Since the 2024 presidential election got both of its main nominees confirmed, the Palestinians have been in a worse situation than ever. Between when the Zionist entity began its extermination campaign in October 2023, and when the U.S. media gained an effective means for distraction in July, the entity’s activities were constrained to a certain extent. As Norman Finkelstein has observed, the “Israeli” Nazi state understands the importance of the USA’s news cycle; it knows that the more the news is talking about Gaza or the West Bank, the more risky it is to assault the civilians within these places. His point is that like Nazi Germany, “Israel” needed a cover before it could implement its Final Solution. So for the first half-year or so following October 7, “Israel” needed to calculate how many atrocities it could get away with. The “Israeli” sentiments about wanting to nuke Gaza, Finkelstein has said, represent the true desires of the Zionist entity; the entity has only been waiting for a moment when it will be enabled to act with that level of boldness.
When the student revolts happened in late spring, the discourse became further focused on Palestine, which extended this period of relative “Israeli” hesitancy. It was when the protests momentarily lulled, and U.S. politics became more focused on personalities, that the genocide could be brought to its next phase; that “Israel” could accelerate its mass murder efforts with a reliable narrative cover.
Part of this cover involved an effort to hide the true death numbers, and pretend the count is under fifty-thousand when it’s most certainly many times bigger than that. “Israel” has also been murdering ever-more of the journalists who document its crimes. And the additional part of this campaign to hide reality, the one which makes the other concealment tactics work, has been the effort to de-center Palestine in the discourse. If the Gaza protests were to have maintained their initial impact, there would have been sustained public attention on the genocide, and the attempts to obscure Zionism’s crimes would have been made mostly ineffective. But the USA’s national conversation has instead been diverted towards political theater, letting “Israel” act with minimal scrutiny from the American public.
The U.S. media and political elites were always going to carry out such a diversion; they never liked having to talk about “Israel” so much, so they would redirect the discourse at the first opportunity. This narrative manipulation wouldn’t have succeeded, though, if the activist leaders hadn’t joined in on the effort to de-center Palestine. If they hadn’t largely lost interest in talking about the genocide, and pivoted towards fixating on Trump. That’s where a crucial part of the blame lies: in the organizing figures who had an opportunity to sustain the pro-Palestine movement’s momentum, but decided instead to tail the liberals.
For the last decade, the empire’s propaganda machine has been able to use Trump’s presence within politics to carry out these kinds of diversions. Trump’s narrative role is a big discourse psyop, where the conversation gets made to revolve around one personality. And it’s participated in both by the side which thinks Trump will save our society; and by the side which thinks Trump is the new Hitler. With the rise of the anti-woke psyop, where the right gets presented as a revolutionary alternative, MAGA has become especially easy to co-opt for these purposes.
At the moment, this psyop’s main purpose is to convince conservatives that Palestine is a “woke” issue. And this narrative depends on the discourse psyop’s wokeist side. It depends on there being an unserious, adventuristic leftist element that represents the pro-Palestine cause in the worst ways possible, and alienates the masses from the struggle.
This element hurts the Palestinian cause by shifting attention away from Palestine itself; by emphasizing Trump, or U.S. culture war fights, or other such distractions. Its main priority is neither a sincere effort to center Palestine, nor an analysis of how imperialism hurts the workers; at this point, its rhetoric has largely become indistinguishable from that of the Democratic Party’s “radical” controlled opposition wing. That’s what we see from PSL, DSA, and the other NGO-aligned groups which have joined to plan an Inauguration Day protest. This protest’s page of course mentions the Gaza genocide, but there’s a reason why it doesn’t center the genocide: when you’re seeking NGO backing, the opportune decision right now is to copy the aesthetics of the Democrat “ResistanceTM” color revolution.
When the pro-Palestine movement is led by actors who aren’t even particularly interested in advocating for Palestine, Zionism’s anti-woke propagandists are able to fill the discourse vacuum. They can depict Palestine as just another distraction by liberal elites, and sell their pseudo-solution: a country that’s run by the Elon Musk wing of big tech, where further privatization will supposedly revitalize our economy. It’s degrowth sold as progress, with the country being destroyed by extreme neoliberalization and expanded economic wars.
As much as the Trump faction of our ruling class wants to destroy China as well, the PRC has gained too much strength for Washington to defeat it. So the route the Trump White House takes with China will likely be to lean more onto trade war bluster, while labeling Palestine supporters as Chinese agents. This McCarthyist campaign is already happening, and the deep state will be fully united with Trump on criminalizing dissent. That’s how the empire hopes to beat back a pro-Palestine movement that can’t truly be gotten rid of, no matter how much the state suppresses its members.
However severe the crackdown gets, the people will keep mobilizing against our government’s genocidal actions; the empire’s goal is to make the movement’s organizations weak enough that they can’t give the masses adequate support. Then the empire will be able to achieve its next short-term goals for west Asia, such as annexing the West Bank and continuing the rampage against Gaza; along with its larger goals, namely expanding the proxy wars in places like Syria.
The hegemon is acting on the retreat; nothing it can do will stop “Israel” from ending. So it can only try to delay this outcome, while increasingly leaning onto Turkey for warfare assistance in the region. Washington is not going to succeed in overthrowing Syria’s government, colonizing Lebanon, destabilizing Iran, or preventing Palestine’s full liberation. On all fronts of this world war, the imperialists are guaranteed to lose. The worst thing they can do at this point is expand the genocide in a way that takes millions of more lives. We can and must save these souls. That’s a core part of what needs to motivate us as we proceed with the class struggle: rescuing those who the empire seeks to exterminate. Should we let ourselves be sidetracked from this task, we’ll aid our class enemies, and betray those who need us the most.
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