Anyone who happened to amble by the downtown Manhattan courthouse in early December, just after a jury acquitted Daniel Penny—the former Marine who put Jordan Neely, a deranged and threatening fellow subway passenger, in a chokehold that led to his death—would have noticed something peculiar.
It wasn’t that the sidewalk was filled with protesters, or that they were chanting slogans that ignored the facts of the situation, presenting Neely—a mentally ill man with 42 previous convictions, including for violent assaults on the subway—as an innocent lynched by a malicious white vigilante for no reason other than his being black. It was, instead, that many of the protesters were wearing keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headwear popular with the pro-Palestine crowd, as well as pins or t-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag.
Approximately 5,674 miles separate southern Manhattan from northern Gaza, and neither Penny nor Neely had anything to do with Israel or the Palestinian cause. Why, then, would the activists who rushed to condemn Penny’s actions as racist adorn themselves with Palestinian paraphernalia?
The answer is stark: because “Palestine,” an entity that has never existed, has always been a codeword for chaos. For many activists, being “pro-Palestine” is not to support the creation of a national homeland for some Arabs side-by-side with the State of Israel; the Palestinians themselves, as former president Bill Clinton recently reminded us, have repeatedly rejected every U.S.-brokered attempt at independence. These radicals are pro-Palestine because they are anti-America, and because they champion violent, sectarian conduct that is anathema to our core values.
If that seems like an unfair characterization, consider Fatima Mohammed, one of the leaders of Within Our Lifetime, a cornerstone of New York’s “pro-Palestine” vanguard. “I pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform,” she tweeted on May 9, 2021, “but yolo [you only live once] I guess.” A year later, Mohammed gave a speech in midtown Manhattan, praying to Allah to grant victory to the jihadis. For her tireless advocacy of violence—against America, Israel, and the Jews—she was elected by her classmates to give the commencement address at the City University of New York’s law school graduation. She dedicated her talk to calling for a “revolution” against the “fascist” NYPD and the American armed forces, both of which, she argued, were merely tools of “white supremacy.”
Her views, alas, aren’t rare among the pro-Palestine crowd. Nerdeen Kiswani, another prominent activist, explained in a speech at a 2021 rally that she and her colleagues have a simple aim: “We don’t need tens of thousands of people to shut down and disrupt this city,” she said. “We have to up the stakes.”
The stakes were upped on October 7, 2023. Hours after Hamas’s marauders breached an internationally recognized border and perpetrated their atrocities, New York pulsed with demonstrators waving the flag of the terrorist group that, earlier that day, had raped young women, incinerated infants, and executed Holocaust survivors on camera. They weren’t shy about their desire to globalize the intifadah, Arabic for “armed struggle.” And they made good on that effort: marching into a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, shouting anti-Semitic slogans; disrupting iconic events like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting; occupying college campuses and taking custodial staff hostage; and beating Jews in broad daylight. When NYPD officers, pursuing a knife-brandishing fare evader, opened fire in a Brownsville subway station in September, hitting the suspect and a few bystanders, hundreds of keffiyeh-clad protesters, many waving the Palestine flag, showed up at the station, jumped the turnstile, and proceeded to smash contactless card-readers across the city. In each case, disruption and intimidation were the point.
Those goals appealed to proponents of various other causes, who were happy to huddle together under the green, red, white, and black banner of Palestine. Drawing inspiration from the academic principle of intersectionality, which holds that all struggles of the “marginalized” are intricately linked, these radicals adopted the fashionable iconography of the so-called pro-Palestine resistance.
Their embrace involved more than donning the keffiyeh or waving the flag: soon after October 7, the norms of discourse on the left changed drastically, making it acceptable, even attractive, to cheer on physical violence. When Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League graduate who was reportedly an enthusiast of radical causes, allegedly assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, social media lit up with expressions of glee over the father of two’s death. Taylor Lorenz, the star reporter who parted ways with the Washington Post in part because of her promotion of lunatic anti-Israel conspiracy theories—she had retweeted a post accusing the Israelis of training dogs to rape Palestinian women—appeared on live television to declare that the news of Thompson’s death brought her joy.
Faced with this swelling of rancor, you would think that law enforcement agencies, local and federal, would have a solid plan on how to respond to the violent or intimidating elements of the pro-Palestine movement. At least in New York, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Walking by Manhattan’s Park Lane Hotel recently, I came across a protest aimed at one of its guests, Israel’s former minister of defense Yoav Gallant. The demonstrators, many covering their faces, were aggressive; spotting a man wearing an Israeli flag pin, one shouted that he’d like to give him “the UnitedHealth treatment.”
Mohammed was there, too, leaning against the NYPD’s barricade and leading the crowd in a recitation accusing all Israelis of war crimes. When a man wearing a yarmulke strode up 59th Street and stopped to observe the proceedings, the officers demanded that he move along quickly. The man, clearly upset, asked if he hadn’t the same right as the jihad enthusiasts to stand in the street and express his feelings. An exhausted-looking officer responded that he was merely trying to keep the peace.
This coddling is ineffective. It is also costly: earlier this year, the NYPD estimated it had spent more than $50 million on overtime since October 7, 2023, even as the number of illegal protests—those in which demonstrators engage in violence or commit criminal mischief—shows no sign of slowing.
What, then, might be done to respond to pro-Palestinian violence and illegal demonstrations? Like all complex problems, this one has no easy solutions. The NYPD is already using advanced technology, including drones, to monitor some of the most disruptive activists and groups. Stricter regulatory enforcement is another readily available option; officers should swiftly intervene when protesters block roads, say, or impede pedestrian traffic. We may also demand that federal authorities use every tool at their disposal to crack down on these organized efforts: Within Our Lifetime, for example, has previously partnered with Samidoun, a “pro-Palestine” group designated by the Treasury Department last October as “a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.”
These efforts, while necessary, are unlikely to defeat an organized and energized movement. Facing the threat posed by violent pro-Palestine agitators requires not only muscular law enforcement but, more pressingly, education. Understanding the nature of the pro-Palestine cause, and its radical adherents’ commitment to undoing all that most Americans hold dear, would go a long way toward meeting the challenge we face more effectively. And not a moment too soon: those of us who came of age in the 1990s, the 2000s, and beyond did so without a competing ideological colossus forcing us to recommit ourselves to first principles. True, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a painful blow, but most Americans understandably dismissed radical Islamism as a menace confined largely to faraway and dusty corners of the world. Removed from the clear and present tensions of the Cold War, we didn’t spend much time thinking about what, precisely, we believed, or why it mattered.
If nothing else, the Palestine brigades are challenging us to do just that. Do we believe that political activism ought to be civil, respectful, and persuasive, or do we hold that it’s better to terrorize our fellow Americans until they acquiesce and see the world our way? Do we reject, unequivocally, the use of violence to achieve political aims, or are we comfortable excusing the assassin’s creed if it serves our partisan interests? Are we interested in building a more perfect union dedicated to our shared values, or in surrendering to the tribal bloodlust that has plunged so much of the Third World into darkness?
These are no longer theoretical, high-minded questions. They’re real-world challenges we face every day on the subway, on campus, and in the street. And the choice could not be clearer.
Top Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images