Free Palestine Failed. Here’s How They Could Have Won.

One year after a near victory, Free Palestine's leaders are being jailed, and bombings in Gaza have resumed. What went wrong?

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student, was kidnapped by federal authorities this week after she co-authored an opinion piece in a student newspaper.

The Free Palestine movement was on the brink of victory. On April 30, 2024, 109 people were arrested at Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall after occupying the building to protest the university’s ties to the Israeli government. Inspired by the students’ civil disobedience, the movement went viral. Occupations spread to dozens of campuses across the country. A famous rapper created a music video lauding the activists as heroes. And the Free Palestine movement was on the front page of every newspaper in the world. After decades of uncritical support for the Israeli government, the United States began pressuring Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

But then it fell apart. The occupations ended. Media attention disappeared. And the Trump administration is now placing many of the movement’s leaders in prison. Israel restarted its bombing campaign last week, and 400 people were killed on the first day. What went wrong?

In short, the Free Palestine movement failed to learn the lessons of social science. From civil rights activists in the United States to pro-democracy protesters in Serbia, effective movements have used these lessons – which have been vetted by social movement research – to achieve astonishing success. Failure to embrace them, in contrast, has left many of the largest and most powerful movements with surprisingly little impact.¹

And what are the lessons? The first is the importance of nonviolence. Nonviolent movements are twice as successful as violent ones because (a) they inspire more people to participate and (b) they cause repression to backfire. When civil rights activists took over the streets of Birmingham, the protest’s focus on nonviolence was one of the reasons grandmothers and school children joined them. And when the authorities sent the police to crush the protest, it backfired spectacularly. Images of police dogs attacking peaceful Black teenagers were on the front pages of newspapers across the world.

In contrast, the Free Palestine movement has failed to maintain nonviolent discipline. One of the leaders of the Columbia student group, for example, stated that the university should “be grateful that I'm not just going out and murdering Zionists [i.e., proponents of a Jewish state in Israel]." The Columbia student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, followed that up by declaring that “violence is the only path forward.” Internal debate on this messaging was suppressed by leaders who have condemned any disagreement with violent rhetoric as “tone policing” that is “harmful and… a form of racism.”

The failure to maintain nonviolence led to two catastrophic outcomes. First, violent rhetoric suppressed participation. Despite unprecedented attention for the Columbia protests, in the long term, mobilization fell off a cliff when the public saw some of the movement’s most prominent leaders and organizations advocating violence. There have been few grandmothers and kids at Free Palestine rallies. Second, efforts to repress the movement were given legitimacy. When the Trump administration recently arrested Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and a number of other student leaders, it cited statements like those above in justifying its actions. The result of the failure of nonviolent discipline is a movement that is shrinking and shattered.

The second lesson is that effective movements try to win over, and not cancel, their adversaries; “defections” of this sort undermine an oppressive system’s pillars of support. For example, when democracy activists in Serbia faced off against Slobodan Milosevic, they were going up against a brutal police apparatus. But instead of demonizing officers, the activists sought to win them over. And when Milosevic ordered the police to fire on protesters, many refused the order. With its pillars of support crumbling, the regime fell.

But the Free Palestine movement often did the opposite of winning over adversaries; it canceled them instead. For example, among the most important pillars of support for the Israeli government is the global Jewish community. But when the Jewish political scientist and pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein gave a speech at a Free Palestine rally where he suggested a one-word change to a chant to avoid allegations of antisemitism, he was met with derision. A mask-wearing activist shouted the same chant literally seconds after he completed his speech, with many activists at the rally laughing openly. This was a more general problem. Cancel culture drove, not just Jews, but other potentially influential supporters, out of the movement. Instead of undermining the Israeli regime’s pillars of support, the movement undermined its own.

Perhaps the most important lesson, however, is that effective movements push back against “safetyism,” the misguided philosophy of prioritizing individual safety over collective purpose. Gay rights activists in the 1980s and 90s faced a dangerous political environment. Being openly gay could lead to imprisonment or real violence, as AIDS ravaged America. Yet the movement won because it encouraged its supporters to come out openly despite these risks. Millions of LGBT Americans publicly announced their sexuality in the face of deadly threats against their community. This courage inspired attention and sympathy across the world.

In contrast, activists in the Free Palestine movement have often seemed obsessed with their own safety. Less than a day after the Hamilton Hall occupation, for example, a spokesperson for the student protesters complained that the university had not brought the protesters any food, water, or other “humanitarian aid.” “Do you want students to die of dehydration or starvation?” she asked. It was not clear why the students couldn’t call Uber Eats or use the many water fountains in the building.

Perhaps the most counterproductive example of safetyism, however, has been the movement’s extreme focus on “security culture.” Many activists at encampments wore masks to cover their faces, and patrols were set up to expel intruders, who the activists feared might “dox” (i.e., publish the identities of) the encampment’s residents. The contrast with gay rights activists could not be more stark: rather than “coming out,” activists for Palestine covered their faces. This fed into the worst stereotypes about activism – cowardly snowflakes, etc. – and diminished the movement’s legitimate acts of bravery. It also ironically undermined the movement’s actual safety. The mask-wearing activists, who were described as intimidating and a threat to Jewish students, helped to justify the state’s arrest of activists like Khalil and Ozturk.

These failings in the Free Palestine movement were apparent from the start. I remember having a conversation with Dan Kidby (who was then a director at Animal Rising) about the potential for an alliance between animal rights and Free Palestine. Dan had witnessed the power of such an alliance when he led animal rights activists to join the UK-based climate movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) in 2019. The whirlwind of climate activism lifted animal rights to another level in the UK.

But I told Dan that Free Palestine would probably fail due to the movement’s unwillingness to implement the lessons of social science. It would be foolhardy, I argued, for animal rights to ride on a whirlwind that was taking people off a cliff. Dan did some reading, and watched some videos I sent, and quickly agreed.

“The purity politics is a huge problem,” Dan said. “I think you’re right. This movement is going nowhere.”

Dan and I were sadly correct in making this prediction.

But if the mistakes are so obvious, why do movements keep making them? It is not just Free Palestine, for example, that has suffered from violent rhetoric or cancel culture. From Black Lives Matter to animal rights, very few movements implement the lessons of social science. (Extinction Rebellion, with its near-religious focus on nonviolence and opposition to cancel culture, is one of the prominent exceptions. It’s not surprising that XR was unusually successful, too.)

Nonviolence was key to Extinction Rebellion’s messaging.

There are many reasons for this failure. Gaps in the transfer of knowledge from one generation of activists to the next prevent younger activists from learning. Leaders often have great difficulty creating a culture of nonviolence and against cancel culture, given the increasingly punitive culture of the Left.

But the biggest reason that movements ignore the lessons of social science is a lack of vision. What I mean by this is that it’s not enough to “tone police” other activists about violence (though this should be done) or stand up against cancellation efforts (though this is important). Movements seeking to adopt the strategy of nonviolence, inclusivity, and courage need to have a positive vision.

Imagine that Free Palestine activists, instead of calling for the murder of Zionists, asked them to work hand-in-hand to care for the suffering children of Palestine. Imagine that, instead of ridiculing Norman Finkelstein, the movement’s leaders embraced him and thanked him for standing up for Gaza even in the face of attacks from his own community. And imagine a world where activists did not hide their faces, or cower in the face of state power, but walked all the way to Gaza to stand between the snipers and the families facing imminent slaughter. Even a few hundred with discipline and courage of this sort could change the world.

What is true for Palestine is true for other causes, including the movement to end the largest slaughter of them all – the atrocity we inflict on the other animals of this earth. It’s time for movements to embrace the lessons of social science, and build a vision of nonviolence, inclusivity, and courage that inspires the entire world to join them.

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What’s up this week?

• I’m at the Vegan and Animal Rights Conference in the UK this weekend and speaking on Saturday evening. I’ll be discussing the legal and political strategy behind our recent cases, including the Ridglan rescue. Come and say hi if you’re around!

• A new open rescue and investigation — exposing the corrupt ties between Government and Big Ag — should be coming out on Monday! It’s been slightly delayed, but we’re told by our media partners that it’ll come out next week.

• I’ll be speaking at a number of law schools in Northern and Southern California in mid April. If you’re interested in joining, shoot me an email, and I’ll send you an invite! The focus will be the government’s weaponization of “terrorism” allegations to undermine social movements.

Expect to see more blogs in the months to come, but I haven’t settled on an exact schedule. Thanks for reading!

1. It’s worth noting James Ozden’s critique of the use of social movement history. I distinguish here between lessons with stronger evidence, based on numerous empirical methods and studies, and lessons that are based on anecdotes or a handful of case studies. The lessons described in this newsletter are in the former category.