A popular cause begins to gather steam. Originating from leftist activists, it attacks its target with unremitting focus and ferocity. The movement runs contrary to all available evidence when analyzed rationally, but it attains a sharp emotional resonance. It gains steam from social media algorithms juiced by foreign actors eager to promote division and advance their own preferred policies. It begins to break containment by attracting support in the center and even on parts of the Right. And it suddenly becomes mainstream, turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Sound like the “Free Palestine” movement? Yes, but also the increasingly vicious backlash against data centers. While the turn against Israel — rooted in the libel that early Zionists were ruthless settler-colonialists displacing an indigenous people and, more recently, in the calumny that the Jewish state supposedly committed a genocide in Gaza — has taken years, even decades, to outgrow its origins on the far Left, the resistance to the facilities powering the artificial intelligence revolution has reached escape velocity in record time.

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The similarities between the two causes are abundant, even if their respective tempos differ. Repelling both of these false and noxious movements will be as challenging to execute as it is critical to the future of the liberal democratic world.

Opposition to Israel is foundational to the extreme progressive worldview, dating back to Soviet times. As the Cold War intensified, Soviet leaders allied themselves with the Arab world and wielded opposition to the Jewish state as a cudgel against imperialism and capitalism. The Russians even formed the so-called Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public to dissuade citizens from departing the deteriorating USSR for the sunnier climes of Israel. Communist fellow-travelers the world over echoed Moscow’s fervent advocacy against the Jewish state.

The anti-Israel movement entered a dormant phase beginning in the early 1990s with the advent of the peace process that saw the emergence of an autonomous Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. It came roaring back to life in late 2000 after Yasser Arafat spurned Israel’s generous offer of a Palestinian state and instead launched a bloody intifada that claimed the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians. The conflict spawned the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions initiative that germinated on college campuses throughout the country, seeking to equate the Jewish state with apartheid South Africa.

The Oct. 7, 2023, massacre carried out by Hamas terrorists supercharged the movement, shunting aside previous pet progressive causes like racial equity and the “climate crisis.” Perhaps the most pristine example of the reprioritization of leftist activism was illustrated by Greta Thunberg, the environmental crusader who donned a keffiyeh, joined a flotilla to Gaza, and reconstituted herself as an ardent opponent of the Jewish state.

While protests against Israel multiplied on campuses throughout the spring of 2024, it began to stretch outside the ivory tower, powered by social........

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