Author and pilot William Langewiesche once said that flying an airplane is “90 percent boring and 10 percent scary.” “Make it great, like ’68! [Democratic National Convention] A “For Gaza!” demonstration took place in front of the Israeli consulate in downtown Chicago on Tuesday night. The event Behind the enemy’s defensesAnd as you might expect from a group whose tagline is “The Empire is the Enemy. From the Belly of the Beast We Choose to Resist,” participants arrived with banners, flags and megaphones ready to resist.
They arrived promptly at 7 p.m., after Behind Enemy Lines had been promoting the protest on Instagram for weeks and providing helpful links on their website. The group’s leaders also gave me several pre-DNC interviews in which they described themselves as true radicals, unlike the weak and sloppy people who filed for city permits for the DNC march. If any group in Chicago is going to let the Democratic Party know that they are being watched for imperialist and genocidal acts and aren’t afraid to fight the police, it’s Behind Enemy Lines.
Perhaps they had spread the message too well, because the 75 or so participants were joined by twice as many journalists and six times as many police officers. The police were everywhere, eventually lining every curb and blocking every intersection. It was a police fallout that almost assured that the protest would not get out of hand.
It all felt like a rigged thing. Protesters gathered and chanted, “Intifada revolution!” “Killer Kamala, what should I say? How many children did you kill today?” The press all snapped the same picture (flaming flags? check). Meanwhile, more than 20 law enforcement officers from the Chicago National Bar Association, recognizable by their fluorescent green hats, stood guard over the police action and ready to assist any protesters who needed it. There was a lone man waving an Israeli flag, and at least at first, no protesters approached or harassed him.
“Is this a bit boring?” the cameraman asked. The Irishman agreed, and the three of us, who had covered more inflammatory events in France, Minneapolis and Portland respectively, talked about the days when protests were not announced weeks in advance but spontaneously formed, or were announced by literal samizdat or their digital equivalents. Maybe we were a little nostalgic for the days when such conversations were impossible, when we were too busy dodging projectiles, swarming crowds and shielding our faces from tear gas.
There was none of that. There was very little of it. The protesters, if you’ll excuse my vulgarity, were what my ex-boyfriend would call “young, dumb, and full of cum.” They wanted a confrontation, and if that meant getting in the face of the police, they would. They did, and there was a three-minute brawl in which several protesters were arrested before everyone went back to their seats.
It was absolutely bizarre. It was an overly organized rebellion where nothing new was happening. Maybe we were paying the wrong attention. During the downtime (almost all of it), I talked to reporters. that The New York Timesthat New York PostABC, and other outlets: Have social justice protests jumped the shark? And are we covering it just chewing on the bait?
I think it could be. Young people protesting against injustice have always been like that, but the current form is exhausting. The protests that started in 2020 were a kind of liberation, a way to get out of lockdown and loot the streets with friends, and at the same time believe that they are making the world a better place. The cause can change. Black Lives Matter, Ukraine, Roe v. Wade—as long as they provide the rage calories they need. And October 7th had many notes racially, historically, and religiously. We fought in the streets to prevent another Nakba or Holocaust, and we refused to believe data that didn’t align with our values.
Michael Voight, one of the founders of Behind Enemy Lines, says the Israeli Defense Forces have killed and mutilated 168,000 Palestinians, including children. If that were true, it would be understandable that protesting in front of the Israeli consulate would be an emergency, a “get your message across by any means possible.” But it’s not, and while you might think that the numbers would be inflated to make the protests more violent, that wasn’t the case tonight. Maybe people smelled a rat. Maybe there’s activist fatigue. That’s what happened last Monday when 30,000 people were expected to march on the DNC, but only 1,500 showed up. That’s an arrival that could make leaders a little sore. Even combative.
Looking around at the people who showed up on Tuesday, the protesters, wearing face masks and keffiyahs and chanting the same slogans over and over again, looked like corporate rock rather than punk rock. It was no wonder they didn’t gain much popularity. They were content with the imitation, a movement that needed nothing more than to show up and shout. They could have worked in many ways, even quietly, to end the war in Gaza.
Instead, a boy stood two feet from the cops’ faces and shouted into a megaphone, “This is what democracy looks like!” He kept shouting, and I thought, this is what democracy looks like: the freedom to be loud and boring without fear of backlash.
At about 8 p.m., another police line formed to protect a small group of pro-Israeli protesters, one of whom was holding a poster of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis, while another was singing “America the Beautiful” to the pro-Palestinian protesters. As the latter began to leave, the night seemed over. Perhaps they felt it was safer to sneak away than to risk a confrontation.
The rest of the people didn’t care about safety. They were ready and excited. They had been playing for an hour and it was time to mix it up. But it was an unfair fight and they knew it. About 60 young people and 600 police officers. But the line moved towards the police anyway, shouting, “Look what these police are doing to us!” and “They’re in trouble! They’re in trouble!” And they ran after the police line, and some of them chased them.
As I left the protest, I passed more of the Chicago police line. Three unknown officers with bomb-sniffing dogs, two Secret Service agents getting out of unmarked cars. It seemed like overkill. It’s understandable that the city wouldn’t take a chance during the Democratic National Convention, but most people didn’t want to see a repeat of the violence of the 1968 DNC, despite Behind Enemy Line’s attempts to make it so.
Or maybe it was. On Wednesday morning I read a report that 55 people were arrested, then 67, and finally 72. Almost all the protesters were arrested. I find this surprising and strange. Did the police overreact? Did the protesters want to be arrested? Are we at the point where we have to end the conflict to the satisfaction of both sides?
