Welcome to the New Red Scare

When fascism comes to America it will be draped in an Israeli flag

This has always been a fiercely anticommunist country. From the time of the October Revolution and seizing of the state machinery in Russia in 1917, the specter of communism has haunted the ruling classes around the world, but rarely moreso than in the United States. From the Palmer Raids in the 1920s to the wave of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the government has had no problem bringing the full force of the state down on those with beliefs that were subversive to the goals of the ruling class. With the Soviet Union in the rearview mirror, the end of the Cold War, and the culmination of the decades-long work of dismantling trade unions and working class solidarity, the numbers of those with remaining communist sympathies has been no more than a rounding error. While Occupy Wall Street, the rise of Bernie Sanders, the resurgence of DSA, and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 are hardly what one would call communist in character, these events have shaken the ruling class after decades of a left that barely existed at all. Enter the movement for a free Palestine.

Photo by Nikolas Gannon on Unsplash

After the Al-Qassam brigades launched an incursion against Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel began its full-frontal assault on Gaza, and a nation who rarely seems to care about foreign policy at all, took notice. People all across the U.S. rallied to oppose Israel’s actions and to demand that the Biden Administration stop supplying the financial support and arms used to conduct this genocide. On November 4, 2023, less than a month after Israel began its attacks, around 300,000 people gathered in Washington, DC to protest. This was the largest anti-war protest in the US since the Iraq War and the largest Palestine protest in United States in history. I attended this protest, and it was staggering to see how many people from all walks of life showed up to demand a free Palestine and an end to the decades long occupation of Gaza. A political and media class that had supported this settler-colony since its inception immediately jumped into action.

PHOTO BY PROBAL RASHID VIA GETTY IMAGES

From MSNBC, CNN and other cable news networks, to the halls of Congress, to the resolute desk, the narrative was that anyone who objected to the genocide was a terrorist sympathizer and that Israel had a “right to defend itself”. This was a war, not a genocide, and if you opposed this “war” you were an antisemite. “The most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust” was the refrain repeated over and over ad nauseam to anyone willing to listen. Those who cared about Palestinian rights were to be treated with extreme suspicion, even hostility. Israel, after all, has a “right to exist” (at the expense of Palestinians) and if you oppose this right then you were clearly motivated by bigotry against Jews. Joe Biden went on live TV and falsely claimed he saw images of babies that were beheaded by Hamas. Congress members rushed to condemn protests and to restate their unwavering support for Israel. The propaganda machine was in overdrive.

Not content to just state support for Israel, to condemn protestors, quibble over phrases, approve billions upon billions in spending packages and arms shipments, Congress got to work to try to tamp down objections to the genocide through legislation. A wave of dozens of new bills and resolutions were introduced in the 118th Congress that were designed to condemn, harass, intimidate, and even criminalize Palestine activists. As early as December 4, 2023, a bipartisan bill was introduced that would establish a committee that would work much like Joseph McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee to target Palestine activists and subpoena them to testify in front of Congress, thus ruining their reputations and careers.

Follow @LaraFriedmanDC for updates on anti-Palestine legislation

A bipartisan resolution passed in April 2024 that condemned the phrase “From The River to the Sea” as antisemitic. Another bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate, championed by Chuck Schumer, that would use the IHRA definition of Antisemitism, to effectively criminalize anti-Israel speech. This bill didn’t pass in the last Congress but has already been reintroduced. Just as disturbing, was a bill that passed the House on November 21st, after Trump won the election, that would give the Treasury Department broad authority to defund non-profits accused of supporting terrorism, with no evidence required. If this bill becomes law, this would be akin to handing Trump a loaded gun to defund any liberal NGO he pleased, including the NAACP and the ACLU.

Leo Terrell, current senior counsel to the assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights said Wednesday, “You see all these disorderly demonstrations, supporting Hamas and trying to intimidate Jews? We are going to put these people in jail—not for 24 hours, but for years”. While the Trump administration has made it clear that it will go after anyone who publicly supports Palestine, Democrats have been in lock-step doing the same. Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul recently called for a shutdown of a Palestinian Studies professorship at CUNY due to concerns of “antisemitic theories”. Even just being Palestinian is enough to be branded antisemitic in the US.

There is seemingly no one in government, state or federal, Democrat or Republican, who will protect the civil rights of millions of Americans who oppose Israel and its actions. This is the new Red Scare. College protestors have been violently attacked by police and pro-Israel thugs, expelled from their Universities, demonized by the media. The only Palestinian member of Congress was censured for calling for the liberation of her people, smeared by two different cable news hosts, and attacked by a Zionist Democrat AG for criticizing her efforts to charge pro-Palestine college students with felonies. Pro-Palestine protestors and activists have been fired by the hundreds, have been doxxed repeatedly, have been beaten up and even stabbed by Israeli-American terrorists and then arrested for the privilege. Every single word spoken by someone who defends Palestine has been scrutinized endlessly while supporters of Israel have called for the razing of Gaza without consequence. Nancy Pelosi even suggested that those that were protesting her support of Israel were secretly funded by Russia, no! China. RIP Joseph McCarthy, you would’ve loved this.

Although among Democrat voters, three times as many of them sympathize with Palestine than Israel, among the ruling class the support for Israel is total. In their endless quest to protect the interests of the US in the Middle East, any rollback of civil rights is deemed acceptable. The more civil liberties the government is willing to trample on to protect something, the more that something can be understood as an important site of struggle against the ruling class. The United States has risked it all for Israel in the last 16 months, losing a lot of legitimacy on the world stage in the process, by making a mockery of the concept of international law and the “rules based international order”. It’s clear this little settler-colony is an immensely important part of the western strategy for hegemony and the dismantling of it is a vital piece of dismantling the state machinery itself.

These are terrifying times. Having the entire weight of the state against you while you stand up for basic humanity can be daunting. The ruling class is baring its teeth, is becoming less ideologically delineated, and is flexing its class solidarity. We are up against the most advanced surveillance and military technology ever created. This is an existential struggle for the survival of all life on earth against the most well-armed machine in history. As the contradictions heighten, as the working class becomes more agitated and angry, our rulers are abandoning even the managed democracy they have deigned to give us for something much more restrictive. This is by no means a call to give up, however. One benefit of this sort of suppression is that it does a lot to reveal what the ruling class really is, and what their interests are. Despite unprecedented repression on college campuses, students are still vocally supporting Palestine. Despite the best efforts of the Biden administration, Congress, the media, the pundits and legacy journalists, public opinion has turned on Israel for the first time ever. The cracks are there and they are starting to show.

If you told me a couple years ago that hundreds of thousands of people would soon march on DC for Palestine, I never would’ve believed you. Just like I never would’ve believed that 30 million people would participate in protests spanning months demanding justice for black lives taken by the police before it happened. We must never underestimate what we are capable of when we come together. As ever, our job is to continue to speak loudly on these issues of human rights and challenge the dominant narrative. We can’t predict when crises will occur, but we can be ready to meet those who show up to object and bring them into the fight for a better world. The arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice on its own, it’s up to us to bend it. When we fight, we see that there are a lot of other people standing there fighting with us. Our rulers want us to feel hopeless about our ability to change the future, but if all was truly lost, they wouldn’t spend so much effort trying to demoralize and repress us. Though they wield their swords of steel, their coffers of gold, their tongues of influence, it is we who hold the luminous torch of truth which can never be seized.

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