‘Kib­butz Blinken’ and the Lim­its of Protest

Uncat­e­go­rized

‘Kib­butz Blinken’ and the Futil­i­ty of Protest

A con­sid­er­a­tion of protests’ pow­er to per­suade.

Like a lot of com­muters who cross the Potomac, I dri­ve by Antony Blinken’s house fre­quent­ly. The sec­re­tary of state lives on Chain Bridge Road, a long down­hill slope which runs from the CIA to Chain Bridge itself, and which con­nects res­i­den­tial Arling­ton to North­west Wash­ing­ton, DC. It is one of the most-hat­ed roads in the area: nar­row, wind­ing, and at rush hour impass­ably clogged with cars. It is also pocked with per­ilous blind spots, a fact I have only ful­ly appre­ci­at­ed in the eleven months fol­low­ing the Octo­ber 7 attacks on Israel, as pro-Pales­tine pro­test­ers and the Arling­ton Coun­ty Police Depart­ment have engaged in a pro­tract­ed strug­gle over the road­way direct­ly in front of Blinken’s house.

The trou­ble began just a few days after Israel began war on against Hamas. Blinken vis­it­ed the coun­try, met with Ben­jamin Netanyahu, and pro­vi­sion­al­ly assured the prime min­is­ter of Amer­i­can sup­port for Israeli action in the Gaza strip. His words were not so force­ful as Israel’s more fer­vent sup­port­ers wished, yet they were far from the tone its most out­spo­ken crit­ics demand­ed. In the days, weeks, and months that fol­lowed, he main­tained more or less the same atti­tude, which became the Biden administration’s offi­cial stance on the con­flict. This was upset­ting for every­one involved, but most­ly for the pro-Pales­tine side. It did not take long before the DC protest cir­cuit dis­cov­ered Blinken’s address, showed up across from his dri­ve­way, and set up an encamp­ment dubbed “Kib­butz Blinken.”   

For pass­ing motorists, Kib­butz Blinken was yet anoth­er haz­ard on Chain Bridge. Much of the prop­er­ty across the street from the secretary’s house is owned by the Sau­di Ara­bi­an roy­al fam­i­ly, and per­haps for that rea­son lit­tle effort was made to con­tain the dis­grun­tled activists to the road’s shoul­der. In no time, they set up fold­ing tables, posters, and tents all along the road­way and often occu­pied the street itself, caus­ing a per­ma­nent traf­fic jam. The Arling­ton police were called in to con­trol the sit­u­a­tion, and for sev­er­al months, the two sides antag­o­nized each other—not to men­tion all of us passersby—until one morn­ing in late July, the po …