Above: the Israeli Offense Force dropping its “earthquake bomb” on the Syrian coast as part of its ongoing invasion of the country
Expand the genocide, create a distraction from it during a crucial juncture, then crush the pro-Palestine movement: that’s been the plan of our ruling class. And we’re now at a stage in this operation where an important threshold is being crossed. If the U.S. empire can keep the discourse detached from the extermination campaign—even at a moment like this one, when the genocide is rapidly growing—then the empire will gain more advantages in the domestic repressive effort. To crush the pro-Palestine organizations, our government will need to sufficiently divert the public’s attention towards a wedge issue; that being the pro-Trump vs anti-Trump cultural battle.
That’s the primary purpose of the push for a new ResistanceTM towards Trump: to take eyes off of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and the other targets of these Nazistic aggressions. To defeat this discourse psyop, what we must do is overcome the most insidious part of the anti-Palestine counterinsurgency. This hidden threat is the NGO industrial complex, the network of organizations which fund activist groups with the goal of steering them in a certain ideological direction.
The pro-Palestine struggle is going to continue, no matter how severe the repression gets. People will keep being compelled to take action against the genocide, even if they’ll have to do so clandestinely. We will be able to find a solid base of participants in any potential underground projects; the greatest threat to the success of such projects, and to the efforts which already exist, are the liberal institutions that seek to co-opt the struggle. Because if these institutions get to define how the movement goes, even the ostensibly anti-Zionist groups will become funneled into the ResistanceTM. They’ll be led away from their true purpose, convinced that the best way to fight against this genocide is by focusing on Trump.
The argument for this relies on the perception that Trump, and by extension his base, is the primary problem for the class struggle to overcome. This is the idea that these organizations put forth, even if they make statements about how they’re fighting against a system; if an org views an anti-Trump rally as more important at this moment than a rally for Palestine, that org’s priorities are backwards. Numerous left-wing groups and leaders, including the “communist” PSL, have gotten behind the Trump-centric “We Fight Back” Inauguration Day demonstration. This has the effect of de-centering Palestine, even if that isn’t the intention. It also perpetuates the antagonisms between self-described Marxists and the MAGA base, wherein at least a third of the country’s people get preemptively excluded from the communist movement.
Because this further pushes the genocide out of the discourse, and keeps millions of proto-conscious Americans out of the anti-imperialist struggle, the ruling class is better able to push the inverse psyop. That being the right-wing psyop about how Elon Musk’s big tech rule will save the country, and bring a new prosperity. Trump’s promises of re-industrialization and an end to neocon foreign policy won’t come true, as Trump’s cabinet-building decisions have already shown; which is why this psyop is destined to largely fail. But in order to take advantage of MAGA’s coming decline, communists and their allies can’t tail the Democratic Party, and echo the standard liberal anti-Trump statements. We must point to the ways Trump has betrayed his antiwar mandate, with his support for the Palestinian genocide being among the prime examples of this.
Adopting this strategy isn’t just about winning more people to the Palestinian cause. It’s also about treating the Palestinian cause as the universal, culturally transcendental thing that it is. The Palestinian question is not a left vs right matter, and framing it as such only undermines the struggle for a free Palestine. Rather it’s a question of whether all people deserve to live and be free. The anti-Zionist struggle is something that people across the ideological spectrum are capable of joining with; that’s why the majority of the USA’s people have already realized the genocidal Gaza military action isn’t justified. By building a pro-Palestine movement that’s based not within the left, but within the people as a whole, we’ll be able to bring in far more participants while throwing off NGO control.
As the NGOs and their affiliated groups push the “anti-Trump” movement, we’re getting a clearer sense of what building this alternative force looks like. It looks like avoiding the liberal trap of fixating on Trump, and instead truly orienting our practice around fighting the genocide. Criticizing Trump is certainly a necessary part of this, but not in the way that’s designed to exclusively appeal to leftists; only a minority of people are in the headspace of obsessive anti-Trumpism, and such an obsession detracts from the Palestinian cause anyhow. If we want to stop the NGOs from sabotaging the struggle, we must refrain from echoing their rhetoric, which too many activists uncritically absorb.
This is what the Marcyists in the PSL have been doing for decades: aggressively signaling that they represent the cultural left, which takes attention away from whatever anti-imperialist statements they make. It also keeps them confined to a niche, which isolates the anti-imperialist movement by extension. The logical conclusion of this is what we’re seeing today, where PSL has joined the ResistanceTM at a moment when the anti-Zionist cause desperately needs more focus. And the core of why they’ve done this is because that’s what keeps their NGO funders happy.
It’s not something that can be reconciled with a committed anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, or communist practice; it’s a deviation that’s now more harmful than ever, because the stakes are higher than ever. If we don’t commit to this struggle right now, the empire will succeed at taking millions more lives, and at destroying even greater amounts of infrastructure throughout West Asia. It will also be able to delay revolution in the core by crushing the pro-Palestine movement, and the proletarian movement by extension.
The ResistanceTM now has a different role than the one it had eight years ago; at this point, its main purpose is to take attention away from the genocide. Originally, this color revolution came from a genuine anxiety within the dominant wing of our ruling class, which was shocked by Trump’s victory in 2016 and wanted to ensure the system wouldn’t get destabilized. Today, the bulk of the ruling class has come to accept Trump, because he’s shown that he can be controlled. What remains of the “anti-Trump” movement is a psyop that’s specifically tailored to mislead the people who are most conscious on Palestine. If we fall for this ploy, the repressive aspect of the anti-Palestine counterinsurgency is going to succeed, because the movement will lack serious leadership.
We cannot open our orgs up to influence from the NGO-industrial complex, which is fundamentally tied to the State Department and therefore allows for federal infiltration. We cannot start treating the genocide as a secondary issue. It’s still necessary to explain to the people how the genocide is part of the imperial system, and how this system is what’s harming working families; such a rhetorical tactic is in fact crucial, because it’s how we can win the USA’s people to the fight for Palestine. Palestine must still be among the central things we orient ourselves around, though. If we can keep this cause from getting derailed, build substantial ties with the masses, and prepare our cadres for clandestine organizing scenarios, then we'll be able to keep making progress amid the crackdown.
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