What comes next for the Palestinian Youth Movement: Interview with Mohammed Nabulsi

Mohammed Nabulsi is an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. This interview took place on June 25, prior to Joe Biden stepping down as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

In our last interview, on Oct. 25, you told Hammer & Hope that Palestinian Youth Movement’s (PYM) strategy included an immediate call for cease-fire, broad mobilization of supporters, direct action, and a demonstration “that there isn’t a consensus in support of genocide.” Eight months later, what’s PYM’s assessment of that strategy? What has been successful and what hasn’t?

Generating crises was the primary strategy. There was a strategy of mobilization, agitation, and confrontation on every single front of our movement to create crisis for the American ruling class, and for the Western ruling class more broadly, to raise the political, social, and economic costs for their participation in this genocide. That occurred through mass mobilizations, direct actions, bridge and roadway shutdowns, airport and port shutdowns, things of that nature, but also through direct confrontations with the ruling class. Now we’re in a moment of reflection.

These past nine months have given us a sober and frank assessment. What are our resources? How much labor can we contribute to this struggle? What are the organizations that do exist? What are their capacities for a variety of things not just on a national level but on a local level? PYM is a national formation, but we exist across numerous locales, numerous chapters, and they differ in terms of skill sets, experience, leadership, infrastructure, base, everything you can imagine.

This assessment now helps us to understand: What should have existed nine months ago? How could we have built toward that? Now we can ask: What do we need to build in terms of infrastructure, resources, skills, organizers? We’ve always known we should build organizers, but organizers to do what? Give speeches? Yes. Organize events? Yes. Outreach? Yes.

When you ask where we have not been successful, that’s a question rooted in where we were deficient: infrastructure, organizers, networks, local scenes, connections to the left, connections to other movements and to other communities. We relied too heavily on mass mobilizing. I can say this in hindsight because I didn’t know how long this war would last.

What’s difficult, especially in a moment like this, is transforming everyday people who come to protest into organizers. That’s a project in and of itself. To do that while organizing a protest every week is hard. You can give people volunteer work all the time, you can ask them to bring water bottles, to set up, to become marshals. Transforming people into organizers means bringing them in politically. And the threshold to bring in someone politically is much higher than to give them a task. It requires developing a shared politics with this person. It’s not just what I think about the world. It’s also about how you do politics, how you relate to other organizers and to one another. This stuff is tough.

The Palestine solidarity protests have hit the nerve of the U.S. establishment, university administrations, and the police, further exposing their imperialist inclinations and support for genocide. How does PYM see the expansion of the movement into a broader anti-authoritarian movement that integrates students, faculty, and workers? How does persecution, criminalization, and violent repression affect PYM’s strategy?

Over the past nine months, the violent reaction of the state to the movement has facilitated a sharpening of contradictions for the broader public. The backlash has allowed for a lot more clarity regarding the role of the state. The state’s repression has exposed its long-term strategy around counterinsurgency. It demonstrated the state’s capacity to innovate, in real time, to expand its repression, and to use all the tools in its toolbox.

For the first few months, the repression wasn’t as heavy-handed. But with time, the Palestine movement generated a lot more crises, a lot more pressure, and there was greater demand to quell the movement coming from the right and from Zionists. As time went on, more arrests occurred for things we were doing before — and not just arrests but also surveillance and targeting of leadership and core organizers. Other movements have experienced this, particularly the Black struggle in the U.S. But up until now, there hasn’t been a confrontation with the state in a way that’s cross movement.

To your question, how has PYM’s strategy shifted: We need to strengthen the politics of anti-repression work for our movement, and it has to go beyond our base. We have to reach across communities so they understand that the issues they are working on are going to be met with repression. We need to face that repression together through a shared strategy. This is especially true with the coming elections regardless of who wins, because the Democratic Party is willing to severely repress our movement. This will especially be the case should Donald Trump win — we’re all going to face even harsher oppression.

We see the state learning in real time what counterinsurgency strategies look like: facial recognition technologies, the expansion of Cop City in Atlanta to various locales. There’s going to be a study or some conference where they talk about what’s happened in the past nine months in relation to movements.

We’d like to hear more about PYM’s position regarding electoral politics and the upcoming election.

We believe that progressive movements can reflect the demands of the broader masses that are often articulated as non-starters by Democrats or Republicans. The Bernie campaign revealed this — those types of insurgent campaigns can present new political horizons and allow us to imagine outside what Democrats and Republicans think is possible.

I’d like to narrow the question to this upcoming election. You have, on the one hand, Biden, whose pitch is We are what stands in the way of fascism and the complete dissolution of democracy in this country — which is not true — and that’s why you should vote for us. [This interview took place before the June 27 presidential debate and Biden withdrawing from the race on July 21.] Then you have Trump and everything he offers. With the border, the Biden administration has implemented the policies of the Trump administration. In fact, the Biden administration has co-opted the forces that were previously agitating against Trump’s border policies. The Democrats completely lower the political ceiling of what is possible and what is deserved. Biden is not in a confrontation with fascism. And when I say Biden, I mean Biden himself, his policies, the Democratic Party. They are not what stands in the way of fascism. They are the flip side of the Trump administration, they are the current in our society that sustains the conditions that give rise to fascism. So our fight is the same because our fight is about the conditions, not about who is steering the sinking ship.

PYM recently organized a conference in Detroit. What was the importance of that conference? Is there a central outcome that will influence the way PYM organizes the struggle?

The People’s Conference for Palestine was organized by a steering committee of 15 organizations; PYM led the planning. The conference helped us develop shared politics, a shared assessment and understanding of the points of unity around specific topics, including the right of our people to resist occupation, siege, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and the need to advance that right.

We also launched the Mask Off Maersk campaign at the conference to target one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics companies, which facilitates the weapons trade. That was an important feature of what came out of the conference. We also addressed a central problem: weakness of coordination among organizations in the movement. One of the first things we did after the conference was to organize the red-line protest on June 8, when thousands of people demonstrated outside the White House dressed in red or keffiyehs. The same steering committee that helped organize the conference was now organizing an action. It’s now working to organize a mass mobilization on July 24, in response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to D.C. to address Congress at the invitation of both parties. So this coordination now will, over time, strengthen.

I would like to hear more about PYM’s participation in the university encampments. How do you see them integrated into the organization’s tactics?

They’re often described as spontaneous, and there’s some level of spontaneity. But at the same time, there’s been nearly two decades of building toward this moment. The student movement has been organizing on university campuses across the world, especially in the US, to advance the idea of divestment. There has been an accumulation of organizers both inside and outside the student movement. Many student organizers become community organizers, as I did. We contributed to the advancement of the student movement and its politics, its infrastructure, its skill set. And despite the four-year turnover, which creates a difficult environment — you’re replacing your organizers and having to start from scratch, and you lose institutional memory — the movement outside the university campus is still linked to the student movement. That allowed the encampments to be sustained. And that linkage allowed students’ politics to be articulated and advanced. Had there not been divestment campaigns years prior, there wouldn’t have been an encampment movement, and we wouldn’t have seen the ascension of the demand for divestment.

We have this concept of tarakum, which is accumulation. This refers to our movement’s capacity to accumulate victories, achievements, skills, experiences, lessons. In order to move forward, we’re in a constant state of accumulation, and it’s important to build a movement that is able to accumulate, not just rupture or separate from the past through the building of new politics, new organizations. That is what happened with the encampments. Maybe 80 percent of our organizers are former student organizers. Our PYM chapters have relationships with students and student organizations, and they support the movement in two principled ways. First is direct support, the provision of resources, political advice, strategic advice, logistical advice. Second is support bridging the student movement with the outside world. We were a bridge. We’ve linked chapters to lawyers and businesses we’ve leaned on to help sustain the encampments. We wouldn’t have been able to directly help had we not been working on this for years.

How does class inform PYM’s political project?

Class is something that PYM has attempted to engage strongly in terms of the makeup of our membership. The difficulty is it is a diaspora movement. The demographics of PYM used to be dominated by people who have graduated from universities and are engineers, medical professionals, lawyers, NGO workers, etc. Now the younger members are more likely to be students and service workers.

But we believe that our external programming, especially on the educational front, must engage every segment of our society and include the working class, obviously. Beyond our community, there’s the labor struggle, the question of unions. That’s where we’re starting to develop our footprint. The labor movement in this country is weak, especially in southern states. Canadian and British chapters have more experience and more engagement with unions. On the West Coast, for example California and the Bay Area specifically, the chapters are more experienced with unions than in Houston or Dallas or where it’s a little more elementary or embryonic. That’s a front we’re still working to develop.

PYM views the popular classes as the working classes of Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora more broadly. And because we are an exiled refugee population, which is not one and the same as a class, but reflects a class dynamic, class is the foundation of our struggle and the foundation of our society. We’ve developed a deeper articulation of what a future Palestinian state or society would look like. At the center of it is a politics that understands the role of the working class as central to the constitution of any state. Now, whether we’ve consolidated that politics — we haven’t reached that point as an organization or as a movement. That’s a deeper engagement we will likely have in the future.

How are PYM’s relations with organizations in Palestine at this moment?

PYM as an organization, or as a movement field, sees ourselves as an extension of our people, as an extension of our homeland politics. It’s very difficult for us to directly engage Palestinian political organizations, because the dominant ones that are carrying the movement are deemed illegal and criminalized. You really can’t engage in a direct way or in a coordinated way. Instead, our politics develop independently through our shared struggles. That’s one aspect. Now, there are organizations and institutions that are not criminalized and that we do have relationships with — these are the nonprofits, the NGOs, the unions, etc. At the same time, the problems and the issues facing our respective institutions differ. Engagement can only exist on some high level and not in the nuances. PYM has relationships with organizations that do similar things, that think about things in similar ways. And creating space to gather engaged people and allow them to participate in political space is institution building.

What’s PYM’s relation to anti-Zionist Jewish organizations both in the U.S. and in Israel?

With Jewish anti-Zionist organizations, we have relationships, we work together, we organize on local levels together. But we also understand that Jewish anti-Zionist formations have a specific role to play in our struggle, and sometimes those roles can be complementary, but not necessarily overlapping. We’re still working to understand the parameters of that. So that means we’re not organizing together, but our efforts complement one another. For example, Palestinians are not going to enter Jewish community centers to agitate around Zionism among Jewish youth. But anti-Zionist Jews will play that role, and it’s complementary to our project.

It’s important to note that Jewish anti-Zionism isn’t a politics. Jewish anti-Zionism describes a segment of the struggle that carries that politics in order to achieve a specific goal. Jewish anti-Zionist groups have a specific role to play within their social context, as Jewish people who have come up in Jewish communities where Zionism is hegemonic. Zionism produces two things in my opinion: fear and isolation. Jewish anti-Zionism is supposed to contradict that — and contradict it not just on a discursive level in terms of proving its negative but also on a material level, on a confrontational level, to agitate against it and undermine its hegemony.

Jewish anti-Zionism, for me, cannot just be the negation of Zionism. It has to be an affirmative project of understanding the response to antisemitism as solidarity and internationalism, a confrontation with fascism, with state violence, a project that sees all of these other struggles, including the Palestinian struggle, as part of the fight. We want more Jewish people to reject Zionism as an ideological project.

A problematic formulation of Jewish anti-Zionism is about the redemption of the Jewish soul — this idea that there’s a state speaking in the name of Jewish people, so it’s important for them to speak out as Jews. Anti-Zionism is not an answer to the problems facing Jewish people. It’s not about a redemption of the Jewish soul or an answer to how Israel and Zionism have distorted Jewish identity, Jewish religion, etc. Anti-Zionism is a response to the problems facing Palestinians. Solidarity and internationalism are the answers to the problems facing Jewish people in terms of antisemitism. There’s a state that claims affiliation with Jewish identity. It could have been a British state, it could have been a French state, it could have been any cultural or ethnic or religious background that’s doing this to Palestinians. But anti-Zionism and the struggle for Palestinian liberation as an anti-colonial project is a struggle for the liberation of Palestinian people, not the redemption of the Jewish soul.

The struggle is about centering the Palestinian condition. By centering, I don’t mean that I as a Palestinian want to be seen and understood — I think that idea is very shallow and doesn’t benefit me. By centering the Palestinian condition I mean: What are we facing as a people? What is required for us to overcome it? That is what I need centered, not some ontological relationship between me and another group of people. That’s not what has to be fixed here.

I do think Zionism is a negative project, the same way that fascism and its consequences for the soul are a negative project. But we’re not going to say, for example, that the end of fascism in Germany is the redemption of the German soul. That’s not a politics. Any ideological project that’s predicated on either the extermination or the expulsion of another people is not about the oppressor. A lot of the discourse among the Jewish anti-Zionist movement, or the Jewish pro-Palestine movement in the U.S., places emphasis on this redemption narrative, because it’s responding to its conditions. It is trying to intervene within its social base, within a social context of Jewish people saying, Look, Zionism is damaging to our souls. And this is why we should end it. But Zionism is actually damaging to us Palestinians.