Tal Fortgang
WSJ, Jan. 10, 2024
“If the costs of continuing to support Israel are too high, they figure, Americans will start lobbying their elected officials to capitulate to terrorists at home and abroad.”
The anti-Israel demonstrators who have blocked traffic in major cities across the country know that their victims are decent people. There is little risk that the drivers who can’t get to their jobs, families and other obligations will run them over because those drivers are careful to avoid harming others and breaking the law—even as they face down people who flagrantly do both.
It is no coincidence that only one side in the clash between Israel’s friends and foes in the West behaves this way. Those who reacted to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack by doubling down on calls for Israel’s elimination emulate Hamas by inflicting suffering on innocent people to achieve their political ends, albeit at a much smaller scale. Seeing their own cause as absolutely righteous, they are blind to the cruelty of their own actions and prey upon those too decent to respond with deterrent force. They think they are engaging in civil disobedience, the tactic that exposed the injustice of racial segregation. But they aren’t trying to draw attention to the wrongness of the laws they are breaking; they are trying to draw attention to an unrelated political issue. These demonstrators would more accurately be called civil terrorists.
Why would anti-Israel activists think infuriating thousands of their fellow citizens with useless stunts will win allies for the cause? That question is based on the incorrect assumption that these activists are trying to persuade or win sympathy from those on the fence. Rather, the demonstrators, like Hamas and other “decolonization” groups, are trying to make civilian life miserable, while forcing people to draw a mental connection between that misery and some political status quo. … [To read the full article, click here]
