On the sad disconnection between our (Western) campaign to free Palestine from our campaigns to liberate the… West – video

My hopes these days spring not from Europe nor from the United States. Let me be frank on this. I take my hat off to the young people particularly, but not only young people, to Jewish comrades who went out on the street to demonstrate for Palestine, who were beaten up by police, who were arrested who were harassed, who lost their jobs (I have colleagues in Germany from our party MeRA25 who lost their jobs). I take my hat off to them and I’m very pleased that there is this push back.

But allow me to be also critical of our own people, myself included. Allow me in this context to draw a comparison between the protesters against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and the protesters today in the United States and in Europe. Back then, in 1968, 1969, 1970 the anti-Vietnam war movement held this strong belief that if Vietnam frees itself from imperialism, from the United States’ army occupation, that will be connected somehow to their own project in the United States, in France, in Germany, in Britain to liberate their own societies from oppression from the capitalist yoke – to put it in old-fashioned leftwing terms. There was this hope that the anti-imperialist war campaign goes hand in hand with their own liberation.

Today that doesn’t happen. The great boys and girls, the men and women who demonstrate in the campuses of the United States at great risk to themselves as we have seen, especially under Trump, have no hope in their hearts or minds that America will be liberated. The same here in Europe: The good people who demonstrate in Berlin, in Munich, they are doing it for the Palestinians. This is fantastic, this is brilliant. But, do  you know what I lament? I lament the fact that they do not connect the fight to liberate Palestine with a fight to liberate Munich, with a fight to liberate Brussels, with a fight to liberate the British working class from the yoke of the people who are actually keeping them down, not leaving them behind, but holding them down.

This works both ways. The fact that they don’t hope anymore that we can liberate Europe means that our capacity to be helpful to the the cause of Palestinian liberation is circumscribed and vice versa. However, when I see similar movements, similar

protesters in South Africa, in Namibia in Malaysia, in Latin America, supporting the Palestinian cause you can still see what used to be the case in the 1960s and early ’70s in Europe and in the United States.

You can still see that these young people are connecting the Palestinian liberation struggle with their own liberation struggle and I think that creates the feedback – the positive feedback effect between the local liberation struggle and the Palestinian liberation struggle which is good both for Palestine and for the Global Majority.