The most important fact about the June 10, Washington DC March to End the Israeli Occupation was simply that it took place. Part of an international weekend of mobilizations for Palestinian rights, marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war and the occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the rally at the U.S. Capitol and march to the Ellipse drew a crowd of five or perhaps six thousand.
This is modest in comparison with the 20,000 who marched in London on June 9 (according to press reports I'm reading), and small indeed by the standards of major U.S. antiwar protests. Its significance for the movement in this country, however, goes deeper than the numbers may indicate on the surface.
After an afternoon rally, we hit the streets in spirited fashion, with the loudest chants occurring as passed by a couple hundred pro-Zionist counter-demonstrators on the sidewalk.
The march was called jointly by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the dominant coalition in the current U.S. antiwar movement, and a partially overlapping coalition of several hundred groups called the Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
This was the first national action explicitly called by UFPJ centered on Palestine, an issue which many activists have long felt the UFPJ leadership hesitated to take on due to the overwhelming pro-Zionist consensus in the Congressional Democratic establishment.
The occupation in Palestine has been linked, to be sure, to the U.S. occupation of Iraq in antiwar mobilizations, but how to do this is a constant source of tension within as well as between antiwar coalitions.
Marches for Palestine have also been called by "hard" anti-imperialist and solidarity organizations, but June 10 was a first for the antiwar "mainstream."
Those with a long memory recall a real atrocity in 1982, at the height of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when a million people rallied in New York for nuclear disarmament and any mention of the Middle East or Lebanon was explicitly barred from the speakers plattorm.
Times have changed: On April 20, 2002, just months after 9/11, when hundreds of thousands marched in Washington against the Bush regime's war in Afghanistan and its already sinister threats to Iraq, tens of thousands of Arab and Muslim Ameriçans participated, expressing enormous solidarity with the Palestinian struggle (in the immediate wake of the Jenin massacre).
END THE OCCUPATION ISRAELI
JUSTICE PALESTINIANS FOR THE