Tens of thousands rally in D.C. to support Israel, crying ‘never again’
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of people filled the National Mall on Tuesday for the biggest pro-Israel rally in a generation, demanding release of hostages held in Gaza and denouncing the antisemitism unleashed by the Hamas attack 40 days earlier.
“It’s been quite a few years since we felt like there was an existential crisis for Israel,” said Joel Schwitzer, Dallas-area director of the American Jewish Committee, who attended the March for Israel. “This feels different than anything I can remember.”
Security was tight, with streets around the mall closed and a heavy presence of police. Busloads from synagogues across the Northeast and Midwest converged on the capital. Texans by the hundreds flew to the capital.
Organizers said 290,000 people were on hand to show solidarity with the Jewish state, the hostages, and each other — more even than a 1987 march to protest Soviet oppression of Jews.
“I couldn’t not come here,” said David Kogut, 71, a retired pediatric dentist in Dallas. A relative in Israel was shot in the spine in the early hours of the attack and faces a long recovery.
Antisemitism has boiled as the death toll in Gaza mounts. The Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations organized the march as an antidote.
“We’re Americans,” said Dena Ofengeim, 30, who left Texas for Boston three years ago, adding she attended to defy the uptick in “psychological warfare against Jews.”
Her father fled the Soviet Union decades ago and lately, she said, “my dad’s been talking about ‘never again.’ I thought he was exaggerating but he’s right. People don’t take these things seriously. First they dehumanize us. Then they come for us.”
The five-hour rally was held with Congress in session, in part to keep up pressure on lawmakers to approve $14 billion President Joe Biden wants to send Israel in security aid. The request has been bogged down amid resistance to requests for $9 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza and $61 billion for Ukraine.
The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, R-La., vowed that Israel will get the aid it needs. So did Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat and the highest ranking elected Jewish politician in U.S. history.
Johnson drew cheers when he declared that “the calls for a ceasefire are outrageous…. Israel will cease their counteroffensive when Hamas ceases to be a threat to the Jewish state.”
The crowd chanted “no ceasefire!”
“Never never never will we forget the evil of Hamas,” Schumer told the crowd.
John Hagee, senior pastor at San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church and a staunch supporter of Israel, told the crowd: “I am here to deliver a singular message: Israel, you are not alone!”
Hagee added, “After the Oct. 7 massacre we must all make choices. We choose peace, or terror. We choose Israel, or Hamas. There is no middle ground in this conflict. You’re either for the Jewish people, or you’re not.”
The current crisis has forged rare unity between secular and religious Jews, and between factions in the U.S. and Israel that support and oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies of expansion into the West Bank.
“I’m not a religious person,” said Dallas resident Arona Ackermann, 53, whose grandparents fled Lithuania in 1933 for what became the nation of Israel in 1948. But given the current peril, she feels an “intense obligation” to honor the sacrifices of her ancestors and those defending Israel now.
“I want the Palestinians to have peace and I want them to build their own country alongside us, and I want them to either leave us alone or partner with us,” she said.