ATHENS, Ohio — An intergenerational, multiracial crowd of about 250 students and community members showed support for Palestine outside the Athens County Courthouse on Thursday, Oct. 26.
A protest in solidarity with Israel was called for the same time and place as the protest in solidarity with Palestine, although only five people attended, The Post reported.
Ash Dasuqi, who helped organize the pro-Palestine protest, said “it meant a lot to see a lot of different people” attend.
“For Palestinians all over the world, the scenes of seeing how many people are getting to the streets are so moving,” said Dasuqi, who is Palestinian. “It’s something that we think about every day all the time, so seeing this on people’s minds and in mass is very validating in the process of being invisiblized.”
Photos by Athens County Independent Visual Communications Intern Abigael Miles
Between chants including “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “Ceasefire now!” speakers highlighted the importance of local solidarity with Palestine.
“We are here today, because there is an impending genocide and there is a worldwide movement to stop it,” said one speaker, Katherine King. “That is our objective.”
King said it is important to welcome disagreement, although she said many aspects of the conflict — including Israel’s attacks on civilians and its use of white phosphorous — are “not complicated.”
Tom Hayes, an Ohio University School of Film professor who has made three documentaries about Palestine and recently blocked traffic in Athens to show solidarity with Palestine, criticized US aid to Israel.
Hayes also criticized Israel for blocking Palestinian access to necessities, including water, medicine and food. He said Israel’s actions in the war should not be conflated with Judaism.
“Denying medicine, food and water to 2 million people — who does that?” Hayes said. “Is that Jewish? No. That’s ‘genocidish.’”
King, who is Jewish, said she was attending “for my Jewish ancestors, so that this oppression doesn’t happen in our name.”
Over 9,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel in the current war as of Thursday, Nov. 2. More than 1,400 people had been killed in Israel, most in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, the armed group that politically controls the besieged Gaza Strip.
OU religious studies specialist Loren Lybarger spoke at the rally and condemned the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians, which sparked the current war.
“Hamas did not come into existence out of thin air, and it never acted in a vacuum,” Lybarger said. “Hamas emerged in the context of a violent occupation.”
The conflict stretches back decades. Britain facilitated Jewish settlement in Palestine under the British Mandate in the 1920s-40s, with many settlers fleeing European Nazism. In 1948, Israel was formally established. From 1947 to 1949, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes. Many were displaced to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is home to 2.3 million Palestinians and is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
The rally closed with speeches from two Palestinian University of Cincinnati law students, who identified themselves with only their first names, Sarah and Basma.
Sarah spoke about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and the importance of Americans speaking out about the situation in Palestine.
“Your voices matter so much,” Sarah said. “On the ground, you don’t know what it means to have Americans speak up — specifically white voices. The Palestinian voice right now is being silenced.”
Basma spoke about the importance of education and said, “We need to be able to always educate those around us, educate our friends, our neighbors, our family members, because that’s how we eventually get to congressional levels. That’s how we end up speaking much, much louder.”
One table at the rally featured informational resources about the conflict in Palestine. At another table, the local Food Not Bombs group distributed free food to participants.
“Today, we wanted to show up and show our support for freeing Palestine and just wanted to serve the people here,” Food Not Bombs organizer Julian Keith said.
Among attendees in solidarity with Palestine was Athens mayoral candidate Damon Krane, who told the Independent he attended to “take a stand against 75 years of ethnic cleansing.”
He said the lack of attendance from the city’s Democratic Party officials reflects the party’s “complicity in Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and that’s a real shame.”
Hala, an OU doctoral student who is Palestinian and grew up in Jordan, attended the protest and said, “It’s really heartwarming to see a lot of people waking up and understanding what’s going on.”
Olivia Raney, another protestor, told the Independent, “As an American, I think I have a responsibility to speak up about the same cycle of violent colonialism that we’ve perpetrated and that we support and fund Israel in perpetrating.”
After rallying at the courthouse, protestors marched down Court Street to the Ohio University graffiti wall, painted with a mural reading, “end apartheid.” There, about 60 protestors held a vigil for lives lost in Palestine.
Dasuqi said the vigil was important in creating a space for “collective grief.”
“I’ve been grieving so much on my own,” Dasuqi said. “The way that I understand Palestinian grief — from how I’ve seen it modeled in my family, and what I know — is just that it’s so collective, and so it keeps feeling really sad to be doing a lot of grieving alone … Holding space for grief and honoring the dead is very important, especially collectively.”
According to a United Nations report, more than 1.4 million people have been internally displaced within Gaza since Oct. 7 — more than half of the territory’s population.
The international nonprofit Save the Children estimates that more children were killed in Palestine during Israel’s attacks in three weeks than were killed across world conflict zones since 2019.
Protestors collected donations for the Middle East Children’s Alliance, which is providing emergency aid to Gaza.
Editor’s note: Dani has personal relationships with multiple individuals involved in the demonstration. They attended the demonstration in their professional capacity as staff writer for the Independent. Although Dani disclosed their relationships ahead of time, I directed them to proceed because Dani was the only staff member available to cover the demonstration. — Corinne
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