The protests against Israel’s bombing campaign are pretty hot right now, and watching them play out I have been blown away — not just by the courage of the protesters, but by their savvy and discipline. Still, I’ve noticed a few recurring PR mistakes just over the past few days, so allow me to offer some hard-earned advice, and you can do with it what you will.
Never throw the first punch or adopt a threatening posture.
If there is an imminent threat of violence, your absolute priority should be to protect yourself and those around you. And not just from serious physical harm, but also from police escalation and from prosecution by a criminal justice system that is stacked against the left. If you throw the first punch or even position yourself in a way that other people can construe as aggressive, the opposition will use this as a pretext to retaliate and the courts will use it as an excuse for an adverse judgment.
I’ll just be blunt here: if you are alert enough to throw a first strike, you should be alert enough to either dodge or absorb a hit with little problem. These people are not the trained killing machines they want you to think that they are. Look how out of breath this Chabad goon was after landing two standing punches to a guy lying on the ground:When a guy like this approaches you, stand your ground but adopt as relaxed a posture as you are comfortable with. If he swings at you, loudly narrate what is happening (EG “Why are you attacking me?”) and then decide whether you want to defend yourself, engage in passive resistance, or leave the area. Remember that as an activist, the most damaging thing you can possibly do is almost always going to be to get the other guys thrown in jail.
Narrate for the camera.
Most modern protest incidents have plenty of accompanying footage from witnesses with smartphones, but that doesn’t mean that your audience will always have a clear view what is happening. A lot of times the footage is just too dark, shaky, and poorly positioned to capture crucial details; even clear footage can miss certain things, like whether the clouds wafting into view are smoke or tear gas.
So even if you aren’t the one holding the camera, it’s often a good idea to narrate what you see happening. As mentioned above, if someone attacks you, you should make a point of being loudly incredulous about it while making it clear that you are not resisting or provoking them. If you see a cop trying to goad a protester into fighting, say so. If counterprotesters are brandishing weapons, ask “why do you have a knife?” If you can identify someone or who they’re with, do it. If a Zionist is posing as the opposition and yelling slurs, don’t assume that everyone watching will realize what’s going on — call them out. Your extemporaneous narration in the video will be taken much more seriously than anything anyone tries to say about it afterwards
Record faces and other personally identifying information.
Especially when someone is breaking the law. This may seem obvious or like something that will just happen naturally when people are filming, but one of the biggest obstacles to identifying and taking legal action against counterprotesters and scofflaw cops is often just figuring out who they are.
Where the women at?
This tactic is controversial but I’ve seen way too many radical groups use it effectively over the years to ignore it. If you can do this safely, set your machismo aside, turn the opposition’s bigotry against them, and put your smallest, least threatening-looking women on the front lines. Even guys on the hard right often hesitate to attack women, and if they do it looks terrible on film.
Avoid left jagon during confrontations.
When fascists start intimidating protesters while posing as transgressive populists, they are really just petit-bourgeois footsoldiers for monopoly capital’s campaign of resource extraction in the Third World. And when they start intimidating protesters, you absolutely should not explain this to them.
Why? It isn’t because what you’re saying is incorrect, or because the public can’t understand it. It’s because an aggressive confrontation is a bizarre time to try to teach someone about left theory, and if you try to do it you’re just going to come off as in insane person. When most people see this happen, they don’t think “that guy’s analysis is inaccurate”; they think “does that guy even know what’s going on around him right now? He is in immediate danger and he is not responding to it in a way that will either de-escalate or persuade anyone. This is insane!”
Protests can be a great opportunity for education, but save it for the teach-ins, or the pamphleting, or the rallies, or the one-on-one conversations with passersby. When you’re in the middle of a conflict, be present and make the moral case as simply as possible.Stage positive publicity stunts.
Remember during the Occupy Wall Street protests when activists gave out meals to homeless folks and handed out stickers? Protest opponents love to frame activists as destructive narrow-minded outsiders trying to create chaos and impose their agenda on locals, and nothing disrupts that narrative like staging little uncontroversial gestures of good will and cooperation with your community. No, you shouldn’t have to do this when your cause is righteous — but yes, it is probably a good idea anyway. If your encampment isn’t completely under siege or if you can get something going at a nearby location, try to get some positive publicity.
Run a minimal media operation.
I know this isn’t as sexy or romantic as holding a sign, but it’s just an indispensable part of the toolkit in any modern long-term action. Spend an hour or two putting up a basic web page with information about your encampment. Prepare rapid-response press releases after any incident. Build a mailing list of sympathetic media outlets and influencers to send them to. Designate an official point of contact — if not a person, then a specific email address or social media account at least.
One major reason you want to do this is that if you leave your media efforts informal and decentralized, journalists will have an excuse to cherry pick the most embarrassing people and statements they can find as representative of your entire group. Or they’ll go the other way and not speak to anyone on the logic that no one speaks for the encampment — which means that your side of any given story won’t get out there. Establishing a very basic media operation gives you at least a little control over your presentation.
Get local religious groups involved.
After the anti-imperialist left, religious doves have always been the most reliably antiwar constituency in the country. And even if you haven’t noticed them in your community, you probably have some nearby. In my experience, Quakers, Buddhists, Mennonites, Muslims, Unitarians, and Sikhs have always been extremely likely candidates for some kind of cooperative effort.Find a local group, but instead of cold calling them, take a look at their website and see if they’ve issued any statements or had any services relevant to the war. Often the best move is just to ask them if they’d be open to holding a candlelight vigil for peace. With some more of the more hardline pacifist traditions you may have to keep the messaging at that level of vagueness, though with others you may be able to take a more overtly anti-imperialist position. Do your homework, feel them out, and use your best judgment. And above all, make sure you get media coverage. This, again, is a strategy that is primarily aimed at countering Zionist attempts to portray you as some kind of radical outsider.
Make sure all of your comrades know whether or not you are engaged in civil disobedience.
Encampment activism usually relies on one of two strategies: a lawful strategy or a civil disobedience strategy. In a lawful strategy, you are legally occupying a high-visibility location and exercising your first amendment rights to publicize a political perspective that people might not otherwise hear. A civil disobedience strategy, meanwhile, is very different. In this situation you occupy a position and demonstrate, knowing full well that the opposition will probably succeed in any legal action against you.1
Both of these strategies dictate a different public presentation. In the lawful strategy, your goal is to force the opposition to either a) let you speak or b) expose themselves to legal action. When you are doing this there is really no point in spending much time publicly arguing about free speech or trespassing rights; just stick to your message and save legal arguments for court. In fact, in this situation I would actively avoid reminding the opposition of their legal obligations, because draconian administrators and counterprotesters love to run at top speed right into (b) and it damages them way more than anything else you could ever do.
In the civil disobedience strategy, however, you probably do need to talk about the first amendment at some point. Sometimes civil disobedience occupations have an immediate aim, like stalling some kind of administrative action, and in that case you are going to have to say whatever you have to in order to hold your position. A more classical Gandhian civil disobedience strategy will want to draw attention to the injustice of the law being wielded against such a righteous cause, and to make it clear that you are only being defeated by physical force.Personally I think the first strategy is usually the most effective; but whatever strategy you pick, stick to it and make sure everyone stays on the same page. It’s always too easy for protesters to get derailed onto free speech arguments when they don’t need to make them, or for protesters who are engaged in a civil disobedience strategy to discredit themselves by making losing legal arguments.
Make counterprotesters argue with college students.
When you are holding a rally or marching or engaged in a demonstration, yes — that is a time when you need to invoke the moral authority of the antiwar movement and demand to be taken seriously. But when the counterprotesters show up, remember that your goal isn’t to defeat them in impromptu debates or to overpower them in a violent clash. It’s to embarass and discredit them.
And to do that, often the best move will just be to draw attention to the absurdity of what’s going on: these people are grown-ass adults, a lot of them clearly coordinated by powerful organizations, who have shown up on campus to argue with college students. Just look at this beautiful clip. An older woman shows up and tries to provoke the students into a reaction, but instead of trying to intimidate her or even debating with her, they refuse to take the bait and just ignore her. The contrast between her ranting in the foreground with students goofing off and hanging out in the background makes her look way crazier than anything else they could have done.Elite media and right-wing activists may hate protesters, but most Americans just take for granted that this is an ordinary — even cliched — part of the college experience. The optics of older Zionist brownshirts showing up ready to fight kids who are just loitering on a lawn can look extremely bad if you play it right. So far, the most devastating response to counterprotesters that I’ve seen hasn’t been an argument about Israeli settler-colonialism or a black flag guy trying to initimidate someone. It was a younger guy, probably a freshman, laughing at an older MAGA goon: “Dude what are you even doing, we’re just college students. Why are you even here?”
Note that I said “if they are likely to succeed in legal action against you” rather than “if you are breaking the law.” There are a whole lot of things that protesters can do that are completely legal but that you are likely to get punished for anyway, either because the law is too controversial or too ambiguous.