Jewish Protesters Target Wall Street As Israeli Strikes Hit Hospitals In Gaza
Sophie Hurwitz
Wall Street’s Monday began with Jewish protesters and anti-war advocates gathering outside the New York Stock Exchange in protest of U.S. funding for Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, some reportedly locking themselves to the gates of the building, in an action organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. Protesters laid out a banner reading “Gaza Bombed, Wall Street Booms” in front of themselves on the street in front of the Stock Exchange.
In a press release, Jewish Voice for Peace noted that the stock price of arms manufacturing companies Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have “skyrocketed” in the past year of warfare. “As Gaza is bombed, Wall Street booms,” Emma Seligman, writer and director of the film “Bottoms,” said in a statement to Teen Vogue from the protest. “Right now, the Israeli military is dropping bombs on homes, schools, refugee camps, and hospitals in North Gaza. Meanwhile, the members of Congress who vote to send these weapons to Israel invest in these companies and get richer every day.”
Today has been a day of carnage. Footage of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a hospital in central Gaza spread across social media, showing burning tents housing sleeping families in refuge, as well as one man burning alive, as reported by the Washington Post. The New York Times' reported death toll from the attack is currently at 4. The majority of those injured were women and children. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported, another Israeli strike killed at least 18 in the town of Aitou in northern Lebanon.
That same day, it was reported by the Associated Press that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering “seal[ing] off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”
At the end of last week, the U.N. announced that no food has entered northern Gaza since the beginning of October, and that “aid entering Gaza is at its lowest level in months,” per ABC News. A U.N. inquiry, also at the end of last week, “accused Israel of carrying out a ‘concerted policy’ of destroying [Gaza’s] health care system,” reported CNN. Per the BBC, the same inquiry called the attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and healthcare workers “[amounted to] the crime against humanity of ‘extermination.’”
“At this very moment, the Israeli military is massacring family after family in North Gaza – with US-made bombs,” Elena Stein, Director of Organizing Strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, said via a statement. “The Biden Administration wants the public to believe that the US’s $18 billion slush fund for Israel’s genocide is for the sake of ‘Jewish safety.’ We’re here refusing to be used as the US’s moral cover and to expose its true interests: financial gain and control in the region. Weapons embargo now.”
JVP connected their action at the Stock Exchange targeting those they accuse of profiting off the war to the recent Hurricanes Helene and Milton: FEMA spent almost half its disaster relief budget for the next 12 months in the first eight days of the fiscal year, right after the U.S. government approved $8.7 billion in military funding to Israel. A banner at the protest read “FUND FEMA NOT GENOCIDE.”
The protest is in part a reference to the first action from the protest group ACT UP in 1987, targeting pharmaceutical companies amid the AIDS crisis. Two years later, a similar protest from ACT UP became the first to disrupt the opening bell of the Stock Exchange. Their protests helped force lowered prices for AIDS medication.
“ACT UP’s first action took place on Wall Street to protest the lack of funding for AIDS care and medications. Today, a growing anti-war movement returns to this street to demand healthcare not warfare,” artist and ACT UP activist Gregg Bordowitz, who was at the 1989 protest and joined the JVP action today, said in a statement. “For those of us still alive today the continuity of struggle and commitment remain clear.”
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
More great activism coverage from Teen Vogue: