'Freedom for Palestine means death to America' - comment

The protests that have erupted across the United States of America since the October 7 Massacre in Israel are indicative of a much broader problem than just rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism: A desire to destroy the USA. The anti-American rhetoric at the demonstrations is not a byproduct of anti-Israel sentiment, but a chief preoccupation. The protests were never just about the destruction of Israel “river to the sea” but also the death of America from coast to coast.

The anti-Americanism of the recent protests is now well documented. “Down with the USA,” chanted protesters at a March 28 New York City protest against US President Joe Biden. In Dearborn, Michigan, demonstrators chanted “death to America” during an April 5 Al-Quds Day rally.

“It’s not Genocide Joe [Biden] that has to go, it is the entire system that has to go,” said activist Tarek Bazzi at the Dearborn event.

A US flag was set alight on April 15 in New York City, accompanied by a man shouting “death to America.”

The slogan was found on posters at New York University and The New School encampments last week, reading “disrupt, reclaim, destroy Zionist business interests everywhere! Death to Israeli real-estate! Death to America!”

"Death to America"

Anti-Israel activists on Monday set fire to an American flag at the base of The 107th Infantry Memorial in New York City’s Central Park, which had itself been defaced. The Grand Army Plaza Sherman Memorial honoring Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was also vandalized. At University of Pennsylvania, two American flags were torn down and desecrated on Tuesday.

These anti-American acts could be accepted as not representative of the greater population of protesters, but the organizations leading these events have not issued denunciations. 

Dearborn Imam Usama Abdulghani, who was present at the Quds Day rally, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute on April 10, denounced the utterance of “death to America” – but only because it could be used by their enemies to discredit the Islamist movement.

Like with the antisemitism of the encampments and post-October 7 protests, the desire to destroy the US is often expressed more palatably. In the same way that Zionist is used as a substitute for Jew in antisemitic rhetoric, calls for the fall of “imperialism” or “empire” is used to cloak rabid anti-Americanism. Activists have repeatedly called for an “end to Empire.” On the Sherman memorial, vandals scrawled “F**K Empire.”

“It is our responsibility to confront the greatest purveyor of violence in our lifetimes and the leader of this Empire, who is coming to our city,” Within Our Lifetime  wrote about the protest against Biden on March 28. “The important thing is that we cover the area, besiege the besiegers, and do not let the enemies of humanity slip in or out unnoticed.”

National Students for Justice in Palestine was not alone when it said on Tuesday on X that it believed there is a “critical link between the struggle in Gaza and US empire.”

“Hands off the Middle East, from the belly of the beast,” protesters called in New York City in a Palestinian Youth Movement video.

Many of the activist groups see Israel as an outpost of the US empire, as does NSJP on Instagram on Wednesday when it said, “We know the US empire holds the Zionist entity’s leash tightly.” These organizations see an attack on what they believe to be an imperial puppet in the Middle East to be an attack on the US itself.

“US empire and its satellite compradors will fall,” NSJP said on Tuesday on social media.

An anarchist flyer circulated at University of Michigan, shared by author Aviva Klompas on social media on April 22, showed that at least some factions of that ideological camp saw the October 7 Massacre as an attack on US imperialism, which could be continued by domestic efforts.

“Ultimately, our main task as revolutionaries in the United States remains to be the unmaking of the American empire,” read the flyer. “Freedom for Palestine means death to America.”

Globalize the intifada

AMERICAN ISOLATIONISTS may believe that the hatred of the United States is an outcome of support of Israel, but the coalition of various movements sees both polities as enemies on the same revolutionary front against the West. Activists have repeatedly indicated that a “free Palestine” is only the beginning, and that the revolution would not end if all objectives were achieved in the Levant.

Palestinian Youth Movement Houston’s Mohammad Nabulsi said at a Texas Al-Quds day event on April 5 that “The Palestinian people have shown us what it means to confront US empire and Israeli settler colonialism with your head held high.”

At the same event, protesters sang “From Houston to Gaza, globalize the Intifada,” a term for widespread political violence popularized the Intifada waves of terrorism that afflicted Israel in the 1990s and 2000s.

Calls for global intifada in American cities have become commonplace at the encampments and other mass protests. At Columbia University, student activists chanted in a Within Our Lifetime video “New York to Gaza, long live the Intifada.”

Activists use the term intifada interchangeably with that of revolution, as indicated by the popular chant “There is only one solution, intifada, revolution.”

The encampment movement, which is now being called by the protest groups the “student intifada,” is not simply a disruption of individual institutions. At George Washington University and City College of New York last week, activists pulled down the stars and stripes from flagpoles and installed Palestinian flags. The statues of founding fathers George Washington at GWU and Benjamin Franklin at University of Pennsylvania were defaced and laden with keffiyehs and Palestinian flags.

These were not just acts of desecration, but ostensibly of revolution. The activists see the encampments as a challenge to US sovereignty, conquering and occupying territory as “liberated zones.” This is why they have established their own rules, enforce borders and security, and control movement in the proximity of their settlement. To the students at these campuses, they intentionally act as an occupying military administration.

Like Israel, the coalition of various activist groups seek to “decolonize” the United States, with calls and banners at protests commonly calling for “land back” from “Turtle Island [North America] to Palestine.”

“Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Rutgers University SJP wrote on Instagram in 2018. “Just as their ‘Israeli Independence Day’ is our Nakba commemoration, we commemorate the genocide of Turtle Island’s indigenous peoples on July 4th.”

PYM called in a statement the same year to “decolonize our lands together from Turtle Island and Palestine. Inter-community building, co-resistance, and decolonization are not just metaphors, they are a set of actions that we are committed to bringing into our everyday struggle for dignity and self-determination.”

Decolonization, as many discovered on October 7, was indeed not a metaphor, but a violent revolutionary act.

“What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers,” writer Najma Sharif said on social media on October 7.

The October 7 Massacre was an act of intifada as Houston demonstrators explained on April 5, when they chanted “Flood Al-Aqsa, Flood Al-Aqsa, we are with the Intifada,” referencing the Hamas operational name for the pogrom.

Israelis have learned the hard way that when someone says they want to kill you, believe them. “Death to America” is a serious threat that can only be ignored for so long. When activists say they want an intifada in the US, that they want to bring about the fall of “Empire,” that they want a revolution, they mean that they want the same evil in America that was visited upon Israel on October 7. Do not wait until October 8 to realize the threats were real.