Weapons of the Meek - Assessing risk in pro-Palestine organizing
▻https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-53/politics/weapons-of-the-meek
In those early months, debates about militancy — how far to go, when to pull back — confounded Palestine organizers across the United States. After October 7, marches and rallies drew in massive crowds, blocking traffic, shutting down bridges, and chanting previously unspeakable words (“Palestine”) and positions (“Resistance is justified”). But despite big successes in mobilization — like the three-hundred-thousand-strong March on Washington in January 2024 — organizers had formed no consensus on a strategy for escalation. Where I lived, rallies avoided seriously targeting Zionist politicians or the logistical infrastructure of the genocide. Coalition leaders were locked into their thinking that protest militancy, or even efficacy, might come at the cost of turnout, and lost to the reality that turnout would soon dwindle anyway. “Mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution,” John Berger wrote in 1968, but this was beginning to feel less and less true as the months rolled on. Each rally ended with the call to show up to the next one; we were forever rehearsing rehearsal.
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Shuffling along at a large camp-defense rally outside a university that spring, I felt the unfamiliar thrill of living for an instant inside the right pitch of militancy. Unbidden, one flank of the crowd had poured onto a nearby busy road, closing it off without prior warning — and distracting the dozens of cops who had arrived expecting an orderly sidewalk march. Meanwhile, the other flank found itself face-to-face with the increasingly exhausted campers whom the administration had locked behind the school’s iron gates to separate them from “outside agitators.” For all the endowment’s billions, the gates were secured with a measly padlock. It was nothing a hard and sturdy object couldn’t take care of, perhaps one of the rocks I’d spotted next to a fenced tree on the sidewalk.
I let my imagination wander to a world where I — or more likely the tall, white, anarchist-looking comrade next to me — could pick up the rock. Gates breached, the rally-goers flood onto the tented lawns to loud cheers. The reinforcements bring fresh energy and immediately up the movement’s leverage by making the admin’s worst nightmare — that their private grounds are no longer private — come true. The president calls for a police sweep, but something delays it: maybe the sheer number of arrests necessary, or the scale of the imminent bad press, or some tactical innovation of the movement. In the meantime, as students and community members stand as one, the pressure for divestment builds and builds. It seemed like the only thing separating us from this hopeful timeline was one padlock, one person’s decision to risk a vandalism charge while trusting in the surrounding crowd to have their back. That other world felt so close. Were we there yet?
No one, including myself, broke the lock. The groundwork for that kind of risky spontaneity hadn’t been laid. Instead, the crowd snaked through the streets around campus and returned, surrounded by cops, back to the plaza where the march had begun, energized by its own unplanned defiance. Though it was latent, there was a feeling that the rehearsals were getting more serious, and soon we might be on to the main act.