Hundreds, including Jewish groups, protest Trump's meeting with Netanyahu

By Molly McCluskey

(First published on Middle East Eye)

WASHINGTON, DC - Hours after Donald Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an official state visit, hundreds of people, including many Jews, gathered at the White House and the Trump International Hotel to protest the new president's Middle East policies.

Demonstrators were angry at the choice of David Friedman as US ambassador to Israel, the possible moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem and the failure to halt Israeli settlements in Palestine.

At the White House, the crowd gathered amid a blustery twilight with printed signs clutched in gloved hands. About 200 people chanted “Bibi go home!” as the DC Metro Police, a fixture at such events, kept a discrete distance and watched from the warmth of their patrol cars.

“It’s our position that it is not in America’s best interest to have Friedman as an ambassador because he’s biased,” Kristin Szremski, the media director for American Muslims for Palestine, one of the organisations behind the protest at the White House, told Middle East Eye. “It’s not good for Americans because it will hurt our credibility with our global partners, and it’s not good for Palestinians because he supports annexation, and he supports moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which will only inflame tensions in the Muslim and Arab world.”

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