Thousands take to streets to protest Netanyahu and Gaza conflict

Thousands of Palestinians and critics of the Israeli war in Gaza descended on Washington DC to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional address on Wednesday, with US flags set alight and pepper spray deployed during clashes.

“The crowd failed to obey our order to move back from our police line,’’ Capitol Police said X during the protest. “We are deploying pepper spray towards anyone trying to break the law and cross that line.’’

Several hundred protesters at the city’s Union Station Plaza replaced US flags with Palestinian ones, and it was the site of the burning of the US flag.

The visit of Israel’s controversial leader on Capitol Hill drew thousands to the streets, shutting down several blocks while a smaller group led a march around the vicinity.

Though Netanyahu was speaking to Congress, it was the presidential race atop the minds of both demonstrators and speakers who delivered addresses between shouted chants of “free, free Palestine!”.

Both at the main rally and a much smaller sidewalk setup organized by the Socialist Equality Party, speakers warned that Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket meant little hope for a meaningful shift in US-Israel policy either in the next few months or under a potential Harris administration.

However, it was in that potential Kamala Harris presidency that organizers found reason for hope — even if Harris herself remains, like Biden, an ally of Israel generally. Speakers at Wednesday’s event pointed to two factors, Harris’s apparent decision to avoid attending today’s speech and the decision by Biden to step aside, as signs that the political pressure exerted by their movement on the Democratic Party was working. The Democrats’ dropping of Biden, they reasoned, was not only attributable to concerns about his age and mental faculties but also the uncommitted-vote movement which won a handful of delegates in the primary process this spring.

One speaker said it plainly: “Joe Biden is not the nominee because of you”, she told the cheering crowd. “Kamala Harris is the nominee because of you.”

But that speaker and others also pointed to Harris’s private meeting with the Israeli prime minister this week as a sign that a serious shift in policy was not imminent.

A number of activists took to Twitter to make the point that Harris was “just as bad” as Biden when it came to US-Israel policy in an apparent attempt to head off any undue sense of victory throughout the movement. For months, the pro-Palestine left has argued that the White House has put insufficient pressure on Israel, which is the recipient of billions of dollars in US weapons and ammunition, to reach a ceasefire in Gaza or to adequately mitigate civilian casualties across the region.

The protests remained largely peaceful, with a few outbreaks of chaos. In one instance, protesters were prevented from marching down a street by police and initiated a tug-of-war with officers over a barricade; a few were pepper-sprayed. In another moment, demonstrators took down American flags outside of Union Station and burned them, along with an effigy of Netanyahu.

Biden in particular has been sharply criticized for telling a journalist that he would stop supplying weapons to Israel if the IDF went into the city of Rafah; numerous military operations have taken place in Rafah since the president made that promise, but US officials have repeatedly contended that they don’t rise to the scale that would trigger a US response. Meanwhile, reports indicate that large parts of Rafah have been devastated by fighting.

Harris has one advantage on the issue of Gaza, though it is a temporary one: as vice president, she has not yet been called to enunciate her own path forward to the end of the conflict in Gaza and beyond to the potential establishment of a Palestinian state. Given that she remains a Biden administration official, however, it will be difficult for her to lay out a plan that differs significantly from Biden’s even though the president is no longer her running mate.

Last November, she indicated that she would defer to Israel in its handling of military actions across Gaza, telling reporters in the United Kingdom: "We are not telling Israel how to conduct this war."

At that press conference, she would go on to call the loss of civilian life “heartbreaking” but repeatedly declined to say whether a strike on a refugee camp by Israeli forces crossed a line.

In an interview this month with The Nation, Harris did however indicate that she may hold a more nuanced view than her boss on one angle of the Gaza issue: the subject of student protests in the US calling for divestment from Israel by major universities.

“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” she said. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”