NY: Rights groups protest Hebron settlement fundraiser
Adalah-NY, Brooklyn for Peace rally outside Marriott Marquis hotel against fundraiser held there by settlement group, chant 'Hebron's settlers, Klu Klux Klan, racist groups go hand in hand'
Thirty-five rights advocates from Adalah-NY and Brooklyn for Peace rallied Monday evening outside the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York's Times Square to protest a fundraiser held there by the Brooklyn-based Israeli settlement group the Hebron Fund, the right groups said in a statement.
The fundraiser was held while tensions escalated in Hebron, as the Israeli High Court ordered Hebron's settlers to temporarily evacuate a disputed home in the West Bank city.
Standing on 45th Street near New York's Broadway theaters, the protesters' chants included: "Mamma Mia Marriott, you support a racist lot" and "Hebron's settlers, Klu Klux Klan, racist groups go hand in hand."
Aaron Levitt, an activist with Jews Against the Occupation-NYC who has spent time in Hebron as a human rights monitor, noted that, "We made a lot of noise, but I don't know if the settlers heard us at the dinner. Some of them cast agitated looks in our direction as they entered, and I engaged a few in conversation.
"The subtext of what I heard from most when I described the settler attacks on Palestinians that I had witnessed in Hebron was that they see no equivalence in the moral worth of non-Jew and a Jew," he said.
"This is racist in a deep and meaningful way. And it is a worldview that allows settlers in Hebron to throw stones at Palestinian girls every day as they go to school, and to drive Palestinian families from their homes."
