They Don't Care About Gaza
Seattle's protesters care about chaos.
“But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.” —Revolution 1, The Beatles
When activists shut down I-5 last Saturday they didn’t do it because they care about Gaza or Palestinians or the value of life or children or for that matter, facts.
Surely they knew that blocking highway traffic could lead to accidents, endangerment, road rage, and delays in emergency response time. They shut down the interstate and caused a traffic snarl that caught the Washington State Patrol with its pants down because they care about making chaos.
Why? Because ultimately Gaza is a proxy war for a communist revolution in the United States. And revolution is not a dinner party.1
At the center of the escalating activist disruption in and around Seattle is a constellation of socialist, communist, Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist activist groups. They work in partnership with Arab activist groups like Samidoun Seattle, an organization that supports the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and has been banned in Germany and is possibly materially linked to the terrorist organization PFLP; Falastinyat, a Palestinian feminist group that lives at the “intersection of gender justice and anti-colonialism”; SUPER UW, which “understands the struggle for Palestinian liberation as intimately entangled in global struggles for economic, social, and cultural justice,” among others. (I’m leaving Jewish Voice for Peace aside for the moment because I think their motivations are more complicated. Also of note, no Muslim religious organizations get publicly involved with these protests.)
The glue holding these activists together is not really Gaza, but the opportunity the war in Gaza provides for toppling “imperialism” and creating a new society that violently throws off the yoke of capitalism and unites the working class in a new shared society. That’s why they vandalized the Capitol Hill Starbucks in November, causing it to close, and continue to tag it with anti-Israel graffiti.
That’s also why so many of them woke up the morning of October 8th chanting for intifada revolution. They may be calling for a ceasefire and an end to “genocide” now, but it’s not about the devastation in Gaza as much as it’s a call to arms for the revolutionary struggle to continue unhindered. Imperialist America and Israel, the last apparent colonialist holdouts, caused these problems. Therefore, resistance must happen by any means necessary. Glory to the martyrs!
What’s even more interesting is how this ideology has captivated some local high school students.
The Issaquah Students League (ISL) is advertising a January 28th march along with the Seattle Student Union, a group formed by local teens to advocate for progressive causes. (They were key in getting more mental health counselors in schools after the 2022 shooting at Ingraham High School that killed 17-year-old Ebenezer Haile.) Before October 7th, the ISL was mostly a handful of kids talking about nuclear de-proliferation, leading workshops on socialism, and screening People of the Shining Path.
In fact, on October 6th, an ISL leader gave an interview to The Masses, a Maoist online publication. There is no mention of Israel or Palestine. The representative, who is either an eloquent high school student or not a student, explains how the group considers itself Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (MLM, not to be confused with a multi-level marketing scheme). “The ISL is not an explicitly Maoist organization however it is an organization formed and led by Maoists,” he/she says. “It is our view that mass organizations should be organized by Maoists, and guided by Maoist Principles.” The ISL leader adds that the group plans to expand to neighboring cities, like Bellevue, and strives to keep youth connected to their activism after high school. The ISL also encourages other student groups to start chapters of the Revolutionary Student Union (RSU).
Just for a peek into the next tunnel in this rabbit hole, point 1 in the RSU’s points of unity states:
…we want to popularize the understanding that all issues we see in our current society is the product of capitalist-imperialism, where the US is the biggest imperialist country in the world, who does not only exploit its own people, but carries out atrocities all around the world. It is an utmost corrupt and disgraceful system, and the only solution is to overthrow it. Therefore, we are for a violent revolution, organized by the most advanced section of the working class, that overthrows existing capitalist regime and establishes working class political power.
Relatedly, the International Student Peoples’ League (ISPL) and branches of the Party for Socialism and Liberation organized many of the protests in the first month after the attack and continue to do so, especially in Eastern Washington.
October 7th gave MLM groups a new purpose. By the end of that day, The Masses had republished four statements put out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and finally a sweeping editorial praising the fighters and “martyrs” that includes this stab in the heart of the peace process:
It is painfully obvious that the zionist rhetoric which portrays the offensive as only the work of Hamas is a deliberate mischaracterization designed to downplay the scale of the uprising, and the connections to the masses which the organizations involved have. What we are seeing at this moment is the full scale mobilization of the Palestinian people…
What did you think, decolonization was a metaphor, sis?
I haven’t found one example of a disclaimer or condemnation of violence. All these groups, while they may have slight variations in their visions, overlap, cosponsor, and share each other’s posters. Their imagery overlaps, too — if you see a fist, a star, and/or the colors red and black, you can bet they have something in common with MLM. It’s not a coincidence that the Black Lives Matter symbol is a fist; the movement venerates the Black Panthers, who were aligned with the Maoists in the 1970s.
The scariest realization is that many of them seem like they wish they could look down and see blood on their own hands. To witness the uprising of their dreams happen on another continent! If only their unionized coffee shop job paychecks could cover the cost of the ticket.
Everything old is new again. The activism of the 1930s revived in the 1970s and it’s back, right on cue. Violent revolution is all part of the plan, but what happens after the so-called revolution? Well, history has taught us over and over what happens after the revolution. But ask this question and you’ll be met with a milquetoast answer: “it will take creativity.” The least horrific answer is that Israel-Palestine will become a secular, democratic country. That sounds a hell of a lot like a Western colonial idea.
Washington state leadership still seems to be running in circles trying to figure out how to get out of this mess, or ignoring it altogether. Americans have the right to protest, and no one wants to go back to the McCarthy era. But when do protests in the American spirit of democracy go too far, and what do we do about it? I urge our state leaders to ask themselves this question, before they get caught with their pants down again.
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Mao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927.
This is all part of the latest fashion. And that is just as ludicrous as it sounds. I dropped off my kid at a friend's house yesterday, and the mother was wearing a Palestinian prayer shawl. She said that she will not take it off until Palestine has been liberated. Let me reiterate, she was wearing it in her own house where it will have no visible impact, except, possibly, with her own children. Prayer shawls as protest/fashion material for someone who is NOT Palestinian.
Thanks for the article. I didn't know about the relationship between the kalediscope of communism/socialism causes and the pro-palestinian movement. I hope it's just a trend. The only thing this country hates more than terrorists is communists.