Dueling demonstrations outside the Museum of Tolerance became heated on Wednesday night.
Inside, a private screening of video of atrocities from the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel was underway. Outside, horns were blaring, flags were waving, and shouting matches were erupting.
About 50 protesters gathered outside the museum prior to the start of the 47-minute film titled “Bearing Witness.” The film is a compilation of video from the attacks, gathered by the Israeli military. An estimated 1,400 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage in the Oct. 7 attacks. In response, Israel has bombarded the Gaza Strip and initiated a ground invasion with the stated goal of eradicating Hamas. More than 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, most of them women and minors, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
Outside the Los Angeles museum at the corner of Roxbury Drive and Pico Boulevard, protesters waved U.S. and Israeli flags, and a woman used a bullhorn to chant, “Bring them home,” a reference to the Israeli hostages.
LAPD officers separate pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian supporters at the dueling protests outside the Museum of Tolerance on Wednesday.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles police officers were scattered among both groups, who were gathered on opposite sides of the intersection.
One pro-Israeli protester held a poster showing a 4-year-old child held hostage by Hamas. Another woman shouted into a bullhorn: “You can’t take away history. Jews are indigenous to Israel. Decolonize.”
On the other side, a man held up a sign reading “Honk for Ceasefire!” and a cacophony of honking from passing cars filled the air.
Lyra Silvertongue, 28, a Culver City resident and a policy coordinator at a nonprofit organization, wore a black shirt with the words “Free Palestine.”
She said her parents came from Ukraine in 1993, and she compared the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of that country with the U.S. response to the violence in Gaza. She said the United States “only rallied for Ukrainians because we are white.”
When it’s “brown people … they don’t acknowledge it. They won’t support them,” she said.
She said she didn’t know much about the video but believed it to be “a huge propaganda attempt.”
“Everything they have put out has been denial and refusal to call it a genocide,” Silvertongue said of the Israeli government.
At one point in the night, a small group of demonstrators draped in or carrying Israeli flags crossed to where the pro-Palestinian protesters were standing, and shouting matches broke out. A pro-Israeli protester moved through the crowd chanting through a bullhorn, “Terrorists go home,” before being confronted by a pro-Palestinian demonstrator also yelling through a bullhorn.
Shauna Johnson, a nearby resident, said she was on her evening walk when she saw the demonstrators and decided to return to show her support for Israel. She said of the film being screened at the museum: “My thought was that they’re trying to show they’re not making things up.”
Johnson said that, although she supports Israel, she has empathy for the Palestinian people and their suffering in the war. Looking at the protesters across the way, she said she wished the two sides could just hear each other out.
Wednesday’s protest took place three days after a Jewish man, Paul Kessler, died as a result of a confrontation at a similar Israel-Hamas war demonstration in Southern California. No arrests have been made and the investigation is ongoing.