Most Of The Building Blocks For Revolutionary Action In The West Are Now In Place, But Which Revolution?

Palestinians | MEMRI Daily Brief No. 784

What would you do to stop what you consider ultimate evil? If you are truly sincere, the likely answer is that you would do whatever it takes. “Genocide,” an incandescent, inciting word much used these days, would seem to be part of what many would regard as evil.[1] But these days that incitement, in terms of public rhetoric, is used almost exclusively in regards to the State of Israel, Jews and Israel’s main supporter, the United States of America.[2]

Several writers – I was one of them – have compared the student unrest seen over the past two years against Israel and the Gaza War with Sixties anti-Vietnam War activism in the United States and Western Europe.[3] That large, usually peaceful, movement did spin off several very small, extremely violent, leftist revolutionary movements that endured for years even after the war that had initially triggered student protests had ended. These groups, of which the Weather Underground is the perfect example, had made two transitions: They moved from a specific criticism (the Vietnam War is bad) to a more general, systemic one (the system or the regime is bad and is irredeemable) and they embraced revolutionary violence.

In early 2025 we have seen several examples of what could be seen as revolutionary violence in the United States inspired by opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza:

On April 13, 2025 a 38-year-old man firebombed the official residence of the governor of Pennsylvania while Governor Shapiro and his family slept inside. The arsonist, Cody Balmer, said that he wanted to kill Shapiro, a Jewish Democrat, because of what Shapiro “wants to do to the Palestinian people,” according to the Pennsylvania State Police.[4]

On May 21, 2025, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez shot to death two local employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., outside of a public event hosted by the American Jewish Committee at the Jewish National Museum.[5] Rodriguez was an enthusiast of left-wing and anti-American causes but his immediate motivation was “Free Palestine,” as he himself chanted for the camera after his arrest.

On June 1, 2025, Egyptian illegal migrant Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Islamist who arrived in the United States only in 2022, used Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower against a Boulder, Colorado gathering of Jews supporting Israeli hostages in Gaza.[6] Soliman also called for “Free Palestine.”

On the surface, Balmer (who seems to have mental issues), Rodriguez, and Soliman are very different individuals. Two are American and one is a foreigner. Balmer seems to have been vaguely left-wing, while Rodriguez was a far-left true believer. Soliman is an enthusiast of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Three very disparate individuals, and yet all three were motivated to take direct, violent action against Jews by the cause of Palestine, specifically the situation in Gaza.

We have so far, a pretty good fit between some of the elements that prevailed with the situation in the late 1960s and today: a war generates a widespread, student-led protest movement; the protest movement combines or agglomerates other causes; the movement transcends the specifics of the war that generated the protests in the first place; targeted violence – not just the three mentioned but many other lesser examples – connected to the cause ensues.

Here the similarities fray and the comparisons end. We do not yet have, that we know of, actual political movements committed to revolutionary violence along the lines of the Weather Underground or the Black Guerrilla Family. We do have a broad swathe of organizations and individuals – Antifa and Leftist/Socialists – who practice a lower level of direct street action that approaches violence and includes things like simple assault, seizing and destroying property, and disturbing public order. This is not insignificant but is not – not yet – the clandestine, terrorist revolutionary action we saw in the Days of Rage.

Here is where our near future diverts radically from the situation in the heyday of the Weather Underground. Back then, the revolutionaries got older, some died and others were captured, others started families, America society moved on from Vietnam, the Seventies led to the Reagan years and the capitalist and consumerist excess of the 1980s and beyond.[7]

Today, we see a much different scenario unfolding. Instead of revolutionary ardor being curbed by rising prosperity, we see an age of looming economic disruption. Not only is the West, including the United States, saddled with enormous debt, but family formation and home buying, activities that tend to move people toward the political right, among the young at historic lows.[8]

Even worse, especially for the young is the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the workplace. Not only does AI threaten jobs in general, its immediate target will be entry-level white-collar jobs, the very positions that new university graduates would be looking for as they start their careers.[9] College-educated women may be hard hit by the end of office work.[10] This means that we may see in the West – very soon – that phenomenon many of us have seen in third world countries in pre-revolutionary situations: hordes of well-educated young people with nothing to do – no job, no house, no marriage prospects.[11] Just time to seethe and ponder.

Maybe they will become the harbingers of a “Free Palestine” themed violent revolution, melding leftism and Islamism into a potent revolutionary cocktail, the continuation of the so-called Red-Green Alliance we already see in several Western European countries.[12] But the reality is that we do not know what these masses will do – just that they are likely to exist and to be very dissatisfied.

Perhaps their cause will be instead an anti-AI Luddism or even, one can hope, we are on the verge of a mass religious revival or a turning toward the, often derided and battered, and yet eternal wellsprings of the West – Classical and Christian, as economist Philip Pilkington has suggested.[13]

Revolution is coming. It will be disruptive and even violent. But what it is for and what it will be against and what comes out of it is not at all clear.

AUTHOR

ALBERTO M. FERNANDEZ

Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.

RELATED VIDEO: U.S. college protests: The parallels between Gaza and Vietnam

SOURCES:

[1] Jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/from-blood-libel-to-genocide-libel/

[2] Mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2024/12/the-onslaught-against-the-jews-is-an-onslaught-against-the-west, December 26, 2024.

[3] See MEMRI Daily Brief No. 551, Blinking Terror Lights – But What Kinds Of Terror?, December 8, 2023.

[4] Abcnews.go.com/US/alleged-arsonist-targeted-pennsylvania-gov-josh-shapiro-palestine/story?id=120860365, April 16, 2025.

[5] Justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/federal-charges-filed-after-deadly-shooting-israeli-diplomats-dc, May 22, 2025.

[6] See MEMRI TV Clip No. 12048, Boulder, CO Firebomber Mohamed Sabry Soliman Recorded Video Before Attack Declaring: Jihad Is More Beloved To Me Than My Mother, Wife, And Children; Allah Is Greater Than The Zionists And America, June 3, 2025.

[7] Time.com/4549409/the-weather-underground-bad-moon-rising, November 2, 2016.

[8] Ifstudies.org/blog/the-societal-cost-of-the-marriage-decline, March 5, 2024.

[9] Msn.com/en-us/news/technology/anthropic-ceo-says-ai-could-wipe-out-half-of-all-entry-level-white-collar-jobs/ar-AA1FEPBU?ocid=BingNewsSerp, May 28, 2025.

[10] Msn.com/en-gb/money/other/how-the-ai-takeover-might-affect-women-more-than-men/ar-AA1FiQne?ocid=BingNewsSerp, May 22, 2025.

[11] Carnegieendowment.org/sada/2024/04/algerias-graduate-studies-dilemma?lang=en, April 18, 2024.

[12] Start.umd.edu/publication/emerging-red-green-alliance-where-political-islam-meets-radical-left, 2013.

[13] Multi-polarity.com/episodes/episode/1ccca10a/special-edition-pilkington-launches-the-collapse-of-global-liberalism, June 5, 2025.

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