WASHINGTON (TNS) — Commencement season is over, but don’t expect the “pro-Palestine” movement that overtook universities in recent months to dissipate. Given its larger ambitions and significant financial and political support, this protest movement will continue its disruptions nationwide well into the summer.
Nearly eight months after Hamas attacked Israel, it’s abundantly clear that this movement is anything but “pro Palestine.” A recent weekend rally outside the White House featured overt support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and calls to murder Zionists. As they demand a “cease-fire,” these protesters ignore Hamas’ rejection of numerous Israeli offers for just that and ignore its intentional use of civilians as human shields.
One would think a movement ostensibly about saving Palestinian lives would urge Hamas to release the hostages and surrender, which would immediately end the war. Instead, their chants of “We don’t want two states, we want 1948” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” make clear they support the U.S.-designated terrorist organization and its antisemitic objective: to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
Furthermore, the invocations “by any means necessary” and to “globalize the intifada” are licenses to replicate Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 — the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust — and Yasser Arafat’s second intifada — the three-year terror campaign he launched after rejecting an opportunity to establish a Palestinian state by sending suicide bombers to kill Israeli civilians at home.
Some may dismiss this movement as nothing more than a small, self-evidently noxious cadre of extreme antisemitic students with no constituents outside the university quad. Yet, according to the FBI, antisemitic hate crimes are up three-fold, with some of the assaults against Jews most reminiscent of 1930s Germany occurring on university campuses.
And while the average participant may know little about the cause for which they protest, they certainly share their pro-Hamas comrades’ political goals — and the movement’s organizers have the means to pursue them far beyond America’s ivory towers.
The New York Post and Politico recently revealed that major Democratic and progressive donors have given substantial funds to Students for Justice in Palestine, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Within Our Lifetime, Jewish Voices for Peace and other pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist organizations leading this movement in recent years. Some of these donors may overlook or excuse their recipients’ anti-Zionism as, falsely, something distinct from antisemitism, but they share a common political agenda.
More concerning is that this marriage between the pro-Hamas movement and powerful domestic interest groups has a third bedfellow: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, the CCP has been funding Shut It Down For Palestine (SID4P), an “anti-capitalist, anti-police and anti-government protest movement” that mobilizes frequent demonstrations in “escalating direct-action campaigns [that] target critical infrastructure and public spaces.” SID4P, notably, was formed after Oct. 7.
Under the pretense of protesting the Israel-Hamas war, this unholy alliance of domestic and foreign actors threatens the fabric of American society.
Targeting the American Jewish community is just the first step. Small in number and with a preference for accommodation rather than confrontation when threatened, American Jews are unlikely to mount a serious, coordinated response. Moreover, many progressive American Jews can be recruited as useful tools to cover their antisemitism in the cloak of anti-Zionism, as if the two are distinct.
But what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. Antisemitism is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Today’s contagion is a particular strain of anti-Americanism that seeks social and political revolution, “by any means necessary.”
Now, with the school year over, look for this virus to relocate to cities with weak or sympathetic leadership, as we’ve seen in Washington, D.C., and at UCLA.
Following the successful college encampments, the movement might continue in the popular leftist tradition and establish “occupation zones” across the country that combine the populism of 2008’s Occupy movement with the pseudo-sovereignty of Seattle’s 2020 Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, yet with more overt anti-Jewish and anti-American animus.
Of course, the real prize this summer is Chicago for the Democratic National Convention in August. The parallels to the events of the 1968 DNC in Chicago are already apparent, except for one important distinction: Unlike his predecessor Richard Daley, today’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, is more likely to join the protesters than silence them when they chant “Genocide Joe.”
The good news is that Americans are waking up to the threat the pro-Hamas movement and its connections to progressive organizations and malign foreign actors pose to our society. Still, pushing back will require voters and donors to carefully consider how they allocate their political and financial support.
Antisemitism has destroyed every society it infects. Hopefully we are not too late in diagnosing and destroying it before it destroys us.
(Daniel Flesch in a Visiting Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.)
 - Shopify)