Admittedly, my thoughts on the inner psychology of Wednesday's Israeli Consulate protestors were speculative. But political motivations? Well that's another matter.

Anyone new to the Boston political landscape may not be aware that, just as the Hub has a community of supporters of Israel, so too the city is home to a community of people whose political loadstone is a loathing of the Jewish state.

Interestingly, while Israel supporters have either taken part in decades-old stable institutions (our "alphabet soup" of organizations like CJP, JCRC, ADL or AIPAC) or started their own entrepreneurial groups (CAMERA, David Project, Christians and Jews United for Israel), organizational coherence within the Israel-hating community has been hard to come by.

When I first got into the game twenty years ago, many of the people taking part in protests like this week's Consulate spat were members of the now-defunct Middle East Justice Network. Other institutions that seem to have come and gone, leaving little more than loony or out-of-date Web sites in their wake, include One Palestine and the Somerville Divestment Project.

Those familiar with political activism understand the dynamics that affect groups built around politically-charged positions. It should come as no surprise, then, that within the anti-Israel "community," organizational life routinely involves infiltration, loyalty tests, back-door maneuvering, and - frequently - purges. With today's anti-Israel animus being driven by a weird hybrid of far Left and Islamist politics (the so-called Red-Green alliance), the potential for instability is greater than ever.

And so, with resources up for grabs (including a core group of anti-Israel activists and a significant, but rotating cast of younger student "labor"), and no clear leadership, up-and-coming national organizations like the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (AAPER) or Code Pink are trying to fill the void. The problem is that these organizations suffer from the same afflictions as Boston-based activists: notably lack of support within the general public and radical and (especially in the case of Code Pink) incompetent leadership.

This incompetence is not necessarily based on stupidity or lack of experience (even if both seem to be in heavy supply recently). Point of fact, many people involved with the anti-Israel "movement" are smart and articulate, especially with regard to how to "market" a political message. But they all suffer from what one writer has called "Fantasy Ideology," that is politics driven not by external reality, but by the need of dwell in a fantasy world where they are the heroes of their own mythology.

As noted before, the fact that Palestinian suffering has dramatically increased during the very period the Israel-haters have been plying their message of "no compromise" means nothing to the Code Pink/Gaza Freedom Marchers because to them the Palestinians are simply props for their own political drama, a drama that places the activists themselves at the vanguard of political potency and edginess. In fact, Israelis and Americans are also props for this play, with the city of Boston simply serving as one more backdrop for members of a movement who have managed to mask their own self obsession by erecting an impenetrable wall of self righteousness.

So why were they on the streets on that cold January afternoon? Because if they did not do so, the latest wannabe leaders of the "movement" would "lose their momentum" (i.e., be revealed as just the latest set of wankers soon to be replaced by whoever comes next). And, if they did not go out on the street and start screaming their opinions over a megaphone (regardless of the fact that only bemused cops and hostile cab drivers were there to listen) they (or at least their heroic fantasy selves) would simply not exist.