No more business as usual," the organization leading the protest said on social media.

Dozens of Jewish protesters and their allies were arrested on Wednesday morning after they blocked rush hour traffic on a busy Los Angeles highway to demand a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Palestinians in Gaza.

  • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I don’t have a problem with people disrupting traffic to protest, I have a problem with people doing it for a purpose that the government can’t actually achieve, with only a few people, or in places that don’t make sense for the cause.

    If you want to disrupt it over some local (to at least the country) issue, and you have enough popular support to host an actual rally with hundreds or thousands of marchers blocking the road, go right ahead and disrupt traffic. If you’re marching about the environment, rally at a park then march to a government office. If you’re marching about police brutality, go sit down outside a police station.

    Unfortunately, The US government is not the Israeli government. The most they could do is exert pressure on Israel, which to be fair is quite a lot of pressure given it’s the US, but I highly doubt that Israel would stop immediately even if the US asked them to. In this case, from the pictures, they also only had enough people to make a single line across the road. The location isn’t relevant to anything either.

      • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        After the bombings? That would have been done by primarily US troops, so of course he could stop it with a phone call.

          • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            I thought you might be referring to the 1983 attacks.

            I was a little underdeveloped at that age to be aware of everything going on.

            Doesn’t look like he stopped anything though, given that fighting continued despite the ceasefire for a few more years, and that Israel still attacks Lebanon on a regular basis because of Hezbollah.

            • NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              He didn’t stop the conflict as a whole, but he stopped the bombing of west Beirut itself.

              That bombing was followed by a protest to the Israeli government by President Ronald Reagan. Within 20 minutes of a phone call between Reagan and Begin, in which the former said the bombings were going too far and needed to stop, Begin ordered the bombings stopped.