The 'Gaza Playbook' arrives to America's streets.
Tactics developed to delegitimize Israel are now being deployed to recast American law enforcement as an occupying force.
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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The first sign that something had changed was not the chanting. It was the flags.
At protests against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across America — outside courthouses, detention centers, and federal buildings — Palestinian flags began appearing with increasing regularity. Not as curiosities. Not as side statements. But as central symbols. Gaza invoked at immigration rallies. Keffiyehs draped over signs about deportation. Chants about ICE sliding seamlessly into denunciations of Israel.
This did not happen spontaneously. It was made permissible — made kosher — by anti-Zionist Jewish groups that have spent years constructing the moral architecture necessary to fuse Palestinian nationalism with American domestic protest. What would once have appeared to be ideological hijacking is now treated as moral clarity. Palestinian symbols at anti-ICE rallies no longer require explanation. They confer legitimacy.
Anti-Zionist Jews are taking the lead in Americanizing the intifada. And nowhere was this more visible, or more consequential, than in Minneapolis. As my friend Guy Goldstein observed early on, Minneapolis was not an accident; it was a test case.
In January 2026, the Department of Homeland Security deployed roughly 2,000 additional immigration officers to the Twin Cities as part of Operation Metro Surge. Within days, two people (Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti) were killed during federal enforcement actions. The facts of those cases remain contested. The political response did not wait.
Within hours, organizers applied what they openly described as the “Gaza Playbook.” Chapters of the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace” (which is neither Jewish nor for peace) and allied activists branded the unrest as actions for “Palestine and Immigrant Rights.”
The playbook’s goal is to provoke confrontation, create “martyrs,” and portray ICE personnel as occupiers. The personnel who promoted this fake narrative about Israel were involved in Minneapolis. Many organizers and marshals had passed through networks of the organization “Students for Justice in Palestine” on nearby campuses, later reappearing under the banners of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, or affiliated “abolish ICE” coalitions. The pipeline, from campus Palestinian activism to street-level immigration protest, was visible and deliberate.
As federal agents deployed flashbangs and tear gas outside the Whipple Federal Building, activists responded with “community defense zones” modeled explicitly on West Bank resistance tactics. The language mirrored Gaza solidarity protests: occupation, siege, apartheid, resistance. ICE was no longer framed as an agency enforcing U.S. law; it was framed as a colonial force.
The symbolism followed. Palestinian flags were carried prominently. Jewish anti-Zionist activists appeared at the front of the marches — some wearing Jewish prayer shawls, some identifying themselves as rabbis — providing immediate moral validation. The message was unmistakable: This was not an ideological trespass, it was sanctioned.
Minneapolis demonstrated how the fusion works in practice. Anti-ICE outrage supplies grievance. “Palestine” supplies the interpretive frame. Anti-Zionist Jews supply the legitimacy.
What crystallized in early 2026 was a single-front strategy: Erase the distinction between U.S. border enforcement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By collapsing Gaza and America’s southern border into a single moral narrative, activists trained participants to see all sovereignty as criminal and all enforcement as violence.
This strategy relies on a disciplined division of labor. Islamist advocacy organizations and Far-Left groups provide numbers, logistics, and confrontation. But the decisive role — the one that makes the coalition viable in polite society — belongs to anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and intellectuals.
Groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow provide what can only be described as a Jewish seal of approval. Their participation neutralizes accusations of antisemitism in advance and grants moral permission to delegitimize both Israeli and American sovereignty. As the Washington Free Beacon reported:
“Jewish Voice for Peace, the fringe anti-Zionist group with a history of supporting Palestinian terrorism and peddling propaganda demonizing Israel, joined forces with an Abolish ICE group to pressure senators to strip funding from ICE and Border Patrol.”
“The partnership between Jewish Voice for Peace Action, the anti-Israel group’s political arm, and Detention Watch Network (both funded by George Soros) helps activists lobby senators. After filling out a form with their contact information, supporters are connected by phone to senators’ offices and given scripts that urge the lawmakers to vote against appropriations for ICE and Border Patrol. The effort has already sent nearly 38,000 letters to representatives and fostered collaborations with more than 1,000 other organizations, according to Jewish Voice for Peace and Detention Watch.”
Without this seal, the coalition collapses. With it, Palestinian flags become welcome at immigration protests — and expected.
As journalist and author Asra Nomani documented in her book, “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom,” the template was tested a decade ago in Ferguson, Missouri, after a police officer killed a Black man. A local tragedy was globalized through a slogan “From Ferguson to Palestine” that trained protesters to see American law enforcement and Israeli sovereignty as interchangeable expressions of colonial violence. Accuracy was irrelevant. Utility was everything.
That fusion hardened. Black Lives Matter institutionalized anti-Israel language. Campuses incubated the rhetoric of a “student intifada,” borrowing the lexicon and moral binaries of Palestinian resistance to frame disputes over unrelated American policies. The lesson was unmistakable: American protest could be used to train Americans against Israel.
Unlike abstract debates over policing, immigration enforcement offers constant confrontation: raids, detention centers, courthouse arrests. It supplies images, urgency, and moral theater. It teaches the catechism efficiently: Borders are illegitimate, enforcement is violence, resistance is righteousness. Once that lesson is learned, Israel follows inevitably.
What distinguishes this coalition is not only its tactics, but its liturgical discipline. Jewish ritual is weaponized. Passover seders are staged outside ICE offices in New York, Minneapolis, and Chicago. These “Liberation Seders,” often organized by Jewish Voice for Peace or Never Again Action affiliates, explicitly reinterpret the Exodus as a departure from Zionism and from “ICE cages.” The Jewish story of national liberation is inverted into a denunciation of Jewish statehood and American borders alike.
Tisha B’Av, traditionally a day of mourning for the destruction of Jewish sovereignty, is observed at detention centers, where activists read Lamentations not for Jerusalem, but for the “catastrophe” of immigration enforcement. The destruction being mourned is not exile; it’s the existence of borders.
The Mourner’s Kaddish is recited for non-Jewish victims of ICE encounters. This ritual move signals that Jewish mourning has been universalized and detached from Jewish peoplehood, placed instead in the service of border abolition.
Rabbinical students and self-described “diaspora rabbis” affiliated with anti-Zionist networks regularly appear at these events, blowing shofars, leading prayers, and issuing statements framing opposition to ICE — and to Israel — as a Jewish moral obligation.
Even the High Holidays are conscripted. Repentance is redefined as opposition to Israel and the abolition of sovereignty itself.
A parallel infrastructure of sympathetic outlets has played a crucial role in laundering activist narratives into elite discourse: translating movement claims into respectable analysis and feeding them back into politics, philanthropy, and campus life.
Publications such as Jewish Currents have functioned as narrative bridges, providing Jewish-branded intellectual justification for collapsing ICE enforcement and Israeli security into a single framework of “state violence.” Essays, interviews, and podcasts frame immigration enforcement as a form of transnational repression, often borrowing language developed in Palestine activism.
Similarly, outlets like DropSite News, underwritten through progressive funding channels, have specialized in “investigations” that draw technical or symbolic links between Israeli defense technologies and U.S. immigration enforcement. These pieces are then cited by activists, shared at protests, and referenced in congressional lobbying — closing the loop between media, movement, and policy.
The effect is cumulative. Claims that would once have been dismissed as agitprop acquire the sheen of journalism. Activist slogans become expert analysis. The moral assumptions of the street migrate into the language of institutions.
This movement is not improvised; it is financed. A network of foundations, fiscal sponsors, and media intermediaries allows activists to move seamlessly between foreign and domestic theaters, treating Gaza and U.S. immigration enforcement as a single campaign.
For example, the Yoosufani Family Foundation illustrates the pattern. Its grantmaking shifted decisively toward adversarial nodes: the Center for Constitutional Rights (the primary legal defense for both anti-ICE and anti-Israel activists), CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, and media projects linking Israeli military practices to U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Westchester People’s Action Coalition (better known as WESPAC) functions as a fiscal switchboard, sponsoring National Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement. As legal scrutiny increased, some groups rerouted donations through alternative conduits, such as Honor the Earth, to obscure the funding trail while maintaining operational continuity.
Technology firms became narrative choke points. Activists affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and allied networks coordinated protests against Palantir Technologies and Cellebrite (an Israeli digital intelligence company) using unified slogans like “First Palantir tracks, then ICE attacks” and “First Palantir surveils, then the IDF kills.” The goal is not reform; it is a conceptual fusion.
That fusion is translated directly into political pressure. Jewish Voice for Peace Action, partnering with Detention Watch Network, mobilized tens of thousands of letters and calls to U.S. Congress demanding both the defunding of ICE and the termination of U.S. military aid to Israel. The pairing was explicit. Lawmakers were not permitted to separate the two. That’s how ideology graduates into party norms.
Calling this an intifada is not an allegation of violence; it is a description of political grammar: resistance over law, grievance over sovereignty, and absolution through struggle. By laundering that grammar through anti-ICE protests, the movement acquires domestic vocabulary and local grievance. By recruiting anti-Zionist Jews as moral emissaries, it gains immunity.
Those who provide that cover, especially in the name of Jewish conscience, do not stand outside the conflict. They have chosen a side. And it is a side not only against Israel, but against the very idea of a sovereign democratic nation worthy of defense.
This isn’t protest—it’s narrative warfare. What Goldberg exposes is the quiet genius of the Gaza Playbook: take a foreign conflict, strip it of context, and redeploy it to delegitimize American law itself. ICE becomes the IDF. Borders become apartheid. Enforcement becomes violence. And anti-Zionist Jews are used as ideological human shields to preempt criticism. I’ve covered lawfare for years, and this fits the pattern perfectly: collapse distinctions, provoke confrontation, manufacture martyrs, then dare institutions to respond. Once sovereignty is criminalized everywhere, no democratic system—Israel’s or America’s—can survive the onslaught.
Are all the confrontations, here with law enforcement and in Israel on multiple military fronts, are being exploited by Islam to establish a Caliphate in Europe and US?