Last week, 18 Jewish elders were arrested and charged with trespassing for chaining themselves to the White House gates. The group, calling themselves the White House 18, were protesting Israel’s U.S.-backed siege of Gaza and calling for a permanent ceasefire.
“As elders, our hearts are shattered watching the Israeli military murder thousands of Palestinians, destroying families and lives,” the group wrote in a statement on X (formerly Twitter). “Everyone should be able to grow old like we have.”
“Jewish feminists have always been on the forefront of movements for peace and justice,” the group wrote in another, longer statement on HeyAlma.com. “Many of us are descendants of Holocaust survivors who know all too well the price of silence. We have lived our entire lives honoring our identity as Jewish women by taking action against all forms of injustice.
“Challenging the prevailing media narrative that there is a generational divide [between older and younger Jews],” the statement continues, “we have been honored to join younger feminist and social justice activists, so many of them queer and trans, to take historic action together with the organization [White House 18 member] Penny Rosenwasser was a founding board member of, Jewish Voice for Peace.”
Israel has been bombing Gaza for over two months in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis. President Biden has pledged $14.3 billion in military aid to Israel. At the time of the White House 18’s protest, over 17,000 people had been killed by Israeli attacks; that number is now up to nearly 20,000, with thousands more thought to be buried under the rubble of bombed buildings. Almost the entire population of Gaza is displaced and in need of food, water, fuel, and medical supplies, which Israel is largely blocking. More and more scholars agree that the siege of Gaza risks becoming genocide, if it isn’t genocide already.
(featured image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
