Above Photo: Taher Dahleh, leader in the Palestinian Youth Movement, speaks at a demonstration in Times Square, New York City. Wyatt Souers.
Undeterred By Trump’s Attacks.
The Palestinian Youth Movement and other organizations plan to demonstrate in Washington, DC to oppose Israel’s genocide and call for an arms embargo
Emboldened by an ultra-right wing and extremely pro-Zionist administration in the US, Israel has resumed its genocidal bombardment of Gaza. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump and his immigration authorities are rounding up and detaining student organizers for standing in solidarity with Palestine. Student activists such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk have been violently abducted by ICE in front of their families and communities for registering their peaceful opposition to genocide.
Rather than having a chilling effect on the movement for Palestine, however, these ICE kidnappings have actually had the opposite impact: more have taken to the streets in support of Palestine than ever since Trump’s election.
In addition, Palestine solidarity organizations, progressive groups, and others including the Palestine Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, the People’s Forum, Democratic Socialists of America, Jewish Voice for Peace, US Palestinian Community Network, American Muslims for Palestine, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, Tamkeen, Al-Awda, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, and the US Council of Muslim Organizations, are planning a march in Washington, DC, to oppose the genocide and to call for an arms embargo. In anticipation of this demonstration, set for on April 5, Peoples Dispatch spoke to Taher Dahleh, a leading organizer in the Palestinian Youth Movement and a labor leader in the Communications Workers of America.
“Last year, when the genocide first began, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Shut It Down 4 Palestine Coalition, and many others organized what is to date the largest demonstration in favor of Palestinian liberation and against American and Israeli genocide on November 4,” Dahleh described. “On April 5, we’re going to do that again. People in the United States are going to go to DC to reject this genocide, to call for an immediate arms embargo.”
Peoples Dispatch: Israel has resumed its genocidal bombardment of Gaza. Why are people in the US protesting this?
Taher Dahleh: This resumption of the genocide comes in the context of ceasefire negotiations for phase two of the ceasefire breaking down between Palestinians and Israel. Israel has consistently worked at every single turn to undermine them in many different ways, but probably most horrifically by completely cutting off any kind of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, already besieged for 17 years, and denying the strip access to critical resources like electricity and fuel needed to run hospitals and water treatment plants.
The United States was one of the guarantors of the agreement, and was one of the primary brokers of the agreement. Actually, Trump and Steve Witcoff, who has been responsible for negotiating this deal and holding Israel to it, bragged about this deal as their proposal and touted it as an achievement of diplomacy.
We know, of course, that this is a lie. In fact, Trump’s administration has worked to undermine the agreement and to build support for the complete displacement of the people from Gaza, exemplified by the Trump plan of rebuilding Gaza as a “Riviera.”
I’m saying all of this background to say the United States is heavily, heavily, heavily involved in planning and executing this genocide at every single level, whether it’s from military support and financial support for the Israeli army, or whether it’s from providing consistent and powerful diplomatic cover, as we saw when the attacks resumed last Monday, with the White House saying that they were informed ahead of time that the strikes were coming.
This is the role the United States government has played in Palestine for the last 76 years, but particularly in the last 18 months with the genocidal war.
The people of the United States are not standing for this. The people of the United States reject this genocidal agenda, and have been showing that every single day on the streets, through consistent protests and consistent organizing in neighborhoods throughout the country, and through multiple national marches.
Last year, when the genocide first began, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Shut It Down 4 Palestine Coalition, and many others organized what is to date the largest demonstration in favor of Palestinian liberation and against American and Israeli genocide on November 4.
On April 5, we’re going to do that again. People in the United States are going to go to DC to reject this genocide, to call for an immediate arms embargo.
As we’ve seen since the ceasefire deal went into effect, and then collapsed, a deal with no arms embargo is just continued genocide.
Also, the attacks are right here at home. Trump’s plan is to attack the Palestine movement, to attack leaders like Mahmoud Khalil, to attack organizers like Yunseo Chung and others who have been part of this movement, by horrifically stripping them of their democratic rights, and doing this at the same time as as the administration attacks immigrants, ICE terrorizes and raids not only college campuses but communities throughout America.
I don’t think the American people are standing for this. I think on April 5, they will come together in mass numbers to reject the genocide and to call for an arms embargo, and to reject this entire Trump agenda, to reject DHS and ICE attacks on our communities and on our democratic rights.
PD: Trump has posited himself as an anti-war president, as someone who’s going to get rid of endless war. As someone who’s active in the movement for Palestine, what do you have to say in response to that sort of positioning?
TD: I think the framing is completely false.
The American people are sick of war, we know this. The United States’ policy has been, since World War II, forever wars: starting wars throughout the world and terrorizing the masses of the world’s people in order to advance the interests of this government and to enrich it.
For a long time, this has been sold to Americans as needed for our national security. The reality is that Americans haven’t seen anything positive from these wars. Most ordinary Americans have seen their sons and daughters shipped to war and slaughtered on the front lines of these adventuristic conflicts.
They’ve seen money that could have been directed to healthcare, that could have been directed to education, that could have been directed to any number of needed social services, redirected to the development of the arms industry, to funding client states like Israel, and to building more than 900 US military bases throughout the entire world.
This is an expensive endeavor, and one that comes on the backs of the American people and the people of the world.
Trump is trying to capitalize on this, to redirect justified anger against this policy, into this the claim that he’s an anti-war candidate, and to use that to bring people into his right-wing program of consolidating power within the executive branch and stripping more and more people of their right to dissent.
We know in reality, that words are meaningless. Trump is giving a complete green light to the Israelis to continue bombing.
I would ask the American people what they think of how Trump is handling this, the idea of peace through strength. Massive strength, he’s been clear, means a massive military. In what sense can this be anti-war? In what sense can sending militarized police through immigrant communities in Colorado, in California, in Texas, building up huge border fences, be anti-war? This is all a policy of militarization. The militarization is here, and it’s also throughout the world.
It’s a continuation of what we saw from Biden. Trump has now fully resumed the exact same policy that Joe Biden had on Palestine, and has made it more extreme, with naked threats of displacement. So of course, there are important changes to how Trump is managing the US empire and wars abroad. But there is a consistency around more militarization, more attacks, and more support for Israel and others to carry out needless and grotesque wars.
PD: Over the past years of the beginning of this new upsurge in the movement for Palestine, which you have been a part of, people in the United States have gone through a transformation of public opinion and mass consciousness. Can you describe this process, of how public opinion and consciousness has shifted in the US, from being unquestioning pro-Israel to having far more sympathy for the Palestinian cause?
TD: Let’s start with how extreme the shift is. Just to give an illuminating statistic that brings how stark the shift is into numerical terms, 90% of American college students sympathize more with the Palestinian people than they do with the Israelis or with Zionism.
This is an enormous change. When I went to college in the mid 2010s, we were lucky if maybe 15% of the student body was sympathetic to our struggle.
This change has been achieved through constant organizing, through a really powerful and broad mass movement that has swept the entire world, with weekly, sometimes more than weekly, mobilizations, that have focused on key demands that have brought forward anger and and outrage at what they’re seeing from the genocidal state of Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank, where Israel has committed massacre after massacre.
People watch this, and they understand now humanistically and intuitively how horrific this is. But prior to this mass movement coming around, and prior to this extensive organizing campaign, it was very easy for the corporate media and the ruling political forces in the United States and in Europe to confuse people. But through mass organizing, there is now a movement that has authority, that people look to in order to explain what’s going on.
I mentioned November 4, but several others, the red line action on June 8, the two actions when Netanyahu came in September and then also on July 24 in Washington, DC, these big calls for all Americans to unite together, have also played a really crucial part in people understanding that there is power in numbers, that there is an ability to overcome fear by coming together as a larger and larger bloc of people to reject not only this genocide and to call for an arms embargo, but also to reject the entire Trump and imperialist right wing agenda.
I’m going to make an appeal that all people come to the national march on April 5. The Zionists are spending more than 130 million dollars on public opinion campaigns and propaganda, particularly in the United States and particularly on college campuses. They are attempting, along with the United States and the entire imperialist bloc, to roll back these gains to attack Palestinians in America, so that we are afraid to continue organizing, to to attack leaders of this movement so that we’ll go back into our houses rather than going to Washington, DC on April 5, and to attack anyone participating in this movement because they stand with justice and they stand with truth.
The United States, and particularly the Trump administration, has been a threat to the people of the world. This includes to Palestinians, whether it’s in Palestine itself, in the region, or even in North America, as we’ve seen through the resumed slaughter of Gaza and also through the targeting of Mahmoud Khalil and other Palestinian youth in America, but also to every single person, who either dissents from their agenda or who they view as unnecessary for their agenda, thinking here specifically of immigrants in this country.
They’re counting on fear and they’re counting on intimidation and authoritarian tactics to undermine what we’ve built. We will assure that this won’t happen by being there on April 5. We are going to show them that these attacks will never work.
We will assure also that companies like Maersk, the logistics giant which transports more military cargo than any other logistics company to Israel, another crucial pillar of the genocide on the people of Gaza, are rejected. We are calling for a people’s arms embargo on Maersk.
We will raise that demand on April 5 and will continue organizing against Maersk and all other companies complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people past April 5, and until the complete liberation of our land.