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njoseph's avatar

Sorry to be late to the party. I think what MLK, Gandhi, Mandela and other people who created positive social change realize is that you have to make it safe for the other party to grant concessions. To put it another way, if you're fighting a democracy, you have to convince a certain proportion of the people that the change you want is in their interest. This is something most Palestinians and all the loudest supporters in the West have utterly failed to do. There is a very clear pattern since 1973: make peace with Israel, get land back (see: Egypt), or: make peace with Israel, and Israel will not attack you (see: Jordan.) Fail to make peace with Israel, and let your extremists sabotage the negotiations, and you get war. See: first Intifada, second Intifada, Lebanon War(s), Gaza war(s), etc.

I'm a middle-aged Jewish Zionist who has spent a fair amount of time in both Israel and some of the occupied (sic) territories, and would consider myself a leftist. But there's a reason the Left in Israel, which was ready to compromise and used comprise a pretty big part of the population, is now a mere shadow of its former self: they failed, over and over, to successfully conclude negotiations that would bring peace. That's not entirely their fault, but after Barak and then Olmert put almost everything on the table and got bupkis in return, the Right basically said: see, we told you this would never work. (Also, the religious right has more babies, but I think the first reason is bigger.)

To put it a third way, I'd love some of the noodleheads at the Gaza encampments to answer a very simple question: what would it take for the Knesset to vote to withdraw entirely from Gaza and the West Bank? How would you get there? When I have tried to ask this question, usually online, the answer is usually something like: Free Palestine, Palestine must be free, because Israel is a settler-colonial state.

OK, OK, great, Israel is a settler-colonial state, but it also has a badass army and nuclear weapons. You aren't going to convince Iran or Turkey to help you invade Tel Aviv and risk their capitals becoming holes in the ground. So maybe, just MAYBE, try behaving in a way that convinces Israelis that you're not trying to kill them all? So they vote for center and center-left parties that might cut a deal with you?

I read recently that the attacks on Jews in DC, Boulder, the worst of the encampment rhetoric, is ultimately such a self-own because the OG theory of Zionism is that we need a Jewish state because Jews aren't safe in the Diaspora. Well, fucking duh, every time you attack a Jewish event yelling "Free Palestine," you. . . . validate Zionist ideology and create Zionists.

Well done, Palestine activists.

PS: the lack of ability to connect your ideal vision of the future to concrete, practical steps to enact it in a democracy is hardly limited to Palestine activists. I used to travel more often in environmentalist circles and you'd hear "to stop climate change we need to totally change the economy from Earth-raping capitalism!" To which I'd ask: OK, great, how do we get there? How do we do that, with the Senate in the US set up the way it is? What Constitutional changes would you like to allow us to overthrow capitalism and how do you think we should go about getting those passed? Blank stares. . . . "to stop climate change we need to overthrow capitalism!"

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Testname's avatar

Great article

One thing I would add: be prepared to take the win. Fundamentally, what most people will want from most protests is for them to shut up and go away. If the public/politicians/<insert whoever can grant your demands here> thinks that you will just find something else to protest even if they capitulate on everything…well then why would they capitulate in the first place?

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