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.
I always feel conflicted when I see things like this. On one side good for them, they found a way to get their message across to a nation news. But on the other hand they are intentionally disrupting infrastructure people rely on everyday. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that people want global change, but I do think it is a bad thing that people feel powerless to influence this change so they have to resort to more disruptive methods like this. More representation in the federal government could help prevent this.
A non-disruptive protest just gets ignored. You need to impact people’s daily lives to make them think why the problem arose in the first place.
People will find a way to get mad at any protest no matter how little it impacts others. See kneeling for anthems or just wearing shirts at events
But, you need to impact the lives of the people who have the means to make that change. A traffic jam isn’t going to do that.
I mean, is a major highway in the second largest city of the primary colonial sponsor a bad place? I guess if we had free teleportation they might find marginally better success in DC or Tel Aviv, but if you’re located in LA I can see why you’d choose to protest there and not somewhere else.
If it happened in a vacuum, probably not. But traffic jams don’t happen in a vacuum. They ripple out and cause effects that hit millions of other people. Such as this news article, this lemmy post, and all of the people here discussing it.
Traffic jam equals lots of news coverage lots of pissed off voters, lots of attention lots of eyes, that is how you get to people who can make a change.
And a disruptive protest just makes people hate you and your cause.
I’m not really asking you to look it up or anything, but this gets parroted around a lot, and I wonder if there’s actually any data to really support it or if it’s just a statement that kinda sounds nice.
I mean maybe not data but it’s telling that almost every successful movement goes beyond the “quietly protest on the side of the road” step.
What does a non-disruptive protest even look like? The entire purpose of protest is to be disruptive, and every protest is disruptive in some way.
Adding a flag to your profile pic.
I wouldn’t consider that a form of protest personally. Just a way of expressing support.
This post itself provides a new data point as a piece of evidence to support that claim. There is a news article written about it, and we are talking about it.
Also conflicted: I don’t think the disruption itself is a bad thing if it’s disrupting a part of society that derives benefit from the whatever is being protested against.
That said, I’m not sure how disrupting traffic in Los Angeles is going to affect the change they want to see. You can’t get much further from Washington DC than the West Coast.
This is the dumbest way to protest. Out of the book of any publicity is good publicity: “any protest is a good protest”.
Also, the US government isn’t the Israeli government.
Also also, Biden is a zionist, so it’s not like he’s going to change his stance because of a traffic jam in LA.
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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.
Just gonna say: Reagan stopped the bombing of Beirut with a phone call.
After the bombings? That would have been done by primarily US troops, so of course he could stop it with a phone call.
After the what? We’re talking about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 here.
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.
He didn’t stop the conflict as a whole, but he stopped the bombing of west Beirut itself.