To those who saw this coming,

We have to build a mass movement. Given Trump’s links to Netanyahu’s government and his strong Zionist support, we expect he will continue to support the Zionist entity’s campaigns of genocide in Gaza and Lebanon, and intensify repression of Palestine solidarity activism here.

This leaves us with two questions: how can we explain his victory, and how should we respond?

The year of unconditional support for Israel’s mass slaughter in Palestine and Lebanon is the most important issue Democrats ignored. But it’s not the only one. The Harris campaign also lacked any comprehensive policy proposals on health care, housing, education, policing, or any affirmative vision of a future beyond the status quo. In addition to its hostility to criticism and indignance at the idea that we might ask for more, its pandering to Zionist donors and voters and condescension to youth cemented its defeat. 

Trump dominated the race in every swing state and picked up unprecedented support even in solidly blue areas of the country. 

Trump himself offers nothing to the people but a government dominated by the whims of the billionaire class with none of the veneers of progress and civility we saw from the Biden administration. That he was victorious speaks to forces integral to our political system: Candidates who stoke hatred and division have a built in advantage.

In a country that reduces all peoples — especially those suffering under the thumb of racial capitalism and imperialism — to a single vote, nobody should be surprised by this outcome.  The Democratic Party has long taken advantage of the assumption that the agenda of “the other party” is enough to vote against, but has done little to offer an agenda to vote for. The Democrats have yet to learn that fear-mongering is a limited organizing tactic. Because they failed to respond to people’s rage, the people rejected their agenda. 

This moment must be an opportunity to build political clarity amongst ourselves and the people, we must continue to organize and escalate against imperialism at home and across the world. We must do away with apathy and inertia and prepare our networks of resistance for a fight against the demagogues who now own the other side of the challenge.

The demand remains the same, regardless of who occupies the executive chamber: end the Zionist genocide of Palestine. 

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“Put a wrench in the machinery of war”

“Direct action loses effectiveness if there isn’t a mass movement,” Dhoruba bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), told a packed room at our election night town hall on Tuesday. In under ten minutes, Wahad elegantly summarized some of the movement’s most pressing disconnects: the disconnect between underground direct actionionists and mass movements; the fact that AIPAC and police unions “have more power in the Black community than the Black community has.” Palestine has forced U.S. leftists to become internationalist and Wahad’s analysis connects American imperialism in Gaza and Lebanon to America’s internal colonies.

Wahad’s wisdom comes from decades of struggle, including 19 years of incarceration on charges of attempting to murder two NYPD officers in 1971. In prison, Wahad learned about COINTELPRO, the covert FBI operation used to break up anti-Vietnam protests, feminist groups, and Black liberation organizations like the Black Panthers, from which the paramilitary BLA emerged. Wahad sued the FBI in 1975, forcing the federal government to release 300,000 pages of confidential documents that Wahad would eventually deploy to overturn his own conviction. Today, as the U.S. and Canada label Samidoun a “terrorist” group, and as Georgia officials charge Stop Cop City activists under RICO and domestic terrorism laws, it’s crucial to study the history of state repression in order to battle evolving forms of counter-insurgency. Wahad’s work and life are a model of steadfast invention in the fight against what he has dubbed “democratic fascism.” Below is an excerpt of his speech: 

We have to organize people where they are at, in the streets, around issues that impact their lives. We have to be able to create centers of people's power and control in the urban areas where we can access the electoral system and use it to our advantage. All politics is local, you see. So we're in a moment right now, as the genocide is proceeding in broad daylight, every day we pick up the news, we see 53 children and women slaughtered with American bombs and American military hardware.

But we need to understand that the trillions of dollars and millions of dollars the U.S. spends on its proxies never leave the United States. It goes to the corporations and the companies that manufacture the weapons of mass destruction in war. They go to the Boeings and McDonnell Douglas and they go to all of these corporate agencies.

And this is the working class. This is the class of technicians that underwrite and support and make the fascist nation-state possible. We have to understand the police are not workers, so why do they have a union? So that's a struggle right there. That's part of our mass line in the united front, that the armed agents of the state are not workers. They kill workers when workers get out of line. They beat students when students protest against the policies of their schools and the policies of government. They enforce the policies of the white supremacist nation state.

And the state is involved into what I call democratic fascism; the delusion of democracy.

Why do African people who have been brought here as an act of war and declared slaves and chattel, why are we paying taxes when these crackers that started this country, this nation, said no taxation without representation. And Africans aren’t, Black folks are represented in the halls of Congress. They are not represented. AIPAC has more power in the Black community than the Black community has. The police unions exercise more power in urban governments in New York, in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Seattle than the people that live in those communities.

This is the militarized, corporate national security state.

So I just want to say to you, when you consider direct action, you have to consider: where to strike, who to strike, and how to strike, and it has to be attached to the needs and the requirements of a mass movement. 

We have to build a mass movement first. We have to be clear about our role domestically and clear about our connection to other oppressed people around the world and their struggle and how the U.S. empire uses proxies in order to suck the resources of the Third World and North Africa and use it for the benefit of the elites and the powerful here in this country.

So you are in the belly of the beast so you have a unique opportunity to strike blows that nobody else can strike. And these blows have to constitute a monkey wrench.

We have to understand, we have to put a monkey wrench in the machinery of war, in the machinery of death and destruction that's dissolving our planet right before our eyes.

The boats have been blocked

A new report from the Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International reminds us that data sleuthing and deep investigation can help our movement build immense power. 

The researchers found that shipping and logistics giant Maersk has been repeatedly violating Spain’s arms embargo on Israel by sending hundreds of shipments of armored personnel carriers, tactical vehicles, aircraft parts, and projectile bodies to the Israeli military directly from Port Elizabeth in New Jersey, transiting through Algeciras, Spain. For their part, the Israeli military has been obscuring shipment details through the use of freight forwarders, which conceal the original manufacturer of military goods, in this case Oshkosh, Rolls-Royce, and General Dynamics. 

In response to an article on the report published in the Intercept, a spokesperson for the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the findings constituted “fraudulent actions” by Maersk, for which “appropriate actions will be taken.” The next day, Spain announced that it would block two Maersk vessels—the Maersk Seketar and Maersk Denver—that had departed from New Jersey from docking in Spain. 

“The MFA has rejected and will continue to reject all requests to call at Spanish ports of vessels carrying military material and having Israel as final destination,” the spokesperson told The Intercept. 

This research effort was part of the PYM’s multi-national campaign Mask Off Maersk, which exposes the world’s largest shipping and logistics company’s role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and pressures governments into enacting arms embargos of Israel. While a stricter enforcement of the Spanish arms embargo will not yet fully prevent Maersk from sending weapons to Israel, it would upset the so-far uninterrupted supply chain of death, and marks a major win for our movement. 

Protect the journalists

The situation for Palestinian journalists in Gaza is dire, and in an open letter, a group of American journalists have called for: 

• Immediate medical evacuations for Ali Al-Attar, Fadi Al-Wahidi, and all injured journalists.

• The protection of the journalists who remain.

• Fair reporting on Gaza and the condition of Palestinian journalists there.

Journalists and media writers can add their name to the growing list of signatories here. 

We are not powerless against these vicious attacks on journalists and their families. As writers, reporters, editors, publishers — we have agency and, with it, a responsibility to protect our colleagues. Silence in this moment is unconscionable. Speak out! Organize your colleagues and friends! Escalate! 

Failure to act would make us complicit in the largest assassination campaign against journalists in history. 

Get organized: Help us build the cultural front for a free Palestine

For students about to graduate — particularly, those about to join culture industries — and for grad students, we made a 10-question W.A.W.O.G. recruitment quiz. For non-student recruits, we made a slightly different version, which we encourage you to take before you email us. Find it here.

Over the past year of joint struggle, WAWOG has helped achieve a number of movement wins. 

• Our nine-month, multi-pronged campaign against PEN America led to the departure of its Zionist CEO, Suzanne Nossel, last week. 

• Our Toronto chapter, as part of the No Arms in the Arts coalition, successfully pressured Canada’s “arts bank,” Scotiabank, into divesting four fifths of its shares from Elbit Systems. 

• Our Los Angeles chapter has steadily supported PYM’s work on the Maersk campaign. 

• Our labor committee — in collaboration with PalFest, Books Against Genocide, Publishers for Palestine, and others — helped organized more than 6000 authors and book workers to commit to a boycott of Israeli publishers (if you haven’t signed the letter yet, do that now). 

• As of this month, more than 250 arts institutions and organizations have, through the work of our boycott committee, signed onto PACBI.

• Last weekend, our popular education committee was honored to support the largest-ever general assembly of National Students for Justice in Palestine, offering workshops on agitprop and on institutional memory. 

Pressure the UAW International Executive Board to divest from Israeli bonds

Following the election, UAW’s rank and file Labor for Palestine group launched UAW Divest Now! renewing their call for the UAW to divest from Israeli bonds, organizing to pressure their International Executive Board to vote on divestment, and to translate the union’s support for a ceasefire into a material interruption in the manufacture and shipment of arms to Israel.

Use the script and call the IEB with your demands today

We leave you with the words of the children of Gaza, who addressed the world from a press conference at Al-Shifa Hospital one year ago. 

Since the 7th of October, we’ve faced extermination, killing, bombing falling over our heads. All of this in front of the world. They lie to the world that they kill the fighters but they kill the people of Gaza, their dreams and their future. Kids of Gaza run out of their hopes and wants. We come to Al-Shifa Hospital to keep us from bombing. We suddenly run out of death more, after bombing the hospital. The occupation is starving us. We don’t find water, food, and we drink from the unusable water. We come now to shout and invite you to protect us. We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children. We want medicine, food, and education, and we want to live as the other children live.

For the children of the Al-Shifa press conference, for all the children of Palestine, we carry on the fight.