{"id":12582,"date":"2024-03-04T23:27:53","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T04:27:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=12582"},"modified":"2024-03-19T23:29:24","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T03:29:24","slug":"perspectives-for-socialists-in-2024-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/03\/perspectives-for-socialists-in-2024-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspectives for socialists in 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tempest Collective:<\/span> What is your perspective on the state of resistance and movement internationally? It has been wonderful to see the Palestine movement in the United States reemerge at this moment. When one travels internationally, one gets that sense that people are looking at the movement in the U.S. and see its importance, especially because of the role of the U.S. government vis-\u00e0-vis Israel. Since the initiation of the\u00a0 Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) in 2005, the Palestine movement has consistently faced outright hostility. Now it faces repression, and a more extreme form of McCarthyism than we\u2019ve seen in this country for decades. What\u2019s your assessment of the evolution of the Palestine movement, its political contours, and the challenges it is facing?<\/p>\n

David McNally:<\/span> The wave of McCarthyite attacks on campuses, in Hollywood, and other places that we\u2019ve seen is ominous, but it will not hold. That doesn\u2019t mean they are not dangerous. But I believe that the repression overcompensates for ideological weakness. Israel and the United States confront a legitimation crisis over Palestine. There are ingredients of a Vietnam moment right now, a series of elements that could create a huge social rupture in the U.S. and beyond.<\/p>\n

Symptomatically, you see them in very straightforward ways. Let\u2019s start with the scale of the mobilization. I\u2019ve been going to demonstrations for more than 50 years. In November of last year, I attended the largest of my life. I walked with at least 600,000 people in London on the Palestine solidarity march. Some of the organizers are saying it was 800,000. I\u2019ve never marched with 600,000 people before in my life. That alone tells us something.<\/p>\n

Scores of President Biden\u2019s staffers have picketed the White House<\/a> wearing masks and protesting U.S. support for the war on Gaza. Employees of the World Food Program have written to their boss<\/a>, a U.S. hand-picked political hack, protesting the war on Gaza. BBC journalists have written an open letter denouncing their own broadcasting corporation<\/a> for its bias against Palestinians.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re only two months into the war. There are major unions, like the auto workers<\/a> and postal workers<\/a> in the United States, coming out for a ceasefire. It took five or six years with Vietnam to get a major union to come out against the war in Vietnam. All of this speaks to an enormous fracture in the hegemony of Zionism.<\/p>\n