Protestors demonstrate on Capitol Hill on July 24, 2024 in Washington, DC. Photo by Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images

By Lauren Markoe July 24, 2024

Police blocked roads. Helicopters droned overhead. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and separately, American and Israeli Jews who want a hostage deal now, denounced Congress for giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an audience Wednesday.

Here are three scenes from the National Mall, the site of most of the protests.

‘Among Jews’

Simone Zelitch, the author of “Judenstaadt,” a novel that imagines a Jewish state in Germany after the Holocaust, came from Philadelphia to protest Netanyahu with a sign that read “Democracy from the River to the Sea.”

Zelitch said she has not been sure what to do with the “agony” she’s been harboring since Oct. 7. She considers herself a “cultural Zionist,” who feels a connection to Jewish life in Israel, but not to a Jewish state. She said she doesn’t believe any nation founded to protect one religious or ethnic group can be a democracy. But she wasn’t about to join the pro-Palestinian protests off the National Mall either. “I can’t stand the simple-minded clarity and certainty the people seem to feel about their positions on the war in Gaza which I see reflected in the majority of the groups protesting,” she said.   

‘The piper’

Bagpipes aren’t heard much in the Middle East, but a piper in a kilt decorated with a Palestinian flag led a long line of protesters toward the Mall, playing Amazing Grace and other bagpipe standards.

The 25-year-old musician, who said he was of Scottish and Irish descent, declined to give his name. “Call me the piper,” he said.

But he did explain why he wanted to play for the protesters.

“How the Scottish were treated 200 years ago, and how the Irish were treated 100 years ago reminds me of how the Palestinians are treated today,” he explained.

‘We would never have come’

Barbara Paleologos and her 7-year-old son, Elias, are in the middle of a summer road trip from their home in Sarasota, Florida, to New York. They had a stopover in Baltimore, and decided to take a day trip Wednesday to Washington, D.C., to see the monuments and the Air and Space Museum. But when Paleologos exited Union Station this morning, she was taken aback by blaring sirens, throngs of protesters and police. 

“I don’t watch the news,” she said, explaining her surprise.

Outside the National Museum of Art, Paleologos, a loan processor, plotted a course toward the monument, wondering how far down the Mall the protests would stretch.

“I would not have come,” she added.

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