Nearly 2 Years Into Gaza Genocide, US Activists Escalate Their Resistance

“This season feels especially urgent because the escalation of the genocide is happening at the same time that there’s less and less attention being paid to it — even as the violence increases,” Avi Steinberg, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Chicago, told me as we sat adjacent to the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago on July 3. The building remains an epicenter of Chicago politics and government, and is, in particular, the local office of Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, who has previously been the target of pro-Palestine demonstrations and refused to meet with JVP. A group of local JVP activists — who, by that point, had been on hunger strike for 18 days in an effort to urge their political leaders to end military aid to Israel as it wages a starvation campaign in Gaza — had decided to head into the building and demand that Duckworth come out and discuss the issues that matter.

“We’re doing this because it’s unacceptable for our government to continue arming a genocide,” hunger striker Becca Lubow told me from a wheelchair, as she prepared to enter the building, sit at Duckworth’s office, and refuse to leave without a meeting. “I can definitely notice my body getting weaker. And I also feel really acutely aware of how much easier this is for me than even a fraction of the discomfort people in Gaza are experiencing.”

We took turns heading to the senator’s office, with small groups taking different pathways to avoid direct security intervention. Yet upon arrival, despite calling ahead to ensure that there were staff in the office, the door remained shut. “We’ve been trying to get a meeting with you for three weeks and you’ve been avoiding us,” said Lubow into the office intercom, pointing out that Duckworth’s staff promised a meeting that they then refused to honor. “So we are going to stay outside this office until one of you comes out and talks to us. So, save yourself some time and open the door.”

Eventually Homeland Security officers, the same department that has been participating in the mass ICE raids happening around the country, came in, arresting the small group who refused to disperse, including the two hunger strikers seated in wheelchairs. Downstairs a solidarity rally continued, with two of the other hunger strikers present. (Two others had to drop out of their strike after the health implications involved became too severe.)

“When our elected officials refuse to respond to clear calls for justice, we have no choice but to escalate,” Avey Rips, one of the four remaining hunger strikers on July 3, told Truthout from the front doors of the federal building. Rips pointed out that there had been a great amount of movement locally since they started their hunger strike two and a half weeks before, with multiple legislators who had previously been unresponsive agreeing to meet. The Chicago-based activists announced that the hunger strike had ended on July 4 after doctors warned that they could face permanent health effects if they continued it any longer, but the solidarity organizing generated surrounding the strike has continued.

“Just within Chicago’s organizing ecosystem, we’ve seen a lot of real solidarity emerge — not only within the Palestine solidarity movement but across the broader left. Allies have shown up for us, and we’ve made so many future plans with partner organizations we’ve worked with before,” said Rips. “The sheer amount of support we’ve received — hundreds of messages from across the country and the world, the hundreds of people who’ve joined in solidarity fasts, the dozens and dozens of actions led by JVP and PYM [Palestinian Youth Movement] chapters nationwide — it’s been incredibly heartening.”

But Duckworth had been a hard target, and, despite representing the largest Palestinian American community in the country, has done little more than offer criticism of Israel. She supported an anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolution in 2022 and opposed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ two resolutions to challenge U.S. financing for Israeli security systems, saying that “[at] a time when Israel regularly faces barrages of rocket attacks, I feel strongly that the U.S. be able to provide reinforcements to Iron Dome without delay if required.” Nearly two years since the beginning of what experts call an unprecedented genocide in Gaza and the largest surge of Palestine solidarity organizing in American history, the violence, starvation, and cruelty has continued in Gaza as Israel uses U.S. aid to wage an eliminationist military campaign.

This is why many activists say they have hit a turning point in the American Palestine solidarity movement and are trying to integrate as many tactics as possible to shift the needle and end the U.S. financial complicity in Israeli violence.

Everything Is Welcome

“[We’ve] been trying to stop this genocide for over a year, and we haven’t succeeded yet. That’s a tragedy and a grief we carry every day in this work. To me, that means we have to do everything we can,” JVP Campus Organizer Nate Cohen told Truthout. “Every tactic we can try, every step we can take, every amount of pressure we can muster — it’s all necessary. If this kind of tactic moves any elected official who might have the power to act, then it’s valuable.”

Already one of the largest anti-Zionist organizations in the U.S., JVP has seen an unprecedented growth of members since October 7 — it now counts at least 32,000 dues payers and 100 local organizing formations — and helped catalyze a shift in the public consciousness on Palestine. Alongside a massive campus movement and the growth of a larger Jewish left allied with the Palestinian freedom struggle, there has been soul searching inside of the organization about how to reckon with the fact that the genocide has continued despite their many demonstrations and actions. This was largely the debate that was had on the floor of the recent JVP National Member Meeting, where there were real questions about what it means to scale up the work that itself, just in the past two years, was already at a scale previously unheard of.

“Our job as an anti-Zionist Jewish mass organization in this country is to work to shift the political calculus that our elected officials have on the question of foreign policy related to Palestine and Israel,” Beth Miller, political director of JVP Action, JVP’s public advocacy and lobbying organization, told Truthout. “Ultimately, we are trying to end U.S. military funding and all forms of US support for Israeli apartheid and genocide. That’s a big goal, and it’s obviously not going to happen tomorrow, but that’s where we set our sights.”

To do this, both JVP Action and the larger JVP organization are leaning into their strengths by mobilizing specifically Jewish constituents — though everyone’s invited — to show that the assumed uniform support for Israel has eroded severely and that the constituents of the politicians making these decisions no longer support a blank check for the Israeli military. But doing this is itself a multi-pronged strategy that takes the form of more direct lobbying, political relationship building, and mass action.

“If activists and organizers think they are going to move their member of Congress by going in and only lobbying them or speaking to them, they are going to be mistaken,” said Miller, who points to the fact that part of the political calculus in Washington comes from all the ways that elected officials can see popular opinion. “What also needs to happen is outside pressure, like protests. JVP and the rest of the movement carried out countless sit-ins and protests in front of electeds’ offices the last two years that moved them on positions like ceasefire … the pairing of inside and outside strategy is absolutely key.”

Legislatively, part of JVP Action’s work has been to support the Block the Bombs Act (H.R. 3565), which was introduced by Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez of Chicago (who spoke at the recent JVP Chicago hunger strike launch event) and is now co-sponsored by more than two dozen lawmakers in Congress. Part of the hope for the meeting with Duckworth’s office was to push her to introduce a similar piece of legislation to the Senate, coming at the same demand from two directions. In just the last few years JVP has seen a number of political leaders now willing to not just meet with JVP, but even to speak at their events.

But despite that evolution in opinion, it is unlikely that the Block the Bombs Act will even make it to the House floor for a vote under Republican control. This means the advocacy is part of a longer game, and not an immediate solution to the pressing violence of an unfolding genocide. This is why activists stress that it is simply one of many tactics that they must take. Another is the large-scale campaign, now being taken up by chapters across the country, to divest from Israel bonds — savings bonds that fund the Israeli state and are common gifts in the Jewish community.

“We are forging a Judaism without Zionism, militarism, and Jewish supremacy, and we call on our communities to commit to tikkun olam,” says JVP communications staff Liv Kunins-Berkowitz. “This means committing to personally divest from Israel bonds and instead investing in solidarity and social justice.”

Israel bonds are also held by a number of municipalities and institutions as part of their investment and wealth storage strategies. Recently, Summit County, Ohio decided not to reinvest in Israel bonds at the same time as nearby Cuyahoga County froze a full $3 million in bonds. Both moves came under clear pressure from regional campaigns by JVP and other organizations, which demanded that these localities ethically invest and bring that money back into Ohio instead.

Similarly, JVP worked with other organizations to launch the No Tech for Apartheid campaign specifically to utilize the position of tech workers at places like Google, where they could interfere with the ways high-tech infrastructure is being used to dispossess Palestinians. The Israeli tech sector is heavily built on supporting the occupation and has become a testing ground for police technology used around the world, including in the U.S. According to Israel’s own recounting, there are over 500 Israeli tech companies in the “homeland security” industry, with Israeli tech operating as one of the undisputed leaders in weapons and law enforcement. Israeli firms like Elbit are using the experience of monitoring Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to develop systems for border security used by U.S. agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

But as a specifically Jewish organization, JVP also focuses on countering the manipulation of Jewish trauma and the weaponization of accusations of antisemitism used to silence demands for Palestinian liberation. They have an ongoing campaign to counter the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has long conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The campaigning by JVP and others is seeing success as the ADL increasingly falls out of favor with progressives, including the recent vote by members of the National Education Association, the largest union in the country, in favor of breaking their relationship with the ADL. The union’s executive committee later rejected the union membership’s decision to cut ties with the ADL, but even so the initial union vote represents a major advance for the campaign.

This mission has led JVP to take an active role in fighting anti-democratic measures that employ Jewish messaging, such as the recent “non-profit killer” bill, H.R. 9495, which used vague accusations of antisemitism against pro-Palestine nonprofits to give the president unilateral power to revoke their tax-exempt status. The same was true of their effort to defeat the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which used the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that critics say conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Most recently, their work has been focused on educating people about Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to use Jewish identity as a weapon to attack left-wing social movements. This came alongside the larger Project 2025 plan, also from the Heritage Foundation, to attack universities and deport activists over allegations of antisemitism, which they define largely in terms of Palestine solidarity and which JVP Action’s Beth Miller said is the “blueprint to try to destroy the Palestinian rights movement.”

“The reason we are [focusing on this project] is because every single thing the Republicans are doing right now [is] in the pages of Project Esther,” points out Miller. “What we’re seeing the MAGA loyalists do is take a blueprint from the ultra-conservative, authoritarian think tank leaders about destroying the Palestinian rights movement, smearing it, and doing it in a way that can make it easier to tear down civil rights and liberties and social justice movements across the board.”

As JVP builds out strategies, both locally and nationally, there remain questions about what, exactly, will finally bring the violence to an end. Repression remains a primary threat, particularly as movements that employed effective direct action tactics face blowback and the MAGA movement’s alliance with the Israeli right seems to have a profound impact on foreign policy decisions.

“The range of tactics that JVP members are engaging with, and the discussions that members and chapters undertake to decide what actions to take, reflect broader discussions across social movements in the U.S., in which people are recognizing that we need a diversity of tactics,” Dean Spade, a movement writer and JVP member in Seattle, told me. “In my opinion, JVP’s multi-tendency, diversity of tactics approach is a strength, allowing room for local and regional experimentation, as we work against the behemoths of colonialism and militarism that currently dominate the globe.”

With a growing membership and a shifting dial of public opinion, organizers hope that continuing to grow their influence and escalate different strategic channels of intervention will ultimately do what JVP Action has described: It will show those casting the votes that unquestioned support for the Israeli military is a losing position.

“I’m a big believer in a diversity of tactics. I don’t think there’s one answer for how to change the world. There are a million answers, and we need all million of them,” said Ash Bohrer, one of the hunger strikers, directly after the Federal Protective Service released her from her arrest in front of Duckworth’s office. “[If] you’re someone who feels most comfortable doing legislative advocacy and annoying your senators — please, go annoy your senators. If you’re someone who wants to do civil disobedience and direct action — go do that. If you want to organize your union to take a strong stance on Palestine — please do it.”