At Brooklyn pro-Palestine rally, calls to eliminate both Israel and US

Hundreds take part in anti-annexation protest in which activists call to abolish police, Israel and American government, and cry ‘From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!’

Pro-Palestinian protesters in a 'Day or Rage' protests in Brooklyn, New York, July 1, 2020 (video screenshot)
Pro-Palestinian protesters in a 'Day or Rage' protests in Brooklyn, New York, July 1, 2020 (video screenshot)

At a pro-Palestinian, pro-Black Lives Matters demonstration in Brooklyn this week, participants called to eliminate the Jewish state as well as the United States, amid chants of “Death to Israel,” “Death to America” and “From Gaza to Minnesota, globalize the Intifada!”

Several hundred people were reported to take part in the July 1 rally at the New York City borough, defined as a “Day of Rage” event to respond to Israel’s plans to annex parts of the West Bank. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had originally intended to start the process on that day, but it has now been postponed amid doubts over whether it will take place at all.

“We don’t want a fake Palestinian state that they give us while Israel still exists,” activist Nerdeen Kiswani of organizing group Within Our Lifetime said at the rally, in a video compiled by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

“The land that Israel exists on is still stolen. The 1948 lands are still stolen — Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv… was stolen. We don’t want to go just back to our homes in Gaza and the West Bank. We Want all of it.”

Dequi Kioni Sadiki, the wife of former Black Panther Sekou Odinga, said: “The European Jews who occupy, slaughter and continue to force millions of Palestinians onto their killing fields called refugee and concentration camps, are the relatives of the Europeans… who kidnapped, slaughtered and forced millions of Africans and indigenous” into slavery and prison death camps.

Amid chants to free Palestinian and of “Black lives matter,” one activist also led calls of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”

Another activist tied between the need to “abolish the police” to abolishing “the Zionistic state of Israel” and “the United States government,” to cheers from the crowd.

Also speaking at the event was a pro-North Korean activist, who said: “I believe that within our lifetime, Palestine will be yours again and Korea will be one again! The United States of America and all of its puppet governments will be no more!”

Protesters at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, DC, linked Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian cause on Wednesday, chanting “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too.”

At another “Day of Rage” event in Washington, DC, protesters linked Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian cause, chanting “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too.”

The march, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol building, was led by a Harvard student, Christian Tabash, who read a poem about Israel’s crimes against Palestinian Muslims, according to the Washington Examiner. The poem referred to Israel as “puppet master of continents,” an age-old conspiracy theory that Jews run the world.

The Republican Jewish Coalition said in a statement in response to the Washington event: “We are horrified by this vicious hatemongering by Black Lives Matter protesters. The Black Lives Matter charter is filled with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic lies. It is deeply disturbing, but not surprising, to hear those sentiments chanted in the streets of Washington, DC.”

The statement called on former Vice President Joe Biden, “as the standard bearer of the Democrat Party, to condemn these anti-Semitic chants by BLM protesters.”

JTA contributed to this report.

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