Thousands Demand Biden Enforce the “Red Line” in Gaza
Peace activists gathered in Washington, D.C., over the weekend to call for an end to U.S. support of the eight-month-old war.
This is an extended post of a previously published Progressive article.
On June 8, thousands of pro-Palestine protesters rallied around the White House in a “red line” protest against the Israeli war in Gaza. Several weeks earlier, President Joe Biden had said that his “red line” in the war was Israel launching a major military ground operation in Rafah. The Biden Administration continues to claim that the attacks on camps in a safe zone that killed forty-five Palestinians, most of whom were women and children, do not rise to the level of the President’s “red line.” The Israeli war, which the International Criminal Court and others have called a “plausible” genocide, has now claimed more than 37,000 Palestinian lives.
Activists arrived at the protest in buses from Ohio, Kentucky, Florida, and elsewhere. The rally was organized with a large coalition that included dozens of labor, Jewish, and Palestinian peace groups.
While the majority of protesters gathered at the park in front of the White House in Lafayette Square, hundreds held a mile-long “red line” around the park’s perimeter. Names of many of the victims of the war were written on a red banner in black marker.
Sitting in the shade of Lafayette Square park, Sonia (left), whose family is from Syria, was on her twentieth day of a hunger strike to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide. She started her hunger strike as she was “feeling saddened and frustrated by so much silence still around the subject.”
“Genocide Joe” has become the nickname that many Pro-Palestinian protesters have given Biden for his funding and complicity in the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
Biden wasn’t the only person at whom the protesters directed their ire—U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was targeted as well. This poster depicts his hands covered in blood.
Eliyahu, who is an Orthodox Jew, held a sign that proclaimed that Israel was using him as a human shield. He says that the Israeli “campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people [is] in complete defiance of every Jewish value. He cites the Israeli lobbying group AIPAC as the reason that both major presidential candidates are supporting the war. “We know that they’re funding President Biden,” he says. “We know they’re even funding President Trump. We know they’re funding members of Congress and paying them off to continue to support this unconscionable genocide in the name of my religion.”
Earlier in the day, protesters painted a large red, white, and green slogan reading “ARMS EMBARGO NOW” on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. While similar painted protests had been allowed to remain on streets for days during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, this one was quickly removed by city street cleaners with pungent chemicals.
After the verdict was announced, many of the demonstrators left for their buses and their homes, but a group of students stayed on and set up tents in the shadow of the Washington Monument. Police quickly told the protesters that they would have to remove the tents, or they would be dispersed once reinforcements arrived. The hundred or so protesters that remained locked arms and chanted.
As more police arrived and the sun began to set, the last of the protesters marched toward the White House again, where a LGBTQ+ Pride Day party was taking place on the South Lawn. The building was lit with purple lights.
Finally, around 10 p.m., the U.S. Park Police, in an oddly aggressive fashion as the encampment was abandoned, stormed in. They lit up the field with vehicle headlights and shined strobe flashlights on the handful of hangers-on.
