Anti-Israel protests broke out in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Boro Park, in New York City, which turned violent, Arutz Sheva reported.
By Rachel Avraham
Anti-Israel protests broke out in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Boro Park, in New York City, which turned violent, Arutz Sheva reported. According to the Times of Israel, the anti-Israel Pal-Awda activist group organized for around 200 protesters to show up in an area barricaded in by police.
“Flood Boro Park to stop the sale of stolen Palestinian land,” organizers said in a social media post announcing the event, the Times of Israel reported. According to the report, anti-Israel groups in New York often refer to their events as “floods,” a homage to the Hamas term for the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”
Arutz Sheva reported that protesters chanted “settlers go back home; Palestine is ours,” “Zionists go to hell,” and “We don’t want no Zionists here.” According to the report, most of the protesters wore keffiyehs in order to cover their faces.
The Times of Israel reported that some of them shouted, “How many kids did you kill today?” to the beat of a snare drum. Another protester shouted through a megaphone, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” According to the report, some of the protesters held up their hands in an inverted triangle, a Hamas symbol, toward Jewish counter protesters.
According to the Times of Israel, a crowd of Jewish neighborhood residents and other pro-Israel counter protesters demonstrated on the sidewalk across the street. Dozens of police officers separated the two sides. According to the report, the protest began just after sundown and the temperature was below freezing.
However, the Times of Israel noted that the protesters did not limit their venom to counter protesters and also targeted local children attending New York yeshivas. One man called neighborhood residents “filthy Zionist assholes,” and a woman shouted at a pair of young girls watching from a crosswalk, saying, “you’re so gross. You’re disgusting.” According to the Times of Israel, a woman shouted: “Were you guys like this on October 7? Stay in Palestine and there’ll be more October 7s. We were dragging your soldiers on October 7.”
Meanwhile, counter protesters did not sit by silently. One of them shouted at them, “Brooklyn doesn’t want you. Get out of our neighborhood. We don’t want you here.” Others in the group chanted “Nazis go home.” Others called the protesters “terrorists.” According to the Times of Israel, several of the protesters on the pro-Israel side started to sing and dance to a song in Hebrew which translates into English as, “Whoever believes is not afraid.”
The anti-Israel protesters were very much angered by the pro-Israel counter demonstrators, leading to some of them pushing and shoving members of the pro-Israel group, and performing other acts of violence on them. A short time later, a violent fight broke out when the anti-Israeli protesters began attacking pro-Israeli protesters and other Jews who were passing by the area, Arutz Sheva reported. The New York Post claims one person was arrested.
Congressman Riche Torres told the New York Post in response, “It should come as a shock to no one that the pro-Hamas mob targeting Jews and promising to “flood” Boro Park has descended into violence. Violence is not a bug but a feature of the so-called “Free Palestine” movement, which has no desire to free Palestinians from Hamas.”
“This ‘protest’ is in fact targeted harassment aimed at a neighborhood with one of the highest populations of Orthodox Jews in the US,” Congressman Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat, told Arutz Sheva. “To harass and intimidate Jews because of the actions of Israel is textbook antisemitism. True progressives must speak out against this hate.”
Activist group End Jew Hatred called out other city leaders for failing to “stand up” against the anti-Israel protesters, the New York Post reported. “Hamas apologists and supporters, cloaked in the tired and well-worn pretense of supporting “Palestine,” showed their true nature as violent thugs looking for any reason to attack Jews,” the group said in a statement.
