u/HummusSwipper

Am I the only one watching the footage coming out of NYC lately? The lack of discussion is making me wonder if I've finally become the neurotic Jew myself lmao

If you're unaware there were several protests in NYC under the pretext of protesting "real estate events", where we’ve seen a shift from political demonstration to something much more sinister: residential intimidation. There were two major escalations in the last week:

• Park East (May 5): Pro-Palestinian protesters breached police lines at a synagogue with enough violence to hospitalize an NYPD officer with a severe leg injury.
• Midwood (May 11): This protest moved into the heart of a residential Jewish neighborhood. You can see videos of protesters on private lawns, an elderly man shoved to the ground (hitting his head on a tree), and reports of a young girl being assaulted.

These protestors weren't chanting at a government building, they were screaming "Death to the IDF" and "Zionism will fall" into the windows of family homes while waving Hezbollah flags and the Hamas "red triangle" symbols.

The first thing that came to my mind was images of white supremacist tactics of the 70s and 80s. What we’re seeing in Midwood is a literal copy of what hate groups used to do to terrorize Black neighborhoods:

1. Boston (1974): White anti-integration mobs marched through Black neighborhoods. The goal wasn't a policy debate, it was to signal: "You are not safe here. This is our territory."
2. Chicago: Neo-Nazis and the KKK used residential marches specifically to create "no-go zones" for Black families, using hate symbols to mark the neighborhood.

Both then and now, the goal is the same: terrorize minorities in their homes.

And there is a sad irony here that I must mention: seeing people of color participating in these exact same tactics is a tragic role reversal. There is something deeply broken about a movement that claims to be about "social justice" while using the literal manual of the white supremacists who terrorized their own parents and grandparents just 50 years ago.

When you adopt the tools of the supremacist (the marking of homes, the intimidation of the elderly, the physical targeting of a neighborhood based on who lives there) you're not doing anything for Palestine, you just become the new face of the same old bigotry.

Admittedly I don't live in these neighborhoods, and yeah drawing parallels between the pro-Palestinian movement and other hate groups feels like beating a dead horse, but I felt like this had to be mentioned. I feel like we are witnessing a cycle where radicalization has convinced people that they can "liberate" one group by terrorizing another in their living rooms.

History is less than half a century old here. This is a reboot of the most shameful era of American residential warfare, and if we don't recognize the tactics for what they are, we're letting the same old hate rebrand itself as "activism" in real-time.

Thanks for reading.