Liberals are a Liability to the Free Palestine Movement

Since May 29th, over 44.9 million people have shared the “All Eyes on Rafah” AI-generated post circling the internet. The image has orderly rows of tents with “ALL EYES ON RAFAH” in the middle of them. Behind the tents are beautiful blue skies with fluffy clouds overlooking a snowy mountain range, but the real Rafah, and most of Palestine, is covered in smoke from Israeli bombings. In real life, tents are scattered and destroyed. Massacred bodies and limbs of Palestinian men, women, and children are lining the city. Over 2.3 million people are packed into a small 24.71 square-mile strip that was supposed to be a refuge. Tens of thousands of them have been executed by the Zionist state of Israel, and dozens more by the time you’ve read this.

We’ve seen this type of performative allyship before in 2020 when George Floyd was murdered by the U.S. state, the same state that has funded the Palestinian genocide for over seven decades. On June 2, 2020, liberals, mostly white, posted a black square on their social media feeds, a day known as “Blackout Tuesday.” This was as far as the activism went for many of them. It did nothing to pressure or call out the contradictions of the state and how cops do not and will never keep us safe. Cops serve as watchdogs of the wealthy ruling class and their property. The co-opted movement then became corporate philanthropy. Big businesses used it as a way to drain even more money out of the average American consumer with merchandise and false promises to promote “diversity and inclusion” within their companies while doing nothing to materially help Black communities. Democratic President Joe Biden included a false promise in his platform to defund the police prior to being elected that year, but in 2023, he signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that gave 17.8 billion dollars to law enforcement. Merciless killings by the state via policing have only increased since then.

We have no time to repeat history with liberals coming out of the woodwork almost eight months after Israel escalated attacks to co-opt the Free Palestine movement. We have no time to congratulate people for finally speaking up about a genocide that has been going on for over 76 years,. “All Eyes on Rafah,” they say, but they fail to name Palestine. They fail to say there’s a genocide happening. They fail to call out the apartheid, settler-colonial project of Israel and all of the countries who fund it, its biggest backer being the U.S. They fail to condemn the historical actors who manufactured this genocide. They fail to recognize that imperialist violence is an inevitable and direct product of the final decay of the capitalist mode of production.

The image being shared is politically safe for liberals to voice their concerns because it does nothing to pressure the settler state and its financial backers. There are no donation links to help Palestinians. There is no information about what’s happening in Gaza. There are no dismembered, bloody bodies, mourning parents or traumatized children from the real-life horrors going on day after day in Rafah. Liberals can’t even be bothered to share videos of the culture and joy Palestinians still have despite it all. This is because liberalism is a façade. Their self-image as good people, paragons of “social justice” and the “smart” ones clashes with what is expected of them as loyal subjects of the state. They either throw their support behind genocide or post meaninglessly on social media to launder their own conscience of societal shame.

We are past the point of appealing to the sense of morality of our elected officials. Have we learned nothing from the Black Lives Matter movement? The liberal strategy of declaring opposition to the state and its policies without doing anything materially to challenge it or organize against it must end. We cannot win by begging. Revolutionary potential cannot stall or funnel into behaviors that do not challenge the state. If we have any hope of being materially effective, we must abandon all attempts of moral persuasion and use what we know from a historical and material basis to gain leverage against those who do not serve our interests. A ceasefire resolution passed by our City Council members, while symbolic, will not change what’s happening in Palestine. The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, if strictly confined to those demands, is still a liberal movement unless it calls for the organization of the masses under a revolutionary program. College encampments calling to disperse after an administration’s “pledge” to “discuss” divestment do not do enough to enact material change. Constant pressure on the state apparatus is necessary. 

The Free Palestine movement calls to “shut it down,” but we don’t have the organization or numbers to shut down anything. Escalation in the realm of non-violent disobedience against the largest, most violent and amoral state apparatus has, materially, proven powerless. The end of a genocide cannot be brought about by posting on social media or marching in parades that would otherwise ignore the plight of Palestinians. The ruling class cannot be and do not need to be educated, convinced, moved or reasoned with. We leave these dreams to the Utopians. The bourgeoisie no longer has any progressive historical role to play. They need to be defeated, crushed and fully deprived of any ounce of power over the lives of the poor and working class through militant organization and opposition to capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and all that they entail. Genocide is not something any human with a sense of morality should be able to stomach, and we are not here to make the Free Palestine movement acceptable and digestible to “mainstream” petty-bourgeois culture.