With around 6,000 attendees, the event was the country’s largest anti-war gathering since October 7, outside of street protests. As they filed into the Menora Arena, giant screens displayed a video from 2019 about a group of musicians from the southern city of Sderot who teamed up with a group in Gaza to create a joint music and dance video. As if to further emphasize the stark distance between that time and our current one, it was immediately followed by a segment from John Lennon’s song “Imagine.”
This idyllic atmosphere inside the stadium was shattered by the first group of speakers to take the stage: Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose family members were killed or kidnapped in the Hamas-led attack nine months ago, or killed in Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza. One speaker, Liat Atzili, was herself kidnapped and held captive until late November. ….more
