Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
This past spring, in response to escalated campus protests in solidarity with Palestine, President Joe Biden proclaimed: “Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder.” Peace is framed as order, or a lack of conflict. Yet, as we surpass 40,000 Palestinians killed in an ongoing Israeli genocide, it raises the question: Peace for whom? Democracy for whom? Disorder for whom?
This September, as students return to campus and begin to threaten mass unrest once again, the landscape is changing: Coming off the heels of an anticlimactic Chicago Democratic National Convention (DNC) in August and facing the impending presidential elections, our movement now risks backtracking.
During the presidential debate on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris promised she will “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself” and suggested that Donald Trump was “weak” on foreign policy. Yet not even one month prior, Biden dropped out of the presidential race due to overwhelming public pressure, in part driven by the general discontent cultivated by our Palestine solidarity movement’s threats to withhold votes, campus occupations and national ungovernable unrest.
This shift of the movement’s power within the span of just a few months — from making headlines regarding a mass shutdown of infrastructure in April to being praised for our containment in August — was due to a few factors. First is a new groundswell of people eagerly discarding the issues they once cared for in exchange for vibes and identity politics sold by the freshly coronated Democratic Party presidential nominee. There is also an understandable collective exhaustion from fighting for what is a rather basic demand — a ceasefire that can be secured via an arms embargo on Israel. Instead of being heard, we have been repeatedly ostracized and criminalized by university administrators, media outlets, peers, employers, and the state more broadly. These factors are, unfortunately, more or less inevitable.
But this isn’t just about exhaustion. A significant reason our movement is backtracking is the very dangerous and growing success of the state’s divide-and-conquer strategy and fear tactics aimed at turning our dissent inward and making our movement self-cannibalize.
In particular, this involves the creation of the image of an “outside agitator” — a boogeyman-type character outside of the community who is unaffected by the issue at hand and shows up to escalate an otherwise non-threatening community.
A significant reason our movement is backtracking is the very dangerous and growing success of the state’s divide-and-conquer strategy and fear tactics aimed at turning our dissent inward.
The term was originally used by enslavers to delegitimize and discredit enslaved Black people’s revolts by suggesting they could not possibly have planned or executed those revolts, or have even desired to rise up against masters who treated them “so well.” The enslavers instead argued that the revolts were orchestrated by white northern outsiders who were disrupting their way of life.
The language of “outside agitators” was most loudly on display throughout the months-long student encampments across university campuses — and it is likely to reemerge. Emory University President Gregory Fenves blamed “highly organized, outside protesters” for militant student demonstrations on campus, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams cried out that “outside agitators and lawbreakers” were out to “radicalize our children,” distinguishing peaceful, innocent students from the criminals “vandalizing and taking over private property.”
But beyond the obvious ways this trope is used and has already been critiqued and challenged, the term quietly and nefariously permeates mainstream society and is even internalized in our movements — where it poses an even more serious danger of turning the state’s policing inward.
The logics underpinning the “outside agitator” trope that are most often internalized by our movements are: 1) the creation of a dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” actors/protestersbased on adherence to law, order and minimal disruptions to the status quo, thereby justifying ruthless state violence and marginalization of those branded as “bad” actors; 2) the legitimization of the state’s monopoly on violence; and 3) the suggestion that there is a single-issue homogenous “community” that has clearly delineated borders, severing necessary movement intersectionality.
“Good Protesters,” “Bad Protesters” and “Peace Policing”
By defining an “outside agitator” as an escalator — someone who engages in actions beyond permitted lines to disrupt the status quo — and at the same time criminalizing and marginalizing them, the state is designating what constitutes legitimate forms of protests (i.e., that which is not actually disruptive to the flow of capital, “business as usual,” or simply acts as a peaceful release valve) and those that are illegitimate and must be dealt with violently.
For example, in response to 2020 uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, where the “outside agitators” trope was also regularly weaponized, Kamala Harris warned that: “We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protesters. We should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of violence … make no mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.”
Ironically, what officials are not referring to when invoking the “outside agitator” trope are the pro-Israel mobs formed to harass protesters, or Twitch live-streamers yelling “Kill the Jews!” from behind their Confederate-flag phone cases.
Instead, an “outside agitator” or “bad protester” is any individual who dares take action that is both in defense of Palestine andbeyond the bounds of law and order: taking over a building, jumping over DNC fencing to reach the convention venue, resisting arrest, property damage, damaging police vehicles, or other actions typically called “violent.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just the state that’s promoting this binary. Our movement has internalized it by taking strides to distance itself from “bad protesters” — even going so far as to collaborate with the state in self-policing — at the expense of our movements and the most vulnerable in our communities.
Our movements must foster resilience by building deep trust across communities and practicing tactics for collective safety to overcome these challenges without succumbing to self-policing out of fear.
One of the most harmful ways this “outside agitator” trope is internalized can be through the creation and use of a “peace police” force — volunteer protest marshals trained to contain protests within previously designated bounds, often limited by permits, or really anything that goes beyond walking while holding a sign. These forces, increasingly common at protests across the country, ostensibly exist to keep protesters safe but can act as a police force turned inward to curb and control dissent.
Last month in Chicago, a coalition of over 200 nonprofit organizations and collectives came together to organize a “March on the DNC,” hoping to bring an arms embargo on Israel and other demands to the top of the Democratic National Convention agenda. With official permission from the City, the march took place on designated streets, several blocks away from where the DNC was held. Employing a robust troop of marshals working with the police to contain the protesters, the organizers were able to maintain tight control over the protests, prohibiting anyone from taking a step closer to the DNC than permitted or otherwise disrupt the “peace.”
In the months preceding the DNC, pundits speculated whether Chicago might see a repeat of the mass, ungovernable Vietnam War-era protests that forced the DNC’s attention. Instead, Politico’s headline from this year’s DNC reads: “Chicago’s convention puts to bed the ugly baggage of 1968. The only major disruptions were caused by the rush of people who wanted to get in to see Kamala Harris.” It was one of dozens of articles and hundreds of social media posts that shared sentiments of patriotism and pride in the order maintained in the city despite fears to the contrary.
“They are policing their own people,” Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling shared with reporters at a briefing on August 22, explaining why the march on the DNC in solidarity with Palestine was so non-disruptive. “That was very helpful to us.”
According to Snelling, police had worked “in tandem with civilian protest marshals” as “part of a planned strategy.” In other words, the great success of the state’s divide-and-conquer tactics has turned our own community members into collaborators with Israeli military-trained police forces out of fear of state violence.
It’s possible that the Harris campaign thought it could get away with not permitting a Palestinian speaker a slot on the convention stage because of how non-threatening the march was, compared to the fears of what it could have been. On the other hand, material disruptions that impact movement, flow of capital, or choke sites of traditional power — such as blocking roads and access to the conference, or even better yet, blocking the manufacture and transportation of the weapons transported to Israel — instead force attention and represent a flexing of our collective power. We are more powerful when we can demonstrate an alternative to “normalcy” if our demands are not met.
The best-intentioned organizers argue that “peace police” keep families and children safe from police violence, act as a buffer between police and protesters, and keep the protest predictable. Yet, this reproduces state logics that “bad protesters” are the cause of state violence, rather than the police. This defies the history of the 1968 student protests at the DNC, where police viciously descended on students protesting the war in Vietnam, as well as police violence against Black communities and other communities of color in the decades since. And no matter how “peaceful” our protests may be, the moment police begin attacking us — or the moment we are actually successful at leveraging our power to force a shift — we will be branded as violent.
Taking these tropes at face value is particularly harmful when we recognize who among us are seen as inherently dangerous, violent, criminal, or a “ticking time bomb” — distancing ourselves from “bad” and identifying ourselves as “good” means legitimizing a violent binary that disproportionately leads to Black and Muslim deaths.
“Good Violence” and “Bad Violence”
Inherent in the “good” versus “bad” protester binary is the transformation of violence from a tactic to a value. The defining distinction between the two — good versus bad, democracy versus chaos — is that the “bad” protester engages in violence. In this way, it flattens all forms of resistance to state violence and brands it as illegitimate.
What are two shattered windows at Columbia University when all of the Gaza Strip has been shattered with the help of the corporations in which Columbia’s massive endowment is invested? How can we instead distinguish “good” from “bad” actions not based on their level of escalation, but instead based on their effectiveness at achieving the shared goal of an arms embargo? Can we instead reframe breaking a barrier beyond city-issued permits, a few broken windows, a shutdown on campus, or even self-defense in the face of Zionist aggression — actions that could place additional pressure on decision makers to reduce support of weapons manufacturers — as acts of anti-violence? If we understand state violence as the context of our actions, acts of “escalated action” become less stigmatized, understood as tangible acts of self-defense against empire.
The very same night that students (or “outside agitators”) were branded as “violent” for breaking a few windows to occupy a campus building, the New York City Police Department shattered windows in the very same building in their efforts to extract the students from the building — and were championed by city leaders for their valiant efforts at ushering in “law and order.”
In other words, an act itself — the breaking of a window — is not what determines what is or is not violent; it is the actor and the purpose of the act. Apparently, breaking windows to preserve the status quo is not violent, but breaking windows to protest the status quo is.
I’m by no means erasing the very real dangers posed when a fringe few take actions without the group’s consent that create unanticipated risk for those most vulnerable to state violence, or the state’s use of infiltrators to escalate a group straight into police custody. Yet, language of “outside agitators” and their “illegitimate violence” has historically exaggerated these threats as a red herring.
There are, of course, real threats, but our movements must foster resilience by building deep trust across communities and practicing tactics for collective safety to overcome these challenges without succumbing to self-policing out of fear.
“Our Community” or “Outsiders”
The good/bad, inside/outside binary inherent in the “outside agitator” trope divides and silos our movements, creating lasting, damaging consequences for our immediate effectiveness and future imagined possibilities. This is internalized in many ways, and often fans the flames of intra-community differences along race, class, national origin, gender, etc.
For example, returning again to the example of “peace police,” marshals are also typically tasked with maintaining the action’s focus on the Palestine-related target at hand and away from all else, such as the police protecting the Palestine-related target from the protesters. They do so as part of their attempts to not upset police and “invite” their violent wrath — again recalling failed good/bad protester logics that assume that only “bad” protesters face police brutality. This is counterproductive and serves to turn policing inward as described above, and it also deepens the fractures of our communities.
This practice of “keeping the focus only on Palestine” severs the Palestine solidarity movement from the police abolition movement, undoing generations of Black-Palestinian efforts to link the two together. It erases the well-documented relationships and collaborations between the Israeli military and local U.S. police departments, and weapons companies that arm both the Israeli and U.S. police occupation forces. In fact, some of the exact same men trained in torture sites in Israel and Abu Ghraib were on the streets of Chicago protecting the DNC and collaborating with marshals.
This siloing of issues also becomes particularly relevant as students return to campuses to resume Palestine solidarity organizing. Campuses are a primary space where “outside agitator” tropes are weaponized to sever student/non-student coalitions and disconnect the movement for Palestinian solidarity with school gentrification and policing. There, the “outside agitator” trope often exacerbates class and racial divisions between students and the broader community. It suggests that community members harassed by police or pushed out of their homes by university gentrification have no relevance to Palestine solidarity protests, have no place to express their anger, or worse yet, have nothing to add.
Yet, as many students have already learned, success — and safety — in campus organizing often relies on students’ ability to build principled, intersectional movements in collaboration with non-student community members. After all, in most of these campus coalitions, it was “outsiders” who were protecting, feeding and educating students, while their own universities sent police to attack them, evict them and expel them.
Movements are messy, complicated and meant to challenge us all to grow. While many are self-policing and victim-blaming out of fear, engaging in an escalated struggle toward ending empire — not only in solidarity with the people of Palestine, Congo, Haiti, Sudan and elsewhere, but also for ourselves and our communities in the U.S. — builds greater unity among our domestic and global struggles. It involves a recognition that a fight for Palestine is also a fight for ourselves, our own agency within the empire, and our own liberation. It is instead a politics of identifying and building our collective power — as workers, educators, writers, artists and others. This is a power that cannot be contained within homogenous, single-issue imagined communities in which the state would like us to remain untethered, with a vote as our only recourse.
We must not stifle our imagination of resistance and collective movement building. As our movements teach us, “We keep us safe.” And to keep ourselves safe — from Chicago to Gaza — we must not internalize and reproduce state policing and divisions of our communities out of fear, and instead practice collective and courageous resistance on our own terms.