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From 7 October 2023 to 7 June 2024, the Crowd Counting Consortium recorded nearly 12,400 pro-Palestine protests and over 2,000 pro-Israel protests in the United States. Since January 2017, when CCC first started counting protest events and their crowd sizes, the current pro-Palestine protest wave involves the largest, most sustained US protests sparked by a foreign event. We hypothesize three possible reasons for the size of the pro-Palestine mobilization: casualties and suffering motivate protestors and the Palestinian casualties have been much higher; protestors react to the US government’s position, which in this case strongly favors Israel; and protestors are driven by emotional outrage at Israeli policy and the resultant Palestinian suffering. By looking at property damage and police injuries, we also conclude that this pro-Palestine movement has not been violent. That is true of both the national protest wave in general and of the student encampments in spring 2024 in particular. The rhetorical core of this pro-Palestine movement has not been a call for violence against Jews, but rather a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end to violence being inflicted upon them. To substantiate this point, we considered two sources of evidence: 1) the banners, signs, and chants seen or heard at pro-Palestine events; 2) the demands issued by organizers of over 100 student encampments. One caveat: Although we use the terms pro-Israel and pro-Palestine as shorthand, we acknowledge that these binary terms are unsatisfying and misleading.
Chenoweth et al. (Fri,) studied this question.