he state of Israel has unleashed the most brutal military bombardment since World War II on the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. This siege came in response to Hamas’s breach of the wall that delineates the Israeli occupation and the group’s subsequent attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.

 the nearly 15,000 air strikes the U.S. carried out on Iraq in its campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. In December, U.S. intelligence sources divulged to CNN that 40 to 45 percent of the 

 against Gaza were “dumb bombs,” or unguided missiles, which can be more dangerous to civilians in densely populated areas.

“When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target,” an Israeli military source told reporters as part of a bombshell 

 attributing the virulence of Israel’s assault in part to an increased reliance on artificial intelligence to generate targets. “Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

Intense anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, and what the Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said described as “Orientalism” have underwritten the West’s perpetual wars, sieges, and onslaughts against the Middle East, wars that America’s client state, Israel, has helped manage for multiple generations. This racism has normalized America’s and Israel’s war crimes in the Middle East.

But this is far more than a simple ideological project. As the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the region, to the tune of more than $3 billion each year, Israel has long been of use to the West as the Zionist project of building a state on the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population. The U.S. disguises its geopolitical designs to control access to the region’s oil supply under the guise of rooting out terrorism. Though America’s “war on terror” failed, its afterlife of security theater, surveillance, and abject racist demonization of a perpetual Arab or Muslim “other” lives on.

Soon after Israel began its siege, Joe Biden made a mockery of Palestinian grief and death. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” he said, echoing the Israeli government. His 

 recognizing 100 days of the war on Gaza made no mention of the thousands of Palestinians whom Israel had killed. More recently, Biden enjoyed an ice cream cone with a late-night talk show host while blithely suggesting the possibility of a cease-fire. A week later, The Washington Post revealed that the United States has quietly delivered 100 weapons packages to Israel over the course of its assault, including thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, and bunker busters.

Of course, the U.S. has long licensed Arab death. Consider the Clinton era. In 1996, when Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” asked UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children caused by U.S.-backed sanctions on Iraq, Albright infamously said, “The price is worth it.” Activists confronted her the next year, and she responded, “I am as concerned about the children in Iraq as any person in this room.” But, she added, “Saddam Hussein is the one who has the fate of his country in his hands. … He is the one responsible for starving children, not the United States of America.”

George W. Bush claimed after the attacks on Sept. 11 that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” and “Islam is peace.” But the indiscriminate targeting of Arabs and Muslims abroad through various war efforts and domestically by federal and local police during the Bush presidency contradicted such overtures. The federal government’s gearing up for war reverberated across the country and fomented an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and extraordinary racism. 

 taken soon after Sept. 11 found 58 percent of Americans supported “intensive security checks” for Arabs, 49 percent favored special identification cards for them, and 32 percent approved of “special surveillance” of Arabs.

The media played a significant role in providing bigoted justifications for racial profiling. Richard Cohen, then a columnist for The Washington Post, 

: “We have become driveling idiots on matters of race and ethnicity. One hundred percent of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 mass murder were Arabs. Their accomplices, if any, were probably Arabs, too — at least Muslims. Ethnicity and religion are the very basis of their movement. It hardly makes sense, therefore, to ignore that fact and, say, give Swedish au pair girls heading to the United States the same scrutiny as Arab men coming from the Middle East.”

Indeed, less than a month after the attacks, Bush sang a different tune from his earlier overture:

They hate us because we love the idea that people can worship an Almighty God any way he or she sees fit. They hate us because we love political discourse and a free society. They hate us because of our free press. They hate everything about us, because of our freedom. And there’s another — there are a lot of distinguishing features, but one of the most clear ones to me is this: We value life in America. We say everybody is precious, everybody counts, every life has worth, every life has dignity. They don’t value life.

An emboldened American security state was activated. In the weeks after Sept. 11, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies rounded up and detained more than 1,200 people, mostly Arabs and Muslims. The Department of Justice initiated a program of “voluntary interviews” with 5,000 “non-immigrant” men who claimed citizenship from countries the U.S. insisted harbored Al Qaeda. Two years later, in preparation for war with Iraq, a new Iraqi Task Force, created by the FBI, interviewed 11,000 people of Iraqi origin living in the United States, many of them citizens.

The swell of anti-Arab suspicion and racism shaped the lead-up to America’s baseless war of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. Politicians’ xenophobia obscured the brutality of a war that killed between 150,000 and perhaps as many as 600,000 Iraqis. The widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, already weakened by a decade of brutal U.S.-backed sanctions, resulted in even more deaths of Iraqis. It also helped to foment the conditions that allowed for the creation of the U.S. gulag in Guantánamo Bay — a military space controlled by the U.S. absent any rights or freedom. The climate of war allowed for torture and abuse of detainees at 

, too. Tens of thousands more were killed in Afghanistan — the longest war in U.S. history, ending only in 2021.

According to a 2023 report from Brown University, researchers estimated that more than four million people were either killed or eventually died in the War on Terror. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, millions have died from what The Washington Post 

 as “waves of violence, hunger, the devastation of public services, and the spread of disease.” In fact, it was anti-Palestinian bigotry that drove the creation of and shaped the development of anti-terrorism laws, according to a new 

 by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In 1969, the first-ever mention of terrorism in a federal law “dealt specifically with restricting humanitarian aid to Palestinians and inaugurated a pattern of rendering Palestinians synonymous with terrorism.”

The characterization of Arabs and Muslims as forever enemies was built into politics and disseminated through popular culture, which endlessly portrayed brown-skinned men as terrorists.

Republicans have long worn their derision of Arabs and Muslims openly. The far right concocted a mass hysteria over the conspiracy theory that Muslims sought to implement Shariah law in the U.S. Since 2010, state legislatures have introduced at least 201 anti-Shariah bills. Breaking with longstanding international consensus, Trump moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested land of Jerusalem. And he implemented a ban on entry into the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries after he was inaugurated as president, a ban the Supreme Court upheld. More recently, in the weeks after Hamas’s attacks, Montana Representative Ryan Zinke introduced legislation (with 10 cosponsors) that would 

 from entering the United States. “I don’t even want to call it the Palestinian flag because they’re not a state,” Republican Representative Max Miller of Ohio 

 after Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib pinned a Palestinian flag to her office door. “They’re a territory that’s about to probably get eviscerated and go away here shortly, as we’re going to turn that into a parking lot.”

We have come to expect such racist dreck from the Republican Party. But this is the Democratic Party’s war. Democrats have mastered the art of performing grief even while Biden’s intersectional and multiracial cohort of UN ambassadors and functionaries oppose cease-fire resolutions that could immediately end the war. When Tlaib spoke out early in favor of a cease-fire and for an end to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, a queer Haitian American, described as “repugnant” and “disgraceful” statements from Tlaib and others in the Squad calling for a cease-fire or criticizing Israel.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi told Palestine solidarity protesters to “go back to China” and 

 that calls for a cease-fire are “Mr. Putin’s message.” As if time-traveling back to the Cold War, she pressed on without evidence. “This is directly connected to what he would like to see,” she said. “Some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere,” but others “are connected to Russia.” Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, 

 that if Canada attacked Buffalo, N.Y., in the way that Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, “there would be no Canada” — an apparent endorsement of collective punishment and the right of Israel to annihilate Gaza.

Beyond such crass rhetoric, in early February, 

 voted for a $17.6 billion aid package put forth by Republicans to finance Israel’s siege of Gaza; it failed to pass. Instead of pressuring Israel to allow more aid trucks into Gaza, which is on the brink of famine, the Biden administration has dropped parachutes of food aid, some of which failed to open midair, killing people upon landing, and rushed to create a temporary port off Gaza’s coast for humanitarian aid shipments, a theatrical, cumbersome workaround.

But we are in a new moment. For the short life of this war, millions across the globe have roared in opposition, demanding a cease-fire, along with medical aid and food for Palestinians. The protests spurred a campaign spearheaded by South Africa at the International Court of Justice to make a surprising intervention, holding that Israel’s actions may constitute genocide. Opposition to Israel’s siege has activated a Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. led largely by Palestinian Americans and young Jews. U.S. financing and arming of this war has made Biden politically vulnerable even as he continues to stand by it.

Biden’s polling among Arab Americans voters has plummeted from 59 percent to 17 percent, while progressives have threatened to withhold their votes in the fall’s presidential contest. His political future is further imperiled by 

 to Israel’s actions in Gaza among Democratic voters, especially the young. Most recently, tens of thousands of Democratic Party primary voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and elsewhere voted “uncommitted” as a protest vote against Biden’s Gaza policy. The Democratic establishment downplayed the Michigan vote in public, but when Vice President Kamala Harris was dispatched to commemorate the 59th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, she called for an “immediate cease-fire,” then paused for applause, “for at least the next six weeks.” Of course, the movement demands an immediate and permanent cease-fire and an end to the occupation. Harris’s use of “cease-fire” instead of Biden’s “pause” is the administration’s effort to co-opt an antiwar movement that has spiraled beyond their control or their imaginations. But that rhetorical shift is also evidence that the “uncommitted” movement is unsettling the party’s consensus, as was Senator Chuck Schumer’s surprising excoriation of Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech.

Palestinians have challenged the U.S.-Israeli war machine. The U.S. war in Vietnam was the first to be broadcast widely in the homes of Americans, and the Israeli onslaught in Gaza is the first genocide to be watched live on people’s smartphones across the globe. The sheer determination of the Palestinian people to document their own suffering has transformed our understanding of this lopsided war, slicing through state-generated propaganda that has, since Vietnam, sought to shield the public from the death and destruction that is the reality of all war.

As the West has moved toward remote war conducted by drones, the human costs have become more abstract. Mainstream media outlets reinforce that remove, refusing to show the extent of the carnage, obliquely sanctioning the dubious claims of “smart bombs” and other euphemisms meant to assuage the public’s concern about the deaths of innocents. Because Israel has locked Gaza’s doors, courageous Palestinian journalists have risked their lives to broadcast Israel’s atrocities, and dozens have died doing so. It is because of Palestinians that we know of the hunger they are experiencing, visible in the gaunt bodies of their children. We know of the sniper attacks outside hospitals, the bombings of residential housing, mosques, and universities. Palestinians have learned how to circumvent the mainstream media’s equivocation about the value of their lives. They have seized the technology to show the world the consequences of Israel’s actions. Activists around the world emulated those techniques to document global movements like Occupy, the Arab Spring, Fees Must Fall, and the Black Lives Matter movement during the Ferguson uprising in 2014.

But today it is not only Palestinians who document their genocide in real time. For months, Israeli soldiers have 

 their atrocities. There are the group selfies of soldiers huddling, smiling in the foreground of the smoldering remains of apartment buildings and neighborhoods. Male Israeli soldiers fondling the underwear and nightwear of Palestinian women. A soldier in a tank 

 about running over a Palestinian man. Israeli soldiers beating, degrading, belittling Palestinians on camera, as if to showcase their hatred as well as their imperviousness to human rights, international law, or the rules of warfare. Israel has made a mockery of all of it, as settlers build illegal housing units 

 at record pace, murdering Palestinians in the process and arresting thousands to be held in indefinite detention. In doing so, it has betrayed the fake piety of U.S. officials who defend Israel’s every action while deflecting queries about a cease-fire or humanitarian aid for Palestinians. That these bureaucrats feel obliged to explain this particular foreign policy is because of the mass movement and Palestinians who, from a tiny strip, occupy the center of its moral universe.

The longevity of the Palestinian movement in Gaza and beyond allowed a core of activists to immediately jolt into action after Israel began to strike Gaza. Student activism organized around the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign has been a staple of the Palestinian solidarity movement for years. Now there are almost 100 new 

 chapters. The political atmosphere is still charged by a decade of Black Lives Matter activism and just three years removed from the paroxysmal marches in the summer of 2020. Solidarity activism replaced the political ennui brought about by an adrift Biden administration.

Even as young Jews and many of their parents have rejected Israel’s war, Israel’s propaganda machine has denounced the movement as antisemitic. Those accusations have created an academic year like no other, with student activists taking courageous action week to week, while being 

 by paranoid college administrators. The punishment of Palestinian solidarity and activism can’t be attributed only to “Islamophobia.” In the U.S., Zionists and conservatives attack the language of decolonization along with Palestinian demands for self-determination, as captured in the old slogan “From the river to the sea,” as antisemitism. (The far-right Likud party used a version of that slogan in its original platform.) They seek to marginalize and ban Palestinian solidarity on college campuses. Here, the work of the right, liberal college administrators, and the donor class converge. There is little doubt that antisemitism is on the rise. But its ascendance must be understood alongside the simultaneous growth of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that Israel’s ruthless assault on Gaza has encouraged, and fear of the loss of a significant portion of young Jews for the Zionist project.

Today, the reputation of the United Nations is in tatters because of both Israel’s relentless criticism of the organization and America’s ability to unilaterally undo the sentiment of a body that claims to represent the international community. Of course, the U.S. has always used or ignored the UN for its own purposes, but never under a spotlight this searing. Consider how the U.S. relied upon the UN to launch its illegal war in Iraq after the specious claim that the country harbored weapons of mass destruction. As the world longs for a cease-fire, we all watch in astonishment as U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield erases the will of the world with a mere wave of her hand.

What will become of international law as Israel continues to flout every postwar convention intended to constitute a new global order based on human rights in the aftermath of the Holocaust? All were intended to prevent exactly the kinds of atrocities that Israel is carrying out in Gaza. Of course, we have never enjoyed such a global peace. The global north instrumentalized these legal frameworks to police and control the global south. But now the emperor has no clothes — the hypocrisy of Israel’s barbarism, bankrolled by the United States, has been exposed before a global audience not just on the internet but in the Hague itself, the embodiment of the supposed sacrosanctity of international law.

Israel is a state forged in the aftermath of the traumatic experience of the Holocaust. But it has long weaponized this trauma and displaced it from Europe onto Arabs. In this siege, Israel is not satisfied with only territorial conquest and the defeat of its enemies; its military and state leaders also seek to torture, humiliate, and revel in the murder of Palestinians and the ruin of Palestinian society. Despite the gruesome suffering of Gazans, in a 

 of Israeli Jews that asked “to what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza when planning the continuation of the fighting there,” over 80 percent said a very small or fairly small extent. Nearly 75 percent of Israeli Jews supported the invasion of Rafah in a 

. Israel projects its own violence and hatred onto Palestinians in an orgy of racism, mass murder, and wanton destruction, while Western states, led by the United States, claim to be powerless to stop this madness.

But even amid a powerful backlash that conflates demands for a cease-fire and support of Hamas’s attacks, the power of Palestinians has propelled a global antiwar movement and in turn made the Western world finally see them and their righteous demands for freedom as legitimate — even urgent. No one in any country that has been colonized or invaded or occupied by Western imperialism needs to be told about either the atrocities or the hypocrisies of the world’s greatest democracies. Vietnam, India, Congo, Namibia, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Belfast, and beyond do not need to be reminded of the compromised freedom of imperial democracy. Their own colonial and imperial histories, and their legacies of resistance, are being remembered by and for a new generation.

In the United States, disapproval of Biden’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to rise — now among 79 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of Democrats. 

, a stunning 67 percent of Americans support “calling for a permanent cease-fire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza,” including 56 percent of Republicans. This may not translate into immediate support for Palestinian freedom, but Palestinian liberation is being seen in the new light of day.

This is the challenge for the left now, the one we are all focused on and the one we must think most sharply about. We are living through a revival of internationalism and another extended moment of mass protest. Even as we tire in the face of exhausting odds, a hulking imperial ship that refuses to acknowledge our power as it trembles, we must persist. A victory against the systems that oppress Palestinians is a victory against the systems that oppress us all. We hope this special edition of Hammer & Hope on Palestine provides some measure of the history, politics, and solidarity needed to support any liberation movement in its quest for freedom.

Anti-Arab Racism and the U.S. and Israeli War Machines

olidarity with Palestinians and their decades-long struggle in defense of their land, culture, and freedom has long been a central theme of my political life. I am gratified to see so many young people — especially young Black people — supporting the struggle in Palestine today. The emotional turbulence so many of us have experienced for the past five months as we’ve witnessed the unprecedented damage the Israeli military has inflicted reminds me just how central the Palestinian quest for justice is to liberation struggles here in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, as well as to my own sense of self in our extremely complicated political world.

The state of Israel is the purveyor not only of a settler-colonial project but also of one that actively continues its violent expansion in the 21st century. Over the past months we have witnessed widespread, unnecessary death and extraordinary devastation that has led to the uprooting of practically the entire population of Gaza. Massive demonstrations all over the planet and deep collective grief about the conditions in Gaza have turned my attention back to the emotion-laden political mobilizations during the summer of 2020. People everywhere, including in Palestine, felt both rage and profound sadness at the racist police lynching of George Floyd. Some might say that the issues driving the George Floyd mobilizations and the current protests against the war on Gaza are different. But are they?

The collective mourning elicited by the racist violence that claimed the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others galvanized demonstrations aimed at the systems, structures, and histories that enabled such racist state violence. And those demonstrations were implicitly directed at the global imperialism that furthers the proliferation of racial capitalist strategies. Some of the protests also highlighted the lessons the U.S. has learned as a direct result of its close alliance with Israel, which has included trainings offered by the Israel Defense Forces to U.S. police departments all over the country. Whether or not the Minnesota police ever directly learned combat moves from the IDF, the increased militarization of policing here is directly related to global capitalism, including the economic and military ties between Israel and the U.S.

Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza — who, along with those in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel itself, have been conscripted to serve as involuntary embodiments of the foundational enemy of Israel — has produced unimaginable grief and sorrow. Gazan families will never fully recover from the deaths of their loved ones, from the destruction of their homes (as many as 70 percent of homes and more than half of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed), from their monthslong attempts to survive without food and water, or from sleeping in the open as human counterparts of the scarred landscape, which may not recover in the foreseeable future. The vicious and dehumanizing verbal assaults by representatives of the government and armed forces have compounded this trauma. In announcing a “complete siege” of Gaza, the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.” He justified this action by adding, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” The international press widely quoted these remarks in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 assault by Hamas.

These atrocities, according to the charges South Africa brought before the International Court of Justice, have acquired genocidal proportions. But amid all of this, we have witnessed the rise of an unprecedented degree of global resistance and solidarity with Gazans and Palestinians. Like many others during these heartbreaking times, I have been encouraged by the leadership proffered by Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and other progressive Jewish organizations. Their dramatic presence in the movement is a reminder that binary constructions obscure more accurate and nuanced understandings of what it means to engage in freedom quests.

I was fortunate to witness Jewish solidarity with Palestine, however minoritized, during the early history of the state of Israel, which coincided with my undergraduate years at Brandeis University. My own lifelong sense of solidarity with Palestine is rooted in those experiences of my young political life. I learned the moral value of political solidarity and what it means to express that solidarity not only as a minority position within a larger progressive community but also through a deep identification with those who have been designated as enemies. Solidarity is never entirely straightforward, but in this situation, it requires us to reach beyond simplistic explanations that attribute positions of moral rectitude to one side and utter depravity to the other. Solidarity commands us to recognize the fallacious either/or construction that effectively forbids the proximity of positions of solidarity for Palestine and of deep and heartfelt condemnations of antisemitism.

In the process of reflecting on the meaning of solidarity, I have also learned over the years how dangerous it is to objectify one’s perceived enemies such that nothing they do or say can ever change or even challenge the qualities they are assumed to embody. It is always easy to defer to prevailing discourses that rely on these objectifications, and I think that most of us (myself included) have given in to such pressures at times. Colonialism, racism, and patriarchy all thrive on such capitulations.

But some of us have had the good fortune to have been presented with alternative ways of understanding, critical engagements that question the ideological underpinnings of what we are confronting. I am thankful to many people in the various collective movements and organizations to which I have belonged — the Communist Party USA, L.A. SNCC, Black Panther Political Party, Black Panther Party, Socialist German Students’ Union, Black Women’s Health Project, and others too numerous to name — for having pointed me and others in more productive directions, regardless of the consequences for their own lives. I have always gravitated toward those who are prepared to challenge the status quo. And I am grateful to those who have offered support when I have come under attack personally.

In 2018, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute offered me a human rights award named after Fred Shuttlesworth, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then rescinded the honor because of my activism in support of Palestine. Before I even had the opportunity to decide what my response would be, Jewish Voice for Peace and other progressive Jewish organizations began to organize.

Their support was especially important, because it was clear that I was not being targeted as an individual. Several months after the rescission of the award, Representative Ilhan Omar was singled out by Donald Trump, who misrepresented her as he argued that she was insufficiently critical of the perpetrators of 9/11 and accused her of antisemitism because of her principled support of Palestine. Scholar and activist Barbara Ransby and others organized an outdoor convergence and protest in Washington, D.C., to support Omar, alongside her fellow representatives Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In November 2018, CNN fired academic and activist Marc Lamont Hill because he had used the phrase “from the river to the sea” at a UN meeting on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. His firing prefigured Zionists’ widespread contemporary effort to ban a rallying call that for many, in the words of Tlaib, is “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

Palestinian solidarity protesters in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 21, 2023. Photograph by Christopher Lee for Hammer & Hope.

It was clear then that the Zionist lobby was stepping up its offensive because it had been losing ground. During and after the 2014 Ferguson protests, young Black activists and their supporters had begun to fiercely challenge the ideological representation of Israel as the central outpost of democracy in the Middle East, which had to be defended at all costs. The longstanding work of Palestinian activists Linda Sarsour, Ahmad Abuzaid and others to develop productive alliances that could amplify Black solidarity with Palestine and further cultivate internationalism within the Black Lives Matter movement began to resonate broadly. The Dream Defenders, founded in Florida by Phillip Agnew, Ahmad Abuznaid, and Gabriel Pendas in the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s murder, not only brought Palestinian Americans and African Americans together in an organization that identifies as abolitionist, feminist, and socialist but also has organized a number of delegations to Palestine. I see a direct line connecting this recent history — and, of course, all the history linking Black and Palestinian movements since the Nakba in 1948 — with the rising numbers of Black people who now refuse to toe the Democratic Party line on support for Israel.

As radical advocates and activists, we don’t often have the opportunity to experience the changes for which we struggle; instead we expect that our work will affirm new starting points for generations to come. But sometimes, if we manage to live long enough, we may also have the good fortune of experiencing the transformative impact of struggles in which we have participated. When I first heard the news that the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award was being rescinded as a response to my Palestine activism, I felt unable to breathe — as if this blow had literally knocked the wind out of my body — which was why my statement at the time indicated that I was “stunned.” That feeling soon dissipated, however, as many expressions of solidarity from all over the world, including from organizations of rabbis and other Jewish formations, began to circulate. Overwhelmingly supportive responses from Black and other politically progressive organizations reminded me that freedom work, even when it may not appear to be making an appreciable difference, can lead to profound and transformative results.

Though the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s gala had been canceled, community activists, together with the mayor and other city officials, came together to organize a public event at the Boutwell Auditorium that probably attracted 10 times more people than the fund-raiser would have. For me personally and politically, this event occasioned a rare and deep-seated sense of collective triumph. In this historical bastion of racist segregation where I had been born and grew up — the Johannesburg of the South — a vast collection of people of different racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds attested to the weakening influence of Zionist ideology. When I looked out into the audience from the stage, I saw so many of my childhood friends, a number of whom had helped organize this gathering, protesting the BCRI decision, and all of whom were putting their bodies on the line by showing up en masse.

Before visiting Birmingham, I had traveled to Waltham, Mass., to participate in the 50th anniversary celebration of the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis. Students at Brandeis during the early 1960s were constantly reminded that Israel was founded in 1948, the same year Brandeis was established. While none of us could avoid the pervasive Zionism, I was grateful to have a Jewish roommate during my first year who constantly steered me to think critically about the representation of Israel as the only possible defense for the global Jewish community. She turned my attention to the condition of Palestinians, who were being systematically divested of their land, their rights, and their future. She also helped me to understand that standing with the Palestinian resistance was the best way to fight for a world where we could all be safe.

I invoke my own experience at Brandeis because despite its perpetuation of the claim that Palestinians embody a continuing existential threat to Israel (it was the first private university to ban a Students for Justice in Palestine campus chapter), I do not remember any major conflicts around this issue during my time there. But I do recall many subterranean conversations about the impact of this militaristic nation-building process on the Palestinian people. What I now deeply appreciate is that I retained crucial insights regarding the kinship between racism and antisemitism (violent white supremacists dynamited Black churches and homes in my natal city of Birmingham and targeted a synagogue), and these insights continued to lead me to the people I organized with and the people with whom I socialized. They were not displaced by my evolving consciousness of the dangers of Zionism.

After I graduated from Brandeis in 1965, I traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, to study with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and others associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Shortly after arriving, I became involved with the Socialist German Students’ Union (SDS). This was precisely when SDS began to turn away from Israel and toward solidarity with the Arab states challenging Israel. A few days before the outbreak of the 1967 war, the police killed a student named Benno Ohnesorg while he attended an SDS protest against the shah of Iran’s visit to Berlin. Fascist police violence happened at the same time as the Israeli army’s aggression. This led the SDS to create an interesting connection between supporting Third World Liberation efforts (including solidarity with Palestine) and challenging police violence and other forms of state repression within what was then West Germany. That a student could be killed for participating in peaceful protests provided clear evidence that West Germany had not overcome the dangers of fascism.

Angela Davis speaks at a Free Huey rally in DeFremery Park in Oakland, Calif., Nov. 12, 1969. Standing next to Davis is James Burford. Photograph by Stephen Shames.

After I returned to the U.S. in the fall of 1967, I was determined to find my way into the revolutionary Black Liberation Movement, and I reconnected with Herbert Marcuse, my Brandeis mentor, who was now teaching at UC San Diego. My experiences in Germany — especially among students from Africa and other parts of what was then known as the Third World — had consolidated my embrace of revolutionary internationalism, and I gravitated toward organizations and individuals who shared that identification. At a time of growing global solidarity with Third World struggles, all of the groups I worked with — the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Los Angeles chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) — were absolutely clear about their solidarity with Palestine. During that period, I participated in a series of exciting and enlightening political conversations with James Forman, who was then the international affairs director of SNCC. At that time, SNCC encouraged its members to study the situation in the Middle East; the organization insisted that making significant progress in our domestic struggles required us to embrace internationalism. In a letter Forman wrote to the executive secretary of SNCC during the 1967 war, he explained:

The class struggle in the black community will become sharper if the war continues. Obviously the “gut” reaction in many people is against Israel and for the Arabs, reflecting the black-white tension, the hardening of racism, and the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves in this country. However, it becomes very necessary for those of us in the organization, especially those of us in leadership positions, to study the historical development and the contemporary economic policies of Israel. Actually Israel represents an extension of United State foreign policy as well as an attempt by the Zionists to create a homeland for the Jews. The latter merges with the former in many countries, especially the United States, Great Britain, and France in some respects.

When the FBI arrested me in October 1970, I could not have predicted that my own political proximity to Palestine would increase exponentially. Of the many expressions of solidarity forwarded to me during my imprisonment, I was most deeply moved by the messages emanating from prisons. I can still remember how humbled I felt upon receiving a beautiful letter of solidarity signed by Palestinian political prisoners. The letter had been smuggled out of an Israeli jail and transmitted to my lawyers, who brought it into the California jail where I was being held. Some 40 years later, when I joined a solidarity delegation to Palestine of women of color and indigenous scholar-activists, I met a Palestinian activist who told me that he was one of the imprisoned people who had signed that solidarity message so many years ago. When we embraced, I experienced a profound sense of satisfaction with the trajectory of my life and how it has intersected with so many others around the world who again and again collectively generate the hope that radical transformation is being inscribed on the agendas of our futures.

Today the unceasing military assaults on Gaza are reason for deep despair, especially as we learn every day about a loss of life and community destruction that is unprecedented in comparison to all recent wars. Despite the obvious need for a cease-fire — a permanent cease-fire — the U.S. government continues to lend aid and support to Israel. Young activists today are trying to unravel this conundrum, even as the government and both major political parties remain in thrall to Zionism. Despite efforts to persuade the public that any critique or even questioning of the state of Israel

is equivalent to antisemitism, astute young people, including radical Jewish activists, are pointing out that the most effective struggles against antisemitism are necessarily linked to opposition to racism, Islamophobia, and other modes of repression and discrimination. This is the first time in my own political memory that the Palestine solidarity movement is experiencing such broad support both throughout the U.S. and all over the world. Here in the United States, despite the McCarthyist strategies employed against those who call for freedom and justice for Palestine on campuses, in the entertainment industry, and elsewhere, we are in a new political moment, and we cannot — we must not — capitulate to those who represent the interests of racial capitalism and the legacies of colonialism. As June Jordan wrote in “Poem for South African Women”:

    And who will join this standing up
    and the ones who stood without sweet company
    will sing and sing
    back into the mountains and
    if necessary
    even under the sea

Angela Davis in Paris, France, March 2013. Photograph by Richard Dumas/Agence VU/Redux.

Angela Davis: Standing With Palestinians

In Gaza, without weapons or military training, women are keeping their families alive and united amid the massive bombardments of their homes by Israel. In addition to searching for shelter, water, food, and wood for cooking, they are taking care of children, the elderly, and the sick. Their survival, and their resistance, take place daily. In late December 2023 and January 2024, six women in Gaza agreed to record answers (in English) to Vinícius Assis’s questions about their lives and routines before and during Israel’s war on Gaza, their current challenges, and what they hope to do first after the conflict ends.

I’m 22 years old. I used to work as an English teacher before this war started, but now I’m jobless. I used to wake up early in the morning, with gratitude in my heart, eager to greet my beloved family with love and warmth. I pray for 

, and I pray for a great day ahead. Then I have my breakfast and get prepared to go to work. I used to spend eight hours at work teaching different levels of students of different ages.

Then I get some rest and prepare for the next day. After that, I help my mom with teaching my younger brothers. After we finish our duties, we gather or sit together and talk about our whole days, how did we spend it, how was it. If there is a problem that needs to be solved, we can share our thoughts together.

On Oct. 7 we were preparing ourselves for schools, universities, and our work. In the early morning, suddenly we heard heavy explosions. My father woke up and immediately rushed to the office. He ordered everyone to stay at home because of the heavy bombardments and explosions. We canceled all of our daily plans, and we stood in front of the TV and followed the news.

We knew about the attack from my father, a journalist. He gave us the latest news updates. We were astonished. We didn’t understand who, when, and why. We were confused. We didn’t know what was going on.

On the first day, nothing happened. The Israelis started to bomb after at least 24 hours. Until they responded, we were afraid and scared since the Israeli media was warning, and we understood there would be a big response. Then when the Israelis started this war in Gaza, after a week we got displaced from Gaza City to the central area. We responded to the Israeli orders, as they said it’s dangerous. Then, when we felt it’s getting worse and worse, we moved to Rafah, and now in Rafah we have no other plan, because we are next to the Egyptian-Palestinian border. We don’t have a plan for the next five minutes. We don’t know what to do next.

The Israelis shut down the borders from the first day. So no food, no water, no electricity, no cooking gas, no fuel. When we run out of cooking gas, we use wood; we have been using wood for cooking, boiling water, and other daily life needs. In this world I learned to do many things: I learned how to use alternatives; how to save water, fuel, wood, food; how to accept the minimum.

People’s health is affected badly, since we are deprived of vegetables, fruits, and the nutrients that our body needs. So I’m losing weight, and sometimes I lose my concentration. Some pregnant women lose their balance, some of them give birth early, and some of them have miscarriages. This war affects our psychology, our mental and physical health. There’s even a shortage and lack of vitamins in the pharmacy. So everybody’s life has been affected, especially women in general and pregnant women in particular.

I still hope and look forward to the moment that the Israeli killing machines stop. I don’t really have a plan, but I need to sleep peacefully, without the sounds of explosions, bombardments, and drones.

We are out of plans. We can’t plan for the next five minutes.

I’m a 25-year-old freelancer working on various projects in communication and marketing. I prefer not to share my full details at this moment.

My days were filled with work, followed by evenings out with friends and family. In Gaza, we had wonderful places where I loved to spend my evenings. Living with my siblings meant daily grocery shopping, cooking, and enjoying large family meals. My life was full, and I had many ambitions and dreams.

I was at home when I first heard of the attack. The news was shocking and deeply worrying. Having experienced several attacks on Gaza before, I was immediately concerned about my family and my own safety.

Everything has changed. Now I’m in a shelter with my family, focusing solely on survival. Our days are about finding basic necessities like food and water. Safety is a constant concern, as is getting enough to eat and stay warm. We’re trying to make the best of this situation, staying together and supporting each other.

Our diet is mostly white rice and tomato sauce. Cooking in the traditional sense isn’t possible; we just try to make something edible. Survival is challenging: there’s a scarcity of water and food, and the needs of the many displaced people outweigh the available resources. We prioritize the most vulnerable among us, like when we fasted so my sick younger brother could eat.

The ongoing threat to our health is severe. Lack of hygiene products puts us at significant risk of infections and diseases. For women especially, maintaining hygiene and health has become a daily struggle.

When this conflict ends, the first thing I want to do is sleep. Just sleep without worries or fear.

I arrived here [at El Arish General Hospital in Egypt] on Nov. 21. My leg hurts; they operated on me. They will operate on me again. They have to stitch the wound. I think I’ll stay another two weeks. Then I don’t know — maybe they’ll send me to Cairo.

My family is in Gaza. My son died, and my husband is hospitalized in Gaza.

We left Gaza while the bombing was ongoing — there was no respite.

Here my condition is a little calmer, and the doctors are good.

The situation is catastrophic in Gaza. I was in Nasser Hospital in Gaza. The situation there was difficult because there are many cases and they don’t treat all of us. There are many injured and sick people.

Due to her health situation, Elwan was not able to address all questions.

I’m 22. I’m a fresh graduate from university. I used to work as a translator, but after the attacks on Gaza I lost my job, like so many others.

I used to wake up really early for a training that I used to go to, translation training I used to attend with Dr. Refaat Alareer, who was killed by the Israeli forces. I used to wake up at eight, have breakfast, and have my headphones on in the car on my way to the university where I took the training. I listened to a podcast or music and just looked at the sea from the car windows — you can hear bombing in the background, sorry — the road to university was a very beautiful one; it gave me the best morning just looking out the window at the sea and people running. Then training would be so productive and so fun, because our trainer, Dr. Refaat, was amazing. We learned a lot from him. So I would have learned a lot and returned home happy. Or I would walk around Gaza, get some coffee and chat with my friends around the streets of Gaza — they’re all gone now. When I got home, I would do some translation work, and if I had assignments, I would do them and sit with my family, watch some TV shows on my iPad. Then I would just go to sleep and repeat. On my days off, we would surely go out with my family or just stay home — all in peace.

On Oct. 7 I was in my room. I still had my makeup on, because my brother’s wedding was the night before. I was in my room, trying to clean my room after the wedding and cleaning off my makeup.

I didn’t need to read about it or anyone to tell me about the attack. I knew about it when I first opened my eyes. I was planning on having a long sleep, because the wedding was tiring. I woke up to the sounds of bombing, and I started wondering, 

 I mean, I was at a wedding the day before. 

What’s that? Is that some kind of celebration?

I was so confused. I was so scared. I was disappointed, because that’s not how I wanted my day to start. I started wondering what will happen to everything. What will happen to the training? What will happen to the scholarship I was applying to? I was applying to this scholarship — two, actually, one of them was in Australia, and the other was in Qatar. Then I just started thinking about how will everything go and whether I’ll be able to continue with my life or not. Lots of questions were rushing to my head hearing the first bombing in the early morning.

What changed my daily routine is that it’s demolished, completely demolished. I lost my university, I lost my very dear doctor and trainer, I lost everything that I used to do. I just now basically sleep, wake up, look at the news, get stressed, hear bombings, and sleep again if I am able to. Nights are mostly sleepless because of the bombings and the stress. And that’s pretty much it. I don’t have a routine. I’m just sitting here waiting for this to end or for me to die the next minute, the next hour. I’m just here waiting for my fate. I don’t know if I’m surviving. I can’t say I survived until this thing is over.

I’m lucky enough that I’m staying at my house. We have lots of people who evacuated from their houses staying at my house as well. There’s not enough cooking gas, but we have some little amount of it. We use it to make coffee or tea if it exists, because it’s not always here. We cook on wood fire, and the wood we used for fire is now rare. So now no gas or wood to cook our food on. Cooking on fire is a very tiring process: lighting it, cooking on it, and all the gasses coming from the fire. It’s really tiring.

The attack and the war we’re living now is very much affecting our health. We are losing lots of weight because of shortages of food and drink — not only me, I assure you. All women and not only women, everyone, but mostly women because we have to do everything, the chores. They have to care of their kids, they need to secure food, clothing; if they’re sick, they have to take care of them with very little food. Imagine having very little food and at the same time you have to cook on the fire and you need to wash your kids’ clothes using only your hands and a very little amount of water. No diapers for kids — sometimes they use pieces of cloth, and they have to wash them. So that will definitely affect their health and their bodies, their bones, and their weight of course, because they don’t eat, they do lots of work.

I don’t want to forget to talk about the shortage of sanitary pads and shortage of painkillers that we used during our periods. It’s a very sensitive topic to talk about for them, so they just suffer in silence.

First thing I would like to do is just to sleep in my bed, close the windows. We keep them open because we’re afraid they would fall from heavy bombings. I’ll just close the windows and sleep with no noise outside. As you can hear, lots of noises are outside. I just want to sleep with no noises. Next morning, I want to go see my family. I haven’t seen them in too long, because it’s not safe to go out. I just want to go see them and sleep over at my grandma’s house. I can’t sleep over there because they have lots of evacuated people also. I want to sleep over at their house and have some sweets with them. I haven’t had anything sweet in too long. I simply want these basic things when this war ends.

I am 37 years old, and I am a life skills trainer. My daily routine was between my job and my family requirements and my social life.

On Oct. 7 I was in my home. At 6:25 I was trying to wake up my kids to go to school. Once we heard the rockets fired, I immediately decided to not send them to school, and actually I started to pack up my emergency backpack, because I knew that this would happen.

I live day by day. We don’t have plans, we can’t expect what will happen in the next minute.

We are trying to survive. Everything is a struggle. If I want to shower, I have to plan for this for three days. I have to start thinking about how to secure water and how to heat water, because now we are in the winter and the water is really cold. I was displaced two times. The first time I got out from my home in Abasan al-Kabira, in the east of Khan Yunis, I went to the town center. Now I am in Rafah.

This conflict is affecting everything in my life, not just my health. Actually I am getting old, getting more and more gray hair. My memory is worse than a fish’s memory.

My health is not good. I have a chronic disease, which is Hashimoto’s; it’s related to the thyroid gland. The symptoms are getting worse.

What would I like to do [when this is over]? I would like to have a good shower, a very hot shower. I want to go to my home, to clean my home, to cook real food for my kids. I don’t know. This question actually is the hardest one.

Also, as a woman on my period, it’s very hard because of lack of water. It’s very hard to clean yourself.

The basics of life are struggling. We are struggling in securing them, and there’s no pacific place. We are not safe. I know I am in a trauma now. I need mental health care. Let’s see after the war what will happen.

We are dual citizens, Egyptian Palestinians. We are trying to get out of Gaza, but actually they ask for an imaginary amount of money. For each person, they ask for $10,000 dollars to get out of Gaza, and we are six people. So we need $60,000 to get out of Gaza — or a very good and a very strong connection at the ministry of foreign affairs in Egypt.

My uncle has paid $15,000 to leave Gaza. He was with me in the same home. They collect money for leaving Gaza. Actually I am Egyptian — we shouldn’t need to pay this amount of money, because we are registered at the Egyptian foreign affairs ministry. All we need is someone who can follow up our names and send them back or insert them on travel lists.

I’m 35 years old, and I am married and a mother of two children.

My daily routine was amazing. I was working as a project officer at one of the local institutions here. I started my day walking beside the sea, on the corniche, and then I went home to prepare myself for my work. I spent hours of work at my institution, and then I went to the gym for some exercise. Then I had my evening activities with the children, with friends. We had visits, we had outdoor activities —we had too many things to do, in fact. We had the sea, we had a great beach, and we had some resorts. So yes, I had been living an amazing life, and I miss this life.

Around 6:25 a.m. [on Oct. 7], I was helping my daughter to prepare herself for school. The first class starts at 7:15 a.m., so she was wearing her uniform. I was preparing some sandwiches. We heard these noisy sounds of explosions, and we were asking ourselves, 

 After hours we knew that it was an attack from Hamas toward the outskirts of the Gaza Strip. I was completely shocked. I was surprised. I expected an offensive response from the Israelis, but I didn’t imagine this kind of response, I didn’t imagine this kind of war. This is the most violent response we’ve ever had from Israel.

My life turned upside down. My life before this war and after this war is not the same at all.

If I had a routine before the war, currently I don’t have any routine. I don’t have any life. I’m waiting my destiny. I’m living my time minute by minute, because we don’t have safety. We can’t plan for the next step, we can’t expect what will happen the next time, if we will stay alive or not or our beloved ones will stay alive or not. So there is no daily routine. All things have been changed — our way to live, our way to cook, our way to clean our clothes. We are living in the shelter with too many people, with thousands, and we had our home before, so it’s a completely different life. It’s not about the daily routine. It’s about a war. Life has been changed because of this war.

I’m currently displaced for the second time. I moved from Gaza to Khan Yunis, and then I moved from Khan Yunis to Rafah, to a place called Al-Mawasi. I moved from one place to another with too many people, with tens of people in a shelter, and we have been practicing our life there at its simplest. We don’t have any safety, we don’t have any stores for food. We are looking for food, looking for water, looking for electricity, for communication with the other side of the world. It’s a miserable life.

We cook with firewood. We have never had to do that before this war, and it’s hard to have this fire. I have this sensitivity to the fire, and I’m suffering because of that.

It’s a tragedy to be a displaced woman. You don’t have your own privacy. You don’t have your own health routine. You don’t have your own pads, because we have this shortage of pads for our cycle, and we don’t have access for some hygiene. We wear headscarves all the time, even when we are sleeping. We don’t have any space. We are obligated to take care of the family members. We have this double responsibility for them, for the children, and even for our elderly family members — our husbands, our sisters, our brothers, and all the family members. To be a woman in this world, you are doubly victimized — from the occupation, from the current situation, from the community. Even the relief aid that we are receiving doesn’t take into consideration our needs as women. We have a weak response toward our demands related to pads, to hygiene. We are suffering from all of these multiple issues.

I miss my home, I miss my privacy, I miss my bed, my clothes. I’m wearing men’s clothes because there are no women’s clothes that fit me in the market. I feel like a man while I’m wearing these clothes, but I don’t have any other choice. I want to be back in my home and to sleep safely, to sleep with no nightmares, with no bumping and shaking, with no fear that I will be killed while I am sleeping. To take care of my children, I will do my best to make them good people for this community and for the world. I don’t want them to live in this fear. I don’t want them to turn to offensive people in this war. I want them to be healthy and safe and to grow up as good citizens. So my first thing [after this ends]: home and children and that’s it.

“My Life Turned Upside Down”

 write these words from the West Bank with a profound sense of grief and defeat, as the clashing terms of victory, genocide, erasure, heroic struggle, and historic achievement come up again and again in reference to the Palestinian people and to Gazans in particular.

The Gaza Strip cast a spell on me, as it did for many who visited it and came to know its people. It was an inseparable part of historic Palestine until it was cut off after the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948-49. As a result, it emerged as a distinct sociological and geopolitical entity. Its core characteristic was its high proportion of refugees (about 75 percent of its population), whose roots were in dozens of villages and towns that Israel depopulated and destroyed.

The Gaza Strip we knew as a compact geographical entity of 365 square kilometers was still large enough to contain the diversity of village and city, of new neighborhoods and old, of the shore and the hills, of poor and rich, of refugees and native-born. And it was small and crowded, so its people lived in one another’s pockets, more and more as their numbers grew, and it felt that everyone knew everyone else and there were no secrets. It was so small and tightly bound it seemed that all people living there took an active part in whatever political, social, and military events were going on.

Despite the disconnection, destruction and passage of time, the refugees of 1948 and their descendants preserved their family and social bonds and emotional attachment to their lost villages and communities. Through the shared reality of isolation and expulsion, and in the compactness of the place, the people of Gaza developed the collective hallmarks of an entirely non-imaginary, non-abstract community: side-splitting humor, warmth and hospitality, ingenuity, industry and solidarity, stubbornness and suspicion, courage and tenacity, insularity and curiosity, pride of place and a sense of injury from the scorn of others.

As the effects of the closure imposed by Israel in 1991 grew more severe over the years, turning Gaza into a vast prison facility, the industry and ingenuity were replaced by widespread apathy and inaction, alongside the emergence of resourcefulness, impressive creativity, and a vivid will to live. With all these contradictions and hardships, the Gaza Strip evolved into its own framework of belonging and patriotic loyalty while also representing all Palestinians and their cause — a kind of Palestinian microcosm — more than any other group of Palestinians.

About two years ago I wrote, “This unique framework is one of the explanations (although not the only one) for the extraordinary resilience of its people and how they have coped for decades with extreme and nightmarish situations that are hard to summon to the imagination, culminating in deathly Israeli military assaults.” At the time, I could not conceive of the horrors of the current war, which is now raging in its fifth month.

Wars are an extension of policies, and this current war is of a piece with Israel’s yearslong policy to thwart any national Palestinian project toward freedom and independence. Yet there is no denying that this war of destruction was triggered by Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

This attack — against Israeli soldiers and military installations, against civilians in their homes and at a dance party in nature — shattered Israel’s hubris and exposed its structural weakness as a military power. What is this weakness? It is its inability and refusal to comprehend that domination over the Palestinian people, while denying their history as an indigenous nation, their rights as a people and their freedom, is not sustainable in perpetuity. The impenetrable confidence, the arrogant certainty that it is possible to live a good and happy life while also controlling, oppressing, and imprisoning more than two million Gazans — and profiting from that oppression and exploitation — was blown up on Oct. 7 when many hundreds of Hamas militants and an unknown number of Palestinian civilians tore down the walls of the largest prison on earth, if just for a few hours. In the annals of national liberation struggles, this could certainly be seen as an achievement.

Still, my sense of defeat is strong and persistent, and it is threefold. For decades, Palestinians and left-wing activists in Israel, myself included, have warned Israelis and the states supporting Israel that ongoing oppression and ruthless domination will lead to a dreadful explosion, harmful to all, to bloodshed and intolerable suffering. But the appeal of material privileges and benefits that Israel offered Jews (both Israeli citizens and citizens of other states) who moved to the occupied Palestinian territory proved stronger. Those have included affordable villas, subsidies and tax exemptions, better education and health care, and land for agriculture and other business ventures that could be had for free or for only a symbolic price. Add to this the fact that the occupied territory has become a huge laboratory for Israel’s weapons industry and state-of-the-art surveillance technology, two of the Israeli economy’s most profitable exports. The careers and incomes of people from all walks of life are closely tied to these occupation-related industries and to the bureaucratic machinery needed for the maintenance of a repressive hostile rule imposed upon more than five million Palestinians.

Israeli Jews know that any peace agreement would require equal rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens and either compensation or the return of their lands and property stolen by Israel in 1948, and the equal distribution of water resources between Jews and Arabs in the entire country. So the end of the occupation and equal rights are consciously or subconsciously conceived as posing a threat to the good life and well-being of many an Israeli Jew. All this has been bolstered by messianic racist theories and preaching. Such theories (including sexism) develop and spread in order to justify exploitation, discrimination of all sorts, and repression, but at a certain stage they receive a life of their own, spreading poison as they are perceived by more and more generations as irrefutable laws of nature.

We on the left, when we warned that there was nothing “natural” about ruling over another people, leaned on universal and Jewish values; we invoked historical lessons of the failure of excessive power; we tried to appeal to reason and argue that it’s in Israel’s self-interest to end the occupation — in vain. I myself have written and said more than once that we may reach a level of brutality from which there is no return.

This was a warning that I could not imagine would become a prophecy: well planned and meticulous as Hamas’s attack was militarily, it also unleashed the rage, personal and collective, stored up by thousands and their desire for vengeance on Israelis (including foreign citizens working in Israel and Palestinian citizens of Israel). The militants of the Islamic resistance movement and the Gaza civilians who joined them made no distinction between soldiers and civilians, adults and children and babies, mostly Jews but also some non-Jews. The loved ones of about 1,400 families were harmed that day, killed or taken captive. There is evidence of sexual abuse and rape as well. Thousands more were injured or escaped by the skin of their teeth. (The number of Hamas casualties from Oct. 7 are estimated at around a thousand.) It is considered to be the worst defeat and trauma to afflict Israelis since 1948.

Two days after the massacre, in great pain that has not left me since, I wrote: “In a single day, Israeli civilians endured what Palestinians have suffered for decades and continue to suffer as routine: military invasion, death, brutality, children killed, bodies dumped on the road, siege, paralyzing fear, dread for the fate of loved ones, their capture, the urge for revenge, the desire to cause mass lethal harm to those involved (militants) and not involved (civilians), inferiority, the destruction of buildings and ruin of a holiday or celebration, weakness and helplessness in the face of an all-powerful armed force, stinging humiliation. Again: We told you. Oppression and injustice without end erupt at unexpected times and places. Like pollution, bloodshed knows no boundaries.”

In its reaction, Israel acted as one could expect it to and right away commenced a vengeful genocidal campaign of devastation, which, at the time of writing, is ongoing. The number of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing and shelling and the unimaginable scale of destruction surge each day. By the end of January, the Israeli army had slain more than 26,000 Palestinians, more than 10,000 of them children. Thousands more are missing. The number of Palestinian fighters killed in combat inside the strip is not known, and it is unclear whether they are included in the official count. At least half of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed by bombing and fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas militants. At least two-thirds of the residents of the Gaza Strip — about 1.7 million people — have been displaced. Tens of thousands have fled their homes in the north and south of the country. So many precious lives and suffering could have been spared if they had listened. But they did not.

The second reason for my sense of defeat is less personal but no less painful: the failure of the mass popular struggle against Israeli oppression. Unlike the armed struggle, the popular unarmed revolt involves all the people: women and men, young and old, laborers, administrators, and academics, as in the 1987–91 uprising, the First Intifada, and the first days of the Second Intifada in 2000. A mass revolt that includes many social strata will inevitably be diverse and effective through different channels: mass confrontation with the occupation forces, civil disobedience against the occupation bureaucracy, cultural activities, initiatives of popular education and learning, grassroots political initiatives, popular committees of support and mutual assistance, a conscious readiness to sacrifice normal life and take risks, and broad participation in planning and developing long-term strategy. All this gives the struggle a democratic character in its essence.

It is not hard to explain the great devaluation in the status of popular struggle among Palestinians: at every turn, the great collective undertaking yielded damaged crops, politically, nationally, and on a personal level.

The First Intifada led to negotiations between Palestinians and Israel, which produced the Oslo Accords. These were defined as a peace agreement, and the Palestinians were convinced that by 1999 they would result in a small independent state alongside Israel. Although they were making a painful compromise in their willingness to accept only 22 percent of historic Palestine, they supported the accords to spare future generations the pain and deprivation of living under occupation. From the moment the accords were signed, however, Israel exploited the agreement to thwart any possibility of such a state by constructing settlements and compressing Palestinians into small enclaves within the West Bank, separating them from the Gaza enclave.

Those activists who subscribed to the principle of unarmed struggle to work against settlement expansion, together with Jewish left-wing activists, were and are subjected to harassment by Israel’s security branches, which intimidate them, carry out arrests, bring baseless charges, and deploy physical violence causing injury and even death.

Palestinians in Gaza began protesting en masse against the siege and for the right of return to their destroyed villages in 2018 and continued for more than two years. There was some throwing of stones, Molotov cocktails, and incendiary balloons that burned fields across the border, but these did not endanger human life. Yet the soldiers firing from behind the border fence killed many protesters and wounded scores more, causing permanent disabilities and loss of limbs.

Israel cast the civil campaign to impose boycott, divestment, and sanctions and international legal activism against its war crimes as motivated by pure antisemitism, while cynically using the 1939–45 genocide of Jews to force Western countries to criminalize the campaign.

The clear political message from these nonviolent efforts was rejected by Israel, and the unarmed uprising made little impact on the occupiers and the occupation. The logical step, to many Palestinians, was clear: to inflict more pain on the occupier until he understands. This was the conclusion in 2000, when the Israeli army killed unarmed demonstrators and imposed severe restrictions of movement on the entire population at the beginning of the Second Intifada. Armed Palestinian organizations, led by Hamas, returned to their tactics of the 1990s in opposing negotiations with Israel: suicide bombings on buses, in markets, and in restaurants, which killed many Israeli citizens. Over time, Hamas developed and perfected its ability to fire rockets at Israel, while sending conflicting political and religious messages about the future of the country and that of the two peoples who live in it.

Did the suicide bombings of the 1990s and the 2000s and the war of rockets succeed in stopping Israel’s settlement expansion and its drive to constrain Palestinians in enclaves while stealing more land, resources, and space? No, the opposite. They were successful as a terrifying means of vengeance, true, but they failed to stop the colonializing process. Yet the aura of armed resistance only shines brighter for many Palestinians and their supporters in the world.

This is the third reason for the sense of defeat that eats at me, as a feminist socialist: the deeply masculinist praxis of developing and producing weapons, trading them, reaping profits and unleashing them is taken as an axiom and an indisputable starting point — whether as a measure of national power, sovereignty, and the ostensible right to sanctioned violence or as a supreme, revered means of resistance to oppression. But unlike in the 16th and the 19th centuries, today’s weapons and arms and any escalating competition have the capacity to lead to the destruction of the world and humanity at large.

The Gaza Strip we knew has been destroyed and its community has been dismantled by the Israeli war machine. Israel has killed and wounded an unfathomable number of civilians. We haven’t yet begun reckoning with the trauma. The educated, the wealthy, those with connections abroad and ingenuity are leaving Gaza and will continue to leave. Reconstruction will take decades. Will we ever see some seismic political and social breakthrough that will recast this dreadful destruction and Hamas’s strategy of armed resistance as “worthwhile”? It is too early to say.

The Gaza Strip Has Been Destroyed. So Has Hope for a Fair Future for the Two Peoples.

ost of us were still in a state of sleepless agitation on Oct. 18, after absorbing the images of carnage at Kibbutz Be’eri and then of the unrelenting, catastrophic attacks on Gaza, when a new set of images appeared. Hundreds of Jewish protesters had taken over a rotunda in the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., their black T-shirts emblazoned with JEWS SAY CEASE-FIRE NOW, chanting, “Not in our name.” In the following weeks and months, Jewish protesters 

 an interstate highway in Philadelphia, and 

 rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles; they held Hanukkah vigils for the Gazan dead in Boston, Seattle, Portland, and Atlanta, and 

 a campaign speech by President Joe Biden in a Charleston, S.C., church with shouts of “Cease-fire now!” They joined mass marches in 

These expressions of Jewish opposition to Israel’s brutal bombardment of civilians have been intense, raw, and emotional — and unprecedented in scale. Most significantly, they began immediately, while news of the Hamas attack was still fresh, as 

 institutions, was insisting that Oct. 7 had given Israel an unfettered right “to defend itself and its people,” even as that military campaign took a form that a federal judge later 

 “may plausibly constitute a genocide.”

“We saw a completely uninterrupted march to genocidal war in that first week,” Stefanie Fox, executive director of 

, told me in December. “The U.S. government and the Israeli government in equal part were weaponizing Jewish grief and identity to justify it.”

Instead, tens of thousands of American Jews have helped unleash a global explosion of protest. The Palestinian American political historian Rashid Khalidi described it to me as “a new phase in an alliance of progressive groups in the U.S.” By January, a 

 showed that half of American Jews supported a permanent cease-fire. A fissure has shot through the American consensus on Israel.

ideo documentation by Black people has been pivotal to the movement against police brutality, most notably Darnella Frasier’s 9-minute-and-29-second recording of the lynching of George Floyd, which helped launch a global uprising. Maybe the stream of images by Gazans documenting the horror of what they’re witnessing — Israel’s targeting of 

 — is the only explanation that’s needed for the current wave of protest and the strong Jewish presence within it.

Children bloody and battered by the bombardment. Parents in the first unimaginable moments of grief. Unslept doctors treating patients without proper supplies, without even anesthesia. The empty gaze of a 

 sitting on a hospital stretcher. A little girl named Alma, my daughter’s name, 

 deep beneath the rubble of a five-story building, shouting up to rescuers to please save her siblings, parents, and grandparents first, though a glance at the wreckage that surrounds her makes it seem impossible any of them could have survived. The poet and scholar Refaat Alareer struggling to articulate how impossible it was to 

 through the deadly strikes that were coming as steadily as 25 an hour. “You don’t want to hug them so they don’t feel this could be the last one, and you want to hug them so at least there is a hug at the end,” he said on Oct. 9. “All the lies we tell them — that it’s going to be O.K., that the bombing is far away — they’re not working.”

Two months later, he, too, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

More than one activist has said to me, “We’re watching a Nakba.”

But for generations, the destruction of Palestinian lives has been visible to anyone willing to look. An 

 that examined Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon found that Israel was directly involved in planning the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila, for the “deliberate or indiscriminate or reckless bombardment of a civilian character, of hospitals, schools, and other non-military targets,” and for the “systematic bombardment and other destruction of towns, cities, villages, and refugee camps” — for the very kinds of military actions unfolding now, which Amnesty International has said should be investigated as 

Activists say it took years of educational, ideological, and organizing work to be ready for this moment, when tens of thousands of American Jews were able to throw off their blinders and head into the streets.

“Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them,” Edward Said wrote in his essay “Permission to Narrate” 40 years ago. “Such a narrative has to have a beginning and an end: in the Palestinian case, a homeland for the resolution of its exile since 1948.”

Repression of that Palestinian narrative, Khalidi argues, has been at the heart of the Zionist project. In 

, he traces that denial from its beginnings — the early Zionist slogan “A land without a people for a people without land” and the omission of any explicit reference to Palestinians or Arabs in the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.

The Israeli state, U.S. Zionist organizations, and the U.S. government have each in their way heavily policed efforts to recognize Palestinian land claims — even Palestinian realities. On the one hand, an effort by Israel and the United States to delegitimize Palestinian resistance by labeling every successive organization — the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Fatah, Hamas — a 

. On the other, a discourse that has often described Palestinian aspirations as tantamount to a 

onna Nevel, a longtime Palestine activist and a cofounder of 

 (where I served as an early executive director), recalled the 1989 Road to Peace conference at Columbia University, for which she served as a coordinator. The PLO was considered a terror organization at the time by both Israel and the United States, requiring special visas for its representatives to travel to New York to sit down with members of civil society and the Israeli Knesset. It was a taboo-breaking act for Jews to attend talks focused on self-determination for both peoples then. Yet even the progressive Knesset members in attendance and the Israeli activists from Peace Now, which had held mass demonstrations protesting Israel’s abuses of Palestinians, 

 any discussion of the right of return as “totally unacceptable.” Twenty years later, long after the collapse of the Oslo Accords, Nevel recalls her efforts with 

 to open up a conversation in the New York Jewish community about joining the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, a 

 to end Israel’s occupation and colonization of Arab lands and establish the Palestinian right to return.

When the group sought to organize a series of public conversations in New York City about the nonviolent strategy, “not one synagogue would let us hold the debate,” she said.

In 2010, as the BDS campaign gained traction, the national campus student organization Hillel adopted a censorious “Standards of Partnership” policy to officially 

 for students to invite anyone who supported BDS or who sought to “delegitimize” the idea of a Jewish state to speak at Hillel. When an Open Hillel movement erupted on several campuses to defy those restrictions and create room for debate, Hillel 

The silencing has often been accompanied by threats, such as those surrounding the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement, which brought volunteers to the occupied territories in the early 2000s to engage in nonviolent actions such as preventing the demolition of Palestinian homes and orchards. A New York Post columnist 

 its leading U.S. organizer, Adam Shapiro, “the Jewish Taliban,” and his family faced death threats so credible they were forced to temporarily leave their home in Brooklyn. The following year, ISM activist Rachel Corrie was 

Hammer&Hope

No. 3

Spring 2024

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Anti-Arab Racism and the U.S. and Israeli War Machines

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Angela Davis: Standing With Palestinians

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No. 3

Spring 2024

Thank You

Hammer & Hope

Previous Article

Next Article

More From This Issue

1

Anti-Arab Racism and the U.S. and Israeli War Machines

2

Angela Davis: Standing With Palestinians

3

“My Life Turned Upside Down”

FREE TO READ

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