What the Summer of ’69 Taught Us—and Why We Need It Again in 2025
Just as millions in 1969 emptied campuses and blocked bridges to end an unjust war, today we must mobilize to break Gaza’s siege, defund genocide and awaken a global conscience.
March For The Soul
In the summer of 1969, a generation rose up to confront the injustice of an imperial war. From classrooms to capitol steps, Americans marched not just for peace in Vietnam, but for the soul of a nation being corroded by militarism, racism, and greed. Today, in the summer of 2025, that same moral clarity is needed again—urgently, globally, and unapologetically.
Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is being live-streamed in real time: starving children, bombed hospitals, razed schools. Israel’s siege has cut off food, water, fuel, and medicine from over two million Palestinians, half of them children. And yet, as famine tightens its grip, the U.S. government send billions more in weapons while slashing healthcare and safety nets at home.
As Ben Cohen put it when he disrupted a Senate health committee hearing to protest US support for Israel's war in Gaza saying, “Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs, and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the U.S.” The same lawmakers who accuse Hamas of using Palestinians as “human shields” won’t lift a finger to ease a blockade that is now deliberately starving an entire population.
This moment demands more than outrage—it demands action. Like 1969, it’s time for a summer of sit-ins, strikes, solidarity flotillas, and sustained disruption. Because the siege on Gaza isn’t just a foreign policy failure. It’s a mirror reflecting everything that’s broken: our politics, our priorities, and our willingness to ignore mass death when it’s funded in our name.
A Summer of Reckoning: From ’69 to 2025, We Refuse to Be Silent
In October 1969, more than two million Americans of conscience—students, laborers, mothers and veterans, people from every walk of life—flooded the streets in peaceful defiance of a war that had already claimed 44,000 U.S. lives and millions of Vietnamese lives. On October 15 alone, 500,000 marched in over 700 cities for the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, and five weeks later another 250,000 rallied at the March on Washington to demand an end to the futility of “an endless, pointless war”. Empty campuses, blockaded bridges and factory shutdowns forced the nation’s media, its Congress and its commanders to reckon with a movement that refused to let business proceed as usual.
The Siege of Gaza Today
By Summer 2025, Israel’s naval, land and air blockade of Gaza, in place since 2007, has become a policy of deliberate starvation an ethnic-cleansing. On March 2, 2025, Israel halted all food and fuel shipments into the Strip, causing staple prices to soar by 1,400 percent, bakeries to close for lack of flour by April and the World Food Program’s last kitchens to shut their doors within days.
A UN nutrition survey found that 5.8 percent of children under five—over 2,700 little kids—now suffer acute malnutrition, nearly triple the rate during February’s ceasefire. If the situation persists, nearly 71,000 children under the age of five are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next 11 months.
This is a state-enabled famine.
Where are those who insist Israel is not occupying Gaza? Palestinians do not control their own borders, their airspace, the population registry, the electromagnetic spectrum, the movement of goods or people, or their territorial waters. When you ask what Palestinians want, the answer is simple: to control their own lives.
Children Under Fire
As Palestinians in Gaza scramble for survival, Israeli airstrikes kill hundreds every day. In early June, witnesses described more than 30 Palestinians shot dead at aid distribution points, which UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese condemned as “humanitarian camouflage”. As of April 2024, more than 14,500 of Gaza’s 1.1 million children have been killed since 7 October – thousands more are ‘missing’, presumed buried under the rubble, their deaths unmarked. More than 90% of all school buildings in Gaza have now been damaged or destroyed. How many more must fall before the world remembers these are children, not targets to be eliminated at will?
Two Fronts of Resistance
On June 8, the British-flagged yacht Madleen set sail from Sicily loaded with baby formula, rice, prosthetics and medical kits. Its crew included climate activist Greta Thunberg and MEP Rima Hassan among a dozen volunteers risking arrest in international waters. Israeli naval forces intercepted the vessel, towed it to Ashdod and derided it as a “selfie blockade”, while criminalizing humanitarian aid. The flotilla may not have made it to Gaza, but it further exposed Israel’s strategy bare: starve Gaza first, then punish anyone who tries to feed its people.
At the same time, over 7,500 volunteers, from Tunisia’s football ultras to elderly grandparents, organized the Resilience Convoy. Departing June 9 by land through Libya and Egypt toward the sealed Rafah crossing, they carry medical supplies and food in defiance of Israel’s illegal siege and ongoing genocide. These people and their journeys reminds us that ordinary people should not wait for governments to act while children are being mass-murdered.
Parallel Tactics: Then and Now
In 1969, students repurposed dormitories for teach-ins, professors held seminars on Pentagon budgets and labor unions threatened shutdowns of defense plants. In 1969, students across the United States transformed their campuses into battlegrounds for justice—erecting encampments, shutting down classes, and refusing to let life go on while napalm rained on Vietnam.
Today, that legacy lives on as students from New York to São Paulo to Johannesburg pitch tents once more, demanding divestment from Israel’s war machine and an end to their universities’ complicity in genocide. Yet the same institutions — like My Alma Mater Columbia — that proudly cite past protests in glossy brochures are now colluding with a fascist government—calling in riot police, the national guard, doxxing students, revoking visas, and disappearing young people whose only crime is daring to speak up.
Western Complicity
Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing depends on Western support. Since taking office, the Trump Administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major foreign military sales to Israel. The United States supplies $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel, plus an $8.7 billion supplemental package approved in September 2024 to bolster air-defense systems.
Meanwhile, Israel’s own defense exports climbed to $14.7 billion in 2024, its highest on record, even as its bombardment flattened hospitals and schools in Gaza .
Of course, Europe is no innocent bystander. Germany provides roughly 30 percent of Israel’s major arms imports, including Sa’ar 6-class frigates, torpedoes and specialized ammunition, despite ongoing court challenges.
Italy licensed €2.1 million in weapons exports in late 2023, the UK has issued over $576 million in arms permits since 2015 that include F-35 components, and France continues to ship drone electronics even as it claims transfers have “ceased”.
The European Union facilitates U.S. weapons transit through its ports and runways and has invested over €300 million in defense firms like Rheinmetall and Leonardo, whose products rain down on Gaza’s children.
As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese recently wrote after the Madleen interception, “Madleen’s journey may have ended but the mission is not over. Every Mediterranean port must send boats with aid and solidarity to Gaza,” reminding us that breaking the siege by sea is only the first step toward dismantling this rogue apartheid state that is illegally occupying Palestinian and committing genocide against the native population.
Naming the Crime
Human Rights Watch concludes that Israel’s blockade combined with the systematic destruction of water, sanitation and agricultural infrastructure “amounts to the intentional creation of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population of Gaza,” meeting the Rome Statute criteria for extermination and genocide. South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice argues these policies are “plausibly genocidal,” demanding provisional measures to halt the slaughter and starvation now .
A Call to Conscience
The summer of 1969 taught us that collective action—driven by moral clarity and mass disruption—can shake the foundations of empire. Millions of ordinary people, led by students and anti-war activists, refused to remain complicit in the Vietnam War’s brutality. They marched, occupied campuses, and disrupted daily life to demand an end to a war waged under false pretenses and sustained by lies. It was a moment that proved sustained, visible resistance could not only challenge state violence but inspire a global movement for justice and liberation.
Summer 2025 demands a choice. Will you stand with the victims or side with genocide?
If you’re thinking of renting a boat to chase sunsets and sea breezes, why not round up a few friends who believe in our shared freedom and dignity and set sail for Gaza?
If our governments will not live up to their obligations and act to break the siege and end the genocide, we must force them to do it, by doing it ourselves.
Let find the courage that in 1969 toppled an empire’s war. Palestinians cannot wait for a distant ceasefire.
Students and humans of conscience, this is your Summer. Are you ready to make history?
Two recent images, amid a deluge of images, encapsulate the intensifying moral horror of what is happening in plain sight in Gaza. The first is a piece of footage, filmed from the middle distance on a mobile phone, depicting the silhouette of a small girl staggering through an inferno – at a school on whose roof she and her family had been sheltering, along with other displaced Palestinians, when it was hit by an Israeli missile.
It is as though we are glimpsing this little girl through a porthole on to hell itself: she walks through a furnace of billowing flames and roiling smoke, a figure of unbearable human vulnerability against a backdrop of colossal violence. To see this piece of footage – 11 seconds in length, totally silent – is to feel, for the thousandth time, a small wound open in the surface of the world.
Not going to happen. Fuck Hamas and free the hostages.