Leading With the Heart

On protesting for Gaza.

Photo by Austin Crick on Unsplash

I’ve written a lot in the last few weeks about the Israel-Hamas war: About sexual violence on Oct. 7, about the horrific suffering of civilians in Gaza, about the need to not align oneself with fundamentalists just because you seem to share one common cause, about maintaining one’s principles and standing up for pro-Palestinian speech. In the US context, two big outcomes of the ongoing war in Gaza have been large anti-war protests, and young voters turning away from Joe Biden. Both have gotten a lot of coverage, much of it negative.

It’s easy to criticize the kids. And it is worth asking, I think, which protest efforts are the most productive given that most people have limited time and bandwidth; which aims are the most important (policy change? interrupting the supply of weapons? simple disruption?); and whether some tactics may be more alienating than effective. And it’s also worth mentioning, over and over and over, that a Donald Trump presidency vol. 2 will be far worse than his first go, for America, for democracy, and certainly for vulnerable people the world over, including Palestinians.

But there’s also a lot more space for appreciation, awe, and respect for young Americans and their response to this war.

It is heartening that so many young people in America feel personally obligated to show up and speak out against excruciating violence. It says something good about them that they are not cynical or resigned, that they feel so deeply, that they believe showing up can affect change; that they cannot countenance this level of human suffering. They see so much devastation: Homes turned to rubble; human beings forced to flee again and again; bombs blowing people to bits; disease stalking those who survive; scores and scores of dead children. They don’t scroll past or change the channel. They may not quite know what to do, and they may sometimes say the wrong things, but they are showing up.

Whatever you think of who is in the right in this conflict and who is in the wrong and who started what and who is responsible for which horrors, I think it’s impossible for any decent person to look at all of this and not say, my god, this is intolerable.

Maybe you say this is intolerable and never should have happened. Maybe you say this is intolerable and there must have been (maybe still is) a better and less broadly deadly means of national defense. Maybe you say this is intolerable and means it’s time for a radical change to the pre-Oct-7 status quo. Maybe you don’t know the answer and can understand at least some of the complexities here but just feel deep in your bones that tens of thousands dead in a few weeks cannot be justified, cannot continue.

The kids are taking to the streets because they have soft hearts. They are threatening to pull their support from Joe Biden because those hearts are broken.

No wonder the kids also get so mad when people like me pick around the edges — when we point to the things we think they’re doing wrong, when we lecture them about their language or tactics or ignorance of the contested history and complex geopolitical realities.

I realize that not everyone out protesting is young; many people are my age and much older. But like so many protest movements throughout history, the movement in the US for Palestinian freedom, or at least right now for basic physical safety for people in Gaza, is disproportionately made up of young people. For many of these young people, this is the first time they’ve been hit with a barrage of images of a war their government is partly funding, in real time and in large scale. That is radicalizing, especially for the many of them who feel rightly shaken and distraught at the human toll, and the ease with which such massive loss of life is justified or waved away.

I am a middle-aged liberal who is a cringey two-state-solution supporter, who supports Israel’s existence, who thinks Oct. 7 necessitated a response (albeit one more surgically aimed at Hamas), who thinks the language of decolonization and anti-imperialism doesn’t actually fit these circumstances, who is truly disgusted by the left whitewashing or justifying or celebrating terrorist violence, who is appalled at the occupation and the decades of abuses Palestinians have faced, who believes Palestinians also deserve safety and statehood and self-determination. It will not surprise you to know that I think voting for Trump in the name of Palestinian solidarity is objectively insane. Refusing to vote at all is slightly less insane, but still effectively puts the power of the American presidency into the hands of a virulent Islamophobe who is going to shrug or perhaps cheer as Palestinians are slaughtered, and who will give a far-right Israeli government the green light to do as they please.

And also: I see many of the people out protesting and rejecting Biden as principled people, whose principles aren’t identical to mine, but who are very obviously striving for moral goodness — who are mostly driven by a desire to preserve human life, including lives very far from their own.

I am also not convinced that the young people telling pollsters they’re going to vote for Trump because of what’s happening in Gaza will actually vote en masse for Trump a year from now, especially once they hear what Trump has to say about Palestinians and Israel and Muslims. I think what these young folks are doing is the same thing so many people do when they talk to pollsters: They are expressing their dissatisfaction, and threatening to take their votes elsewhere if things don’t change. That’s not quite as foolish as it looks: Politicians do respond to polls, and I have to imagine that the Biden administration is actually worried about how the public sees their role in this awful conflict. By many accounts, Biden and his team have been leaning on Israel to better protect civilian life, and those warnings are becoming stronger as this war presses on. Maybe that’s because Joe Biden’s own views are shifting. I suspect it’s because people in the White House see both the horrors on the ground in Gaza and the horrified reactions of people in the United States — including the mostly-young people who have been exceptionally loud and exceptionally angry about this issue — and are responding accordingly.

This isn’t to say that the kids are getting everything right. Maybe in a year a critical mass of the people saying they will never vote for Joe Biden will actually never vote for Joe Biden, and we’ll be in very big trouble. Right now, the anti-Semitism coming out of many corners of the pro-Palestine left is a real and serious problem, one that same movement seems particularly ill-equipped to deal with, and remarkably uninterested in addressing or even acknowledging. There is a lot of sloganeering and often not a particularly deep understanding of what certain en vogue terms and words actually mean, and how they may (or may not) apply to a complex on-the-ground reality. There are a lot of bad actors in this movement, including at its forefront: people who really do just hate Jews; people whose politics basically come down to “I just hate the United States;” people who routinely deny reality and embrace fundamentalists and autocrats and war criminals.

The thing about large movements, though, is that they are rarely one single thing; they can be more or less disciplined, but they are organisms made up of many component parts, each of those built by individual cells. I’ve been frustrated, disheartened, and disturbed by some of what has come out of this latest protest movement, by its many (at times willful) blind spots, by the rampant disinformation campaign that is sustaining its fringes, by the simplistic explanations, by the naïveté and fetishism of violence. It’s been easy to focus on all of that, because so much of what I write is political analysis and criticism, and because I have serious concerns about the sustainability and power of a progressive moment taken over by people who are chronically dishonest and often pretty awful. It’s easy to focus on the small number of people who fit into that category, and are very loud and very visible right now.

But there is also a deep and obvious impulse at play in these protests for the thousands of average people who show up to them or support them, which is simply to stand up for the lives of people who are being crushed. This is righteous. It is good. It deserves much more recognition and respect than it’s getting.

xx Jill