Why protest when it is not working? The complexities of efficacy in the current Palestine solidarity protests

We write this piece while witnessing the human rights violations against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the violence created by the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.We recognize and share the horror and despair that many have felt as observers of this enormous, preventable suffering.At the same time, we have witnessed massive solidarity protests worldwide in the last few months.Disappointingly, we have also seen repression and the refusal of several governments (above all the United States) to follow the widely-supported demands for a ceasefire.In light of this duality of continued collective action despite despair (see Bird et al., 2024) and lack of apparent wins, our aim is to address how we understand efficacy in protest, both in the immediate and in the long term.We are a group of social psychologists with scholarly and personal connections to what we are witnessing.Many of us work on collective action and social movements.Some of us have experienced the direct or transgenerational impact of war, genocide, human rights violations, political repression and persecution, and displacement.One of us is Palestinian, one of us is Lebanese, and another of us is Jewish.All of us are writing from a shared position of solidarity with Palestine. Collective Action in Solidarity with Palestine -and its RepressionAt the time of writing, it has been nearly 150 days since Israel began its heightened attacks on Gaza, and solidarity events and protests calling for immediate ceasefire have carried on globally in over 100 countries (Al Jazeera, 2024).The ACLED (Lay & Murillo, 2023) reports that approximately 4200 protest events were held during the first three weeks of attacks on Gaza.The demonstrations have ranged from student-led rallies on university campuses to public gatherings in town squares organised by unions and charity groups and large-scale marches down major streets of capital cities, some with hundreds of thousands of participants.The public rallies have been attended by people of all backgrounds and age groups.Some hold homemade placards calling for a ceasefire.Others address their respective governments, calling out complicit politicians.Still others quote Palestinian poetsamong them those who have been killed during this round of Israeli onslaught such as Refaat Alareer.However, these acts of solidarity often have been met with repression, at times quite explicit and severe.In Amman, Jordan, hundreds of protesters were arrested between October and November 2023 (Amnesty International, 2024).In Germany, protests in support of Palestine were banned (Amnesty International, 2023).Similar enforcements are in place in other nation-