Palestine & The Shock of Victory

We aren't winning yet. But if we were, what would it look like?

In 2008, David Graeber wrote an essay titled The Shock of Victory, in which he argues that the biggest problem facing direct action movements today is that we don’t know how to handle victory.

This might seem counterintuitive at first, and so it is, but only because our victories are easy to miss. In his piece, Graeber details how the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and the anti-globalization (or global justice) movement at the turn of the century achieved their mid-term goals almost immediately, while their short- and long-term goals mostly never materialized.

Because they’re flanked by defeat that’s easy to measure, the middling victories go unrecognized or misunderstood.

We might be close to a similar situation in Palestine.

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To be clear, right now we aren’t winning.

More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, and Israel is now bombing Rafah, threatening to drive the remaining population into the desert to starve. The immediate need to save as many Palestinian lives as possible from further death and destruction remains as urgent as ever.

Similarly, the end of Israeli apartheid in Palestine does not seem to be within sight. Even accomplishing a permanent ceasefire will not end the genocide. It will only mean the occupation returns to less overt means of enforcing its rule, as it has been doing for decades.

Faced with these facts, it might be tempting to despair. Why aren’t things changing despite how loudly we’re protesting? we might wonder. How can they keep on like this despite the whole world’s disapproval?

Firstly, this should signal our need for creative resistance. We can move on from standard tactics of protest and demonstration towards more direct forms of action, such as blockades, boycotts, sabotage, and divestments, many of which have already shown success.

But those questions might also be missing something: the emergent quality of social change. We lose hope when we forget that we’re operating on different emergent levels, and especially the unfolding space between them. What we’re doing now, if we don’t lose momentum, could have enormous ripple effects going forward.

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To help us make sense of what the anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements accomplished, Graeber articulates their goals in terms of the short, mid, and long-term.

For the anti-nuclear movement in the ‘70s:

1. Short-Term Goals: to block construction of the particular nuclear plant in question (Seabrook, Diablo Canyon…).

2. Medium-Term Goals: to block construction of all new nuclear plants, delegitimize the very idea of nuclear power and begin moving towards conservation and green power, and legitimate new forms of non-violent resistance and feminist-inspired direct democracy.

3. Long-Term Goals: (at least for the more radical elements) smash the state and destroy capitalism.

And for the global justice movement at the turn of the century:

1) Short-Term Goals: blockade and shut down particular summit meetings (IMF, WTO, G8, etc.).

2) Medium-Term Goals: destroy the “Washington Consensus” around neoliberalism, block all new trade pacts, delegitimize and ultimately shut down institutions like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank; disseminate new models of direct democracy.

3) Long-Term Goals: (at least for the more radical elements) smash the state and destroy capitalism.

Almost entirely across the board, these movements were unsuccessful in accomplishing their short-term goals. Individual nuclear plants, despite delays, bankruptcies, and injunctions, eventually began operations. Summit meetings and conferences did go through, though just barely (many events were canceled, and few deals were made).

Graeber explains this is because “the state cannot be seen to lose such battles,” or else they’d lose legitimacy. I think it’s also important not to discount the possibility of victory even in these short-term battles — for example, the successful siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis — but it’s clear that in general the state does spend exorbitantly to save face wherever they can.

Neither of these movements ignited a social revolution that ended capitalism and the state, but, Graeber argues, these long term goals were not reached in part because the mid-term goals were all reached with alarming speed. In fact, their victories outpaced the movements themselves, which splintered over strategic debates and were dwarfed by the advent of wars.

The anti-nuclear movement “marked the first appearance in North America of what we now consider standard anarchist tactics and forms of organization: mass actions, affinity groups, spokes-councils, consensus process, jail solidarity, the very principle of decentralized direct democracy.” They also successfully discredited nuclear power, to the extent that after Three Mile Island melted down in 1979 the incident doomed the entire industry.

The global justice movement similarly affected how we organize: “almost every small-scale radical group… now operates on largely anarchist principles—though they might not know it.” Similarly, they successfully discredited the Washington Consensus, so much so that free trade agreements from 1998 to 2008 stalled or were canceled, the World Trade Organization’s “Doha round” sputtered to a stop in ‘06 and has never recovered, and the World Bank and the IMF were nearly rendered bankrupt, losing between 60-80% of their revenue respectively:

In 2003, Latin American IMF debt stood at $49 billion. Now it’s $694 million. To put that in perspective: that’s a decline of 98.6%… Asia followed. China and India now both have no outstanding debt to the IMF and refuse to take out new loans. The boycott now includes Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and pretty much every other significant regional economy. Also Russia.

I highly recommend reading Graeber’s essay in full (the story is riveting!), but the point here is that these victories, inconceivable just years before they happened, were the direct result of popular organizing. The collective action of people working together had, not just an outsized impact, but an exponential one — the momentum built up and jumped to a whole new level of cause and effect, like electrons jumping into new orbits around a nucleus.

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If we had to fit Palestine into Graeber’s model, I think we could say something like this:

1. Short-term goals: impose an immediate and permanent ceasefire, end US military aid to Israel, withdraw all Israeli military presence in Gaza and the West Bank.

2. Mid-term goals: discredit US war-machine propaganda, cripple international support for the Israeli state, elicit international support in rebuilding Palestine.

3. Long-term goals: (at least for the more radical elements) smash imperialism and apartheid, achieve liberation for all people “from the river to the sea.”

Framed in this way, we might be closer to achieving our mid-term goals than we think.

Evidence for this includes the temporary ceasefire from Nov’ 23-30 of last year, which was not on the docket of our benevolent leaders.

Noah Berlatsky

shows how that week was won by we the people, the movement for Palestinian liberation. It was not the result of clever diplomats or strong leaders performing statecraft — those things happened in response to the overwhelming outcry of the public.

Then as the ceasefire ended, there was the Kiss Off to mark the death of Henry Kissinger, which, as Noah Berlatsky shows again, was a surprising success but not a spontaneous one. It was a work of conceptual art, long in the making, involving lots of people in clever places. When any public figure passes away, and especially those important to the state, there’s usually a swift and forceful effort to sanitize their reputation in the name of respecting their memory. It didn’t work this time. That victory is ours too.

The Kiss Off was a unique and prominent example of a broader surprising trend: the general failure of the US government to manage the narrative this time around. Since Vietnam, the US has worked hard to avoid igniting powerful anti-war sentiment in the population. It is very difficult to do so when Palestinians live-stream their own genocide in real time. While the bloodshed in Gaza has proven to be the deadliest conflict for journalists ever, the use of social media by folks on the ground has allowed the truth to escape the usual channels of suppression.

This failure of narrative management has ignited huge international outcry. Marches and demonstrations the world over have already matured into direct action and political isolation. Many countries have cut diplomatic ties with Israel, and the ICJ case brought by South Africa against Israel, while fairly toothless on its own, is a significant marker of international attitudes. It is increasingly the US and Israel against the rest of the world.

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All these things signify, not that we’ll win in the short-term (although we still might, and we should still try), but that we might soon find ourselves much further along in discrediting the US war machine, and undermining the credibility of Israel as a nation-state. If that happens, it won’t be one step forward and two steps back. It’ll be one step back, and potentially a sudden leap forward. At that point it will be vital to have clear-eyed strategic debates, because we’ll face immense pressure to dissolve back into the familiar status quo (an untenable two-state solution), the same situation that led us to the genocide in the first place.

In The Shock of Victory, Graeber argues that it was missing the strategic debates disguised as other issues that stalled the movements’ momentum and prevented them from evolving into a general social revolution. Because they were disheartened by losing short-term battles and unable to appreciate mid-term victories until they had already passed, they lost their window of opportunity to pursue their long-term vision.

One reason we’re so surprised by the middle victories is that they happen precisely in the space between emergent levels. We are conscious as individuals, and geopolitics happen at a systems level, but change happens in the movement between the two. In that space, time and causation aren’t linear, they’re logarithmic. Nothing happens for a long time, and then everything happens at once. What’s more, it’s difficult to see how our actions influence the bigger picture because we’re inside it. We think colonies of ants with their chemical signals are intricate only because we can’t directly observe our own social organization at work.

The powers that be know enough of this magic to keep us alienated and isolated from each other. They’re dimly aware that if once people understood our emergent potential, their rule would be over. That’s why the narrative around Palestine unraveling is so significant.

Even if Israel pushes everyone in Rafah into the desert, even if there is suddenly no more place called Gaza and the settlers pour in, it’s not the end of the story.

If we keep at it, it might be the last thing the state of Israel ever does.

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