On November 4, tens of thousands came together in Freedom Plaza, blocks from the White House to call for a ceasefire in the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. Protestors in keffiyehs held placards denouncing the killing of civilians aloft, alongside Palestinian flags. Chants of “free, free Palestine” ricocheted off the surrounding buildings.
Through a section of the crowd, a group was holding a long, printed roll of paper, with line after line of 8,000 names of individuals killed in Gaza in the last month.
The crowd was a mixture of young and old, ranging from idealistic college students to grandparents with their grandchildren. It was a fairly multicultural crowd as well. There were some laying out prayer mats on the edges of the crowd to find a moment of solace and there were multiple Jews for Palestine signs.
For the most part, the crowd kept things onside, but there was one guy yelling into his megaphone “there is only one solution, intifada, revolution.” I frankly found it hard to believe the choice of words there was unintentional.
Ian Hutchinson 