NYPD took 103 people into custody on First Avenue on Friday, breaking up a sit-in a few blocks from the United Nations. The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace.
Nobody stayed in a cell. Those detained were issued summonses for disorderly conduct, a low-level violation rather than a crime, and released. They face a court date and, most likely, a small fine or a dismissal.
Who was arrested
The list is unusual for a sit-in, which is part of why it traveled.
- Susan Sarandon, Academy Award winner
- Hannah Einbinder, Emmy winner
- Chelsea Manning, former Army intelligence analyst
- Glennon Doyle, author
- Caleb Hearon, comedian
- Chi Ossé, New York City Council member
- Darializa Avila Chevalier, Democratic congressional candidate
What they were protesting
The sit-in was timed to Netanyahu’s address to the General Assembly, the one where roughly 77 delegations walked out and he called those remaining moral cowards.
Jewish Voice for Peace listed four things: the conduct of the war in Gaza, which the group calls a genocide, expanded settlement building in the West Bank, the occupation of parts of Lebanon, and the bombing of Iran alongside the United States.
Their demand was summarized in three words on the signs: stop arming Israel.
Nine elected officials went too
Among those detained were nine New York politicians, including city council members Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés, state assembly member Emily Gallagher, state senate candidate Aber Kawas, and congressional primary winner Darializa Avila Chevalier.
I refuse to allow a war criminal to roam the streets of our city unchallenged. I refuse to be complicit in genocide.
Darializa Avila Chevalier
All nine posted photos or video of their own arrests to social media.
Who Jewish Voice for Peace is
Worth stating plainly, because it gets erased in the coverage on both sides.
JVP is a Jewish organization. It is one of the largest anti-Zionist Jewish groups in the United States, and its members organize as Jews rather than in spite of being Jewish.
That matters to how this scene should be read. The people arrested on First Avenue were not a crowd that happened to include some Jews. The action was organized by a Jewish group, on the day the Israeli prime minister told the mayor of New York that Jews here feel unsafe because of him.
The BeezLoop Take
Civil disobedience is supposed to work like this. You sit in a street, you block it, you know the arrest is coming, and you accept it because the arrest is the point. A hundred and three people chose a misdemeanor to make a street corner into an argument. Nobody was hurt, the police cleared it, and the system did roughly what it is supposed to do on both sides.
The elected officials are where we get skeptical. A summons for disorderly conduct, issued and released the same afternoon, is close to the cheapest political act available in New York, and nine officeholders posting their own arrest photos suggests the content was at least part of the plan. Real civil disobedience carries a real cost. This carried a court date and a good image. That does not make the position wrong, and it does mean the arrest is not the evidence of conviction it is being presented as.
The celebrity element cuts two ways and honesty requires saying both. Sarandon and Einbinder being in the van is why this got wire coverage instead of a paragraph, and famous people using their leverage for something with an actual cost is more than most of them do. It is also true that a misdemeanor is a very different thing for a movie star than for the congressional candidate or the council member standing next to her, and different again for anyone in that crowd without citizenship.
The detail that should complicate everyone’s priors is who organized it. On the same day Netanyahu stood at the UN and told Zohran Mamdani that Jews in New York no longer feel safe, a Jewish organization filled a New York street to protest Netanyahu and got arrested for it. Both of those things happened within blocks and hours of each other, and neither cancels the other out. American Jews are not a bloc with a single position on this war, and any argument that requires them to be is an argument built on a fiction.
What we would resist is the framing on either end. This was not, as some will say, a hundred antisemites in the street; it was organized by Jews. It also was not, as others will say, proof that a community has turned; JVP represents a real constituency and not the whole of one. The useful thing about a protest is that it tells you what some people believe strongly enough to be arrested for. It does not tell you what everyone believes.
And the timing is the part with teeth. Netanyahu addressed a hall that 77 delegations walked out of, while a hundred people were being loaded into vans outside over the same war. That is not a country arguing with Israel. That is a very visible slice of New York, including Jewish New York, saying something the delegations inside said with their feet.
The question
When a Jewish organization is arrested protesting the Israeli prime minister on the day he says New York Jews are unsafe, whose account of Jewish safety should carry? And does a sit-in that produces 103 arrests and no policy change accomplish anything?
Also: Abbas addressed the same body by video after a second visa denial.
Sources: CNN · Al Jazeera · Democracy Now
