It is a time-honored tradition [...] to present demands that they know will never be granted: don’t invade Iraq, stop defunding education, bail out people not banks, make the police stop killing black people. In return for brief audiences with bureaucrats who answer to much shrewder players, they water down their politics and try to get their less complaisant colleagues to behave themselves."
"[...] Such efforts may not achieve their express purpose, but they do accomplish something: they frame a narrative in which the existing institutions are the only conceivable protagonists of change."
"Real self-determination is not something that any authority can grant us. We have to develop it by acting on our own strength, centering ourselves in the narrative as the protagonists of history.
(from here: https://mastodon.social/deck/@tty@sunbeam.city/112536757323272313 which fae got from here: https://crimethinc.com/zines/why-we-dont-make-demands)
This is a critically important thing to understand during a time when we all feel an urgent need to take action. It is not only outwardly strategic, as noted above and described throughout the text, but inwardly as well: Your movement and you yourself will be wrecked by this. It goes on:
Making demands establishes some people as representatives of the movement, establishing an internal hierarchy and giving them an incentive to control the other participants.
...In order to maintain credibility in their role as negotiators, spokespeople must be able to pacify or isolate anyone that is not willing to go along with the bargains they strike. This gives aspiring leaders an incentive to demonstrate that they can reign in in the movement, in hopes of earning a seat at the negotiating table. The same courageous souls whose uncompromising actions won the movement its leverage in the first place suddenly find career activists who joined afterwards telling them what to do—or denying that they are part of the movement at all. This drama played out in Ferguson in August 2014, where the locals who got the movement off the ground by standing up to the police were slandered by politicians and public figures as outsiders taking advantage of the movement to engage in criminal activity. The exact opposite was true: outsiders were seeking to hijack a movement initiated by honorable illegal activity, in order to re-legitimize the institutions of authority.
I have a personal theory—based on observation and long-term unpacking with others of more firsthand experience—about the worst of what remains possible when this process isn't even able to culminate in the sort of external cooptation as described above. Maybe the movement goes simply unacknowledged, is incoherent to power or the general public (but desperately intends to be coherent); maybe the demands are backed by nothing, never had any leverage at all; maybe the demands are met and nothing follows (see the above linked piece, point #4). Whatever it is, the apparatuses set up inside your organization have nothing to act on but themselves, and those designated as leaders, as the actors of the demand, must express the demand-impetus that has brought everyone together in some way, so it happens in the form of internal control. Notably, if everything was working, and the demands had external effects, there would be no need to do that. Thus, this becomes especially so the more useless the organization is, because people begin to question its structure and strategies, and you can't have that, obviously, gotta shut that down! You can see where this goes. These kinds of groups, political cults, are widely dismissed as "just crazy people," but the social tendencies fueling them are very ordinary, and susceptibility to their emotional urgency is totally understandable.
It's become a cliche and a bit of a truism(?) that "anyone can fall for a cult." (Anyone who does fall for a cult, has, and anyone who hasn't is still "anyone" and still could. idk.) I think maybe it's more useful to understand that any organized group of people has the potential to form a cult.
So: If you are in the orbit of an organization right now whose strategy consists primarily of proclaiming some variation on "Hands off ___!" ...I believe that your heart is being taken advantage of and your imagination held captive. I dearly hope that we can find a way out this recurring vortex.
If I had one more thing to add to this or paraphrase/sum up from the text, I would emphasize the importance of remaining illegible to power. Ideally, do not even be visible to power. I don't know where to put this thought, but I believe that you owe it to yourself not to fall into the ritualistic degradation of the game they set up for us.
All that being said, free Palestine. Not as a demand but a call.