PART’s Perspective: Moratorium Against Genocide & Apartheid
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)
During the Vietnam War era, the peace, antiwar and internationalist solidarity movements in the US came with a wide diversity of tactics and actions that persisted, grew and intensified in tandem with the US escalation of that war through successive Democratic and Republican administrations. Resistance spread to all quarters of society, reflected in the leading role of revolutionary-minded movements from Black, Chicano/Mexicano, Indigenous, Asian Pacific Islander, Puerto Rican and other anti-colonial liberation movements, but also widespread through high schools and colleges, in rank and file labor organizing and within faith-based communities. It manifested itself within the ranks of the US military as well.
One manifestation within the US of that ferment that was of global proportions was the Moratorium, an effort to develop a consciously escalating “No Business As Usual” manifestation of resistance and unrest that would grow and intensify around the demand to end the war and withdraw the US occupation troops. The concept was that it would grow from month to month as a kind of strike action on campuses, in work places, and in the streets. It grew in part out of sense of frustration with marches and peaceful rallies that had no apparent impact on policy-makers or the actions of the US government or complicitous corporations or campuses (apart from an increase in repression).
The Chicano Moratorium here in Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, in which over 35,000 mostly Chican@/Mexican@ youth and families came out to protest the war in Vietnam and the disproportionate frontline fatalities of Raza GIs was one major manifestation of the Moratorium phenomenon, drawing people from throughout the US Southwest and advancing the Chicano/Mexicano liberation struggle as well as the anti-war cause. It was attacked by LA sheriff’s deputies and at least three people were killed by law enforcement, including two Brown Berets and the LA Times correspondent and Spanish-language TV newscaster Ruben Salazar. The Chicano Moratorium is still commemorated in ELA every year.
Overall, the Moratorium never quite fulfilled its potential at the time but did provide a framework that stimulated and coordinated a host of grassroots actions around the country. I was part of a working class organizing collective in Hayward CA, an industrial suburb south of Oakland, that carried out plant gate leafleting and labor-focused anti-war organizing and outreach efforts at various factories in the area.
The time is at hand for an international Moratorium effort against US-backed and financed Israeli genocidal war crimes against Gaza and Palestinians, demanding an immediate and permanent Israeli cease fire and withdrawal from all occupied Palestinian territories, and reciprocal release of all prisoners held by Israel and the Palestinian resistance forces. Campus occupations and other actions have exposed and undermined US complicity and political support, and contributed to the election withdrawal of Joe Biden just as anti-war organizing contributed to the similar decision by Lyndon Johnson not to seek re-election.
But this has not brought an end to the killing, to US funding and arming of the Israeli attacks, or to Israeli efforts to widen and intensify the fighting throughout the region, augmented by US and UK attacks on Yemen, or the prospects of the war spreading to Lebanon and Iran.
Anti-war and international solidarity forces need to continue to deepen, strengthen and sharpen our resistance. We must increase the political and material costs of the Israeli and US/NATO war crimes until the dynamic of our resistance becomes the over-riding complement to the Palestinians’ own resistance.
Such a moratorium can incorporate a renewed and broadened Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that demands that religious institutions and denominations, labor unions, corporations, universities, and financial institutions including public employees retirement systems as well as mutual funds bring their economic weight to bear on ending the unjust, genocidal attacks on the Palestinians and uphold their national rights.
The protests about to happen at the Democratic Convention in Chicago can be the launching pad for an escalating series of Moratorium actions that will grow month by month, overwhelming the repression, the false charges of antisemitism, and the obstinate refusal of the Israelis and their US and European imperialist backers and enablers to stop their war crimes.
The solidarity expressed with Palestine in every corner of the globe by other anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the global South must be matched by a similar resistance within the bellies of the various beasts. When monthly or weekly protests in dozens of Western capitals begin to match the size and consciousness of the million plus Yemenis who protest in solidarity with Palestine, when boycotts and divestment undermine the bottom line of the banks, Big Tech and the arms manufacturers, when the candidates of both imperialist parties are greeted by protesters at every rally and whistle stop, when Jewish, Christian and Muslim anti-Zionists begin to dominate over the Jewish and Christian Zionists and the sell-out Arab reactionary regimes, it will shake the edifice of Western imperialism and settler colonialism to the rafters.