Pro-Palestine demonstration outside White House draws thousands from many ethnicities and religions, including Arabs, Asians, Latinos, African-Americans and others.
I haven't really kept up with this, so this is a genuine question—why are people protesting in the US about something going on in another country? What is the goal?
Because the US provides tons of money and weapons to Israel, which are supposed to be used for self-defense but are now being used to mass murder Palestinians.
Israel has a fascist stranglehold over United States domestic policy. It is illegal to boycott the state of Israel. They spend millions of the dollars we support them with to interfere with domestic US politics. The state of Israel is an enemy of the American people.
I've been wondering why the US supports Israel so much considering it doesn't do much for anyone else outside of Western Europe if there isn't a secondary gain. Do you have any readings on these claims?
Not handy tonight, I am just very engaged with electoral politics and this is the conclusion I've reached after earning a degree in political science followed by 10 years of observations.
I wrote this comment in two sittings because I have too many responsibilities. Start with the wikipedia page for history of Israel. The unspoken answer to why the US supports Israel so much despite the lack of secondary gains is largely a consequence of Allied strategy going back to world war 1, but most of the geopolitical world except for the far east played a role in what Israel is today.
It is critically important to remember a few things.
that the anti Jewish progroms in the long lead up to the Holocaust first reached critical mass in the old Russian empire.
the Soviets betrayed Hitler eventually but they started WW2 on the side of the Reich and are still (lmao) not commonly considered an "allied" power the way other more anglo countries would fraternize.
Any would-be elders who survived the Holocaust and would speak authoritatively (subjective relative to the Israeli government) out from within Israel against the palestinean genocide are long dead by now and the Netanyahu administration is completely surrounded by yes men and weapons that they don't deserve access to.
and TL;DR; The history of the region called Israel, Judea, Palestine, Levant... Whatever you want to call it, the land is completely soaked in blood going back for thousands of years and the United States of America has an enormous ego when it comes to world war 2, what it meant and what price the allies paid to stop the Holocaust.
The goal is to influence the government to respond in a certain way, protests are a faster and more direct way to show support than sending letters and voting
Here we are talking about living human beings and how they are treated. No one is talking about left or right. People are outraged by the continuous deterioration of the living conditions in a part of the world, that is controlled by Israel. Palestine is for a long time being turned into a open air prison camp, and turned 80% of its 2.3Mln population to rely on humanitarian aid. And if you find this OK, maybe you should seriously question your moral compass!
I don't think that anyone is here defending Hamas, or rejecting that what they did is outrageous. But people are just not okay with what Israel is doing either, which can amount to blatantly committing systematic war crimes. Violence is never the answer and would only radicalize people on both sides of the fence.
I won't even comment on how many hate crimes have been committed against Palestinians by the settlers or the 6-year old Muslim boy who was stabbed 26 times just now in the US.