The Price of Warnings Unheeded
Wracked by frustration, the pro-Palestine movement is only getting more violent. The lack of any level headed leadership has removed the brakes from it.
Surveying the burnt facade of Adass Israel Synagogue, Jacinta Allan, the Premier of Victoria, attempted to allay the fears of a community whose house of worship had been firebombed presumably in response to the continued violence in Gaza. But not everyone in the crowd was mollified, and under the withering questioning of street journalist Avi Yemini she withdrew in a rush. On Dec. 10 Australia’s federal Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was also greeted by an unruly crowd. It was only one more in a rash of violent incidents directed against individuals or community institutions in the Jewish diaspora, all in the name of solidarity with Gaza. The irony of these activities is twofold, 1) it has failed to do anything for the plight of the Palestinians and 2) it invalidates the mantra that anti-Zionism is wholly distinct from Jew hatred while potentially making the case for diaspora Jews that they can only be safe in Israel.
The blame for this is in part on witless Jewish community organisations that have become conditioned to working with their local political establishments at the latter's convenience, and also have focused too much on offensive speech and not enough on illegal and violent behaviour. However the other side of the problem is that the culture of the pro-Palestinian movement brings out an especially venomous variety of miscreant eager to use the violence occurring in the Middle East as a pretext to commit acts of violence.
The fire bombing remains unsolved, and on Dec. 11 another incident was added to it: a car was torched and graffiti proclaiming “death to Israiel (sic)” was found on several homes in Woolahra, a Jewish populated area of Sydney. This joins several other similar incidents across the western world:
An Israeli-American man was attacked in a car ramming by a Palestinian individual in the Laguna Beach, CA.
University of Michigan regent Jordan Acker had his home’s front window smashed and his wife’s car spray painted by protesters disgruntled over the school’s refusal to divest from Israel.
Protesters in Montreal, Quebec ran amok on November 23, enraged at a NATO conference being held in the city and vented their frustrations by setting cars on fire and assaulting the police.
In December an improvised explosive device (IED) was thrown into a Jewish communal center in Cape Town, South Africa which police successfully defused.
A student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville was arrested in November after allegedly holding his Jewish roommate at gunpoint and previously making threats against him.
A nightclub goer was severely beaten in Dublin in December by individuals after he answered affirmatively.
I catalog these incidents, which may be incomplete, because one idea I’ve harped on since the Oct. 7 attacks was that violence abroad would not solve violence in the Middle East. I am all for a world where each person can say what they choose no matter how offensive without fear of being abused or coerced into silence. That’s not what the pro-Palestine movement is about; in fact in the Montreal incident the Jewish Canadian journalist Ezra Levant was arrested simply for filming the protesters/rioters while they were openly flouting the law by committing acts of violence.
If you are expecting sanity to prevail, please don’t hold your breath. Recently two leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine, sisters Jena and Noor Chenaa, at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA were banned from campus having been implicated in acts of vandalism. But even more worrying was the fact that they had both firearms and flags of the Hezbollah terror group in the house, apparently belonging to an older brother. The new Trump Administration and the nation’s state and local officials need to recognise the threat from such radicalised circles and ensure that these protest movements do not come to resemble the “Days of Rage” of October 1969 that signaled the decent of Students for a Democratic Society into what became the Weather Underground terror group.