Palestine Solidarity After the Election
Now that the increasingly artificial spectacle of the election is over, conversations about Palestinian solidarity have stopped being framed around how to cast a vote, and will hopefully return to direct action mobilizations and projects like boycott, divest, and sanction. To that end, we’ve tracked a number of solidarity organizations and efforts underway here in Milwaukee:
Milwaukee4Palestine - marches, events
MKE Mamas for Liberation - organizing daily banner drop actions over Lincoln Memorial Drive
Jewish Voices for Peace Milwaukee - weekly marches on the pro-genocide Milwaukee Jewish Federation every Tuesday.
Healthcare Workers for Palestine Milwaukee- events, workshops, advocacy
UW Milwaukee for Palestine - encampment, protests on UWM campus
Following these groups is the best way to boost and participate in local solidarity organizing. An anti-authoritarian reminder and warning: tankies are present in some of these groups, engage with care.
If you want to donate direct material or medical aid to Palestinian people fighting for their survival, here is a list of organizations. With Israel blocking aid efforts, it is hard to say which of these organizations are most reliably getting aid to people at this time.
There are also many gofundme accounts set up to help people get their family members out of Gaza to safety, but it is difficult to verify the validity of these accounts. We recommend only donating to those hosted by friends, co-workers, people you actually know.
Local pro-genocide Zionists are going to extraordinary lengths to stop Palestinian defense organizing. We understand that some of them object to us describing them as “pro-genocide,” so, we’re going to explain why we choose that language, and look at some of the ways that genocide supporters are making our entire sociopolitical situation more toxic and less able to resist the fascism sure to come with Trump’s presidency.
Why is it accurate to understand Ann Jacobs, Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and their allies as advocates of genocide? We can look at elementary logic or basic algebra. The negative of a negative is a positive. If you are against anti-genocide protests, what are you for? You are for genocide. It is that simple.
Hateful zealots and bigots will always respond to these accusations with bad faith arguments denying that the actions they support are genocide. That is how both antisemetic holocaust deniers, and pro-genocide Zionists behave. For example, Zionists will argue that we have to wait for the International Court of Justice to finish prosecuting Netanyahu’s regime before recognizing that their actions meet a legal definition of genocide. This is absolute nonsense. Should resistance to Hitler’s regime have waited for the Nuremberg verdict? Obviously not.
Most people find the forced starvation, continuous bombing, murder of children, and repeated displacement of Palestinians to be reprehensible, regardless of what an ICJ lawyer might say about it. Israel’s technologically advanced apartheid regime and now regional war is innovating beyond the established understanding of war crimes. They took mass assassination to new levels and opened a horrifying pandora’s box with the pager attack in Lebanon. They are shooting civilians with drones, including children. They have standardized using Palestinian civilians as human shields, forcing them, in handcuffs, at gunpoint, to risk their lives clearing areas for Israeli soldiers to advance. Most people recognize these practices as horrific and dehumanizing. Pro-genocide Zionists are different. On a fundamental level, they refuse to acknowledge the validity and often even the existence of Palestinian people.
When pressed about Israel’s actions, genocide deniers will lie and pretend those things aren’t happening. When their lies are exposed, they move the goal posts to try and justify unjustifiable violence. The magical thinking and genocide denial that Zionism requires toxifies all social interactions and political discourse. Zionists are not only forfeiting their humanity, they also demand that friends, family, co-workers, colleagues, and fellow Democrats accept and condone genocide. This strains and shatters bonds that make strong, resilient communities, bonds that were needed to prevent Trump’s election, and that will be needed to resist his coming attacks.
The zeal of Zionists has cost local Democrats dearly. They ran an unqualified, non-voting Zionist candidate against Ryan Clancy, wasting massive resources that could have been spent on winning an assembly majority under new maps. They pushed the Common Council to endorse and encourage hate crimes against a Palestinian business. Zionists responded to the passing of Jonathan Brostoff with ghoulish opportunistic speculation that even Bruce Murphy described as “absurdly simplistic”.
Denials, bold-faced lies, bad faith arguments, and rampant ad hominem attacks are what happens when a genocide denier is losing an argument. The way they win their argument is by preventing the conversation from happening at all. That is the primary tactic of Milwaukee’s pro-genocide Zionists, and it too erodes our political discourse.
Ann Jacobs and her backers hard-pressured every Wisconsin Democrat to endorse Joe Biden, even though he was unelectable, then they worked even harder to pressure endorsements of Kamala Harris before she had defined her platform and her position. In order to silence discussion about the genocide they support, these establishment democrats organized to prevent all bottom-up conversation within the Democratic Party. The dissenting and hesitant were not endorsing Trump, they were looking for a better platform and better political strategy from Harris and her team. Instead, everyone was made to line up uncritically and to ignore and silence feedback from their constituents on many issues. As the fall-out of Trump’s victory unfurls upon us, we must remember that it was pro-genocide Zionists who helped cement Harris’ position as a status-quo politician, an opponent of the change most people in this country demanded and needed. Ann Jacobs’ hard work helped ensure Harris would proceed with an unpopular platform and a disastrous campaign strategy. She helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump, who is, not coincidentally, the candidate that Israeli war criminal Netanyahu clearly preferred.
Genocide advocates cannot be allowed to organize as freely as they do today. It is time to employ antifascist tactics like no-platforming against them. Promoting genocide alone does not meet our working definition of fascism, but it is pointless to talk with someone pursuing the elimination of an ethnic group. Such bigots cannot be reasoned with, and only need to be stopped. A strong and serious antifascist movement in Milwaukee would organize to expose, isolate, and no-platform local pro-genocide Zionists like Ann Jacobs, Christine Siniki, Karen Krause and others. A Democratic Party that wants to be nimble, responsive to public demands, and to win elections should do the same.
