On Yom Kippur, pro-Palestinian protesters moved their weekly protests from City Hall on Main Street to gather on Kenaston and Grant in the heart of Winnipeg’s Jewish community, in the very place peaceful pro-Israel supporters have gathered for 51 weeks. On November 9, the pro-Palestinian protesters moved to Confusion Corner where they have been since.

At the  pro-Palestinian  protest on Kenaston and Grant on November 2, I witnessed protesters  shouting their hateful slogans, the most telling of which, “We don’t want no two states,” openly dispels the delusion Palestinians ever cared about a state of their own, wanting only what their Palestinian leaders told us time and again—the eradication of Israel and death of  the Jews. Their incessant and deafening chants promoted violence. Their antisemitic rhetoric was amplified as they passed a megaphone among different protesters, including children.

The pro-Palestinian protesters shouted the following hateful speech:

“One, two, three, four / We don’t want your bloody war”; “Winnipeg, where are you / Your hands are bloody, too”; “Winnipeg, you can’t hide / We charge you with genocide”; “Long live the Intifada” and “The only solution is Intifada, Revolution”; “From the river to the sea / Palestine is all you’ll see”; “One, two, three, four / Occupation no more” / “Five, six, seven, eight / Israel is a terrorist state (also a racist state, a made-up state, an apartheid state, a fascist state)”; and “Satanyahu (also Joe Biden/ Justin Trudeau/ Ben Carr), you can’t hide, / You’re committing genocide.”

These are clear calls for violence and the elimination of the State of Israel, to be replaced by Palestine "from the river to the sea."The rhetoric shows that the protestors are uncompromising, unreasonable, and are against the Western values that Canada has long upheld. 

Protesters held signs accusing Israel of “killing babies” when the truth is the IDF does all that is humanly possible to avoid civilian casualties. Another with the accusation “Israel is starving 2.2 million Gazans,” despite the fact that since the start of the war to October 31, 2024 Israel has delivered 1,099,177 tons in 55,609 trucks and 9,979 pallets of humanitarian aid. And another, “Israel is bombing schools” though it is now well-known that Hamas uses protected spaces, such as schools, as weapons depots.

For $30 you could pick up a keffiyeh from the Students for Justice in Palestine table, the requisite fashion accessory for the cowardly protesters to hide behind as they spew their hatred loudly, in case they ever have to account for their actions. Or for free, you could receive a copy of Richard Becker’s Palestine, Israel, and the US Empire, compliments of the Strike Poster Collective. The Preface to the second edition begins with an outrageous description of the October 7 Massacre:

On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian people [amongst 6000 Hamas terrorists and members of UNRWA] broke out of the concentration camps [i.e., the Gaza Strip immiserated by 18 years of oppression by Hamas’ rule] and bulldozed through the apartheid wall [the security barrier protecting Israel from just such an attack] surrounding Gaza. . . . Condemnation and criminalization echoed from the halls of the White House to university classrooms and television sets, denouncing both the resistance and all those who dared express solidarity with Palestine (vii).

If only the last were true. Tragically, the world’s sympathy for Israel did not last a day. By October 8, the keffiyeh-clad protesters were on the streets world-wide condemning not the barbaric perpetrators but the victims of the most horrific pogrom suffered by Jews since the Holocaust. And so, it continues as I witnessed at this pro-Palestinian rally.

It is reassuring that the pro-Palestinian protests have moved away from a space made sacred to the hundreds gathering to remember and honour the 101 hostages still held in captivity and being repeatedly raped, tortured, and starved in terror tunnels under Gaza for 394 days.