Your Protests Are Achieving Nothing
You Can't Bully The American People Into To Caring About Gaza
During the protests after the murder of George Floyd in the Summer of 2020, I was delighted by how many people, even conservatives, in my orbit seemed to embrace a movement to dramatically reform how America does criminal justice. It felt like a real realignment was occurring.
Then came Kenosha. After the shooting of Jakob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020, three months after Floyd, something shifted. The Blake shooting occurred under different circumstances. Unlike Floyd, who was being arrested for a minor crime, and was tortured publicly for nine minutes before he died, Blake had an outstanding warrant for a felony, was holding a knife at the time he was shot, had already been tased and survived the shooting. Unlike in the Floyd situation, the cops who shot Blake were not charged. As a result, protests broke out again and parts of Kenosha were set ablaze. The riot came on the heels of a long summer of protests that led to looting in major cities and a standoff with protestors in Seattle where protesters created an anarchist encampment called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or CHAZ. The encampment was dismantled after a week because of violence that occurred there.
People in my social circle at the time saw Blake's shooting differently due to the aforementioned circumstances. They were also fatigued by the summer of riots and violence and the antics of some of the protesters. In one case, protestors harassed people quietly eating outside a restaurant in Washington, D.C. demanding they raise their fits in support. The video went viral.
At the time, I found myself repeatedly asking people to refocus on the reasons behind the protests, not the protests themselves. Instead of focusing on why Blake was different and why protests shouldn’t be destructive, keep the lens on the larger issue of police brutality and racism.
I tried to change the subject or rationalize away why the violence and disruption was happening. It was to no avail. They could not take their minds off the violence in Kenosha and the anarchy in Seattle and Portland and the looting in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They could not accept that Blake's situation was no different than Taylor's or Floyd's because it all stemmed from the same issue.
I spent some time afterward exploring why people felt that way; how they went from talking about how police went too far in June 2020 to talking about police need to go farther in September 2020. I also began to see that my argument came across as desperate and flailing and not at all convincing.
I had a hunch that summer the protests would cause backlash. I tend to be good at foreseeing these types of things and, whenever I could, I pleaded with people I knew who were involved to keep things civil. Publicly though, I was desperately trying to keep people who weren’t directly invested in the cause to focus on why the protests and violence were happening, and not the antics themselves.
That massive vibe shift was caused by images of burning buildings and chaos in the streets. I coped by saying that these people whose opinions shifted never supported the cause in the first place, but what different would that make if it were true? It means it all a waste anyway.
The backlash to the Summer 2020 protests required me to accept something my young progressive mind could never fathom. People’s primary concerns are their personal ones. Their own safety and security and the safety and security of their loved ones. For most Americans, that means no chaos or disorder. George Floyd’s murder put the focus on cops for contributing to or being unable to control the chaos and disorder, but the protests shifted the focus the other way. Today, the vast majority of the people in my social circle who supported criminal justice reform after Floyd’s death believe the movement went too far and issues like retail theft and violence on the subways are happening because cops are unable to do their jobs due to criminal justice reforms. The chaos and disorder of the 2020 protests only reinforced that idea, no matter how hard people tried to refocus the attention on brutality.
Today, it is happening again with Gaza.
Most openly supporting the protestors on college campus are doing so because they generally support the cause, but there are many who are privately shocked and disgusted by how some of the protestors, especially those at Columbia University and UCLA, have acted. They don't want to criticize them, however, because they think it helps their opponents draw attention to it.
Privately, they are thinking; "Why do they have to act this way? It's only going to give the pro-Israel side and right-wingers more ammo to use against us, but I need to circle the wagons and try to refocus those in my sphere of influence against these violent antics in hopes they’ll forget about them."
That's why they are framing this as a "peaceful protest" and saying stuff like "Cops are arresting people for sitting on a lawn" when at Columbia, they were very clearly storming a building to occupy it. That's why they’re saying "Why aren't we focusing on Gaza? Why are we focusing on Columbia?" MSNBC host Chris Hayes did a monologue on it earlier this week and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) even made this case on the Senate floor on Thursday.
They know what happened at Columbia University and UCLA hurts the cause and they’re desperately trying to figure out how to make it go away. I know this because I've been there. I've done what they’re doing and as I got older, the wisdom of age and experience taught me that it doesn’t work.
President Joe Biden is not changing his policies toward Israel, Congress still passed aid overwhelmingly and also enacted legislation that would essentially make it a hate crime to say Israel shouldn’t exist. Saudi Arabia, the motherland of the Arab World, is still trying to normalize relations with Israel. Biden’s opponent, Former President Donald Trump is back advocating for the extermination of the Palestinian nation. Israel is still all-in on the invasion of Rafah, the final holdout in Gaza.
The fact that these protests haven’t achieved much is also why they’re getting more disruptive and violent. The advocates for Palestine are frustrated. They expected more public support and they aren’t getting it. Like a child throwing a tantrum to get his mother’s attention, the protestors are resorting to ways to force society to pay attention to them. This may have worked with their parents, but it doesn’t work in society.
No matter how much you try to get people to ignore what they're seeing and hearing and try to prioritize something else, you won't do it. You're just going to look delusional and completely out of touch. The best course of action is to admit what went wrong, take the loss and regroup. There's no point in denying what's happening even if it plays badly for your side because it's already happened and can't unhappen.
Like a child throwing a tantrum to get his mother’s attention, the protestors are resorting to ways to force society to pay attention to them.
Protestors have done this to themselves. Like many of those in 2020, they made it about them and lack organization and coherence. You can't create a spectacle on an American college campus to get attention and then complain about getting the attention. The American media isn't going to give more time to Gaza than they have because the war in Gaza doesn't directly involve us and it’s not a unique story. The protests are at home.
There are maybe half a dozen actual genocides going on around the world, and several wars. In Syria, more than 200,000 people, including tens of thousands of Palestinians, have died in their decade-long civil war. In just one year from 2017-2018, 90,000 children died in a famine in Yemen. Tens of thousands have died in refugee camps in Burma, and a genocide has been ongoing for decades in Sudan. Then of course there’s Ukraine and Russia. Gaza still gets more attention than any of them except maybe the war in Ukraine.
In recent polling, even where there is some opposition to Israel’s conduct, the issue ranks very low on people’s concerns. Many polls show a significant number, 25-35 percent, have no opinion on the matter. People are concerned about the cost of living, the migrant crisis at the border seeping into their communities and their personal rights under threat. Progressives hate being told this because their entire worldview relies on the idea that most people aren’t individualistic and value concerns that affect the masses even if it doesn’t apply to them. They don’t, and disruption isn’t going to make them care more, it’s going to make them care even less.
Supporters of these antics keep pointing to Civil Rights protests, but those disruptions happened in the South, not in the places where they needed popular support to pass Civil Rights legislation. No Southern politician voted for it and racism is still a massive problem in the South sixty years later. Civil Rights protestors did not disrupt people’s lives in New York, Boston, Minneapolis, or San Francisco, places where they needed popular support. They did it in Birmingham, Little Rock, and Atlanta. They were able to drive home to Americans outside the South that their fellow countrymen were suffering in horrendous ways. These weren’t people thousands of miles away in a foreign country in a war that didn’t involve one American soldier, these were Americans oppressed by other Americans. One cannot reasonably compare the two movements unless one thinks it's the American people who are really the ones responsible for killing Palestinians. Perhaps that’s what protestors think?
Nevertheless, very few people care about Gaza and unless you can somehow convince Americans their personal concerns are tied to what happens there, very few people are going to. They're not the first people to suffer the ravages of war and they won't be the last.
This really wasn’t that hard. Find some pictures of suffering Gaza children. (Sadly there are many to choose from). Blow them up to poster size and add some signs like “I’m not paying for this”. Just say you want to end support for Israel or at least pressure them. You really don’t need to go all in on “Israel never should have been created” or “we don’t want no two state, we want all of 48”. A protest movement laser focused on JUST ending Gaza suffering really does have the potential to be popular, but I guess that’s not edgy enough for the protesters.
Chris Hayes makes a complete fool of himself every time he brings up Gaza.
And of course, right on cue Bernie Sanders had to run to the nearest camera and declare that the Gaza protests could be “Biden’s Vietnam.” That’s an asinine comparison—and Bernie knows this (which, I assume, is why he attributed it to unidentified “other people”).