A little over a month ago, I wrote a post here called “Against Trespass,” intended mostly for campus activists for Palestine. It’s tempting, I argued, to want to engage in forms of direct action that involve trespass, and morally speaking–abstracting entirely from considerations of cost or consequence–it can be justified to do so. But once we re-introduce matters of cost and consequence into the equation, as we have to, trespass strikes me now as mostly pointless and self-defeating. For one thing, more often than not, it puts the activists who engage in it out of commission. For another, it doesn’t effectively do what most needs doing: generate widespread public support for Palestine. So on the whole, it can’t accomplish the good that activists want or need. It’s more likely to subvert it.  Continue reading →