There is a massive, unspoken hypocrisy playing out on our streets right now. If you look closely at the crowds shutting down traffic for the latest city-wide anti-ICE protests, you will notice something deeply disturbing: it is the exact same mob that spent the last year marching against Israel.

A little over two weeks ago, the high school I attend allowed a student-led anti-ICE walkout to take place on campus. Out of curiosity, I took the liberty of digging a little deeper to see exactly who was in charge of organizing this event. What I found shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. There were about four core students leading the charge, and the majority of them are active participants in the toxic “Free Palestine” movement that has relentlessly infiltrated our education system.

Then, I started to notice my fellow Jewish peers voicing their support for the protest and making plans to attend. These are students I know personally. These are girls who are active members of BBYO. They have Israeli flags and yellow hostage ribbons in their Instagram bios. They proudly claim to be Zionists who actively fight antisemitism. Yet, hours later, I watched them post pictures on their stories from the local ICE protest—with a Palestinian flag waving prominently in the frame right next to them.

Is this not utterly ridiculous?

If I shared the same political ideology as these students and genuinely believed that protesting ICE would make a difference, I still couldn’t bring myself to participate. Does the fact that 50% of the crowd consists of the exact same people driving the anti-Israel movement not bother them? Because it bothers me. In my opinion, if you are a real Zionist—someone who believes Israel has a right to exist in the Jewish people’s indigenous homeland—you cannot tolerate the blatant ignorance of these crowds, let alone march shoulder-to-shoulder with them when they are actively chanting for an intifada. 

The harsh reality is that the vast majority of people at these city-wide protests have absolutely no idea what they are actually demonstrating against. They are simply marching for a trend. This isn’t just an observation; it is a measurable phenomenon. A November 2024 study published in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed over 35 million social media posts and found that a staggering 75% of political links are shared by users who never even clicked to read the article. They read a flashy, biased headline on Instagram, listen to whatever their heavily politicized teachers tell them, and show up to scream into a megaphone without ever doing their own due diligence or fact-checking a single claim.

These movements are one and the same. They operate as a singular, toxic, and often violent crowd driven by performative outrage rather than principle. This is the exact same demographic of activists who cheered when Charlie Kirk was shot last fall, yet demanded the nation weep when a woman in Minnesota was killed by an ICE officer, who claims she was trying to run an officer over. They only care about the facts when they fit their specific agenda. They have completely lost the plot.

You cannot compartmentalize your activism when the mob you are joining fundamentally despises who you are. It is time for young Jewish students to wake up, look at who is holding the megaphone, and stop giving credibility to a movement that would gladly turn on them the second the protest is over.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)