A Movement on the Move: The Big Ride for Palestine

and the Politics of Convergence

John Munro (13 October 2024)

This piece was initially presented at a workshop held by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter (hybrid) on 4-5 July 2024. It was supported by Wellcome Trust Centre Grant [203109/Z/16/Z] and explored “Everyday Mobilities: Social, Cultural, and Environmental Perspectives on Getting Around.” (You can see event recordings here - day 1; day 2.). In recent years, daily travel - especially in urban spaces - has been increasingly politicised. Concerns about the climate emergency, air pollution, and inequities of health and risk exposures have shifted discussions about everyday mobility, simultaneously producing new policy thinking, planning experiments, activist movements, and public backlash. This workshop explored these developments, examining the social relations, cultural frames, and environmental concerns with which everyday travel has become entangled in different local, national, and transnational contexts, as well as attending to the varied histories and possible futures of "getting around”. The "Everyday Mobilities” series on M&M is a first step towards the establishment of an Everyday Mobilities interdisciplinary network bringing together scholars, practitioners and campaigners.

Hostage taking and rocket fire. Air strikes and invasion. Mass civilian casualties and urban destruction in Gaza. 43 Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

For one thing, the context for the October War was different from previous Arab-Israeli wars, because of something Israel had lost amid its stunning victory of 1967: that is, its ability to keep the issue of Palestinian sovereignty sidelined within the politics of the region and on the global stage. Instead, by the early 1970s, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was drawing inspiration from and making connections with the wider upsurge against (neo)imperialism, from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa to Cuba. Interest in, and support for, Palestinian aspirations were ascendant in the 1970s.

And beyond all of this, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) responded to the October War by embargoing oil shipments to what it determined were Israel’s biggest supporters: the United States and the Netherlands. OAPEC aimed its so-called “oil weapon” in an attempt to prompt Israel to return territory captured in 1967, grant greater rights to Palestinians, and relinquish Israeli control over East Jerusalem. 1973 was an undeniably significant moment in the evolution of the Palestinian cause from regional issue to ongoing global concern.

And when did this happen? A decade ago. In 2014.

Back in England, a group of activists with bicycles decided to respond in the way they knew best, by riding together in solidarity. A year after the 2014 Israeli invasion of Gaza, The Big Ride for Palestine undertook a 9-day outing from Edinburgh to London. When they arrived at their destination outside Parliament, they observed a minute of silence for the Palestinian children killed in what Israel called “Operation Protective Edge.” The number of Palestinian children killed? A shocking 526.

This invasion in 2014 was not, of course, the start of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But when the Big Ride first rode in the summer of 2015, few of those taking part could probably have imagined the scale of the horror that would unfold in Palestine less than a decade later. And yet now all of us have been forced not to imagine but to try to come to terms with daily images of an assault chilling in its intensity, scope, and depravity against an imprisoned population overwhelmingly comprised of civilians.

To recall what none of us have forgotten: on 7 October 2023, in what they claimed was a response to Israel’s blockade of Gaza, to attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank, and to desecration of the Al Aqsa Mosque, gunmen led by Hamas breached the borders between Israel and Gaza, and proceeded to kill and capture. 1,139 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed – some likely by Israeli forces during the fighting – plus 251 more were taken back into Gaza. The violence was awful, with casualties military and civilian. The Israeli government had already empowered Hamas in order to scuttle the possibility of an equitable peace before 7 October. After that date, the Israeli Defense Forces unleashed retaliatory violence that shocked and awed victims and witnesses alike. Israel has now carried out what many of its officials, commentators, and military personnel openly claimed they would do, and the world is excruciatingly aware of the results.

Protests against Israel’s conduct have, unsurprisingly, proliferated. From South Africa’s legal charge of genocide before the International Court of Justice to official recognition of Palestinian statehood from a growing number of nations, to marches and student encampments, mobilization has mushroomed. With nearly a decade of experience with annual solidarity rides, the Big Ride for Palestine was ready to bring cyclists together to take to the roads with shirts, flags, chants, and songs – which I saw for myself when I began to take part in some of these rides in the autumn of 2023.

With this scene setting in mind, the argument I want to make here is that the Big Ride for Palestine represents more than the sum of its two main parts: cycling and solidarity. In combining these two elements, the Big Ride draws together two areas of activism, and in the process creates something new: a social movement convergence that offers clues to how we might deal with what is sometimes called the “polycrisis”: the overlapping set of challenges that have come to threaten life on this planet. I suggest that a converging of social movements is not simply salutary, but rather necessary if we are to dismantle the imperial system that generates and upholds injustice across scales, in Palestine and, as we will see, on roads around the world.

The October War

We could start much earlier, but let me begin in 1973. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, that year saw Palestine sitting at the center of the world system. The fighting began when Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked Israel in an attempt to regain territory lost in 1967. The October War brought both the US and USSR to full nuclear alert. Washington’s support for Israel during the war represented both its deepening interests in the region and its commitment to Israel. The international implications of these events were immense.

Vietnam-Palestine Victory Poster, 1972 (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Everyday Mobility Justice

1973 also proved pivotal for what might seem a rather different activist campaign: one that struggled for safety and dignity for pedestrians and cyclists in cities where private automobiles had come to dominate the public space of the street. Across the world and throughout the twentieth century, planners and road engineers in city after city widened road space for car owners and narrowed it for everyone else. Once a scene of congregation, of hustle, bustle, and play, many streets were transformed into no-go zones for those not possessed of cars.

The imposition of automobility was, in essence, a twentieth century enclosure movement by which the commons of the street became the exclusive province of those who owned the means of automotive transportation. The predictable result was that pedestrians and cyclists were frequently injured and killed, and affordable and accessible modes of mobility were marginalized. Activism to oppose this injustice came in waves beginning in the 1920s, from the campaigns of mothers against “motordom” to freeway revolts.

But the 70s were different, for two principal reasons. One was that opposition to automobility took place against a backdrop of heightened concern about the environment, which gave momentum to movements pushing to limit the negative externalities caused by cars while expanding such green means of mobility as walking and cycling. Amsterdam became a focal point of this activism. In the 1950s and 60s, as Amsterdam’s urban planners followed the pattern of other cities, car owners were allocated ever more space, and cycling and walking proved more and more dangerous as a result. Various activist groups – most notably, Stop de Kindermoord – formed to defend public space against the private property of cars by blocking traffic, installing cycle lanes without permission, and demanding that the authorities enable multiple modes of mobility. Today, the Netherlands has tens of thousands of miles of cycle paths and traffic planning no longer caters exclusively to those with automobiles.

The story of how Stop de Kindermoord prompted a turn toward a more egalitarian distribution of public space in Amsterdam and inspired movements for mobility justice around the world is a tale often told in active travel circles. But while standard narrations often make reference to the raised environmental consciousness that propelled walking and wheeling activism in new ways in the 1970s, another factor that made that decade different is often left out. And that factor is Palestine.

It was, it’s worth remembering, international solidarity with Palestine that prompted the OAPEC embargo and price rise. Even if pursued by participating fossil fuel producers for their own reasons of realpolitik and return on investment, and even if the embargo did not force a substantive reorientation in the Middle East policies the countries targeted, this act of solidarity with the people of Palestine, combined with the environmental movement more broadly and mobility justice activism more specifically, made the Netherlands a country where residents who don’t own a car can move around their cities and towns in safety and dignity. Indeed, the Dutch imagination of who and what streets might be for was directly expanded when the government banned private cars from Amsterdam’s roads on Sundays in 1973 in a direct response to the OAPEC-induced energy crisis. Though rarely acknowledged today, the people of Palestine, whose own mobility remains restricted and regulated in myriad ways – are part of the reason why those walking and wheeling in the Netherlands enjoy world-renowned mobility infrastructure.

The Politics of Convergence

Today, mobility justice activism and international solidarity with Palestine are movements with less overt overlap than they might have. Public events focused on Palestine rarely reference mobility justice and active travel events don’t often invoke Palestine. But the links, I think, between these two causes could be brought more productively into conversation, not least because the climate crisis – itself a product of colonialism – connects them. The Big Ride achieves just this kind of convergence.

The harms caused by automobility in much of the world and by colonialism in Palestine are of course not the same thing, and the movements addressing each are naturally different. But both are motivated by social justice, and both contest a clear, and clearly unfair, imbalance of power.

As important, both challenge the international imperial system. This is perhaps more evident in the case of Palestine, where the United States and other junior partners have backed Israeli policy and in return enjoy a close relationship with a strategic asset in the oil-rich Middle East. But the system of automobility also emerged from the imperial system. An expression of liberty for those who own the automotive means of transportation at the expense of those who do not, as a violent expression of a martial culture manifested in suburbanite military-grade SUVs, and as an industry reliant on imperial extractivism in the Global South to fuel electric vehicles and their combustion-engine counterparts in the Global North, automobility is an expression of empire. An analysis of imperialism is thus a prerequisite for understanding why mobility has become so hazardous for cyclists and pedestrians, just as it is for understanding why an unspeakable genocide and ecocide are currently being made possible by the West against Palestine.

Between fire, flood, and extinction, there is much at stake for the social movements of our moment. We have a world to win, but first we must unmake the colonial system that is deepening inequality and hastening the destruction of our planet. Claiming the public space of our roads for walking and cycling is thus a political act, as is demanding an end to Israeli oppression of Palestine. The Big Ride for Palestine, then, not only combines two things – cycling and solidarity – it creates something new: a form of movement convergence that holds the promise of enhancing a mobility justice sensibility within the Palestine solidarity movement, while infusing mobility justice activism with a needed anticolonial politics. All politics are mobility politics. And sitting as it does once again at the center of the imperial system, all politics are the politics of Palestine. In our thousands and in our millions, as the slogan goes, we are all Palestinians.

Solidarity with Palestine is a prerequisite for creating a better world. Achieving mobility justice is likewise a necessity for a just transition. Our challenge is to combine the power of these movements, and others, to sharpen our sense of how car dominated streets are an everyday expression of an international system of Western domination over the resource rich global South, a system in which Israel is a crucial node. The urgent task of our movement is, as political theorist Thea Riofrancos puts it, to develop and nurture “analysis of tactics and targets; messaging discipline and communal care; political education and intersectional coalitions.” Connecting the dots can create an overwhelming image, but another world is possible where movements converge.

The Big Ride for Palestine shows that we can rehearse today the society we want to see in the future, as movements come together to address the multiple crises of our times, so many of which are traceable back to the racial and economic system by which Europeans came to dominate the world. Today, we can enact the society we want to see, as we demand, like those activists in Amsterdam did decades ago, a stop to the child murders, so many of which we have now seen on our screens and so many more of which the people of Palestine have endured. Converging together on our streets, today, we can ride, to stop genocide.

John Munro teaches history at the University of Birmingham. He is author of The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, editor with Kirrily Freeman of Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 and Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989 and, with Radhika Natarajan, author of the Public Books Imperialism Syllabus.