Anti-Israel Terror Will Continue Unless Leaders Crack Down

Two staffers from the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., were murdered in cold blood last week. A young radical chanting “free Palestine” was arrested after allegedly gunning them down outside an American Jewish Committee event at the Capital Jewish Museum. The victims were a young couple on the cusp of engagement, whose bright future together was extinguished in an instant by a fanatic who apparently wanted to “globalize the Intifada.” That’s the phrase chanted at anti-Israel demonstrations—referring to the terror campaigns that killed thousands of Israelis decades ago—and scrawled on statues and campus buildings. Consider the Intifada globalized.

The organizations behind these demonstrations have made no secret of their bloodlust. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a revolutionary group with which the apparent murderer was associated, plasters its name on signs that read “when people are occupied, resistance is justified.” That’s a euphemistic defense for Hamas slaughtering Israeli civilians, an effort the killer sought to “bring home” and “escalate” in solidarity. Outfits like Unity of Fields, which takes its name from Palestinian terrorist groups’ call to action, have joined PSL in various demonstrations and committed vandalism, property destruction, and other acts of civil terrorism.

These groups typically limit their activities to boundary-pushing demonstrations and mass petty crimes, but they have made clear that they see no reason to stop there. “Killing zionazi diplomats is unambiguously anti-imperialist,” Unity of Fields posted on X. The organization “answers the calls from the Palestinian resistance to escalate & besiege the embassies.”

The embassy shooting, in other words, has changed nothing about these organizations except the brazenness of their members. Civil terrorism, unpunished, inevitably drops the modifier, because its logic has always been the logic of terror.

This amounts to the old story about disorder and impunity, applied to domestic terrorism. The Broken Windows theory of policing, pioneered by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, articulated the commonsense idea that visible signs of disorder signal to bad actors that lawless conduct won’t be punished. Police, on this reasoning, need to establish order to prevent petty crimes from mushrooming into more serious ones.

Terror sympathizers know that they can sow chaos without fear of punishment. Leaders in our cities and on campuses have been extremely reluctant to treat these organizations as the malign actors they are. Students in radical organizations are rarely if ever expelled—much less prosecuted—for smashing up buildings, trespassing, and harassing their Jewish and Israeli classmates. Members of radical anti-Israel groups that block roads, deface property, and even commit assault rarely face prosecutions for their crimes, and face prison time more rarely still. Their leaders have not been investigated or prosecuted for organizing such crimes.

As a result, these groups have good reason to believe that they can “escalate” with impunity, sending foot soldiers to commit heinous crimes without putting the whole enterprise at risk. For the ideologues who become terrorists, it’s a sacrifice worth making for a cause they believe stands a chance of bringing down Israel and the West.

Escalation will continue unless leaders get their act together. Federal and state authorities must launch investigations of PSL, Unity of Fields, and all their partners, to examine their role in organizing the “small” crimes that presage bloodshed. Unity of Fields and other groups say that they are “answering the call,” presumably of terrorist organizations. What is the nature of that relationship? Do domestic groups exchange funds or coordinate with foreign terrorist organizations? Are those foreign groups providing them with “material support,” in violation of federal laws? These are questions worth pursuing.

Meantime, authorities should look for opportunities to mend broken windows. That means raising the penalties for civil terrorism and coming down hard on individuals and organizations engaged in such conduct as soon as there is a legal basis to do so, no matter how “minor” the precipitating incident. When radical groups say that they will try to achieve their goals “by any means necessary,” they mean it. They will escalate—unless we incapacitate them first.

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