Rebuilding the Palestine Solidarity Movement

The Tempest Collective has a perspective on the strategy needed to win Palestinian liberation, evident in many articles on this website. However, analysis of the struggle and the politics of various components of the Palestinian national liberation movement is only part of what Palestine Solidarity activists require to be effective. We also need more discussion about the many grassroots and tactical questions that have arisen from solidarity campaigns on campuses, in communities, and in the labor movement.

Many activists are rightly concerned our Palestine Solidarity movement is now stagnating or even declining.

While the first few months after October 7th were a time of dynamism and growth, with new campaigns and actions flowering everywhere, by spring, the movement seemed to stall. Community based demonstrations, while still happening, were smaller. The wave of university encampments sparked by Columbia students in mid-April gave the whole Palestine Solidarity movement a much-needed jolt of energy, inspiring activists around the world. But with the rhythms of an academic calendar, that initiative had a natural expiration date. This summer our movement is at a low ebb; encampments have been crushed or suspended, students have vacated their campuses, and many trade unionists and community activists are taking time off for summer vacation.

This is a key moment for Palestine Solidarity activists to debate and discuss tactics as we prepare for new campaigns and initiatives in the fall. What can we do to ensure our movement regains its momentum? How can campus, community, and union activists break new ground? Are there special one-time events we can organize to mark the one-year anniversary of the current campaign against Israeli apartheid? And most importantly, how can the Palestine Solidarity movement avoid the 2020 fate of the Black Lives Matter movement, being demobilized in the service of a ‘more important’ objective – electing a ‘lesser evil’ Democrat as President?

While debates about high level political strategy need to continue, community, campus and union activists also need to revisit their grassroots tactics of the last ten months. What has worked, and what hasn’t? How can we rebuild the Palestine Solidarity movement to ensure we have growing numbers of increasingly politicized participants while simultaneously opposing the genocidal policies of both the greater and lesser evil parties?

The Tempest Collective doesn’t have definitive answers to such questions. Nobody does. But we are committed to learning what we can from the recent experience of the Palestine Solidarity movement. While we await more definitive global and country-specific analyses of the 2023-24 experience of our movement, we can still learn a lot from some of the radical assessments already produced.  We’ve scoured many websites and examined many articles, so we can direct your attention to some of the most insightful and useful radical reporting about the past ten months of the Palestine Solidarity movement (see below.) These descriptions and assessments of the tactics used by student, labor, and community activists, and the impact of their campaigns, can help us all rethink and relaunch our movement this fall.

While we don’t necessarily agree with every argument or interpretation the authors make, we do think activists can benefit from familiarity with some of the best radical coverage of our movement to date. This body of work about the tactics and experiences of our comrades in the movement will enhance everyone’s decision-making about how best to proceed.

The 30+ articles (plus a few videos) described below share the assumption the Palestine Solidarity movement should base itself on a few broad principles, like the three demands of the BDS campaign and the even broader demand for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. The articles describe a movement that is broad, diverse, and biased towards action to disrupt the economic and political machinery of genocide. The authors share a commitment to building a movement that is sufficiently open and democratic for activists to debate tactics, learn from successes and failures, and improve their campaigns. They seek to build a movement that has a lasting presence and impact.

We’ve divided the articles and videos into three broad categories: community, labor, and campus. We describe why we think each of the selected items is of particular interest.

We encourage you to help us improve this list. Send us links to the best resources you’ve found for building the Palestinian solidarity movement. We’ll update this article in the future.

COMMUNITIES

Building community coalitions to coordinate initiatives by a variety of Palestine Solidarity organizations (like city-wide demonstrations) has been a focus almost everywhere. An excellent example of what can be accomplished was described in a January 2024 Tempest article about building a broad community-based movement in Burlington Vermont.

On the other coast, an interview with Harsha Walia emphasizes the richness of the community-based eco-system of resistance to Israel’s genocide in Vancouver. While discussing some of the standard features of urban solidarity movements (city-wide demos, sit-ins, occupations, and pickets to enforce a boycott) she highlights some novel developments: the unprecedented emergence of neighbourhood-based solidarity groups, and the emerging solidarity between Palestinian youth picketing at the port of Vancouver and the Punjabi workers employed there.

Learning from the experience of other social movements has also been critical in building the Palestine solidarity movement. In May 2024, Portland activists in the Democratic Socialists of America drew some key lessons from the experiences of the Black Lives Matter movement– the importance of internal democracy, an accountable leadership, a capacity to go on the offensive, and an ability to engage with the wider class struggle – to build the local Palestine solidarity movement.

In some cities, like Ferndale, Michigan, Palestine solidarity activists have targeted municipal governments to pass pro-Palestinian resolutions. A March 2024, Tempest article evaluated the value of that initiative.

Critical to the success of our movement has been the high-profile support of two key sectoral groups: Queer people and Jewish people. In November, a Tempest article discussed the experience of Queer activists organizing in Los Angeles. A few months later, an article in Prism surveyed some of the most important Palestine Solidarity initiatives by Queer activists across the US.

Large chunks of the Jewish community, organized in groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Not in Our Name, have played a key role in Palestine solidarity in some cities. In January, Newsline Magazine, described some of the pro-Palestinian actions undertaken by local branches of those two organizations. Often involving non-violent direct action by large numbers of Jewish activists, their mobilizations have garnered a lot of media attention and badly disrupted ruling-class arguments about our movement being antisemitic.

Common to many communities are efforts to build on the BDS campaigns that pre-existed October 2023. Useful tips for doing that are widely available, with those from Mondoweiss being typical.

TRADE UNIONS

The last three months of 2023 witnessed a dramatic growth in labor solidarity with Palestine. An early focus, now less frequently discussed, was the best wording for various types of resolutions. As BDS activity continues in the labour movement, resolutions – whether directed at trade unions as institutions or at employers – will continue to be important. Often, those discussions were accompanied by initiatives to revive or create Palestine solidarity caucuses within trade unions and workplaces.

Building caucuses and adopting resolutions are a prelude to labor action, like that conducted by trades unions in the Bay area. One of the more impressive initiatives in the Bay area saw HS teachers closing down their school with a Mayday strike in solidarity with Palestine. In addition to teach-ins, boycotts and campaigns to divest pension funds from companies supporting Israel, Bay area unions have combined endorsement-revoking campaigns to target politicians implicated in shipping weapons to Israel with direct action. In fact,  halting the shipment of weapons to Israel and disrupting economic ties with the Zionist regime have been a focal point for labor globally, with some high profile successes.

Workers not conventionally associated with militancy and solidarity, have also taken action in response to Israel’s genocide. In the United Kingdom, members of the Public and Commercial Services Union have used decisions by the International Court of Justice to justify their refusal to issue the export licences needed by British arms manufacturers complicit with Israel.

With the impressive start of student encampment movement in April, university-based unions swung into action in support of that campaign. In California, academic workers went beyond resolutions and speeches to launch political strikes to support the encampments, a development that was much discussed globally. Some university-based unions took action regarding the links between their institutions and Israeli-linked sections of the military industrial complex.

UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES

University students were among the first pro-Palestinian supporters to activate during the fall. Before the encampment movement, campus-based students in Palestine solidarity groups sought to expand on a wide range of past BDS efforts. When students at Columbia hit on the encampment tactic, student activity was already at a high pitch, resulting in rapid and widespread adoption of the new tactic. Within weeks, student activists at more than 140 American universities as well as student in at least 25 other countries had created encampments, elevating one tactical innovation to provide the basis for a global student campaign.

The richness of the student encampment experience defies easy summary. Activists who had little direct contact with the encampment movement can gain some sense of its politicizing character from some of the multi-campus discussion panels radicalizing students participated in, such as this one organized by Green Left, or this one organized by Tempest.

The student encampments created new social spaces entirely devoted to Palestinian liberation, enclaves where ideas and plans to challenge the genocidal impulse of our rulers were generated every day. Further, at many encampments, run on the basis of radical democratic practices, students got to experience first hand elements of the social liberation they are fighting for.

In cities where the student encampments were located centrally, they quickly became magnets for the entire movement. They provided space for student, labor, and community activists to meet and coordinate their on and off-campus efforts. In many cities, labor activists used their organization and resources to back student initiatives. And in some cases, labor and community activists were heavily involved in defending the encampments from coercion and repression. The high point of labor defence of the right of pro-Palestine students to protest via encampment was probably the President of the Ontario Federation of Labour’s the public letter  to the President of the University of Toronto. It promised that any police action against the students would have to contend with thousands of trade unionists defending them.

Now that most university encampments have been repressed or suspended for the summer months, there are debates about what happens next on the campuses. Naturally, that discussion will be shaped by assessments about which universities made concessions and how substantive those concessions really are.

As labor and community activists as well as students assess the past ten months, it will be vital not to fetishize any one tactic. We all need to reassess which campaign methods can best exploit the economic and public relations vulnerabilities of the politicians, bureaucrats and administrators who persist in defending genocide. Moreover, the growing instability of global capitalism means we need to be flexible enough to respond to unforeseen developments. A wider war in the Middle East, a global economic recession, another Trump Presidency, or some similar event is likely to create new demands for strategic and tactical innovation by the Palestine solidarity movement.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”