All Out For Gaza - The Anger Continues

Photos: Leon Kunstenaar

(San Francisco, May 18) Twenty minutes before the announced start time of two PM, the crowd seemed small. But the number rapidly swelled to over a thousand a few minutes after two o'clock. Jews in the form of a contingent with a banner saying "Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area" were there to affirm their ideal and promote their demand, unlike many in Israel, for peace and justice.

It became a powerful demonstration driven by Israel's crime, outdoing itself daily, and with Biden making it all possible. After a rally with loud slogans and speakers, demonstrators marched to the Israel consulate on Montgomery street. The consulate was encircled by metal barricades and police. The marchers then closed off the street and held another rally.

The supposed "red line" of an Israeli attack on Rafah, previously touted, has proven to be a PR fantasy. As the UN and a few American doctors report "apocalyptic" conditions of death, disease and starvation, Netanyahu's Hitlerian final solution continues. The Nazi Holocaust or Shoah, as Europeans call it, was once thought the be the unique extreme of barbarity to which a "civilized" government could descend, a one time tragedy, unlikely to happen again. Now, the descendants of those victimized by that horror, are in turn, the new Nazi monsters in a grim confirmation that history does, indeed, rhyme.

That Biden has called the International Criminal Court's likely issuance of an arrest warrant against Netanyahu "outrageous" is understandable since the court, if they do their job, could also issue an arrest warrant for Biden as an accomplice. As Israel is, or should be, placed in the docket, so should be the "United" states.

We are in the habit of calling our country with its political system dependent on wealth, not votes, with an absurd and unjust system of electing the president and a corrupt Supreme Court the "United" states. This is illusory. The country is now half taken over by a party openly contemptuous of democracy. Our country might shed its last vestiges of republicanism (small "r", in the traditional sense) with the coming election.

As the sign in one of the photos says, "turns out that the lesser of 2 evils is really fucking evil."

See all high resolution photos here.