People march towards the U.S. Capitol during a demonstration opposing Israel's genocide of the Palestinians on Saturday, Oct. 21, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The escalating Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza has sparked massive demonstrations, involving millions of people, on every inhabited continent in the world.
The World Socialist Web Site welcomes these demonstrations as the expression of the enormous opposition to the horrific crimes being carried out by the Netanyahu government in Israel. A long period of political stagnation, during which the ruling classes successfully pushed through their policies of war and political reaction, is ending.
In the UK, over 300,000 people participated in a rally in London on Saturday, the largest anti-war demonstration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and one of the largest in the history of London. Tens of thousands marched in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. More than 15,000 people rallied at Place de la Republique in Paris Sunday. Thousands of people marched in the German cities of Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Münster and Stuttgart, with 10,000 protesting in Düsseldorf. There were mass demonstrations in Spain, Australia, Canada and many other countries.
Protests are spreading throughout the Middle East. Thousands of people packed Egypt’s Tahrir Square on Saturday, the centerpoint of mass demonstrations in 2011, in defiance of orders from the El-Sisi dictatorship. Over the past week, demonstrations have taken place in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Morocco, Malaysia and Indonesia. There have been protests of more than one million people in Pakistan and Algiers, and hundreds of thousands in Rabat, Morocco.
These protests have unified people of different nationalities all over the world. In the United States and Europe, the demonstrations have involved large numbers of Jewish people denouncing the Israeli government for carrying out genocide. Young people are taking part in protests and school walkouts throughout the United States, Europe and the Middle East, and an entire generation is being politicized.
In the face of this global movement, the corporate media is pretending that the demonstrations do not exist. The front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian have all ignored the demonstrations, and they have not been reported on the evening news.
An article published in the Times, “What Voters Think About U.S. Support for the Wars in Israel and Ukraine” did not even mention that mass protests had been occurring against the war on a daily basis. The local media is no better. In Chicago, where tens of thousands demonstrated over the weekend, neither of the major newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, carried an article.