DOCUMENTARY: Who Were DC's Anti-Netanyahu Protestors?

Before riots broke out, I interviewed the protestors.

On July 24th, 2024, thousands of Americans gathered around the Capitol building in Washington, DC to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.

These protests were widely covered by American media and ended with a group of protestors getting pepper sprayed and tear gassed shortly before they burned an American flag and vandalized public property.

But before any of that happened, I traveled down to the protests to find out what kind of people made up the protest movement. I spoke with a wide range of protestors, including an avowed socialist, rabbi, Islamist, anti-Islamist, moderate Muslim proselytizer, ex-evangelical Christian, doctor, and even a Holocaust survivor.

What did I learn? The entire truth can never be captured in a simple narrative. Acting effectively requires being able to see and understand reality’s complexity. Even the most publicly radical and anti-peace protestor I interviewed, the Islamist, wasn’t directing his extremism in exactly the direction you might expect.

Narratives that entirely dismiss movements as comprised of violent extremists seek to defeat them and their cause. If your goal is winning at all costs, that strategy might make sense. But if your goal is finding peace with your opponents, agree or disagree, you need to understand where they’re coming from. The conflict between Zionists and Palestinians has been raging for a century, and neither side can obtain a total victory against the other without a genocide. For the majority of Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of us who would prefer to avoid that, we must seek out the complex truth and avoid the simple narratives of those who seek annihilation of “the other.”

Nonetheless, I was genuinely concerned by much of the radicalism I saw. I worry that many protestors were there for the wrong reason, knowing few details about the Palestinians’ situation, but holding a messianic view of a world free of Western imperialism, and joining the protest for the same reasons religious people attend church. In this leftist religion, the vandals were the faith’s zealots: more extreme than their co-religionists, but proving the danger that lies within its doctrine. That’s a societal problem that urgently needs solving, and it’s completely independent of anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.