Why the Disproportionate Activist Focus on Gaza vs Yemen, Ukraine, the Uyghurs or Syria?
Some might argue for anti-semitism as a cause, but more important is the influence of sectarian groups like the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL)
Make no mistake, the Israeli Occupation and its mass murders via bombing Gaza in the last month are political abominations meriting every protest and condemnation possible. However, it is worth asking why we’ve had the scale of mass mobilization against this specific abomination when mass murders by other regimes have merited far less active opposition across the US.
Think of other recent atrocities:
Most on point is Yemen, where a US ally, Saudi Arabia, used US bombs to engage in mass murder, with hundreds of thousands dead due to the military conflict and an estimated 19,000 civilians killed directly by Saudi airstrikes- more than in Gaza so far. Yet there was never the same level of mobilization targeting US support for Saudi Arabia.
Then there is Ukraine, where Russia has invaded and occupied a large Eastern swathe of Ukraine on top of its occupation of Crimea from 2014. Not only has this involved bombings with a civilian death count estimated at almost 10,000 civilians, and mass destruction of cities as with Gaza City, Russia has engaged in a chilling mass deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia for indoctrination that the International Criminal Court has declared a war crime for which Putin has been indicted. Not only have the protests against Russia’s actions been far more muted - but some of the key actors leading protests against Israel have in fact been supporters of the Russian occupation. (More on that below)
And the other superpower, China, has launched what many see as cultural genocide against the Uyghur population of Muslims, with a HALF MILLION Turkic Muslims held in prisons, according to Human Rights Watch, and thousands of mosques in the Xinjiang region destroyed in just a few years as part of a broader effort to erase Uyghur ethnic identities. Again, some key leaders of anti-Israel protests are apologists for China’s dictatorship and cultural genocide.
You can also add other regional nationalist atrocities, such as Myammar’s mass murder of Rohingya Muslims over the last six years that has forced 720,000 refugees to flee to camps in Bangladesh, the estimated 306,000 civilians killed over 10 years in Syria, or the war on the Tigray minority by the Ethiopian government, which some estimate has had 600,000 civilian deaths due to government-imposed starvation on rebel areas.
So why the disproportionate activist focus on Gaza?
Is Anti-Israeli Activism Based on Antisemitism?
Part of it may be antisemitism willing to latch onto the perceived manipulative machinations in Jewish elites - hardly the first time in history - and that is no doubt part of the story. Honestly, when I hear activists denouncing “Zionism,” I cringe since I distrust especially non-Jewish critics of Israel who jump to a specifically Hebrew/Yiddish word instead of just criticizing Israeli nationalism, as they would criticize racist nationalism of other nations.
Focusing on the Jewish word can make it seem like Jewish nationalism is somehow inherently different from other kinds of nationalism - much like the old “Zionism =Racism” slogans avoided saying the obvious point that all nationalisms have a core of racism, so why single out Israeli nationalism as being specifically more racist than others?
Israel is a thuggish and racist government whose nationalism is used to justify oppression of internal ethnic and religious minorities, much as thuggish and racist governments around the world and in history have used nationalism in similar ways. Calling Israel an Apartheid or even a Nazi-like regime is far more acceptable than condemning it for being “Zionist,” since putting Jewish nationalism in the same category as the toxic nationalisms of other regimes is less othering of Jewish nationalism.
The Israeli regime’s Jewishness is beside the point - and offends many Jews by its association with their religion and community, which is why so many Jewish groups are prominently opposing Israel’s Occupation and bombings at this point.
Many Gaza Protests Reflect the Agenda of Sectarian Groups, in particular that of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)
Since it is sufficient to condemn Israel's racist nationalism, pretty much the only real reason to use "Zionism" in the critique is to evoke antisemitism in non-Jews you are appealing to. Even some of those using the term are Jewish activists themselves, but they know it’s a way to hive off an agenda targeting Israel while ignoring the atrocities of Russia or China or Syria.
And the reason for doing that is when your ideology is aligned with those latter regimes.
Enter the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), whose activist leaders have had a central role in organizing protests across the country against Israel, mostly via their front group called ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and other allied groups they largely control. ANSWER was notably a prime organizer of the Nov 3 “National March” to Free Palestine and the early October 8th rally that was so atrociously pro-Hamas that AOC felt compelled to denounce it.
I single out PSL out of grudging respect, since in my three decades as an activist, from the first Gulf War to the Iraq War to the current protests around Gaza, their leaders have been the single most effective force in organizing and hijacking the direction of protest movements to emphasize messaging and tactics that serve their ideology.
Notably, they failed to stop either of those earlier Gulf Wars and their current organizing tactics do more to alienate the public than recruit them in support of the Palestinian cause. Twenty years ago I wrote a piece for Dissent called Where the Peace Movement Went Wrong (blog version here) where I wrote about the ways “pro-Hussein propagandists” like ANSWER and its allies undercut the messaging of the anti-war movement then and helped drive support for the war, much as pro-Hamas messaging by ANSWER/PSL continues to feed pro-Israel propaganda now.
But then, stopping those wars or actually helping the Palestinians improve their lives is not their organizing goal; their goal is to divide the progressive movement, pit allied activists against other left and liberal groups, in particular the Democratic Party, and break off a cadre of people allied to them and to their favored regimes internationally.
The Genealogy of PSL Sectarianism
Why the PSL and allied groups approach politics this way is rooted in the deep (and admittedly somewhat twisted) genealogy of left sectarian groups. A lot of liberals know about the split between mainstream socialist groups and communist parties founded in the wake of the Russian Revolution. But a whole other branch of the left split off when Stalin took over the Soviet Union and expelled Leon Trotsky - leading various party grouplets to split off around the world as well. Those “Trotskyist” groups tended to hold a “third camp” view of the world, opposing both US and Soviet imperialism. In the United States, the Trotskyist groups tended to stay out of Democratic Party politics - compared to Communist Party activists who would participate in Democratic Party coalitions.
However, when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 to suppress a revolt against Soviet rule, some Trotskyists broke with the “third camp” approach and strongly supported the Soviets as their tanks rolled into Budapest. (If you’ve heard the term “tankie” to describe pro-Russia activists, that’s what it refers to). One such group in the US called itself the Workers World Party and ended up slavishly supporting regimes like the Soviet Union and, once that government fell, highlighted the North Korean regime as one of the last bastions of true communism (see this 1995 piece as an example). But they held onto their Trotskyist roots in disdaining working in Democratic Party politics and made attacking “reactionary Democratic Party elites” a mainstay of their politics. The Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) broke off from Workers World in the early 2000s for undisclosed reasons but largely held onto the same ideological frameworks- and they held onto the ANSWER coalition they had built while part of Workers World. (If you are a glutton for punishment, you can look at this family tree of Troskist groups but recognize there is a similarly twisty family tree for Maoist grouplets out there).
So that brings us to the present world, where we have a post-Soviet Russia invading Ukraine, China oppressing the Uyghurs, the Syrian regime engaged in mass slaughter of its rebellious populations, and Israel bombing the Palestinians. And what does a group like PSL make of these varied atrocities:
On Ukraine: PSL opposed helping Ukrainians fight the Russian occupation, justifying Russia’s invasion based on “Russia’s legitimate security concern” and blaming the “imperialist NATO military alliance” for not giving in to Russia’s demands.
On China and the Uyghurs: PSL flatly denies any of it is happening and says is it just “media manipulation” and “humanitarian imperialism,” much as they justify China’s earlier invasion of Tibet in 1959 as springing from China’s liberation of its people from the monkish rule of the “Dalai Lama and the feudal nobility.”
On Syria: PSL describes Assad’s Syrian regime as liberating people and argues that the main project activists need to do regarding Syria is defend the regime and “expose the war crimes of U.S. imperialism in Syria and organize in the heart of the Empire to win the poor and oppressed people to the ranks of resistance against U.S. imperialism.”
That last sentence summarizes how the PSL and like-minded sectarians approach the conflict in Israel - not as a project to organize a majority of Americans to support an end to the Occupation but as a chance to “expose U.S imperialism.” It is a politics that ignores mass murder and occupation by Russia and China and Syria while looking for fights like Gaza that can be used to pit progressive activists against liberal elected officials in the United States.
In an almost Onion-like parody of itself, PSL decided to stage a protest on Tuesday outside the memorial service for Rosalynn Carter in an action guaranteed to alienate most Americans. Such action is doubly ironic since Jimmy Carter is possibly the most prominent political figure to refer to Israel in terms of Apartheid - but making alliances with potential allies in the Democratic Party is the antithesis of PSL-style politics.
https://therecount.com/watch/propalestinian-protesters-demonstrate-outside-the/2645893360
How PSL-style Sectarianism Undermines Left Politics in the US
Now, PSL is only one group with only a few thousand members, dwarfed in size by Democratic Socialists of America for example (see some rough estimates here on membership in various left groups), but the impact of PSL is magnified both by the time each PSL member individually spends on organizing and by the many front groups those members help organize and often lead. And ideologically, the PSL represents a current of thought they both embody and help promote beyond their own specific group. That New York City’s DSA chapter endorsed the PSL/ANSWER rally on October 8th - and suffered significant backlash for doing so - highlights that there are at least factions within the larger DSA organization sympathetic to the PSL viewpoint.
That broader division in DSA has led some prominent members to leave the organization, not over the issue of Gaza, since there is broad agreement condemning Israel’s Occupation, but over an increasing tilt in the DSA organization reflecting a PSL-style politics that prioritizes attacking liberal Democrats more than building broader coalitions for concrete political change. Even before recent events, DSA had been embroiled by votes in various chapters calling for Jamaal Bowman to be ousted from the organization for being insufficiently pro-Palestinian- despite being one of the most prominent critics of Israel in the U.S. Congress- and he recently let his membership lapse.
The problem for the left overall is not the scale of organizing against Israel’s murderous Apartheid regime, but that any organizing bereft of a moral vision of global politics is inherently going to fail in achieving broader goals of peace and justice. If politics is a Manichean choice between Hamas and Israel, most American voters end up siding with Israel. Even more broadly, the left needs to have a consistent moral vision defending human and democratic rights from Gaza to Ukraine to Xinjiang, - or else it will ultimately not be able to build a majority in our politics to shift global politics in a better direction.
Moving to Better Politics on Gaza and a Global Vision
In an ideal world, the left movement around self-determination for Palestine would be tied into demands for self-determination for Ukraine and a broader demand for a just global economic system to protect all suffering under oppression. At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I tried to lay out some of that vision in my piece, The War in Ukraine is a Class War, where I highlighted both the limits of nationalism as an organizing principle but also ways that a just politics might be able to transcend it. In that piece, I highlighted a speech by the Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations (highlighted below), who noted the divisions left over from the past, particularly colonial divisions in places like Africa - and we might add, the Middle East.
The Kenya ambassador to the UN criticized Russia’s complaint of its people being divided across the Ukraine border by comparing it to the “unsatisfying” borders left behind by European colonialism in Africa. He was speaking about the problem of the Ukraine and Russia border but it could be a commentary on the problem of Palestine.
He argued new international institutions like the Organization for African Unity and the United Nations were the best way to transcend the negative impacts of nationalism in our global politics."We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires,” he argued, “in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression"
Just as the Kenyan ambassador rejected a resolution that would restrict Ukraine to its own borders with no right to be part of the European Union, there should be a left politics that would equally reject seeing the Palestinians restricted in their aspirations to the limited bantustan enclaves of Gaza and the remainder of land in the West Bank. “From the River to the Sea” can be evoked by some to mean the annihilation of Jewish rights in the region, but as Rep. Tlaib has argued, it can also be a call for transcending the narrow zero-sum nationalisms that divide people. As she wrote
“From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate…My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”
It may be utopian to believe that coexistence and integration are possible, that the hatred and violence between people would make any form of confederation of peoples in Palestine/Israel impossible, but it’s worth considering that Germany and France moved from a war where they killed far more of each others’ people than Jews and Arabs have ever engaged in, yet found a way to build a peaceful European Union.
But any moral politics on the left should be able to recognize the rights of Palestinians, Ukrainians, and all people around the world to democratic integration in a global system of justice.
The alternative in the US is a Trumpian-style white Christian nationalism - and PSL-style sectarianism is just its mirror image of siding with US enemy regimes. The left needs to transcend both with a real vision of global democracy and political organizing meant to recruit a majority of Americans in support of that vision.
But far more important is the way particular political actors
It is never been about race; it is always about cultural differences.