It’s been a dangerous spring for American Jews. The country’s anti-Israel movement has traditionally focused its ire on the Jewish state. However, adherents are now brazenly harming Jews, and a suspected Jew, in the United States. 

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Over seven weeks, Jews suffered three high-profile attacks. On April 13, the official residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) was firebombed while his family slept after the first Passover Seder. NBC News reported that the attacker told a 911 operator that he wouldn’t “take part in [Shapiro’s] plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people” and that “our people have been put through too much by that monster,” referencing Shapiro.

On May 22, Israeli Christian Yaron Lischinsky and American Jew Sarah Milgrim, two young Israeli Embassy staffers, were killed while leaving a young professionals event at Washington, D.C.’s Capital Jewish Museum. An eyewitness told the BBC that the keffiyeh-toting gunman informed police, “‘I did this for Gaza. Free Palestine. There’s only one solution, intifada revolution,’ and he just kept yelling ‘Free Palestine.’” 

And on June 1, hours before the Shavuot holiday started, Jews were firebombed while participating in Boulder, Colorado’s Run for Their Lives walk and run event, which peacefully raises awareness for Israel’s remaining hostages. According to Colorado’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, the attacker “yelled ‘Free Palestine!’” and he “caus[ed] burn injuries to eight individuals.” He further told law enforcement that “he wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.” 

Attacks have heightened American Jews’ sense of palpable danger since Oct. 7, 2023. In November 2023, 69-year-old Paul Kessler was killed after an anti-Israel protester struck his head with a megaphone at a California protest. However, having three incidents in quick succession signals an intensified threat. They also shed light on the Red-Green alliance — that is, the far Left and Islamists, who power the anti-Israel movement.

Kyle Shideler, director and senior analyst for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, observed that Shapiro’s alleged attacker, Pennsylvanian Cody Balmer, “appeared to have something of an anarchist persuasion, and Shapiro was an object of hate on the Left because of his Israel stance,” which the anti-Israel Left vilified during the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, Elias Rodriguez, the Chicagoan who is charged with killing Lischinsky and Milgrim, is “a Stalinist and Maoist, who felt the U.S. would be improved by a mass persecution of white Americans,” including genocide, according to Ryan Mauro, investigative researcher of extremist groups and foreign threats at the Capital Research Center.

Rodriguez is “a microcosm of what’s happening in the pro-terrorism, seditionist movement in America,” Mauro explained. Rodriguez previously belonged to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a Marxist group Mauro told me he deemed “pro-terrorism” in his study of the anti-Israel movement, as it “endorsed the Oct. 7 atrocities and wants a revolution to overthrow the government.” Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project, added that “PSL is a key cog in a major Chinese Communist Party-backed network active all across North America.”

Based on Rodriguez’s manifesto, he was “radicalized 11 years ago, when he first started following the news about Israeli counterterrorism operations in Gaza,” Mauro said. 

Faran Jeffery, deputy director of Britain’s Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism think tank, noted Rodriguez had “participated in protests organized by the ANSWER Coalition,” which, like the PSL, is “known for their anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian stances.” Rodriguez expressed solidarity with “Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated,” and lauded Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s leaders. His manifesto, “titled ‘Escalate For Gaza, Bring The War Home,’” characterized his actions “as a political protest against what he perceived as genocide in Gaza and U.S. support for Israel.” 

“Rodriguez’s worldview was shaped by Marxist groups and admiration for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah,” Jeffery explained. “These ideologies overlap in their anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist narratives, creating a potent and increasingly normalized cocktail of radicalism. It’s not mainstream — but it’s loud, present in universities, activist groups, and online.” 

Finally, Egyptian national Mohamed Soliman, “the Boulder attacker, by all appearances was a self-identified jihadist, and media reports suggest connected to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Shideler said. “We know, of course, that Brotherhood-linked mosques have been producing copious antisemitic material and Brotherhood-linked organizations have played a major role in protest organizing.” 

Where does all of this leave American Jews? Mitchell Silber, executive director of New York’s Community Security Initiative and a former New York City Police Department senior intelligence and counterterrorism official, told me: 

“The volume of alerts we’re seeing from our social media scraping tools — flagging posts that could indicate real threats — is happening at a much higher pace than anything we saw before the incidents in D.C. and Boulder. I’d call it unprecedented. The level of threat American Jews are facing right now is unlike anything I’ve seen.

What’s truly unprecedented is that American Jews are being targeted explicitly because of Israel’s actions. Just look at the pattern: The Boulder shooter, who told investigators he ‘wanted to kill all Zionist people,’ had been planning his attack for a year. In Washington, the attacker shouted ‘Free Palestine’ right after the shooting. And the arsonist who tried to burn down Shapiro’s home during Passover admitted he acted because of Shapiro’s support for Israel.

These incidents are different from past attacks like the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh or the hostage crisis in Colleyville, Texas. Those were devastating in their own right, but the motivations were different — Pittsburgh was driven by anti-immigration hate targeting HIAS, and Colleyville was about trying to free an al Qaeda fighter. What sets the recent wave apart is that these aren’t just antisemitic in a general sense. These are attacks on Jewish communities here in the U.S. because, in the eyes of the attackers, American Jews are stand-ins for Israelis they can’t reach. That’s the critical shift.”

The campus anti-Zionists’ paradigm has gone big. For years, Jewish students and faculty have been harassed, ostracized, and worse at American universities by Israel boycott supporters. Ostensibly, those campaigns target Israel, but in practice, local Jews and Israelis suffer.

Harvard Professor Emerita Ruth Wisse, who watched this trend develop up close, wrote in National Affairs in 2017: “Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism … can best be described as the organization of politics against the Jews. Whether the ideological justification precedes or follows its political implementation, it furthers the goals of parties and regimes by using Jews as scapegoats. Anti-Jewish politics is fluid and flexible, directed at what Jews are said to represent. Appearing to oppose only the Jews is essential to its political success. Whatever its auspices, it is always anti-liberal, anti-pluralistic, and against free-market competition in goods and ideas.”

The buzziest, real-world example of Wisse’s observation is Zohran Mamdani, the Democrats’ nominee for New York City mayor. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board recently opined, Mamdani’s socialist base was “energized not by the candidate he would later become, but by the anti-Israel obsessive he has always been.” Among the outlet’s supporting examples was Mamdani’s public comment on Oct. 8, 2023, calling for Israel’s “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.” Mamdani supports boycotting Israel. “He proposed a 2023 bill cracking down on most Jewish institutions that donate to Israel. He conspicuously declined to co-sponsor Holocaust remembrance resolutions the past few years, and he defends the chant ‘globalize the intifada,’ despite its call for violence and intimidation in our streets.”

In short, anti-Zionists target Jews, but their shared movement’s primary target lies elsewhere. Jew-hatred unites the Red-Green alliance, but adherents loathe the West more broadly. Attacking Jews, a relatively tiny group of 15 million people globally, is simply considered the least risky path.

Like Wisse, Shideler characterized antisemitism as “the method being used, rather than the objective. The objective is a political one: defeat of Israel, America, and the West, and the institution of a communist or Islamist revolution. Antisemitism is, in a sense, ‘the means’ for whipping their cadres into a fervor and inspiring them to violence.” Attacks represent problems of “national security and subversion” and are “ultimately aimed at all Americans and the destruction of our shared way of life.” 

Given that, what should all Americans know, not only about the immediate threat facing American Jews but also about the Red-Green-fueled anti-Israel movement? For starters, this movement is not peaceful. Mauro’s report concluded that “the current anti-Israel protest movement on and off the college campuses is driven by over 150 pro-terrorism groups, with the vast majority supporting Hamas and/or the October 7 terrorist attacks,” and “a large proportion of the protesting groups support” Iranian-aligned terrorists, including the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Additionally, this “movement is increasingly militant and criminal, with significant elements pushing it to escalate into a wider domestic terrorism campaign.”

Jeffery believes Rodriguez’s attack highlighted “how ideological causes, when combined with personal grievances, echo chambers, or global events, can escalate into extremist action. A deep identification with a cause can lead individuals to adopt a black-and-white worldview, where violence becomes morally justifiable or even ‘necessary’ to advance a cause.” Problematically, international hot spots become “emotional triggers for U.S. activists,” so what happens overseas doesn’t stay there.

There must be “better early detection systems for radicalization, a broader national conversation about political violence across the spectrum, and more responsible discourse, both online and offline, about complex global conflicts and their domestic ramifications,” Jeffery advised. Rodriguez’s attack further raised questions “about what kind of civic space the U.S. wants to protect, and what kinds of extremism are quietly taking root.” Jeffery said that Rodriguez’s attack was “anti-Israel” and “ethnic/religious violence, as well as antisemitic terrorism. Modern antisemitism conflates all Jews with Israeli government policy and sees Jews as avatars of global power. This creates a dangerous climate where Jewish institutions and people are seen as ‘fair game.’”

For his part, Omar Mohammed, senior research fellow at the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, expressed alarm at increasing violence “targeting Jews in the United States” that reveals “the shifting and increasingly permissive landscape of extremism in the country.” Such incidents “are increasingly rationalized, downplayed, or cloaked in political language that seeks to justify hatred as moral outrage. In some circles, antisemitism is no longer even whispered; it is shouted.” There’s “a dangerous erosion of social safeguards” pushed “by extremists” but also “by broader cultural and political actors willing to flirt with, or excuse, antisemitic tropes.”

Mohammed traced negative changes to “a toxic convergence of online radicalization, the decline of institutional trust, the exploitation of identity politics, and the resurgence of conspiracism — often with Jews cast once again as scapegoats,” with the internet amplifying everything. “What’s especially disturbing are the linguistic and symbolic cues,” Mohammed said, referencing literary scholar Victor Klemperer’s comments about 1930s Germany. “As he perfectly put it, ‘Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: They are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a time, the toxic reaction sets in.’” Mohammed explained, “They accumulate, shape perception, and gradually create an atmosphere in which violence no longer feels exceptional but expected.”

“The so-called Red-Green alliance … provides a particularly toxic framework through which antisemitism is laundered into public discourse,” Mohammed said. “If the United States fails to protect its Jewish citizens, the consequences will be felt not only globally but acutely and destructively within its borders.” He warned, “Pro-Hamas and pro-terrorism slogans, especially when deployed in ways that incite violence or glorify brutality, cannot be tolerated under the guise of First Amendment protection. The failure to draw these lines invites impunity and, with it, more violence.”

Far-left violence especially merits more attention. Shideler commented that “the notion that individuals who engage in terrorist acts or acts of political violence are merely radicalized loners or crazy people is completely wrong. Elias Rodriguez existed within a milieu of communist organizations with an extensive history, and with a cogent ideology and explicit and detailed doctrines of behavior … and based on endorsements from groups like the DSA Liberation Caucus and Unity of Fields, his action was … viewed [by comrades] as a useful method for advancing their political goals.”

There’s been “a growing wave of far-left — that is, anarchist or communist — violence,” Shideler noted. That includes antifa’s 2016 attacks on Trump backers, “mass rioting” at 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, “Jane’s Revenge attacks on pro-life and church buildings,” attacks on “Tesla dealerships, and now targeted assassination.” 

To counter this extremism more effectively, Shideler recommended returning to “a counterintelligence approach” that would actively “disrupt revolutionary and foreign-backed subversive groups” capitalizing on public debates “to agitate and demoralize the American people and undermine our faith in our country and government.”

Relatedly, Westrop observed that “far-left violence has erupted while jihadist violence in North America has seemingly lessened. American Islamist networks understand, far better than other radicals, the importance of lawful extremism,” which includes focusing on elections and “subvert[ing] public institutions.”

Westrop considered “the pernicious danger of lawful Islamism” Western democracies’ “bigger danger,” while the hard Left threatens “Jewish institutions.” Hours before news broke of Israel attacking Iran, Westrop noted that “war with Iran” could be a wild card: “There are significant Shiite Islamist networks in the United States. And unlike their Sunni counterparts, the Shiite Islamists are organized hierarchically. So orders from Tehran and fatwas from the grand ayatollahs could, potentially, lead to violence on American streets, especially against Jewish targets.”

As a solution, Westrop urged “all Western governments” to end “Iranian, Russian, Chinese, Qatari, and Turkish funding of extremist networks in the United States. Shut down networks that abuse the 501(c) nonprofit system, on which all of these radicalizing forces subsist. Restart the prosecution of foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act laws. And start designating as terrorists those nonviolent domestic groups ideologically linked to foreign terrorist organizations.”

USAID FUNDS FLOW TO TERRORIST-TIED ORGANIZATIONS 

Finally, immigration-related procedures require attention. Considering Soliman, J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy, commented, “It’s easy to beat up on the FBI for not knowing about these lone wolves, but the fact these people are not being screened when they’re issued visas in the first place” is the real problem. Soliman “was part of a Muslim Brotherhood network, so anyone who’s part of these networks shouldn’t be in the country in the first place.”

The Red-Green alliance poses a multipronged threat. While the anti-Israel movement’s Jew-hatred has become increasingly blatant and deadly, the superpower we all call home remains its ultimate target. It’s time for Americans, and especially our government and law enforcement, to adjust to that reality fully.

Melissa Langsam Braunstein (@slowhoneybee) is an independent writer in metropolitan Washington.