Pro-Lebanon and Palestine groups from across Pittsburgh hosted an “emergency rally” on Wednesday evening in front of the Cathedral of Learning, later moving to Schenley Plaza. About 100 students and community members gathered to protest for the protection of Lebanon as violence rises between Israel and Hazbollah. 

The event drew about 12 pro-Israeli counter protestors who waved an Israeli flag and asked the group of protestors, “where are the hostages?” Some pro-Middle East protestors countered, yelling back, “the government is killing them.”

Mel Packer, a community member representing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction movement of Pittsburgh, as well as the Howmet Accountability Project, addressed attendees on the Cathedral lawn at the start of the protest. In an interview, he told The Pitt News that he has “a moral obligation” to speak out for human rights. 

“It is a great moral failing if we stand by in our nation and watch genocide taking place anywhere in the world,” Packer said, “In particular, when it’s our tax dollars are fully supporting it. I have an obligation, as I had with the civil rights movement, as I had in the anti-war movement of Vietnam … I have a moral, political, an ethical obligation to oppose the use of my tax dollars in murdering people. It’s that simple.” 

Packer highlighted that, with the 2024 presidential election coming up, people are forgetting about the “carnage, destruction and genocide going on.” 

Although Packer and his wife, amongst others, are in their 70s, he pointed out that a lot of momentum in the international protests supporting the Middle East comes from younger people and students.

“It’s important to do some education and some organizing around campuses,” Packer said, “Because campuses, in fact, have huge endowments that are invested in Israel. They’re invested in Israeli products, they’re invested in pension funds that invest in Israel. It’s important to raise those issues on our campuses, as well, so we can divest from apartheid.” 

Packer was a part of the 1980s anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which he said was “very, very effective.”

The protest moved to Schenley Plaza, blocking traffic on Forbes Ave. along the way. Once the protest regathered, Yara, a junior at Carnegie Mellon University who chose not to share her last name or major for safety reasons, spoke to the crowd. She told attendees, “I’m so grateful to every single one of you that keeps showing up.”  

“Everyone here [that] I can see is from different walks of life, we all come from different places,” Yara said in an interview with The Pitt News. “We are all people who have different backgrounds, but everyone here is united by empathy and by our shared humanity. We have not let apathy take us over, as it has done the rest of the world … in the end, our souls win.”

Yara said that she was there because she, along with others, is “very angry about the 76 years of Zionist and Israeli aggression” against Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. 

“We’re angry at European colonialism,” Yara said. “We’re angry at Europeans coming to our lands, taking our land, our food, our culture, our music, reappropriating our stories, reappropriating who we are, and then painting themselves to the world as though they are us,  as though they are the indigenous, while they slaughter us and steal what we’ve worked for thousands of years to create.”

In response to the recent violence in Lebanon, including Israeli bombings and exploding pagers, Yara said that “Israel has completely corrupted and lost their morals.”

“We’ve known this since the inception of Israel, but it has become exceptionally terrible within the past year,” Yara said. “We know that they do not spare anyone … Israel doesn’t spare the lives of civilians, doesn’t distinguish between anyone’s lives. They consider every indigenous person a terrorist, whether they be a child, a medical worker, a journalist or just a normal person trying to live their life.”

Judy Kanafini, a junior natural science major on the pre-physical assistant track at Pitt, showed up to support her “people,” since she is Palestinian, and protest the displacement of over 27,000 Lebanese citizens. 

“The least we can do while we are here in America, under safety, is to speak for the people who can’t speak for themselves,” Kanafini said. 

Kanafini has been protesting for a free Palestine since she was 10-years-old. She believes that protests, especially on a college campus, bring awareness to everyone who sees them.

“Having it on campus makes people walking past question it,” Kanafini said. “So we’re going to sit there and explain to them what’s happening and maybe get some more people to speak out with us against the genocide in Palestine.”

Kanafini thinks that protests are an opportunity to “bring people together.”

“It’s a good way to not only show support to the Palestinians, but also to establish some sort of unity against this genocide,” Kanafini said. “We’re all fighting this together … hopefully, this time next year, we’ll have a free Palestine and we don’t have to keep doing this every year.”