Pro-Palestinian protests could foreshadow a summer of upheaval

Pro-Palestinian protests could foreshadow a summer of upheaval

The traffic-snarling pro-Palestinian demonstrations in U.S. cities on Monday could foreshadow a potentially volatile summer of protests, creating a challenge for President Biden and sparking debate over whether some activists’ tactics threaten to undermine public support for their movement.

Demonstrators shut down major thoroughfares for hours in cities including San Francisco and New York as part of a global campaign to raise awareness about Israel’s war in Gaza on U.S. Tax Day. In Chicago and Seattle, protesters blocked the entrance to international airports, forcing travelers and flight crews to walk to airline terminals or potentially miss their flights. In San Francisco, police had to use welding equipment to free demonstrators from the Bay Bridge after they had locked themselves together with pipes.

The chaos unfolded as the United States heads into a sensitive time related to the presidential election. Biden and former president Donald Trump will appear at their parties’ nominating conventions this summer, and both events appear poised to draw a large number of demonstrators. This summer also marks four years since protests exploded nationwide following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Already, members of Congress, college administrators and some big-city mayors have started more closely controlling who gets into their events to try to minimize disruptions. Some colleges, including the University of Michigan, are expressly warning students they could face expulsion if they disrupt end-of-the-semester campus events.

At least so far, the pro-Palestinian protests have been relatively small compared with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020. Analysts also caution that there are historical limits to how large a social movement can grow when the matter at hand is not taking place in the United States or directly involves American troops.

But with pro-Palestinian protest organizers vowing that Monday’s action was just the beginning of more direct engagement, analysts say the demonstrations are almost certain to add even more unpredictability to this year’s political calendar.

“If this continues for another six months, I would expect that the types of tactics deployed do escalate and we do see more extreme protests,” said Omar Wasow, assistant professor in political science at the University of California at Berkeley who has extensively studied protest movements since the civil rights era. “There will become a more militant faction that advocates for more extreme tactics.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, one organizer of Monday’s demonstrations in California suggested just that.

“Today is proof that people are going to fight and keep escalating until there is a permanent cease-fire,” said Sha Wiya Falcon, who participated in a demonstration that shut down a freeway in Oakland.

People protesting the war in Gaza block traffic on Interstate 880 in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, April 15. Traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area was also snarled for hours Monday morning as pro-Palestinian demonstrators shut down both directions of the Golden Gate Bridge and stalled a 17-mile stretch of Interstate 880 in Oakland. (Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)

Analysts note that the pro-Palestinian movement is now a sprawling network of groups, many of which have different views about what tactics are acceptable or effective. Many of the groups have a diffuse leadership structure — or no leader at all — and that can make it especially hard to predict the movement’s next steps. During the civil rights era, Wasow noted, there was a more cohesive group of leaders who set guideposts for what sort of tactics could be used at different moments in time.

But analysts say whatever protest activity materializes in the coming weeks will pose a new challenge for Biden, who has struggled to balance his administration’s support for Israel against the growing demands from his liberal coalition that he press for an immediate end to the conflict.

Four years ago, amid the Black Lives Matter protests, it was Trump who was in the White House as some demonstrations became disruptive and shook some Americans’ confidence in the stability of the nation.

This year, it is Biden who will be forced to reassure voters if disruptive protests become commonplace. He must also win over younger voters who form a sizable chunk of the overall pro-Palestinian movement.

Vincent Pons, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, recently released a study that shows protest movements in general do not factor into Americans’ political considerations at the ballot box. Of 14 protests and movements studied from 2017 through 2021, Pons concluded that only the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020 “increased votes for Democrats.”

“Overall, our findings point to the limited success of recent protest waves at shifting the beliefs and behavior of the U.S. electorate, at least in the short run,” the report states.

Still, Pons says pro-Palestinian demonstrators could intensify in the coming months, because activists know Biden “does not want the disruption.”

“Whether or not the protests continue will depend on whether they feel heard by the administration,” Pons said. “The fact the protests will take place so close to a presidential election could imply that the administration will be more likely to pay attention.”

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march through a shopping mall in Los Angeles on April 15, 2024. (David Swanson/Reuters)

Wasow agrees, saying one lesson from the civil rights era is that protesters’ “more extreme tactics” tend to be more influential “with the elites” who are trying to guard against upheaval.

“When protesters use extreme tactics, they might lose the public, but nevertheless they get to signal to leaders who then want to manage the issue,” Wasow said. “So, in that way, more extreme tactics might hurt you at the ballot box … but they also could help you get policy responses from leaders.”

The evolution of the pro-Palestinian protest is occurring as public opinion about the war in Gaza has shifted.

In late March, Gallup released a poll indicating 55 percent of Americans disapproved of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, while 36 percent approved. Just 18 percent of Democrats now approve of the action, down from the 36 percent of Democrats who approved of it in November.

But analysts caution pro-Palestinian demonstrators may undermine popular opinion if the public feels that demonstrators are undertaking too radical of protest tactics.

Robb Willer, a professor of psychology and sociology at Stanford University, has done research that shows “extreme tactics reduce popular support for social movements.” Willer said public support begins shifting away from movements that engage in “property destruction, physical harm to other people or major disruption to day-to-day life.”

Blocking access to major airports or highways, as pro-Palestinian protesters did Monday, would generally fall into the category that could result in backlash from the public, Willer said. Those tactics, however, tend to increase media attention, so some activists consider the trade-off to be worth it.

“We call it the activist dilemma,” Willer said. “They are really good at getting you media attention … so different movements, at different stages of mobilization, may have a different calculus of whether the trade-off is worth it.”

Khalil Abualya, a second-generation Palestinian American who has helped organize some low-profile demonstrations at the University of Mississippi, worries about internal disagreements within the movement.

Abualya says that over the past six months, Americans have become more familiar and sympathetic with the Palestinian cause. His colleagues on campus, for example, no longer ask him if he’s from Pakistan when tells them he’s Palestinian.

But he fears some of that progress he and other activists have made is at risk if other demonstrators “are shutting down roads and shutting down bridges and hurting people.”

“I feel it’s a dangerous game to play because, in that moment, in that setting, we are the face of the problem,” Abualya said. “There are real-life consequences to everything we do.”

Still, Abualya sees some value in making Biden feel uncomfortable. The senior pharmacy student has already decided he will not vote for Biden in November, highlighting the president’s challenges in decisively winning young voters as he did in 2020.

“I am definitely not voting for Biden,” Abualya, 23, said. “He sat there and watched for six months as our families got decimated” in Gaza.

Youssef Chouhoud, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, said the continued protests will only further highlight how much support Biden has lost among core Democratic constituencies because of the war.

Chouhoud, who is Egyptian American, said there is a “large segment” of Muslim Americans who would withhold their vote for Biden if the election were held today.

“I don’t see any evidence that [the protests] will lose steam,” Chouhoud said. “They may change in terms of mode, but in terms of intensity … this is still top-of-mind to a large segment of the Democratic electorate.”

Niha Masih contributed to this report.