Leon Goldenberg

The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania protest by “pro-Palestine” activists targeting Jewish-owned businesses was a pointless hate rally that did nothing for Palestinians and did everything to inflame community tensions, held on the eve of “the Night of Broken Glass,” or Kristallnacht, one of the darkest anniversaries in modern Jewish history, when the Holocaust began. The notion that harassing Jewish delis, restaurants, or Israeli-themed establishments in Philadelphia meaningfully challenges Israeli government policy thousands of miles away is absurd. It is performative activism at its worst. Imagine if these activists reached out to the Jewish community and said, ‘let’s do a joint fundraiser for the humanitarian needs in Gaza in a non-political fashion and find a worthwhile organization that will support Palestinian civilians.’ Imagine if these activists developed pragmatic, achievable, tangible, and attainable policy goals that they could have pushed for in the new Congress to improve the lives of Gazans and promote reasonable US policy that can move the needle in a meaningful way, instead of harassing Jewish businesses and random Jews in Philadelphia. Also imagine if the supposedly non-antisemitic and non-hateful elements of the “pro-Palestine” movement intervened to say, ‘maybe let’s not do this, and maybe our efforts could be better focused elsewhere.’ Instead, this movement has disintegrated into decentralized and highly radicalized networks that feed off each other’s contagious toxicity, rhetorical drunkenness, intellectual incoherence, and persistent self-sabotage. This is why the “pro-Palestine industrial complex” is all about making declarative, self-aggrandizing points, almost never about actually making a difference for the benefit of the Palestinian people. I have been warmly welcomed at these Jewish-owned establishments, including those of Michael Solomonov, even as I have made my strong critiques of the Israeli government’s actions and policies well-known. In the face of such hate and foolishness, I encourage all Philadelphians to support these restaurants.