Gaza protests spread across U.S., to the doorstep of the White House

Joe Biden tried taking a victory lap this week, celebrating a coveted foreign policy win. Yet in the streets near his house, he was being jeered over a different foreign crisis — the one that’s threatening his presidency.

A few blocks from the White House, students set up tents, building another impromptu encampment as part of Mideast protests proliferating across the country.

This was as Biden was celebrating a hard-fought, long-sought success: the adoption of a foreign-aid law that will arm Ukraine throughout the year.

But the continued arms for Israel in that same law stoked the anger of students from several schools who filled a square with tents outside George Washington University.

One student, Selina Al-Shihabi, said of the president: “He’s a really disgusting human being.”

“No human could just watch this unfold,” she said. “He’s a disappointment. It’s so sad to see him still providing Israel with those weapons.”

Student protester Selina Al-Shihabi supported Joe Biden and wanted to work for the U.S. government someday. Now she’s soured on both. (Alex Panetta/CBC News)

Her family lives in Gaza and, she said, she’s had relatives killed.

She voted for Biden in 2020. She’s volunteered for the Democrats. And now she can’t imagine going to a ballot booth this fall and supporting him again. In fact, she says she’d envisioned someday working for the U.S. government, and is now disillusioned by that too.

Of all the threats to Biden’s potential re-election, this is atop the list.

‘A pathetic embarrassment’

A drop in youth turnout could be politically lethal in several close states, meaning Biden needs votes from a group with a rock-bottom opinion of Israel’s leadership.

It’s no accident that on the very day that foreign-aid bill was signed, Republicans turned the page on a Ukraine debate that had roiled their party.

They sprinted immediately for safer political terrain: the Middle East.

Facing a threat to his leadership, House Speaker Mike Johnson and several of his allies ventured to the encampment at Columbia University in New York.

They scolded the students as being, effectively, allies of Hamas and were greeted with heckles like, “Mike, you suck!”

This is the fight Republicans wanted — with left-wing students, over Hamas. This is the opposite of Ukraine, because it unites them and splits the Democrats.

One New York Republican bellowed at the students that they were protesting the wrong target: They should be pressing Hamas if they truly want a ceasefire.

“It is shameful, shameful, that you would support a terrorist organization,” Rep. Mike Lawler told the booing students.

“The fastest way for a ceasefire to occur is for Hamas to surrender, and to release the hostages. If you can’t call for that, you are a pathetic embarrassment.”

These encampments have elicited sharply contrasting — perhaps irreconcilable — views in this country.

What the protests look like, close up

An oft-stated view among the protests is that the current state of Israel should not exist — only rarely stated so violently as by one Columbia organizer who, in a recent video, said several times that he approves the killing of Zionists. He later said he wished he’d chosen less violent language.

But there are also Jewish students, in both the protests and counter-protests.

In Washington, on Friday, they co-existed metres from each other. One young woman held an Israeli flag. Jewish students carried slogans such as: “Jews say ceasefire now.”

There were similar scenes in New York. “It’s been very complicated,” said one Columbia professor, Emil Benjamin, who is Jewish, whose family survived the Holocaust.

He says he’s heard hateful slogans outside the camp. But from students inside, he’s heard interfaith solidarity and kindness.

Benjamin says he supports the protest, and also wanted to observe it so he could talk later to members of his own community about what he saw, to counter what he called “dystopian” depictions in the news.

He says people tend to conflate anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment. And he says it’s easy to do, when different protesters might have different intentions even when chanting the exact same slogan.

For example, “I think there are people who chant, ‘From the river to the sea,’ and maybe they are antisemitic,” he said, referring to the common yet controversial pro-Palestinian chant.

Others, he thinks, chant it “because of the literal constraint of movement in the Palestinian territories. They literally cannot move into the lands they once came from.”

He said: “I don’t hear a call to erase Jews. I hear a call for the liberation of a people who are not free.”

‘Truly beautiful’

Back near the White House, Al-Shihabi said she was inspired by what she saw — by students who have been threatened with suspension or arrest, but are still coming out to demonstrate on behalf of strangers, civilians being bombed on the other end of the Earth.

She and a few dozen fellow students from Georgetown and other area schools set up tents around campus overnight Thursday. Police erected barriers the next day, and the students were told they could not leave and come back.

So they’ve been using a bucket for a toilet. People are bringing food, and she’s been moved to see her professors drop by to express support.

“It’s truly beautiful,” Al-Shihabi said.

‘Zionism will fall’

The sentiment is far from universal.

One man shook his head in disgust while walking past the Washington encampment on Friday.

Another tried debating people in the crowd. Counter-protester Michael Wille shouted questions like: “Who here agrees Israel has a right to exist?”

He asked if anyone condemned the slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, and also shouted that Hamas should surrender.

He received no answers. He was drowned out by boos, air horns in the face and chants like: “Brick, by brick, wall by wall, Zionism will fall,” and, “Settler, settler, go back home!”

When Wille asked which home Israeli Jews should return to, people in the crowd shouted things like: “Go to Poland” and “Go back to Europe!”

One man heckled Wille as a colonizer, calling him him, “Christopher Columbus,” and complained that counter-protesters like him are “all white people — of course.”

Wille shot back: “You don’t want peace.”

He explained later in an interview that he’s not Jewish, but an Irish-Italian-German pizzeria worker, a Catholic and a former Mitt Romney campaign aide. He said he’s disturbed by rising antisemitism.

But he added that he is fully supportive of the students’ right to protest.

While he was shouted down, he was never threatened. People eventually ignored him. That’s unlike Jan. 6, 2021, when he said he was roughed up while demonstrating against a far-right march by the Proud Boys in Washington.

“Those guys attacked me [on Jan. 6]. This is nothing,” he said. This is child’s play” “

The students have several goals, Al-Shihabi said. They include their universities withdrawing investments from companies that supply the Israeli military, and amnesty from arrest for student protesters.

As for the long-term goal? “A one-state solution,” she said, meaning a new country that replaces Israel. “A true democracy. Where people can all coexist.”

Michael Wille, right, attended the Washington protest and asked questions like: ‘Who here agrees Israel has a right to exist?’ which drew anti-Zionist chants and blasts from air horns. (Alex Panetta/CBC)