David Finkel
Posted June 22, 2025
With the direct U.S. entry into Israel’s war on Iran, most corporate media attention has turned away from the Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Furious regional and European diplomatic efforts appear to focus on heading off a full-scale conflagration that could bring about not only the collapse of the strategically crippled and generally despised “Islamic Republic,” but the disintegration of the Iranian state.
Along with the immediate catastrophe is the emerging long-term project of a new Middle East order under U.S. imperialist domination with Israel as the trusted (if sometimes annoying) partner. This perspective and its implications will require extensive further analysis. The Palestinian people, including daily massacres at so-called “humanitarian aid” death sites, are collateral damage as the Israeli state prepares its “final solution” of expulsion/extermination.
Prior to the open Israel-Iran war outbreak, I wrote some “Notes on U.S. Palestine Solidarity Activism and State Repression” in preparation for a Fourth International Middle East working group Zoom discussion. I’ve slightly edited them here.
1. While the global population is aghast at the genocidal carnage in Gaza – along with the world’s governments, including many with their own records of imperialist crimes — in comparison to most of the world, people in the United States see very little of it. This is a point worth emphasizing: The information of course is available to anyone seeking it, but for everyday U.S. folks living their lives and getting their news from mainstream or social media, Palestine is largely in the background of the daily chaos. Some of this is deliberate editorial choice and censorship (as in the case of Joy Reid, a prominent evening personality on the liberal cable channel MSNBC, who did important interview segments on Gaza and was fired not long afterward). More, frankly, is probably due to media executives’ professional calculations that the broad public was only marginally interested.
2. Despite this, the extent of the catastrophe has begun to come through and reach popular attention. More important, the anti-Trump resistance understands how the government’s response to pro-Palestinian activism is inextricably part of its broader reign of terror against immigrant communities, foreign students, and the entire U.S. higher education system, including but not limited to the attempt to turn Harvard into a branch of Trump University. Outrage over high-profile detentions and attempted deportations of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi and others intersects with popular concern over the kidnap-and-rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and other such cases.
3. The repressive conditions prevailing on college campuses today – real police-state atmospheres in many cases – ruled out a repetition this spring of last year’s wave of pro-Palestine encampments. The notorious “weaponization of antisemitism” by the federal government and university administrations has a chilling impact. Despite this, the growing activist anger and energy among students and sympathetic faculty is impressively manifested in hunger strikes, kuffiyeh-wearing displays at graduation ceremonies, defiantly pro-Palestinian student valedictory addresses, etc. In terms of campus activist politics at least, Palestine is the front-and-center issue.
4. The remarkable courage of pro-Palestinian students and faculty, especially junior professors, risking their graduation and careers, contrasts with the cowardice of some elite institutions. Columbia University has been most vicious in suspending and expelling students, leaving some homeless. Infamously, university officials ignored Mahmoud Khalil’s appeals for protection prior to his arrest at his campus apartment. And while Harvard is now the darling of liberal opinion for resisting Trump’s attempts to strip its funding and international student admissions, the university previously closed its Middle East Studies Association, cancelling classes and purging faculty. In essence, Harvard’s leadership offered terms of capitulation which the Trump regime rejected, demanding unconditional surrender. (Other universities have taken stronger stands, while some like the University of Michigan have been supine.)
5. The longtime crippling isolation of Palestine from other progressive concerns has changed in a positive way: the “Hands Off!” rallies of April 5 and 19 and the May Day actions all featured Palestinian flags and speakers, and the pending June 14 mobilizations will certainly do so as well. (Postscript: As we know, the “No Kings” rallies did bear this out, although they came too early to fully respond to the Israel-Iran war.) The importance of this breakthrough is not only visual. The explicit intention of the rightwing program in Project Esther, the companion to Project 2025, is to break the Palestine solidarity movement through a series of financial, legal and smear tactics that in some respects even go beyond the McCarthyism of the 1950s. But because the fate of Palestine is no longer separate-and-apart from other issues, it’s harder to put Palestine solidarity in a “pro-Hamas terrorist” box and crush it without meeting broader resistance.
6. There can be no illusions about any imminent fundamental change in U.S. policy, for which the Israeli state remains a strategic pillar of U.S. imperialism, commanding loyalty from both capitalist parties. The fact that 19 (out of 100) Senators voting for restricting arms to Israel is a genuine breakthrough shows how sickening the political situation really is. Nonetheless, the frictions between the Trump and Netanyahu gangster regimes are real. Trump strutting on the oil kingdoms’ red carpets is not only about his bottomless personal corruption, but more importantly about the U.S. project to reshape the Middle East along lines of new alliances.
Trump is indifferent to the slaughter in Gaza, and hardline Christian Zionists shape the administration’s Palestine policy and a toxic U.S. political culture, but this will not allow Israel to dictate U.S. regional policy. In this new dispensation Israel will have its important assigned role but will not be the central decision-making power as Netanyahu conceives it. (The decision on whether to bomb Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility will be based on perceived U.S. strategic and Trump’s political interests, not Israel’s dictates. These strategic differences will likely feed back into the internal conflicts inside both the U.S. and Israeli governments.
7. The rapid growth of Jewish Voice for Peace, and groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement, are important developments (see this sympathetic report on JVP’s national membership meeting at https://jewishcurrents.org/staying-in-motion). These organizations will be major targets of the “Project Esther” campaign to cripple the pro-Palestinian movement. (See for example https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/antisemitism-decoded/664258/the-group-behind-project-2025-has-a-new-plan-to-fight-antisemitism/ A number of members and friends of Solidarity are active in JVP.
8. These hopeful signs cannot overshadow the reality that the Palestinian people right now are a mass human sacrifice on the altar of political cynicism, imperialism and settler colonialism. While a “Free Palestine” in a liberated Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for all its peoples is the longterm goal – not only from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, but from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean — right now stopping the destruction of the Palestinian population in its homeland must be the central imperative.
9. Further, the frightening prospect is that the murderous shooting at the Jewish Museum in Washington DC (https://solidarity-us.org/unnecessary-deaths/) and the firebombing assault on elderly Jewish marchers in Boulder, Colorado, might be followed by other attacks on Jewish as well as Muslim and Arab targets. In themselves, these were isolated attacks by unorganized, disoriented and/or deranged individuals (we don’t yet know all the specifics), but U.S. society is a violent arena where both “copycat” and retaliatory violence are constant threats. In addition to being abhorrent in their own right, these attacks further weaponize the campaign to smear the Palestine solidarity movement, and jeopardize immigrant communities already living under the Trump-MAGA reign of terror.
Leave a Reply