MONTPELIER — A week after three young men of Palestinian descent were shot and injured in Burlington, some 300 people gathered in front of the Vermont Statehouse on Saturday to protest the Israel-Hamas War.
“We rally today in the shadow of a hate crime in our state,” said Ashley Smith, a Burlington activist who helped emcee the event. “We rally in the shadow of Israel restarting its genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza.”
Addressing the crowd from the Statehouse steps, just feet from the state Christmas tree, speaker after speaker invoked the Nov. 25 shooting, which injured Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Aliahmad. The three 20-year-olds, who had befriended one another at a Quaker school in the West Bank, were visiting Awartani’s family in Burlington for Thanksgiving when a white man allegedly approached them on North Prospect Street and shot them.
Jason Eaton, 48, was charged Monday with three counts of attempted second-degree murder in the shootings. He pleaded not guilty. Authorities have said they are investigating whether the incident may have been a hate crime but have not announced such a determination.
Jayna Ahsaf, field organizer for the prison abolition group Free Her Vermont, told fellow protesters that the shooting was a reminder that the state often fails to live up to its own self-image.
“We just reckoned with the fact that a hate crime occurred in Vermont, and many seemed extremely shocked that something like this could even happen here, which illustrates how much work we still have to do,” Ahsaf said. “If we cannot see the ways in which our community contributes to the problem, then we fail to progress. Black and brown community members have been ringing the alarm that the presumed exceptionalism of Vermont is not accurate.”
Even as they addressed last week’s shooting, protest leaders kept their focus on the war that has raged in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas killed roughly 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and kidnapped another 240. In the nearly two months since, according to Gaza health officials, the Israeli military has killed more than 15,000 people — two-thirds of them women and children — during bombing campaigns and an incursion into the Gaza Strip.
After a weeklong cease-fire during which Israel and Hamas traded hostages and detainees, fighting resumed Friday and escalated Saturday as Israeli forces bombarded southern Gaza and ordered residents to evacuate.
Protesters at the rally denounced Israel as an apartheid state conducting a genocidal war — and they took to task American politicians who they blamed for enabling the bloodshed. One woman carried a sign picturing President Joe Biden holding the strings of a marionette in the guise of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Biden = Netanyahu’s puppet,” it read.
Smith, the emcee, said the Biden administration was “supporting, funding, arming and advising Israel to carry out the collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.” But, he argued, pro-Palestinian activists in Vermont were beginning to make a difference — citing recent calls for a cease-fire first by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and then by U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt.
“Our struggle forced Becca Balint to come out for a cease-fire. Our struggle forced Peter Welch to come out for a cease-fire,” Smith said. “Now the only member of the congressional delegation who opposes a cease-fire is Bernie Sanders.”
The crowd booed.
“We are here today to tell Bernie to change his position,” Smith said, referring to the state’s senior U.S. senator, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. “Get with the majority of this country. Get with the majority of people in the Democratic Party. Get with the majority of the world. Call for an immediate cease-fire, a permanent cease-fire in this genocidal war.”
Sanders has called for a humanitarian pause to the fighting, repeatedly criticized the Netanyahu government and vowed to seek an end to Israeli aid if the country fails to meet certain conditions — but he has resisted using the term “cease-fire,” alienating members of his progressive base.
“I’m surprised that Balint and Welch are in front of him on this,” Smith said in an interview. “He needs to catch up with the rest of the congressional delegation.”
April Fisher, a member of Burlington Tenants United and Food Not Bombs, said she was addressing the crowd as “an anti-Zionist Jewish woman.”
“As a person whose Jewish ancestry goes back countless generations, I refuse to allow Zionists to say that Israel stands for Jewish values or acts for the liberation of Jewish people,” Fisher said. “Please take a hard look at the genocide happening in Palestine right now and ask yourself, ‘Is this what liberation for Jewish people looks like?’”
A small group of counter-protesters holding Israeli flags across State Street said they saw it differently.
Martin Green, of Morrisville, said he thought it was important to show up in support of Israel. That nation, he said, “is being unfairly accused when, in fact, it is they who have been atrociously attacked as innocent people.”
Monkton resident Lynne Caulfield, who also took part in the counter-protest, said she took particular issue with the protesters’ repeated invocation of the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The phrase — which refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, now controlled by Israel — is seen by many groups, including the American Jewish Committee, as deeply antisemitic.
“They’re basically saying they want the world free of Jews,” Caulfield said. “You know, there should be no Israel.” Pointing to its use by Hamas, Caulfield said, “It’s the mantra of the Islamic jihadists.”
Said Green of the pro-Palestinian protesters, “I think perhaps a lot of these people may be doing this in ignorance, not really understanding the situation. I think ultimately what’s happening today is antisemitic because if you’re not supporting the Jewish people and their right to defend themselves, then you’re standing opposed to them and you’re standing in support of their enemies.”
On the other side of State Street, Lopi Laroe, of Rutland, defended the slogan.
“When they say, ‘Palestine should be free from the river to the sea,’ what you’re really saying is there should be freedom and justice and equality for all people,” she said. “How does freedom threaten the Jewish state? And the fact that they do frame it as threatening the Jewish state reveals more about the Jewish state than the Palestinian drive for liberation.”
Smith, the emcee, was among those who led the “river to the sea” chants. “It’s slander to call that chant antisemitic,” he said.
“The call for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea, is a call for a secular democratic Palestine, where everybody enjoys equal rights in a democracy,” he said. “That is an anti-racist slogan.”
