Reframing Solidarity

Joshua Gutterman Tranen considers Sarah Schulman’s “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.”

By Joshua Gutterman TranenMay 17, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Politics

SOLIDARITY. IT’S A TERM one hears often now, and with good cause. Daily on social media, I see calls to join in solidarity with those targeted by the state: disappeared migrants in Salvadoran concentration camps, Palestinians murdered by Israel with American-made bombs, trans people whose lives Republicans are attempting to legislate out of existence—the list keeps growing. But what does it mean to be in solidarity?

In her new book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, Sarah Schulman brings nearly 40 years of organizing work to bear on this question. In clear and accessible prose, Schulman redefines solidarity for the present moment, deploys the psychology of fantasy to examine the common impediments to offering it, and provides guidance on avoiding potential pitfalls. Drawing on anecdotes from her experiences in solidarity movements for reproductive justice, medical treatment for HIV and AIDS, and the liberation of Palestine—and supplementing them with examples from the lives of famous writers and artists involved in those and other social justice movements—Schulman argues for a solidarity rooted in big-tent politics and coalition-based frameworks of collective action.

The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity opens with a historical argument: solidarity today is fundamentally different from solidarity in the past—such as the Civil Rights Movement, women’s liberation, and AIDS activism—which worked by organizing similarly marginalized people around a common issue. According to Schulman, this type of “horizontal” activism is no longer effective at securing material wins because the consolidation of corporate power, the erosion of civil protections and social services, and the militarization of the surveillance state have made it easy to ignore the demands of the oppressed. Solidarity today must work vertically, forging a movement across unequal relationships in which those with greater power advocate and create opportunities for the more vulnerable.

One hazard of this power imbalance is the development of unrealistic expectations, or what Schulman calls the “fantasies” of solidarity. As in her previous books, including Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016) and Ties that Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009), Schulman is curious about the psychology of social dynamics and how it shapes the contours and possibilities of political activism. The common fantasies of solidarity she identifies look a lot like naievete—that once someone with power offers solidarity, victory will come in short order; that acts of solidarity will require no sacrifice on the part of those offering it; that those receiving solidarity will be grateful for the intervention, offering their deference and love to their supporters; and that all possible strategies will be pursued simultaneously and successfully. In such fantasies, the inconvenient truths of complexity, conflict, and the need to make strategic trade-offs—in other words, the meat and bones of coalition-building for long-term movements—are banished.

But Schulman reminds us that movements don’t win victories just because we want them to; rather, time and perseverance are the keys to success. This is a lesson many new activists find challenging, especially if they come from positions of privilege and are unaccustomed to the oppression they oppose. To make this concrete, consider the experience of many non-Palestinians in the United States standing in solidarity with Palestine. How many of us truly understand what life in occupied Palestine has been like, not merely for the past year and a half but for the last 77 years, or 100 years? Reading Schulman, I was reminded of recent comments by scholar and refugee activist Diya Abdo. “Every Palestinian knows that Palestine will be free. I know this,” she said. She then continued: “I also know that Palestine may not be free in my lifetime or my children’s lifetime; I work for justice, for equity, and for a free Palestine regardless.” Both Schulman and Abdo make a similar point: solidarity with Palestine requires dedication to a cause that one might not live to see resolved.

As a counterbalance to the fantasies of solidarity, Schulman proposes clear-eyed necessity as a guide. On “necessity,” Schulman’s intervention is more straightforward, and primarily refers to the moral requirement to offer solidarity, or the process of moving from “bystander” to “friend.” Here, the operative act is listening, which allows for the one offering solidarity to understand what is being asked of them (thereby limiting the growth of fantasies), while also teaching them how they are complicit in the system against which they are now allied.

At first pass, this sounds a little woo-woo, if not downright basic. Of course, one needs to listen to those one seeks to stand alongside. But active listening takes Schulman past simple empathy to a place many are still afraid to go: a recognition of the necessity of Palestinian armed resistance. Schulman recounts that a major “turning point” in her journey toward supporting the Palestinian cause was the realization that she “would not want to live under occupation for even one day.” She then poses this hypothetical to the reader: “If [Americans] were being occupied and controlled, never had safety, and were constantly exposed to repetitive cycles of mass murder and ongoing real violence over decades, wouldn’t they do everything they could to change that? Any honest answer would be yes.”

Throughout the book, Schulman’s commitment to Palestine solidarity takes shape in the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. She does not advocate for armed struggle, and she barely acknowledges the central role it has played in Palestinian political history. Yet her sparse writing on the topic is valuable for demonstrating how the necessity of solidarity demands a recognition of all possible avenues of resistance, and for understanding that a tactic can be valid even if it’s not the one pursued. Schulman’s acknowledgment—without the usual both-sides caveats—that Palestinian armed struggle against Israeli colonialism is a reasonable human response is still far beyond what many Western intellectuals are willing to put in writing. 

Yet, while Schulman’s articulations of the fantasies and necessities inherent in solidarity work are helpful for rethinking how we approach movements today, the book often gets in the way of the clarity it promises. What could have been a slim volume, quickly read and passed hand to hand, is instead a 320-page tome that is nonetheless underwritten in its most crucial parts.

One example of underwriting is the section outlining what the Palestine solidarity movement can learn from the direct action and civil disobedience group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). It’s unsurprising that Schulman turns to AIDS activism for inspiration—she was a member of ACT UP, co-founded the ACT UP Oral History Project, co-produced the documentary United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012), and authored the award-winning Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 (2021). And, as she points out, the current wave of Palestine solidarity organizing in New York City has replicated many of ACT UP’s famous actions, such as sit-in protests in Grand Central Station and the New York Stock Exchange, and the creation of satirical-political newspaper The New York War Crimes, modeled after ACT UP’s New York Crimes.

In The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, Schulman looks to ACT UP’s history for three main takeaways activists might apply to the Palestine solidarity movement: first, avoiding a consensus-based model; second, adopting an action first, theory second approach; and third, strategically leveraging those with more power to achieve wins. From a bird’s-eye view, I find little to disagree with in Schulman’s suggestions. In fact, I could imagine a version of this book that opened with Schulman’s theory of solidarity, went on to explain the operations of fantasy and necessity, and then spent the remainder articulating what US-based Palestine solidarity groups can learn from ACT UP, while analyzing the differences between the two movements. But someone looking for a detailed analysis of those briefly presented takeaways won’t find it, leaving the most important details and insights vague.

Surprisingly, Schulman elides the important historical differences between the ACT UP movement and today’s struggle for Palestine. Though Schulman treats these movements in nearly homologous fashion, they have cohered in very different ways. While ACT UP members did come from a wide range of racial, class, ethnic, and gender backgrounds, they were nonetheless united in a shared identity as people directly affected by HIV and AIDS—an observation that tracks with Schulman’s classification of AIDS activism as “horizontal.” Conversely, members of the Palestine solidarity movement don’t share an internal group identity. Not only are many of the participants not Palestinian, but a large portion are also Jews, the group that pro-Israel and right-wing forces are supposedly protecting from Palestinians. The presence of anti-Zionist Jews within Palestine organizing is therefore exemplary of what Schulman calls vertical solidarity.

This distinction between horizontal and vertical solidarity has serious ramifications for Schulman’s three takeaways. The question of consensus is difficult for Palestine solidarity organizing, and has already fractured elements of the anti-Zionist Left, especially the anti-Zionist Jewish Left. ACT UP might have held infamous hours-long strategy debates, but there was little ambiguity in their bottom line: direct action to end the AIDS crisis. In contrast, not all who claim to stand in solidarity with Palestine agree on the basic terms or goals that define the movement. For example, I know anti-Zionists who use the term “occupation” to refer solely to the occupied West Bank, while others who use that term refer to the entire history of Israel’s settler-colonial relationship to historic Palestine. While it’s true that not all terms or goals have to be agreed upon to act against genocide, this disjunction also means that a different kind of organizing tactic will be necessary for Palestinian solidarity movements, not least because many of the voices in these movements who speak on behalf of Palestine are not Palestinians themselves.

The question of who speaks for Palestine suggests a need to renegotiate Schulman’s second takeaway, regarding the distinction between action and theory. In the case of ACT UP, the group formed in response to a relatively new phenomenon: AIDS. The fight against AIDS certainly involved battling homophobia, racism, and sexism, as well as historical narratives of contagion and illness, but ACT UP’s fight was ultimately against the cultural, political, and biomedical weaponization of a novel pathogen. Theories about what was happening were thus made subordinate to actions aimed at ending the crisis in more concrete terms, usually through direct intervention in government and institutional policies and programs.

In the United States, where most of the Palestine solidarity movement plays out, at least on the discursive level, theory and action have different but equally important roles to play. Many anti-genocide activists position the current conflict not as wholly new but rather as the escalation of a century-long effort to dispossess and destroy Palestinians and their homeland. “Free Palestine” is an anti-genocide slogan for the longue durée: to free Palestine, one must understand why and how a genocide could have taken place to begin with, questions that force a confrontation with the history of settler colonialism. Moreover, in the United States, Palestine activists must contend with both the current genocide and a well-oiled and well-funded propaganda machine that has successfully indoctrinated several generations of Americans. In this context, the need for urgent activist responses to the genocide is clear, but a neat dichotomy between action and theory is not possible, particularly when so much education must first take place to convince many that what’s happening is in fact genocide.

Finally, when it comes to Schulman’s third takeaway, about leveraging those in the movement with relative power, the differences between ACT UP and the present movement for Palestine are crucial. In ACT UP, if two members with different levels of social power undertook two separate actions, those events would most likely still be reported on as actions by members of an AIDS activist group (if they were covered at all, of course). Yet, in the Palestine solidarity movement, those with the greatest relative power—namely Jewish Americans—are treated deferentially. The media will, one imagines, not only be more sympathetic and solicitous of the Jewish American voices than those of their Palestinian comrades, but reporting may also co-opt the message on those grounds, attending to the Jewish person’s imagined safety, well-being, and emotional state ahead of the Palestinian speaker’s, whose people face real violence at the hands of the Israeli state. So, while it is true that the Palestinian solidarity movement needs to leverage non-Jews and Jews with power to achieve their goals, how they do so will require a different set of tactics than those employed by ACT UP.

Taking a step back, and having read many of Schulman’s previous works, what puzzles me about this section of her new book is my sense that Schulman would agree with most, if not all, of what I’ve said about the differences between ACT UP and Palestine solidarity organizing. But this only makes me wonder: in a book about how to offer solidarity today, why didn’t she write about those differences more directly herself? The larger problem is editorial: the ACT UP/Palestine solidarity section is not the only underwritten part of the book, and elsewhere, large sections of chapters are included with no apparent payoff. For example, Schulman returns repeatedly to the idea that those receiving solidarity cannot demand for it to come from a place of pure intention. But this simple, yet important observation is needlessly drawn out in the form of long and cursory biographical sketches of writers and artists—Jean Genet, Carson McCullers, Alice Neel—that add little value to the book. Halfway through reading about Neel’s painting of gay men Schulman tangentially knew, I had to remind myself that I was reading a book about solidarity.

More vexing than the inclusion of extraneous material are the places where Schulman gives up writing entirely. I remain perplexed by the final chapter, which is nominally about both solidarity with trans people and “failed” solidarity. Save for a short introductory paragraph, this “chapter” is just a 50-page transcript of a panel Schulman conducted nearly 10 years ago concerning the political eulogy she delivered at the funeral of trans writer Bryn Kelly, who died by suicide in 2016. Without any analysis or personal reflection in an endnote or preface to this section, readers are left to guess what Schulman wishes them to glean from the reproduced discussion. Is the point that Schulman was the recipient of failed solidarity because many accused her of politicizing Kelly’s death at the funeral? Is it that solidarity can also take the form of those with more power delivering tough feedback to those they stand alongside? Who can say, when the word solidarity doesn’t appear once in the entire transcript? It’s because I respect Schulman as a thinker and trust that she has something important to say about both the failure of solidarity and how queers can show up for our trans siblings that I wish she had directly told readers what she wanted them to take from the transcript, and made that insight more directly connected to the book’s overall argument.

Writing about events that are still unfolding is always a gamble, and Schulman’s book is an example of that predicament. At the printers before Trump’s inauguration, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity already feels like an object from a different time, even as it speaks to the urgency of our moment. The fascists have already taken power, and they are reshaping our government in ever more alarming and precedent-smashing ways. Likewise, the subject positions that determine whether solidarity will be horizontal or vertical are in dramatic flux. Solidarity under fascism will require radical strategies outside of protests and petitions, and the risk associated with offering it will be greater. Our movements will need to be clear-eyed, those with more power will need to make sacrifices, and all will need to dispel fantasies of comfort. And despite its shortcomings, Schulman’s book remains a vital resource for those looking to join the fight. The conditions may have changed between the interregnum of writing and publishing, but one of Schulman’s key points rings truer than ever: “If fighting for abortion rights or other basic rights means breaking the law, so be it.”