Labor organizer Chris Smalls addressed the HANDS OFF crowd in Los Angeles. The Palestinian flags and keffiyehs were there throughout the rally.
The Democrats’ HANDS OFF rallies included “HANDS OFF NATO” and excluded “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” but not all rally goers got the memo.
On Sunday, April 6, the KPFA Radio-Berkeley Sunday Show opened with an hour on Saturday’s nationwide “HANDS OFF!” rallies, which had taken place in cities across the country. The first guest, University of San Francisco professor Rebecca Gordon, opened by saying she’d seen some great signage at the rally she attended, the first being, “Trump Has His Head So Far Up Putin’s Ass That He Can See Sarah Palin.”
This New Cold War nonsense was also manifested on the “HANDS OFF 2025” website, where the graphic representing the rally listed NATO near the center, between cancer research and consumer protection, as an institution to be defended. The website also included a PDF for printing a “HANDS OFF NATO” sign.
The site quotes MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting saying, "This peaceful movement is powered by everyday people—nurses, teachers, students, parents," but these everyday people don’t wake up hungry for military industrial profit, asking who NATO can bomb, bully, or overthrow next. Their very real worries about losing Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public lands, civil rights, unions, housing, and more were simply being managed by the Democrats in charge of the message, most notably MoveOn and Indivisible.
In “Why Are HANDS OFF Rallies Supporting NATO?,” an essay published by Sheer Post and Common Dreams, Code Pink co- founder Medea Benjamin and World Beyond War founder David Swanson wrote, “The inclusion of NATO in the Hands Off list contradicts the basic Hands Off agenda. Right now, at the bidding of President Trump, NATO is openly and aggressively pressuring its member nations to move money from healthcare, retirement funds, and clean energy to weapons and militarism.”
They also wrote, “We would be happy to expand the Hands Off demands to international issues, such as Hands Off Palestine or Yemen or Greenland or Panama or Canada. But we do object to including a destructive institution like NATO, an institution that systematically and grossly violates the commitment to settle disputes peacefully contained in the UN Charter.”
The demand for peace and specifically peace in Palestine were wholly absent from the HANDS OFF website for obvious reasons. War and genocide in Gaza are part of the Democratic Party agenda, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris most complicit. Turning attention to that would risk turning people away from the party.
Who got the memo?
To be fair to rally goers, I didn’t see any “HANDS OFF NATO” signs in the many photo essays published around the country. Someone told me they saw a few in the City of San Rafael in California’s Marin County, and I did see one sign that read, “THIS IS NOT RUSSIA.”
I didn’t see any Palestinian flags in the photo essays either, but people who attended the Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles rallies said that there were highly visible pro-Palestinian contingents, and in Oakland there was a Palestinian speaker. They didn’t seem to have gotten the MoveOn memo.
Not surprisingly, the list of partner organizations was largely a collection of donor-dependent NGOs. There was a heavy emphasis on climate and the environment despite the huge carbon costs of war and all the damage it does to soil, food, water, and human health.
There were, however, a few surprises, most notably Peace Action and Veterans for Peace. These organizations would seem to have nothing in common with a pro-NATO rally, so why did they sign up? The Veterans for Peace website prominently features the group’s endorsement of both the national HANDS OFF rally and the concurrent march against Gaza Genocide in Washington, DC.
I asked a member of Veterans for Peace how the group had come to endorse a pro-NATO rally, and he said he didn’t know but he was disgusted. He had attended the rally in Berkeley without knowing that HANDS OFF NATO was one of its official demands. Vets for Peace is loosely organized in local chapters, but the national organization had somehow made a decision to endorse.
It seemed that they may have failed to get the memo because their website reads, “These two demonstrations illustrate the huge organizing challenge that anti-war/peace activists face in an environment where people are under attack and feeling uncertainty and fear. While people are appalled by the blatant ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, many are also panicked by what they see happening here at home.”
Code Pink was not among the “partner” organizations; they definitely got the memo, as evidenced by Medea Benjamin and David Swanson’s essay.
Nevertheless, Code Pink-Los Angeles volunteer Marya Shahriary says the Code Pink contingent clustered on a corner chanting at the march’s starting point, Pershing Square, and gradually other individuals and pockets of people joined them as they marched to City Hall.
“Someone invited us to speak at Pershing Square,” she said, “but then someone else, probably a HANDS OFF higher up, disinvited us.”
Melina Abdullah, Cal State-LA Pan-African Studies Professor and BLM-Grassroots organizer, was invited to speak and she spoke eloquently about Palestine, without hesitation, as did Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls and Bitchuation Room podcast host Francesca Fiorentini. When Abdullah realized that Code Pink had been disinvited at Pershing Square, she invited Marya Shahriary on stage to speak.
At a small protest on the sidelines of the Washington, DC HANDS OFF rally, Code Pink’s Jodie Evans criticized the inclusion of “HANDS OFF NATO” and the exclusion of “HANDS OFF PALESTINE,” and said many people stopped to talk to them.
Medea Benjamin and David Swanson are to be thanked for drawing the activist community’s attention to the HANDS OFF organization’s “HANDS OFF NATO” demand. As more people get the memo, how will they respond? Will they demand its removal for their ongoing participation? And ask for the addition of a “HANDS OFF PALESTINE” demand?
I would hope that Veterans for Peace and Peace Action will otherwise ask to be removed from the list of partner organizations.
If so, we’ll see how HANDS OFF responds.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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