Hundreds of premade anti-Israel signs were waiting near the U.S. Capitol as demonstrators prepared Wednesday to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest visit to America.
Netanyahu was scheduled to address a joint session of Congress at 2 p.m. EDT regarding U.S. efforts to help settle the 9-month-old Israel-Hamas war.
Israel has sought to eradicate Hamas since Oct. 7, when the U.S.-designated terrorist organization invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages.
Sponsored by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, some of the anti-Israel signs at the Capitol read: “Wanted by the Whole World: War Criminal Benjamin Netanyahu for Crimes Against Humanity.”
The Party for Socialism and Liberation’s website declares that members are united in their “belief that capitalism … is the source of the main problems confronting humanity today.”
The ANSWER Coalition, the organization whose website is listed on some of the anti-Israel signs, went public three days after the 9/11 terror attacks in America in opposition to the U.S. invading Afghanistan or Iraq.
Since 2002, the group says, it has demonstrated “for social justice at home and in opposition to war and occupation abroad.”
Shut It Down for Palestine, another group protesting at the Capitol, advises participants to “wear kuffiyehs” (a traditional headdress also known as a keffiyeh) and “black armbands,” and to “picket Israeli embassies and consulates.”
It also advises picketing “companies that profit from Israel’s occupation of Palestine,” a disputed characterization of the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip, and specifies Boeing and Raytheon among many other companies.
According to a Heritage Foundation report released last month, the structure of organizations facilitating the anti-Israel protests across America is essentially the same as those that supported the Black Lives Matter-sponsored protests and riots in 2020.
Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage policy expert in national security who co-authored the report with intern Mary Mobley, wrote that antisemitic, anti-Israel protesters may alter the U.S. in “profound” and possibly permanent ways, just as BLM did, through “this revolutionary ecosystem.”
More and more enemies of the U.S., including China, Cuba, and Venezuela, are “enmeshed in this protesting infrastructure,” Gonzalez and Mobley noted.
