Solidarity Is an Infinite Resource

Toward a politics beyond witnessing.

By Nicholas Russell

Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. 

In the months since October 7, Joe Biden has hemmed and hawed over his support of Israel, materially supplying the IDF with thousands of bombs and artillery while decrying vague excessive uses of force. On May Day, Biden tweeted a picture of a faux-handwritten note proclaiming “Mental health is health”, which, on my timeline, was followed immediately by a censored image of a Palestinian father cradling the corpse of his son. This existential dissonance has led to a maddening state of affairs in which events feel both real and utterly removed from the daily goings-on of many Americans. The proximity of the war in Gaza, and the myriad political actions against it, is still rendered distant on a screen, leading to a feeling of spectatorship rather than engagement. 

The situation—of feeling both overwhelmed by the violence and disheartened by so many people’s unwillingness to acknowledge that it is even happening—can lead to an exasperation that threatens future solidarity or hope of political change. As we’ve previously seen in several politically fraught moments—the protests in the U.S. over policing in the 2010s for example—the combination of constant witnessing of violence without that witnessing leading to change can cause movements to fizzle out.

What’s needed is solidarity, yes, but a solidarity that isn’t contingent upon guilt, proximity, or political convenience; a solidarity that isn’t just based on sharing shocking information; a solidarity that has the capacity to withstand fatigue and, perhaps most importantly, disappointment and frustration. 

As the war on Gaza has continued, a protracted grief has suffused the global atmosphere. To some, this has only emboldened the numerous forms of political action taking place internationally. To others, the war is merely dragging on, oversaturating newsfeeds and timelines, dominating polite conversation, infecting college campuses, and overshadowing closer and more pressing matters of state and community. One might term this feeling of prolonged engagement, timeline-refreshing horror, and unceasing institutional antagonism solidaristic burnout. 

This point of burnout, of giving up, of allowing apathy to take over, happens often, particularly at the point, whether days or weeks or months into a struggle, when the aggressor only doubles down thanks to external support from the very institutions—schools, police, public service officials—who are supposedly on the side of the will of the people. It also happens when activists reach their personal breaking point, stymied by constant resistance to change or acknowledgment of wrongdoing, but also the reality of the situation even necessitating change. 

One move amongst casual allies following such burnout has been to turn away from political activism on the ground, or in solidarity with other actions, to a diluted form of individual radical witnessing, which has already been partially defanged thanks to the ubiquity of social media. 

It’s understandable to feel stymied after so many months of witnessing state violence. And yet it’s important to not let this burnout turn into an impotent form of online activism in which we attempt to make ourselves and others in the U.S. feel better about our meager interventions.  This is how things like anti-racist reading lists continue to thrive, all while a focus on what’s happening on the ground becomes lost. 

This is what's so vital about the sustained political concentration on, and agitation for Gaza, digital or not, freshly invigorated by victory or not. In many ways, the war has achieved a level of spectacle. So many facets of daily life have been touched by it, with attendant hysteria by liberal and conservative commentators alike. And yet, whatever real inroads have been made pale in comparison to the lack of tangible developments extended to Palestinians. 

Simone Weil, in Waiting for God, writes, “The only difference between the man who witnesses an act of justice and the man who receives a material advantage from it is that in such circumstances the beauty of justice is only a spectacle for the first, while for the second it is the object of a contact and even a kind of nourishment.” Weil underlines what is perhaps the most elusive aspect of organizing internationally and across gulfs of time. The utopic result, if it ever happens, won’t be ours to enjoy. And it shouldn’t have to be. 

Given the noise and frustration surrounding the key goal, the liberation of Palestine, burnout might be a legible reaction. But this movement has been agitating for decades across generations and across countless forms of fellowship, in the global spotlight and despite it. This means that burnout, while understandable, has to be treated as an inevitability to be moved past rather wallowed in. When talking about what energies are needed to sustain our political fervor, we should not only be talking about solidarity, but how solidarity can, in its most galvanizing moments, expand what’s politically conceivable. 

Indeed, solidarity with Palestine has consistently crossed age groups and cultures. In the 2022 documentary R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity, director Mohanad Yaqubi restores and preserves films commissioned by the Tokyo office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization between 1964 and 1982. The implication, as Yaqubi cuts between over a dozen of these films, many of which take place in the rubble of bulldozed homes, is not just the long history of the conflict, but the vitality of cross-movement struggles, no matter how detached the origin. 

Countless examples of solidarity forged between disparate groups during twinned adversity abound. It’s often the mode in which political action is most potently galvanized, as a matter of recognition, a slightly altered reflection of self. But there is a difference between reflection and self-insertion, between parallels drawn as a means of universal emphasis and those that merely serve to reiterate, even ensconce distance. This individualist tendency is only fleetingly useful for those who need a visceral, narcissistic tether to the outside world, empathy activated by a limp extension of the imagination. In their book Frames of War, Judith Butler describes this impulse toward those who are worthy of life and those who are deemed merely fit for death. They write, “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.”

Even at its most visceral and upsetting, empathic witnessing of devastation often leads to activist burnout and a lack of material change, over and over again. What prevents this is tangible, embodied solidarity.

This August, the 10th anniversary of Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, will also mark a flash instance of cross-movement solidarity, in this case between Palestinians and the black community. In early July of 2014, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in the West Bank, a military offensive which has since been called simply the 2014 Gaza War. The assault, initiated after three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, killed over 2,000 Gazans and destroyed over 7,000 homes. 

In a recent New York Times piece on black-Palestinian solidarity, Sandra Tamari, a Palestinian American resident of St. Louis, recalls grieving over the violent murder of a 16 year-old Palestinian boy named Abu Khdeir, who had been kidnapped and burned by Israeli teenagers, at the time that she learned about Michael Brown. Tamari’s grief over one meshed with support and protest for the other. St. Louis community advocate Ashley Yates, in a dispatch from Ferguson in the weeks after Brown’s murder for The New Inquiry, wrote, “Palestinians tweeted me to move against the wind. ‘We are Ferguson,’ they wrote. They saw themselves in our oppression. They bonded to us by adversity. Our struggle is their struggle and the justice we all seek is the same. The bombs that light up Gaza at night and the bullets that killed Michael Brown are cousins in lethality. We share no formal allegiance. We have become a family related by blood.”

International solidarity then maps onto international solidarity now: actively, sometimes uncomfortably placing yourself within a conversation to be part of it rather than dominate or distort it. Showing up and speaking out are consequential and essential facets of any solidaristic action.The power of that presence is strengthened when both the exploited and those in positions of authority are united in common struggle. In this way, solidarity also creates understanding of one’s place in the context of an inherited lineage of exploitation, one that knots together far-away wars, domestic travesties, and personal ties. Shame is one way of defining this impulse to action. Another, for a leftist Catholic like me, might be spirit, that which is tied to the ineffable, a fire or will unmoored from the merely rational and much harder to extinguish. 

Lately, momentum for Palestinian solidarity has grown internationally partly because great, courageous efforts have gone towards making the struggle for Gaza visible. That visibility is key, but it’s not the end of the work any individual might do. After all, so much witnessing can only lead to weariness, a fatigue both physical and existential. The only lasting remedy to this burnout is solidarity. Thankfully, the framing of solidarity has already matured in the public eye. 

Rather than merely a hallmark of youth or financial precarity or muddled ethics or ethnic homogeneity, protest for Gaza has come to encompass university faculty members, unions, high school students, administrators, even tech workers. Such widening solidarity also widens the scope of possibility standing as a bulwark against defeat. The countless valences of protest are continually rediscovered instance to instance, generation to generation, sometimes to the detriment of speed and stamina, but their applications can’t be minimized nor overstated: protest for Gaza is a political issue, a labor issue, an anticapitalist issue, a democratic issue, a moral issue, a spiritual issue. It is an issue worth expending all our energy towards. 

The struggle for Palestine historically is necessarily entangled with the struggle for an equitable society here and now. Our most petty and most noble aspirations, the very building blocks of a utopian vision we may never see but must labor to enact, are tied up in the fight for Palestine’s liberation. Fatigue is inevitable, acceptable, even necessary for attaining a material perspective on what it takes to keep showing up. So too must the second and third and fourth and nth wind be after it. We are not fighting so that we might claim in posterity that we tried. We are fighting to win.