Student occupations are fewer and the demonstrations smaller, but the Palestine Solidarity movement has gripped North America and Europe for years. What was it all about?
To the participants, the question hardly needs an answer. The cause of Palestine is the cause of the world, they say. But there are and have been many conflicts around the world that have attracted nothing like the attention that Palestine gets. The war in Sudan that started six months before the Gaza war has taken more lives—but no protests have taken place over it. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, which has been running since 2009, has taken 350,000 lives. The wars the West fought (with Iraqi and Kurdish support) against ISIS in 2013-17 cost some 150,000 lives but were barely protested at all.
Why is it that the Gaza War captivates so many people? To answer that question, we must look at the movement as one that is more indigenous to the West than prompted by trends in the Middle East.
As protests have burst out in European capitals and across North America, the question often posed is whether the movement is tainted by antisemitism. But it is a question that underestimates the problem.
The challenge of today’s anti-Israel movement is not just the antisemitic attitudes that it shares, but that the movement itself fulfills the social needs that antisemitism fills. It is not a tangentially antisemitic movement; it is a programmatic one. At its core is the belief that alone amongst all peoples of the world, only the Jews are unworthy of a state. Of course, one could certainly make the case against Israel’s position in the occupied territories, or for a peace deal over Gaza. But the campaign has opposed the peace agreement between Hamas and Israel in September, as well as the Trump deal, however fragile, in October. The solidarity campaign’s goal is not peace—a term conspicuously absent from “Palestine Solidarity”—or even two states, but the destruction of the State of Israel, and one Palestine “from the River to the Sea”, a phrase drawn from Hamas’s 2017 Charter.
The challenge of today’s anti-Israel movement is not just the antisemitic attitudes that it shares, but that the movement itself fulfills the social needs that antisemitism fills.
Fundamentally, the current iteration of the Palestine Solidarity movement took off in Europe and the US because of the successive defeats of the left. Antisemitism and the projection of one’s own shortcomings and resentments onto Jews has historically always received public attention in one way or the other, and attention was desperately needed by the left.
The de-railing of Bernie Sanders’s electoral bid in 2016, and the left’s inability to make headway in Joe Biden’s administration, has led them to a marked disaffection from constitutional politics. Similarly, the British left’s failure to translate capturing the leadership of the Labour Party into electoral success has led to their isolation and exclusion from the mainstream. The re-badging and re-organizing of the left across Europe has seen groupings like La France Insoumise and broader New Popular Front, the Portuguese Left Bloc, the German Die Linke rise dramatically, only to fall even more so.
The failure of the left’s parliamentary campaigns has prompted them to throw themselves wholeheartedly into agitation over the Gaza war, where they can avoid the public rejection of their larger platforms, and take succour from the street militancy of public protest. The protests, too, have allowed them to march alongside a large group of European and American Muslims, migrants's children who are alienated from the West.
The failure of the left’s parliamentary campaigns led them to throw themselves wholeheartedly into agitation over the Gaza war.
Because it is for the most part an unconscious movement, unaware of why it has turned to the Middle East, or what its orientation away from domestic political issues means, the Palestine Solidarity movement of 2023 to 2025 has nursed some pointedly reactionary trends:
