was mostly focused on college campuses. They were the hub of the movement. It spread from there across different institutions. We have deployed many strategies: one strategy focused on the street, staging direct action to disrupt business as usual amidst the ongoing genocide. That included student protests.

Another strategy focused on changing various institutions from within. It has concentrated on getting these institutions to question their ties to the state of Israel and particularly their support for it. Activists have challenged literary foundations, trade unions, workplaces, and industries of various kinds to abandon their complicity with the apartheid state. There’s been a reckoning across American society.

So, instead of waves, the movement has deployed multiple strategies simultaneously from the encampments to the street protests and direct action to campaigns within institutions. As the direct action slowed down, activists have put more emphasis on institutional Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) work.

More broadly, for the first time the majority of Americans disapprove of Israeli actions. Americans are more aware than ever of the oppression facing Palestinians. But we need to transform this momentum into power through organizing. People are building solidarity units within their workplaces and schools that are systematically assessing ties to Israel and attempting to campaign towards BDS, and those units are building within various sectors. For example, there is Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Tech for Palestine, and so on. I think this type of organizing is crucial for achieving boycotts, divestment, and sanctions.

As a whole, the movement is making Israel a toxic brand—making companies, workplaces, and the like reassess existing ties and avoid new collaborations. I think this type of organizing is still relatively nascent in many sectors and institutions; we have a long way to go, and we have to keep building these solidarity organizations and campaigns.

You are a professor, activist, and organizer in Chicago and supported the University of Chicago and DePaul encampments. Could you talk about what made the encampments successful? Various encampments at universities across the country experimented with different tactics and methods. Could you talk about some of the different dynamics, and which tactics and strategies should be built upon and continued in the fall?

The encampments were successful because they made it clear that business as usual couldn’t go on amidst the unending genocide. They flipped the normal priorities of our society, which have subordinated news from Gaza and our solidarity with Palestine to our daily lives. Suddenly, our daily lives were subordinated to the movement and to the struggle for Gaza. That was really beautiful and important for a lot of people, in some ways restoring our collective sanity.

The encampments became important hubs for people within the movement to connect with each other. These spaces brought people from across the cities, not just the campuses, into conversation and community with one another. They became important spaces for political education, re-energizing the struggle. They were also important because they imposed costs on the universities and exposed the contradictions that plague the universities.

The encampments exposed the supposedly liberal higher education system’s commitment to Israel. Universities across the US are enmeshed with the apartheid state financially, academically, and politically. These so-called citadels of free speech were so deeply threatened by a bunch of kids in tents that they were willing to impose violence on these students and expel many of them. The encampments revealed how the university as an institution operates under a corporate structure that is more aligned with donor interests than it is with faculty, staff, or students.

Now, different encampments had different tactics. Some were very committed to a certain horizontalism that made it quite difficult to make decisions as a group. The beauty of the encampments was how they brought together all kinds of actors. But people had different stakes. There were some people whose tuition dollars were on the line, there were some people who were more likely to be attacked by police, and there were some people who might lose their jobs.

The challenge became figuring out how to balance the needs of different actors in a space like that without any clear decision-making process.

Other encampments took a much more vertical approach. Leadership groups were sometimes established in an opaque and mysterious fashion. These groups negotiated on behalf of the camp, and in certain cases the people in the camp were not happy with that group’s decisions and settlements. In the coming months, on-campus movements will have to come up with something in the middle, recognizing the importance and indeed necessity of both leadership and accountability.

I don’t think that full horizontalism works. Different people end up having outsized influence, and sometimes dissenting voices have more impact than the majority of the group. And there are organic leaders who pop up and end up having a lot of leverage. But if those leaders are not elected as leaders, then there is no way to hold them accountable to the demands and collective will of the group.

In the future, we need to develop a model that formally recognizes that different people invest different amounts of labor and that individuals have different stakes. To address these challenges there needs to be a democratic process to elect representatives from the camp, especially in negotiations with the administration.

Going forward, students and their allies should continue to make Gaza a priority. To zoom out a little bit, I think that successful movements often have three flanks. They have a radical flank, they have a progressive flank, and they have a moderate flank. We certainly saw this in the civil rights movement in the US. The sort of liberal version of civil rights history narrows all these flanks down, downplaying the role of radicals and focusing on personal histories of figures like MLK. On the Left, when we study these movements, we fail to see how moderates also contributed to overall wins.

In reality, all of the different flanks of the movement contributed to the struggle and shaped its outcome. The Panthers, MLK, and folks working with elected officials all played a role. Today, in the Palestine solidarity movement, we have the people power to fill out the flanks of the movement. We need to be strategic, though, about who is doing what work.

So, thinking about the campus, students are the natural radical leaders of the movement. They set the horizon of demands, proposing some of the most left-wing ideas. They can impose costs by being disruptive and refusing to go away. They can do that because their time at the university is temporary. Many of them are at stages in their lives where they don’t have mortgages or children and therefore have the time and energy to take risks. They often form the most radical wing of the movement.

Other actors on campuses can flesh out moderate and progressive wings of the struggle. Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) chapters can play an important role—to use a phrase that people may not like—“working within the system.” They can challenge all the rules and regulations that universities have wielded against their students. Over the past months, these regulations have blindsided faculty and students who didn’t know they existed. Many of these contradict the universities’ own policies and certainly violate our civil and constitutional rights. Faculty can play an important role in challenging all of this from within their institutions.

But other actors also play important roles on campus. Workers, many of whom have built unions, can play a crucial role. They can leverage their power to make changes and to secure reforms, while relying on students to push the horizon of demands. That’s my vision for the movement more broadly as well. We need everyone in their different roles and capacities throughout our society to play a role.

All the flanks of the movement are in motion. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans have taken to the streets since October 2023. We’ve changed public opinion. But lo and behold, we don’t live in a country where public opinion has much influence despite its pretensions to be a democracy. We need more power than public opinion; we need to turn that public opinion into structural leverage to force through change.

As an academic and activist, I think about the university as a place to build power, both as a workplace and an institution. But I also think about it as an institution that is, in my case, in the city of Chicago. It is a progressive city that has a lot of multiracial working-class power that can be accessed, leveraged, lobbied, and brought to bear in the movement for Palestinian liberation.

After the encampment movements faded as summer 2024 began, serious questions emerged within the movement about how to move forward as well as deep frustration as the genocide continues. What do you see as the most important steps to take in the months forward, in terms of strategy, tactics, and political orientation for the Palestine solidarity movement? What key initiatives are activists organizing around now? You mentioned the city of Chicago, what key efforts are happening there?

Unions are on the rise and working-class power is on the rise. There have been all these progressive coalitions, and I think we need to make Palestine a part of a broader progressive platform. We should do this by recognizing that Palestine is not a single-issue cause. In reality, it is at the epicenter of intersecting crises created by US Empire.

To make Palestine part of the broader movement, we need to focus our energy on local organizations, state-level organizations, and especially unions. I think unions are perhaps the most important. They are where people are organized systematically and can mobilize their tremendous power in withholding labor and resources. So, campaigning within unions to take a stand on Palestine is key.

That has already paid dividends. This summer, seven unions demanded that the Biden administration stop sending arms to Israel. We need to see this as an opening to push the unions to back those demands with action. Just think about what it would mean for them to not just make that demand, but to impose it on the government by deploying their union power, their power to withhold labor.

Such action would benefit not just Palestine but also workers in this country. We know that campaigns like this help energize workers and their unions. They increase people’s investment in unions, because they see the union not just as something that’s about increasing their wages and benefits but as a locus of power in a society that’s rendering us less and less powerful. So, I would like to see the movement focus on this strategic orientation on unions to build our power and capacity.

For example, the Chicago Teachers Union has taken consistently pro-Palestine stances and has been supportive of protests and encampments. Across different Chicago universities, FSJPs have popped up. Can we imagine a moment where educators across the city (both in higher education and K–12) coordinate a work stoppage or walk out around a demand for Palestine? This would take a lot of organizing within each of the units of the coalition, but it seems imminently feasible.

You mentioned that seven major US labor unions called on Biden to shut off military aid to Israel. Could you speak more about the role of trade unions, where and how they have been most effective, and what more they could be doing? How do campus, community, and labor activity all fit together?

I think trade unions have been great at presenting Palestine as a bread-and-butter issue that working-class people care about. It’s not some far-off conflict. People understand our complicity in this genocide, and they want that to end. Union support for Palestine has largely been symbolic thus far, and I would love to see labor expand into imposing material costs through work stoppages or strikes. Of course, as I said, an action like that takes months if not years to organize.

I’m also thinking about how the model of union organizing can operate in nonunionized settings. The campus, for instance, is a workplace that employs thousands of people. And these workers from faculty to staff have been increasingly subject to the competitive pressures of capitalism. That is driving workers to organize themselves.

We need to organize on the campuses, whether we have a union or not. We need to deploy all our union organizing strategies: power-mapping the campus, doing structural tests to see the level of worker support for the cause, mobilizing workers, and developing long-term relationships of solidarity.

At the University of Chicago, we now have an FSJP chapter with more than two hundred members. Before launching this, many of us had never even met each other. We had never met anyone outside of our narrow circles of departmental colleagues and friends. Now, people feel like we have a whole new relationship with the institution—and it’s not one that is co-optable, because it’s about building power and solidarity with each other, not just wasting all our time and energy on cosmetic programs that the university can then co-opt and use to pretend it’s a better place than it actually is.

Organizing around Palestine is crucial in its own right, but it also sets in motion all sorts of other initiatives to challenge the corporate logic of the universities. I think that these things are interrelated, and it remains the case that union organizing is the model for organizing in the US, and it’s one that builds long-term power. To use Jane McAlevey’s language, it moves us from mobilizing to organizing.

We can mobilize thousands of people to a protest, and that’s really important, and no one should underestimate it. But the question is, what’s next? What happens when we all get home? What happens when we get tired? What happens when we clear the street? We need to have organizations and institutions in place to continue the struggle and build our power. Both are crucial. There’s a symbiotic relationship between mobilization and organization.

The current solidarity movement for Palestine in the US is certainly not the first, as there is a long history of solidarity for Palestine. And there are Palestine solidarity movements in numerous other countries, too. What do you think solidarity activists should learn from strategic decisions, initiatives, or movement trajectories historically? And what should movement activists based in the US learn from and pay more attention to when it comes to the efforts, and the victories, of activists outside the US? Relatedly, what are lessons for the Palestine movement from the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa?

In many ways, we need to convey to new people that we are at the beginning of long-term work. We are building upon decades of work done by generations. But, for really tragic reasons, we’ve leveled up in terms of the sheer amount of energy over the last year. Now the question is how we harness that power and how we avoid mistakes of the past. We need to learn from movements, and not just look at their highlights and wins, but also their defeats.

Which movements got co-opted, which movements were silenced, which movements weren’t, and why? For me the most important struggle to learn from is the Black liberation struggle, because as I said it had organization, multiple flanks, and practiced a diversity of tactics. And it suffered many defeats. We need to see ourselves as following in the footsteps of that struggle and learning from its legacy.

Most importantly we need to learn from the interaction between the civil rights struggle and the antiwar struggle in the US. The civil rights struggle in many ways was the birthplace of the antiwar movement, and its internationalism fed back into the civil rights movement and radicalized it.

These became internationalist struggles that recognized the impact of the US Empire both at home and abroad. They didn’t draw a distinction between the domestic and the foreign. Placing ourselves within this constellation of movements and within their legacy is really important.

Right now, we are seeing the emergence of divisions, something that often happens within movements and coalitions. These divisions are the product of genuine feelings and disagreements. They can also be the result of the powers-that-be attempting to divide us. But they’re only able to do that if they can tap into something real, some kind of rage. Sometimes Arab Americans, especially Muslim Americans, are seen as opportunistic outsiders in progressive movements. Our community has been quite upwardly mobile, or at least portions of it have been.

So, some activists in Black and Brown communities might be asking, where have you been? Studies show that Arabs have actually been more supportive of Black struggle than the average American. We’re more likely to recognize discrimination and oppose it and attend a protest against it. And of course, our participation in these things doesn’t get any media attention.

But I think that we need to think very seriously about these divisions, and we need to make it clear that we’re here for the long haul. We are not going to pack up and go away if our demands are met. We are invested in defeating this empire and mitigating its effects both at home and abroad.

When I think about intellectuals and about the writings of James Baldwin or Malcolm X, there was a recognition of how power worked and the logics of this society that was much deeper than the liberal revisionists accounts of these movements admit. The revisionists say, “people were out on the street to get their own rights and then they got them, and everything got better.”

But in reality when you read the intellectuals and leaders of the Black liberation struggle, they all speak to the systemic roots of the inequalities and injustice they are fighting to overcome. That analysis is shared through all the flanks of the movement, from MLK to Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and so many others.

Our movement needs to be clear about the systemic roots of what we are fighting. We need to develop a commitment to political education that goes beyond the specifics of our cause and builds to a broader vision of collective liberation. In reality, we need a struggle to liberate Palestinians that is committed to liberating everyone else.

Over the past fifteen years, we have seen movements including Black Lives Matter, the re-popularization of socialism, feminist campaigns and movements, and climate activism—each of them building off of and strengthening each other. How has the cross-fertilization of these social movements strengthened or affected the Palestine solidarity movement, and how can these interconnections be deepened?

They have all interacted in a profound and tremendous way. We’ve come to see that Palestine is a feminist struggle. The Israeli state systematically wields sexual violence against Palestinians, it attempts to control Palestinians’ reproductive trajectories, and so much more. Palestine is an antiracist struggle. Zionism is built on white supremacy and sustains itself through anti-Arab and Islamophobic tropes.

Palestine is a climate justice struggle. We have witnessed the intense destruction of land and agriculture across Gaza and in the West Bank. It will take decades to repair the environmental harm of the last ten months alone. All these problems are intertwined, and therefore struggles against them are deeply interconnected. The movements of the last fifteen years have built on each other and created a radical consciousness about the system in a whole new layer of activists.

Activists are rejecting the incrementalist, neoliberal version of interest group politics that’s been shoved down our throats for the last thirty years. This version that says that you should campaign for your own group, get whatever you can, and then go home without regard for any other group. Today, there is greater instinct toward solidarity. We need to strengthen that by building organization, coalitions, and our structural power. In this dark moment, I think we can see this all developing around us.

What is giving you this hope that you have right now?

I have to have hope in order to survive. Like Mariame Kaba said, “hope is a discipline.” I thought about this at an event at which I was speaking last November. I found myself sitting next to Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Barbara Ransby, and all these OGs of the movement.

They were talking about the struggle, and they were in it just like everybody else in the movement who’s mostly under forty. I realized that we’re gonna be in this struggle for the rest of our lives. That’s OK. Strap in, people! You have to commit to a lifetime of struggle to keep doing the work. Life without struggle for liberation and justice in this world would just be unbearable.

One thing that is also important to learn from previous movements, particularly from the Black liberation struggle, is to distinguish between a friend that you disagree with and an enemy. Sometimes today people forget to do that. This is one of the problems in the discourse on the Left, especially on social media right now: trying to impose one radical line that everyone sticks to, and if you don’t, you’re not really a radical. This kind of attempt at homogenization can be destructive in sowing unnecessary and polarized divisions in our own ranks.

Vincent Bevins made the point in his book If We Burn that if we’re in the West and live relatively privileged lives, some of us think it’s more important to get it right and be morally pure than to sometimes make compromises that lead to progress and wins. We should spend our energy fighting our actual enemies, certainly not people who slightly disagree with us and even people who have serious strategic and tactical differences with us.

Again, our movement has multiple flanks. We should not focus our energy on fighting between different flanks of the movement. We shouldn’t be saying, “I’m a radical, I’m going to go fight the moderates” or “I’m a realist and I’m going to denounce the radicals.” If we do that, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot. Our fight should always be with the enemy, not with people in our coalition. We’re in a long struggle and need unity and solidarity, even as we debate over ideas, strategy, and tactics. ×

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