Hundreds of New Yorkers marched over the Brooklyn Bridge Wednesday in a rally for Gaza. Demonstrators called for boycotting Israel and chanted for a free Palestine.
The video above was shot by the MTL Collective. It shows that as demonstrators streamed over the bridge, a huge Palestinian flag with the words “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” and “Gaza In Our Hearts” was flown off the side of the Manhattan Bridge, which can be seen from the Brooklyn Bridge. The unfurling of the flag attracted local media attention. Here’s a photo of the moment:
Gothamist reports that it hung on the bridge for at least 30 minutes.
The rally was organized by an ad-hoc coalition of New Yorkers who have planned a number of actions since the Israeli assault on Gaza began last month. Protest organizers sought to connect the war waged by Israel in Palestine to the war being waged by the NYPD against people of color.”
Beautiful sight! Hope to see this great strategy become a trend on bridges around the world.
Out of the country at the moment, so I missed this march, but so happy and proud to see that New Yorkers’ are still keeping the protests going.
.
To keep bridge flags hanging vertically and not blowing around, use the same trick Queen Elizabeth’s seamstress uses to keep her skirts safe from any breeze.
Sew small weights into the hem.
Am curious about this effort to link the Palestinian issue to the NYPD “war against people of color.” I’m pro-Palestine, think the NYPD’s “war against people of color” is nonsense on stilts, but suspect that most people don’t agree with me. Indeed if you watch CNN these days, you’d think that the American police war against innocent black teenagers is the biggest problem facing the country if not the world, so much that it crowds out Gaza completely. (If you’re really suspicious of the PEP media, you might suspect an agenda here. Darfur, Michael Brown, etc.) On the other hand, police brutality is certainly a problem at some level, and perhaps the linking of the two issues does help mobilize support on Palestine. I doubt it, but it might.
That is vandalism and the perpetrators should be punished.