Opinion | Blocking the Road Is Civil Terrorism

The anti-Israel demonstrators who have blocked traffic in major cities across the country know that their victims are decent people. There is little risk that the drivers who can’t get to their jobs, families and other obligations will run them over because those drivers are careful to avoid harming others and breaking the law—even as they face down people who flagrantly do both.

It is no coincidence that only one side in the clash between Israel’s friends and foes in the West behaves this way. Those who reacted to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack by doubling down on calls for Israel’s elimination emulate Hamas by inflicting suffering on innocent people to achieve their political ends, albeit at a much smaller scale. Seeing their own cause as absolutely righteous, they are blind to the cruelty of their own actions and prey upon those too decent to respond with deterrent force. They think they are engaging in civil disobedience, the tactic that exposed the injustice of racial segregation. But they aren’t trying to draw attention to the wrongness of the laws they are breaking; they are trying to draw attention to an unrelated political issue. These demonstrators would more accurately be called civil terrorists.