On the 5th of November, one of a great many Gaza solidarity protests was held in Rockville, MD. Extremist supporters of Israel showed up to counterprotest. They tried to shout down the rally, called for the extermination of all Gaza residents and called for turning Gaza into “a parking lot.” Not satisfied with hate speech and open calls for genocide, they got physically pushy with at least one of the pro-Palestine protesters. Cops separated them from the person they were shoving but took no other action against the attackers. Fascists normally don’t arrest Fascists so this is no surprise.

As assaults go, this was low level as the extremists didn’t wade in hitting everyone with flagpoles etc like the Proud Boys at J6, but it’s still an assault. Until now, Israel supporters had quite sensibly avoided Palestininan protests in the DC area. That might be changing-or this may just be an extremist outfit disconnected from their larger community. The latter is to be hoped for but the former is possible. There was more serious fighting on the first weekend of protests both in South Florida and in Washington State. The hate speech was as bad as anything one would expect to hear from the worst hard fascists in the whole US. Overt calls for exterminating the entire population of any community dredge up the very worst memories of 1940’s Europe.