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The Guardian
01-08-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Pro-Palestinian protesters arrested outside Chuck Schumer's office in New York City
Dozens of Pro-Palestine protesters gathered at US senator Chuck Schumer's New York City office on Friday, leading to mass arrests as elected officials joined activists from Jewish Voice for Peace outside the Midtown office. Tiffany Caban, a New York City council member, and Claire Valdez, a state representative, were among those arrested. Demonstrators were seen banging together pots and pans, a form of noise protest. The protest at Schumer's office was one of several such demonstrations that took place in major US cities Friday. 'We are calling on them to let aid in, to stop the bombing and allow aid into the Palestinian people of Gaza right now,' Jay Saper, a Jewish Voice for Peace spokesperson, told the New York Post. 'This starvation crisis in Gaza is at a tipping point, and so we have to raise our voices.' Elsewhere in New York City, there was a demonstration outside the Egyptian Consulate aimed at highlighting Egypt's role in Gaza's border policy. At least five people were reportedly detained after activists chained themselves to New York City's Egyptian Mission to the United Nations. According to a post by Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, who organized the demonstration, the protest's goal was to 'demand the government of Egypt cease its collaboration' with Israel – which it accused of being a 'genocidal Zionist regime' and 'put an end to the manufactured famine of Palestinians in Gaza'. In Los Angeles, activists were holding another pots and pans protest. 'Families face famine and children are dying of malnutrition,' the group Koreatown for Palestine wrote on social media. 'We will make the people of Koreatown hear the sound of starvation in Gaza.' Several other protests were planned for Friday evening in major US cities, including Arlington, Texas; Newark, New Jersey; Houston, Texas; Boise, Idaho; Portland, Oregon; West Hartford, Connecticut; Baltimore, Maryland, and San Jose, California. On Thursday, protesters targeted the New York Times headquarters in Manhattan, writing the words 'NYT lies, Gaza dies' in bold white lettering on the side of the building. There was also red paint smeared over the Times logo. Some in US cities have continually held organized protests voicing support for a ceasefire in Gaza nearly two years into the military campaign that Israel launched there in response to Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack. Some cities have hosted weekly Palestine vigils since late 2023. In some locations, organizers are also using these gatherings to provide legal support for protesters facing arrest or disciplinary actions on campuses. The campus-based movement in support of Gaza, once centered around encampments in spring 2024, has led to a year-long legal back-and-forth between Donald Trump's administration and several institutions, which began with the president accusing the schools of allowing antisemitism to go unchecked on campuses amid protests of Israel's military strikes in Gaza. At Columbia University, school officials have disciplined more than 80 students for their involvement in protests, including expulsions, suspensions and revoked degrees. Columbia recently announced a deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220m to release funding, which Trump froze because of what he described as the university's failure to squelch antisemitism. In protest of the university's compliance with the Trump administration, historian Rashid Khalidi has canceled his fall 2025 lecture course, saying in a letter published by the Guardian that the deal 'constitutes the antithesis of academic freedom'.
New York Times
01-08-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Gaza War Protesters Arrested at Offices of Schumer and Gillibrand
Dozens of demonstrators protesting Israel's war in Gaza were arrested Friday at the Midtown Manhattan offices of New York's senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, days after they broke with many of their fellow Democrats by voting against a resolution to halt U.S. arms sales to Israel. Pressure has mounted on Democratic lawmakers to press Israel to end its military activity in Gaza, where famine and starvation have spread in recent weeks, and allow in a flood of aid. On Friday, more than 100 protesters, who were organized by the antiwar group Jewish Voice for Peace, chanted and banged pots and pans in the lobby of the Third Avenue building where both Mr. Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Ms. Gillibrand have office space. 'New Yorkers are heartbroken, America is heartbroken,' said Alexa Avilés, a city councilwoman who protested on Friday. 'We want an end to the war, we want peace.' The traditional bipartisan consensus in support of Israel among American lawmakers has collapsed over the course of Israel's nearly two-year war in Gaza, which has killed more than 60,000 people, according to Gazan officials. Support for the war has plunged into the single digits among Democratic voters, and on Wednesday 27 Democratic senators voted to halt American weapons transfers to Israel in protest of the war and the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Al Jazeera
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Project Esther and the weaponisation of Zionism
On October 7, 2024 – exactly one year into the United States-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip that has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Foundation unleashed a policy paper titled Project Esther: A National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The 'national strategy' proposed by Project Esther – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel's current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights. The first 'key takeaway' listed in the report is that 'America's virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American 'pro-Palestinian movement' is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)'. Never mind that, in reality, there is no such thing as a 'global Hamas Support Network' – just as there is no such thing as the HSN's alleged 'affiliated Hamas Support Organizations (HSOs)' that the Heritage Foundation has also taken the liberty of inventing. Among these alleged HSOs are prominent American Jewish organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace. The second 'key takeaway' of the report is that the so-called HSN is 'supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy' – a curious choice of terms, no doubt, from a think tank that is doing its best to eradicate what remains of US democracy as we speak. The phrase 'capitalism and democracy' appears no fewer than five times in the report – although it's not quite clear what Hamas has to do with capitalism aside from governing a Palestinian territory that has for more than 19 months been on the receiving end of billions upon billions of dollars' worth of US-funded military destruction. From the perspective of the arms industry, at least, genocide is capitalism at its best. And as per the genocidal logic of Project Esther, protesting the mass slaughter of Palestinians is fundamentally anti-Semitic – hence the need to pursue the prescribed national strategy of 'extirpating the influence of the HSN from our society'. The October publication of the Heritage Foundation report occurred on the watch of President Joe Biden's administration, which the think tank diagnosed as 'decidedly anti-Israel' despite its complete and utter complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The report included many suggestions on how to 'combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States … when a willing Administration occupies the White House'. Fast forward seven months, and a recent New York Times analysis indicates that, since US President Donald Trump's inauguration in January, 'the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther's proposals'. These range from threats to withhold gargantuan sums of federal funding for US universities that refuse to silence resistance to systematic slaughter to efforts to deport legal US residents for the crime of expressing solidarity with Palestinians. In addition to allegedly infiltrating US academia and disseminating 'anti-Zionist narratives across universities, high schools, and elementary schools, often under the umbrella or within the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and similar Marxist ideology', Project Esther's authors contend that 'the HSN and HSOs have mastered the use of America's liberal media environment [and] are quick to gain attention for any and every demonstration, no matter how large or small, from every network across the country'. And that's not all: 'The HSN and HSOs have made prolific and unchecked use of social media platforms, such as TikTok, across the entire digital ecosystem to spout antisemitic propaganda.' To all of these ends, the policy paper offers a whole host of recommendations for how to stamp out the domestic pro-Palestine movement as well as humane and ethical attitudes in general: from purging 'HSO-supporting faculty and staff' from educational institutions to making 'potential demonstrators fear affiliation with HSOs' to banning 'antisemitic content' from social media – which in Heritage Foundation jargon of course means anti-genocidal content. And yet in spite of all of Project Esther's ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic threat posed by the HSN, it turns out that 'no major Jewish organizations appear to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its release', according to a December article in the Forward. A news outlet catering to American Jews, the Forward reported that the Heritage Foundation had 'struggled to attract Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which appears to have been assembled by several evangelical Christian groups', and that Project Esther 'focuses exclusively on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism problems from white supremacists and other far-right groups'. Meanwhile, in an open letter published this month, influential American Jewish leaders warned that a 'range of actors' in the US are currently 'using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press'. Now, if the Trump administration seems to be taking Project Esther and running with it, it is more out of concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that utilises Zionism and anti-Semitism charges to its own extremist ends. And this, unfortunately, is just the beginning of a far more elaborate project. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
