NEW ORLEANS — A few hundred protestors blocked one side of St. Charles Avenue headed toward the Carrollton area on Friday afternoon in front of Tulane and Loyola's campuses, with activists chanting "Free, free Palestine," and other pro-Palestine slogans.
The protest started around noon and included speakers railing against what they called imperialism. Some compared their protests to opposition to the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 70s. The protest broke up around 1:15 p.m.
Most of the oncoming traffic seemed to detour and make a U-turn prior to the protesters without incident.
The protest included several speakers and chants that denounced Israel's actions in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas. Since that time, close to 40,000 people have been reported dead in Gaza, many of them children. The protesters decried Israel's war actions and the U.S. funding of the war.
One of the speakers at the protest, identified as "Millie," said part of Friday's protest was against the Tulane Jewish student organization's hosting of an IDF soldier at an event earlier this week.
The Tulane Hullabaloo had a story on a similar, but smaller protest on campus Thursday in opposition to the Jewish organization's event.
"My first reaction to seeing [Hillel’s event] was if I were a Muslim student, or if I were a student with family in Palestine, and I knew that Tulane Hillel was sponsoring a soldier that may have been a perpetrator of my family member’s death, it would be very, very alienating to the point where I wouldn’t want to be a part of Tulane,” said Daniel Wiesen, a Jewish student who organized the opposition to the Jewish student event.
The protest is similar, though somewhat smaller than what has been seen at larger campuses around the country, especially at USC in Los Angeles and Columbia University in New York.
Much earlier Friday, a vandal defaced the front of the Presbytere museum in the French Quarter with pro-Palestine graffiti.