Three Things the Pro-Palestine Movement Is Not

Protest encampments have sprung up over the past few weeks on more than 100 college and university campuses across the country, and they have rightly drawn national attention to the pro-Palestinian movement of which they are now an crucial part. A few things seem to be getting lost in the coverage of those encampments, however.

First, while the recent crescendo of activity at colleges and universities has caught the national eye, this movement is not primarily a student or campus-centered movement.

Since October 7, 2023, our project has logged more than 10,000 pro-Palestinian protests nationwide.¹ As you can see in the chart below, however, the vast majority of relevant events we’ve recorded over the past seven months—about 7 of every 10—have occurred away from campuses, not on them.

The same is true of arrests made at these events. Of the more than 8,600 arrests we’ve logged at pro-Palestian protests nationally since October 7, about two-thirds of them (5,671 of 8,609) have occurred away from campuses. In other words, far more people have been arrested while participating in this movement away from schools than at them.

One element of the movement driving this pattern is the spread and staying power of routinized actions—demonstrations or vigils that recur monthly, weekly, or even daily. At this point, our project is tracking scores of those nationwide, and they add up to hundreds of events each week. These repetitive actions typically draw little media attention, but they are an important indication of a movement’s salience and staying power. The last time we saw routinized demonstrations emerge and persist at this scale was in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. These actions typically involve small numbers of people, but, as organizers and participants will tell you, they can have outsized impacts on local and regional politics that persist for years.

Second, this movement has not been violent. That’s true of the broader national wave in general, and of the recent student encampments in particular.

Our project tracks several features of protest events that might be construed as indicators of protester violence, including property damage caused by protesters and injuries to police present at the event. In the more than 10,000 pro-Palestine actions we have recorded since October 7, we have only seen property damage at 128 of them and police injuries at 13. The vast majority of the instances of property damage involved graffiti or similar defacement of property, and virtually all of the police injuries occurred while making arrests. If we look only at actions on school campuses, the incidence of property damage is 30 and police injuries 6, with similar caveats about the what and the how.

Some observers might read the high arrest count as an indicator of violence. In fact, as the chart below shows, the vast majority of arrests have occurred during acts of civil disobedience or direct action that may have disrupted traffic but did not target any people or property for harm. Most of the recent arrests have happened on campuses, but these have generally come in response to concerns about the camp’s purported disruptions to academic life, not any physical injuries they have caused to other people.

In fact, we’ve seen far more violence directed at people protesting for Palestinian liberation or against genocide than we’ve seen from them. The pre-dawn mass assault on the student encampment at UCLA is the most glaring example, but hardly the only one. Just in the past week, we’ve seen people drive cars through crowds of pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide protesters four times, at least one of them causing injury (see here, here, here, and here); a counter-protester wearing brass knuckles push and slap medical students gathering to walk to a rally; a counter-protester brandish a knife at students; a trio of flag-wearing counter-protesters arrive at a encampment before dawn to heckle and verbally threaten students there… The list goes on, and it does not include the scores of uncounted injuries suffered by protesters during police sweeps of campus encampments in places like St. Louis, Los Angeles, and D.C.

Last but certainly not least, the rhetorical core of this movement has not been a call for violence against Jews, but rather a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end to violence being inflicted upon them.

Take a look at the word cloud below, which shows the relative frequency of the words we’ve seen on banners and signs or heard in chants from these events since October 7.² The six most common words are Palestine, free, genocide, Gaza, ceasefire, and stop. Based on the thousands of video clips, photos, and dispatches I’ve watched and read from these actions, I would summarize their collective message as “free Palestine,” “stop genocide,” and, more specifically, “stop killing kids,” the latter sometimes with a “…with our taxes/tuition” addendum. When protesters—some of them Jewish, some of them not—have been asked specifically about slogans like “From the river to the sea,” they have almost invariably explained them as positive demands for freedom and human rights and dignity for Palestinians, rather than calls for violence against Israelis or Jews.

There’s much more to say about this movement, of course. In the interest of my time and your attention, however, I’m going to leave it there for now. To stay up to date on what our data show about its persistence and evolution, you can use the interactive maps and dashboards we’ve created to track (crudely speaking) pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protest activity since October 7. And, as always, you can freely download the entirety of our dataset on U.S. protest activity since January 2017, and find more information about what it contains and how we collect it, from our GitHub repository.

-by Jay Ulfelder (May 10, 2024)

FOOTNOTES

When events span multiple days, as many of the recent student encampments have, we create a separate entry for each day, so we can properly record variation over time in the size and behavior of those actions, and so we properly represent the time and energy associated with them. Technically, then, our overall count is of protest-days rather than separate events, but in the vast majority of cases the two are the same. ↩︎
Since 2022, our project has been capturing verbatim as many slogans from protesters signs and banners and chants and shouts from protest participants as we can as a way to let protesters describe for themselves what the events in our dataset were about. For any given event, we only record any unique phrase (e.g., “free Palestine”) once, so it’s more of a representative sample of protest claims or ideas than a full capture of protest rhetoric. And, of course, we can’t record chants and phrases we don’t see or hear in the coverage our process tracks. For the word cloud in this post, we only included words that appeared at least 10 times in the nearly 32,000 verbatim claims we have captured from pro-Palestine events since October 2023. ↩︎

Nonviolent Action Lab Podcast Launches

The Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard Kennedy School‘s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation—one of the two institutional pillars of this project, along with the University of Connecticut—dropped the first two episodes of its new podcast earlier this month. As the we say in the promo blurb:

The Nonviolent Action Lab Podcast brings you the latest research, insights, and ideas on how nonviolent action can — or sometimes fails — to transform injustice. Each week we welcome experts from the field, scholars, organizers, and advocates to discuss nonviolent movements around the world.

You can listen and subscribe via Simplecast.

Episode 1 features a conversation between Lab director Dean/Prof. Erica Chenoweth and me about what the Lab does, how we’re hoping to grow that work, and some of the trends Erica sees in nonviolent resistance and democratization around the world right now.

In Episode 2, I talk with Prof. Désirée Weber from the College of Wooster about the long-running Black Lives Matter demonstrations she helped organize there after George Floyd’s murder and the effects those demonstrations had on local policing and the participants themselves.

Episode 3 should land soon. It will feature an interview I recently did with two organizers of a cycle of walks and demonstrations outside the D.C.-area homes of U.S. Supreme Court justices that ran for most of 2022 after Politico published the leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

While we’ve mostly focused so far on U.S. activism, future episodes will look at movements in other parts of the world as well, and lessons that scholars and activists can learn from them.

You know the drill: please listen, like, and subscribe!

A15 Day of Action for Palestinian Liberation Delivers Intended Disruptions

In the largest single day of deliberately disruptive protest activity in the United States since at least 2020, activists responded to the call for a global “coordinated economic blockade to free Palestine” with at least 26 acts of civil disobedience or direct actions in 23 different cities from coast to coast, resulting in more than 270 arrests and a wide array of diversions, delays, and other interruptions of daily life and commerce.

Roadblock at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, April 15, 2024 (Source: A15 Action)

In Arlington, Virginia, dozens of protesters occupied the lobby and blocked the entrance to Lockheed Martin’s offices, resulting in three arrests.
In Beacon, New York, protesters stood and sat in a line across the Hamilton Fish Newburgh-Beacon Bridge on I-84 at morning rush hour, causing a massive back-up on area roads. Police arrived on scene and arrested 15.
Before dawn in Charlotte, North Carolina, activists dumped paint and screws in the driveway and placed u-locks on the parking-lot gates at a Northrop Grumman manufacturing facility. Later in the morning, a group of demonstrators came to the same facility to hold signs and chant at arriving workers.
In Chicago in the morning, one group of activists used their bodies and a “sleeping dragon” to block an approach road to Chicago O’Hare International Airport for about 2 hours, and police arrested 40 of them.
In Chicago in the afternoon, hundreds of marchers who’d initially rallied at Federal Plaza stopped to block the intersection of N La Salle Street and W Wacker Drive. The massive collection of police officers who’d attempted to block the march at the plaza responded to the roadblock by arresting at least 11.
In Eugene, Oregon, more than 50 protesters stood in a line to block the I-5 interstate while dozens of others demonstrated on the nearby overpass at Harlow Rd. At least 52 protesters were arrested.
In Fremont, California, hundreds of activists marched on the local Tesla plant. When they tore down a chain-link fence erected to block their approach, police in riot gear fired pepper balls at them, reportedly resulting in multiple protester injuries.
In Oregon, in the forest near Grants Pass, activists conducting an ongoing tree sit against logging old-growth trees during a climate crisis marked the day by issuing a statement in solidarity with the A15 call to action.
In Hillsboro, Oregon, near Portland, demonstrators blocked entrances to an Intel campus. Police on the scene didn’t make any arrests, but a counter-protester reportedly burned a Quran and an employee tried to drive their car through the picket line.
In Kahului, Hawaii, dozens of demonstrators stood in a line with banners to block the road near Kahului Harbor, which hosts cruise ships as well as cargo freighters.
In Kansas City, Missouri, activists from several organizations disrupted construction at the Kansas City National Security Campus, where Honeywell manufactures mechanical and electronic parts for nuclear weapons. Ten were arrested.
In Maple Grove, Minnesota, protesters used a variety of tactics, including dabke dancing and a vehicle caravan, to delay shipments from the local Amazon distribution center for over two hours.
In Miami, Florida, activists who lay in the roadway and locked down in a sleeping dragon on Biscayne Boulevard were met with a massive show of police force that reportedly included officers in riot gear, on motorcycles, in helicopters, operating drones, and on horseback; seven demonstrators were arrested.
In Middletown, Connecticut, police arrested 10 protesters from a larger group that blocked roads to Pratt & Whitney’s local facility around morning rush hour.
In Minneapolis, the Anti-Colonial Action Brigade broke windows and left spray-painted messages at a Wells Fargo Bank branch on E Franklin Avenue.
In New York City on Sunday, April 14, a self-described “autonomous group of anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist anarchists” got a head start on the A15 call by vandalizing several Chase Bank branches in the financial district. Chase has been a regular target of demonstrations and direct actions in support of Palestinian liberation due to its investments in Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems.
In Oakland, California, a small group of protesters locked themselves down to concrete-filled barrels on I-880 at Embarcadero before dawn. Police spent hours trying to extract them and arrested at least seven.
Later in the morning, hundreds more gathered on I-880 in Oakland near 7th Street and blocked the freeway for several hours. Police in riot gear approached the group and gave a dispersal order but did not attempt to enforce it by force, and the crowd dispersed on its own in the afternoon.
Also in Oakland, activists disabled approximately 60 parking meters around Lake Merritt and left stickers on the meters explaining the connection to Palestine.
In Philadelphia, scores of demonstrators blockaded the intersection at Schuylkill Avenue and 30th Street while another group slow-rolled the streets in a mock a funeral procession and a third group rallied and marched by City Hall. Police arrested 41 at the roadblock and another 27 from the caravan.
In Providence, Rhode Island, people acting in solidarity with both the A15 call to action and the Stop Cop City movement knocked multiple multiple Bank of America ATMs out of commission “via super glue and yugi-oh cards.”
In Saint Charles, Missouri, activists stood or sat with banners and signs to block entrances to Boeing Manufacturing Plant 598 at morning rush, resulting in eight arrests.
In San Antonio, Texas, protesters blocked the road by Valero Energy’s offices. Police came to the scene, but we saw no reports of arrests.
In San Francisco, an “autonomous group” of more than 60 activists blocked the soutbound lanes of the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning. California Highway Patrol closed the northbound lanes and arrested 26 of them.
In Seattle, protesters blocked the road near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for over three hours, resulting in hundreds of flight delays and 46 arrests.
In Tampa, Florida, protesters marched in the street and then blocked a downtown intersection around rush hour.

Those direct actions and acts of civil disobedience were accompanied by scores of other rallies, marches, and demonstrations with thousands of total participants, including ones in Chandler and Tucson, Arizona; Fresno, Long Beach, and Los Angeles (downtown and at USC), California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New Haven, Connecticut (at Yale University); New York City, where another 48 people were arrested; Spokane, Washington; and Houston, Texas.

As of April 15, 2024, Crowd Counting Consortium has documented more than 7,500 pro-Palestine protest events in the U.S. since October 7, 2023, with a conservative estimate of 1.3 million total participants in the half of those events for which we have information on crowd size. A non-trivial share of those events come from nearly 100 daily or weekly demonstrations and vigils that activists have organized across the country over the past several months, and we continue to find out about new ones almost every week.

You can explore the data and find updated summary statistics on this ongoing movement with our interactive map and dashboard dedicated to it. U.S. protest events in support of Israel since October 7 are tracked on their own dashboard. If you have public information about an event we seem to have missed or a correction to a record we have, please consider using our anonymous online form to share that information with us.

[NOTE: This post has been edited since it was first published on April, 16, 2024, to include additional events and information as we learned of them.]

U.S. Protest Rhetoric Tracks Looming Famine in Gaza

As Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk wrote in a post this week on NYU School of Law’s Just Security blog:

Three months ago the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) process (the official process for assessing famine risk) issued an urgent warning: the entire population of Gaza was “at risk” of famine, and over half a million people were already experiencing famine-level food shortages. Last week, the IPC upgraded that warning, projecting that famine in Gaza is now “imminent.” 1.1 million people, half the territory’s population, are in IPC Phase V, the highest level of risk.

Or, as MSNBC’s Hayes Brown more succinctly stated: “Palestinians in Gaza are starving.”

The imminent famine in Gaza shows up in Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) data as a sharp increase in references to hunger and starvation in protesters’ chants and signs. As the chart below shows, we rarely saw mentions of “food”, “hunger”, “(mal)nutrition”, “starv(ing|ation)”, or “famine” in protesters’ signs or chants over the first few months of the wave of pro-Palestine actions that erupted in October 2023. Since early February 2024, however, those references have occurred at an accelerating pace.

One recurrent contribution to this stream of references comes from Kibbutz Israel, the nickname participants have given to the protest encampment that has stood around the clock in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, since Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire there in late February to protest against genocide in Gaza and to call for Palestinian liberation. A large red banner regularly displayed at that encampment shows a child holding a bowl and reads: “Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war.”

Another flurry of recent references came from Mennonite Action, whose members and allies engaged in demonstrations across the U.S. and Canada this past week “to demand a ceasefire, end the US and western funded occupation of Palestine, and build for lasting peace.” Like the one in Harrisonburg, Virginia, many of these demonstrations saw participants singing and displaying quilts as they carried symbolic deliveries of food and other humanitarian supplies to lawmakers’ offices. In at least one case, in Pasadena, California, demonstrators engaged in an impromptu sit-in and prayer vigil after being denied a meeting with their representative, Judy Chu.

Over 200 Mennonites and allies approach U.S. Rep. Ben Cline’s office in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to deliver symbols of humanitarian aid on March 26, 2024
Source: Harrisonburg Mennonite Action

On Sunday, March 31, Jewish Voice for Peace’s South Florida chapter organized a demonstration in Miami Beach, Florida, associated with Jewish Fast for Gaza, a weekly collective fast in opposition to genocide and in support of Palestinian liberation. Dozens participated in the action, some of them holding signs that read “Palestinians are being starved” and “Starvation is a war crime.”

Screenshot of JVP South Florida Instagram post describing Jewish Fast for Gaza demonstration on March 31, 2024

If you’re interested in tracking this trend yourself, you can do it with the data dashboard we created a few weeks ago by entering “hunger|food|famine|starv|nutrition” (without the quotation marks) in the box for filtering by claim text. As of March 30, 2024, that dashboard shows nearly 6,700 events in over 800 cities and towns across all 50 U.S. states, DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. We use a separate dashboard to track pro-Israel actions since October 2023, which currently number a little more than 1,000.

(Editorial Note: This post originally ran on Saturday, March 30. I updated it on Monday, April 1, with a chart covering events over the weekend and some additional text and photos.)

Israel/Palestine Protest Data Dashboards

To make it easier to find up-to-date information on pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protest activity in the United States since October 7, 2023, we recently created a pair of interactive data dashboards separately covering the two. You can access the dashboards by clicking on these links.

Pro-Palestine Protests in the U.S. Since October 7, 2023

Pro-Israel Protests in the U.S. Since October 7, 2023

Both dashboards show an interactive map on the landing page.

Click on the marker for an event to see details on its location, size, and participant claims. Claims that begin with “for”, “against”, or “in ____ of/with” are summaries produced by CCC coders; all others are verbatim captures of participant signs, banners, or chants (claims ending in “!”).
You can also use buttons to filter the data according to one or more of several criteria, including things like whether or not any protesters were arrested, the presence of counter-protesters, whether the event took place at a university or college or other school, and whether the event included any civil disobedience or direct action.

To see summary statistics about the relevant set of events, click on the “Summary Plots” button in the menu on the left. It shows a count of events, the sum of the observed crowd sizes, and a count of the different cities and towns in which the events have occurred.

If you explore the data and think we’ve either missed an event or misrepresented one, please use our anonymous online form to submit relevant public information, and we’ll review and amend as required.

We expect to update the underlying data on a daily or near-daily basis for the forseeable future, and the upper limit of the data range available in the controls will always let you know when it was last refreshed.

2023 Trends in U.S. Protest Activity

The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) logged more than 29,500 rallies, demonstrations, marches, vigils, and other public protest events across the United States in 2023, up more than 6 percent from about 27,700 in 2022 (and excluding labor strikes, which we stopped covering in 2023). Those nearly 30,000 events occurred in about 2,900 different cities and towns, down a bit from more than 3,200 in 2022. While we only had information on crowd size for 35 percent of the events we recorded in 2023 — about the same share as in 2022 — the sum of our conservatively estimated crowd sizes in 2023 still ran to more than 9.1 million people, or about 2.5 times as many as we counted in 2022.

Here are some trends we saw in our data in 2023. If you want to learn more about what the dataset covers, how we collect and encode it, and how you can freely access it, please see the Nonviolent Action Lab’s CCC repository on GitHub (here).

Physical Violence at U.S. Protest Events Remains Extremely Rare

While some indicators of political violence have surged in recent years and some analysts are warning of escalating risks of political violence in 2024, our data show that nearly all U.S. protest events in 2023 remained free from physical violence.

We saw reports of injured protesters at just 78 of those roughly 29,500 events in 2023, or only about 0.3 percent. That’s almost identical to the 74 events with protester injuries we recorded in 2022 and still well below the recent peak of 472 we recorded in 2020. We also recorded three protester deaths in 2023, the same number as 2022: one at the hands of police (Manuel “Tortuguita” Teran in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest in January), one shot and killed by another attendee at a Juneteenth festival in San Diego’s Liberty Station, and one counter-protester (Paul Kessler) who died after an altercation with a pro-Palestine demonstrator in Thousand Oaks, California, in November.

Police injuries remained even rarer. We saw reports of police injuries at just 18 protest events in 2023, or less than 0.1 percent. That 2023 total is up a bit from the 11 events with reported police injuries in 2022 but still well below the 244 recorded in 2020.

Finally, the number of protests causing property damage rose significantly in 2023 compared with 2022, but property damage still remained exceedingly rare. We saw reports of property damage — ranging from graffiti and broken windows to vandalized or burned construction equipment — at 200 events (0.7 percent) in 2023. That’s up a hefty chunk from the 116 (0.4 percent) instances we saw in 2022 but still well below the 586 we recorded in 2020.

Anti-LGBTQ Protest Wave Persists…and Then Finally Breaks?

In 2023, the historic surge of right-wing protests against LGBTQ+ rights, visibility, and even existence that began in 2022 persisted beyond that year’s midterm elections and even leapt to new heights (or lows, really) around Pride Month before finally ebbing late in the year.

As shown in the chart below, this anti-LGBTQ+ wave began gaining momentum in 2021 but really accelerated in June 2022 and then persisted at historically high levels until November and December. One notable feature of this wave was a focus on Drag Story Hour children’s reading events and other drag performances. These events were the targets of a substantial share of anti-LGBTQ+ protests for much of that wave, and they have continued to draw haters even as the wider wave has receded.

On this topic, it’s important to note the apparent dissipation of this protest wave does not mean that the flow of anti-LGBTQ+ bills through state legislatures has slowed, or that other forms of violence or terrorism targeting the LGBTQ+ community have gone away. It just means we’re not seeing those prejudices manifest as street protests so much any more, at least for the moment.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t also observe that gatherings in support of LGBTQ+ rights and visibility vastly outnumbered even this historically large wave of anti-LGBTQ+ protests over the past two years. As the chart below shows, pro-LGBTQ+ events — including but not limited to pride festivals, marches, and parades that are free to attend — vastly outnumbered the anti-LGBTQ+ ones in both number and scale. As the right ramped up its legislative and street attacks, the LGBTQ+ community and sympathetic activists and organizations responded with a much larger outpouring of activity, including many actions that were direct (and typically larger and joyful) counter-protests to anti-LGBTQ+ actions. Note the difference in scale across the two charts: the y-axis on the anti-LGBTQ+ chart maxes out at 175, while the y-axis on the pro-LGBTQ+ chart tops out at over 600. From spring 2022 to the end of 2023, pro-LGBTQ+ activism produced a dozen months with event counts that exceeded the peak monthly count of anti-LGBTQ+ actions during the same period, and often by scores or even hundreds of events.

Largest-Ever Pro-Palestine Movement

The October 7 attacks on Israel by Palestinian militants, and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in response to them, spurred twin surges of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine activism in the U.S. in 2023. While the pro-Israel surge was relatively short lived, the burst of pro-Palestine protests grew into what’s almost certainly the largest and broadest campaign in support of Palestinian liberation in U.S. history, and that campaign was still going and growing at the start of 2024.

The chart below shows daily counts of pro-Israel protest events — a set that includes public vigils, rallies, and other demonstrations — from October 7 to the end of the year, and the total crowd sizes from the events for which we had information about that aspect. During that period, we saw 468 pro-Israel events across 275 different cities and towns in 45 states and DC. We had information about crowd size for 329 (70 percent) of those events, and the total conservatively estimated size of those crowds was roughly 300,000 people. Notably, more than half of all the pro-Israel events we saw happened within a week or so of the October 7 attacks, and there were just a scattering of events over the last five weeks of the year. Also notable, the single-largest event in this set, the March for Israel in Washington, DC, on November 14, accounted for roughly half of that estimated total crowd size.

The chart below shows daily event counts and crowd totals for pro-Palestine protest events from that same period. As the chart illustrates, while the size of the crowds at these actions has ebbed as the campaign has drawn on, the pace of events has not. That fact is remarkable on its own, but doubly so when you consider that protest activity is typically light at this time of year due to holidays and weather. By the end of the year, we had logged nearly 3,300 pro-Palestine actions since October 7 across 622 different cities and towns in all 50 U.S. states, DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. We had information about crowd size for only 1,561 (48 percent) of those events, and the sum of the conservatively estimated size of those crowds still ran to roughly 767,000 people. As we noted in an early December press briefing on this topic, we’re fairly confident at this point that this year’s pro-Palestine wave is the largest and broadest pro-Palestine mobilization in U.S. history. And, as the chart shows, this mobilization showed no signs of dissipating at the start of 2024.

Last on this subject, the near-absence of pro-Israel protest events in the last several weeks of the year did not mean that public activism in support of Israel had entirely disappeared in the U.S. As the following chart shows, supporters of Israel have continued to turn out to counter-protest pro-Palestine events, even when they’re not organizing rallies or vigils or demonstrations of their own. These counter-protests — typically, small groups of people waving Israeli flags who sometimes verbally confront pro-Palestine crowds about hostages still held by Hamas — were excluded from the tallies reported above. As the chart shows, though, over the last several weeks of the year they had become the dominant form of pro-Israel protest in the U.S., accounting for most or even all of the weekly activity we saw.

Environmental Protest Activity Held Steady

The global climate crisis accelerated in 2023, but U.S. protest activity related to environmental issues did not. In fact, monthly counts of U.S. protest events making calls for climate action or addressing other environmental concerns have held fairly steady for nearly three years now, since recovering from recent lows during the COVID pandemic’s initial peak in 2020.

Rather than any recent shifts, what the CCC data summarized in that chart show are a few distinct phases of environmental protest activity in the U.S. since 2017. The first covered much of the Trump administration and was dominated by the school strikes for climate, coordinated international days of action centered on walkouts and rallies led by students at schools across the country (and around the world). The next phase was the extended lull in 2020 and early 2021 associated with the COVID pandemic.

The current phase began in mid-2021 and persists into 2024. Youth activists have continued to play a central role in environmental activism during this phase, but instead of occasional bursts of climate strikes at schools, we are seeing a relatively steady pace of protests and demonstrations that generally target either a) projects with significant environmental consequences (e.g., the Line 3 and Line 5 pipelines in Minnesota, Atlanta’s so-called Cop City project, or the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the Appalachians) or b) banks, other corporations, or government officials considered complicit in the crisis. As the chart also shows, while protests, demonstrations, and rallies still vastly outnumber acts of civil disobedience or direct action, the latter have also regularly featured in the movement’s public activities over the past few years.

Housing Precarity Spurs Housing Protests

As we wrote back in May 2023 and as the chart below shows, the U.S.’s ongoing housing affordability crisis has spurred a wave of housing-related protest activity that picked up steam during the COVID pandemic, accelerated in 2022, and showed no signs of abating at the start of 2024. Over the past few years, the average monthly count of housing-related protests in our dataset has risen from 46 in 2020 to 72 in 2021, 93 in 2022, and 117 in 2023. December is always a busy month for housing-related events because it includes vigils held on the winter solstice to mark Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, but the data from the rest of the year also implies that this wave continues to roll.

Return to Recent Normal on Reproductive Rights

After surging in spring and summer 2022 in response to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, protests for abortion access and other reproductive rights receded to a more typical pace in 2023. The year saw modest peaks in protest activity on this theme as a result of a national Women’s March in late January, a court ruling that suspended FDA approval of the abortion medication mifepristone in April, and a modest wavelet of actions on the first anniversary of Roe’s reversal in June.

Importantly, though, the apparent ebb in 2023 in protest activity in support of reproductive rights did not result from a decline in the issue’s political salience or a change in attitudes on it. State ballot measures to protect or expand abortion access have won consistently since SCOTUS dropped the Dobbs decision; support for reproductive rights seemed to help tip numerous elections towards Democrats in November 2023; and survey data continue to show that most Americans believe abortion should be legal.

Proud Boys in Retreat

Consistent with reporting by VICE News, CCC data show a significant decline in public protest activity in 2023 by the Proud Boys, a national network of right-wing men’s clubs whom then-President Trump famously shouted out in a 2020 debate and who played a major role in the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We logged just 81 protest actions involving Proud Boys in 2023, down from 154 in 2022 and 210 in 2021. As shown in the map below, those 2023 appearances were concentrated in Southern and Central California, Oregon, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina,Ohio, Wisconsin, and New York, with a handful of other actions scattered across the Rocky Mountain states, the Upper Midwest, DC, and New England.

Of course, the Proud Boys’ diminishing role should not be mistaken for a broader decline in far-right activism or the popularity of the racism, misogyny, and adoration of violence they represent. The past year also saw rapid growth in North America and Europe of so-called Active Clubs, a newer network of organizations with a loose ideology similar to the Proud Boys’. These groups only appeared at 37 events logged by CCC in 2023, but that’s partly because they seem to prioritize training sessions and other group activities over public protests, at least so far. Even more concerning, ideas that used to be considered far-right or fringe —including but not limited to Great Replacement Theory and beliefs about the propriety of political violence — have become increasingly mainstream.

Update on Israel/Palestine Protests

November 28, 2023

Since October 7, the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has recorded nearly 2,300 U.S. protests, rallies, marches, caravans, demonstrations, vigils, banner drops, and direct actions in support of Palestine or Israel, with hundreds of thousands of total participants on different sides of this mass mobilization. While the pace and size of public gatherings in solidarity with Israel have declined significantly since the initial surge, actions in support of Palestine have swelled into a geographically broad and demographically and tactically diverse movement that continues to produce scores of events with thousands of total participants almost every day.

For the period October 7–November 26, CCC has recorded 1,869 pro-Palestine protests, rallies, marches, demonstrations, vigils, banner drops, and direct actions in 468 different cities and towns across 49 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. We have information about crowd size for 1,060 (57%) of those events, and we conservatively estimate the total crowd size for those 1,060 events at nearly 680,000 people. As shown in the chart below, several coordinated days of action — including a school walkout in late October, a Global Shutdown for Palestine on November 9, and another Shut It Down for Palestine call the Friday after Thanksgiving — have served as focal points for pro-Palestine activism, but we’re still recording scores of events scattered across the country almost every day, and the crowd sizes at them have grown and then held fairly steady.

Over the same period, CCC has recorded 433 pro-Israel rallies, demonstrations, marches, protests, and vigils in 261 different cities and towns across 45 U.S. states and DC. We have information about crowd size for about 70% of those events (305), and we conservatively estimate the total crowd size for that 70% at about 291,000 people. During that time, we’ve seen a shift from large indoor vigils or rallies in response to the initial attacks to smaller demonstrations focused on calls to bring home the hostages taken on October 7. Notably, more than half of all the pro-Israel events we have recorded happened within a week of the October 7 attacks. While many of the actions during that initial surge were organized by faith leaders and local or national Jewish community groups, many of the recent actions have been led by community members and have involved displays in public spaces of empty shabbat tables or empty strollers adorned with posters showing pictures of Israeli hostages. A small fraction of the pro-Israel events we’ve recorded have been led by state or local Republican Party organizations or Christian evangelical groups.

Elected officials ranging from city council members and mayors to state governors and U.S. senators have participated in — or, in some cases, helped to organize — a sizeable share of the pro-Israel events we’ve recorded over the past eight weeks. Our data shows elected officials at 102 (24%) of the pro-Israel events we’ve logged since October 7, and that excludes events that were organized solely by state or local governments, which CCC does not cover. By contrast, elected officials have appeared at pro-Palestine events only rarely: just 20 events, or about 1 percent of the time, through November 26. None of those pro-Palestine appearances by elected officials have involved any U.S. senators or governors, and only a few have involved U.S. representatives (almost all of them by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Cori Bush, or both). We have also seen uniformed law enforcement officers participate in some pro-Israel events, something we have not seen at any pro-Palestine actions.

One notable feature of the pro-Palestine movement is the variety of tactics it is employing. While nearly all of the early actions were demonstrations, rallies, marches, or protests on public sidewalks and streets, we’ve also seen a significant increase since mid-October of acts of civil disobedience and other deliberately disruptive actions. Many of these have targeted the offices of U.S. senators and representatives who have not yet expressed support for a ceasefire in Gaza. Others have targeted the offices or other facilities of companies that design or manufacture weapons for the Israeli military, franchises of companies invested in Israel, or public thoroughfares or transit hubs. Over that same time, we have also seen an increasing but still small number of direct actions involving vandalism or other types of property damage at some of those same commercial targets. Taken together, these acts of civil disobedience and direct actions have led to more than 1,600 arrests since October 7, with hundreds of those arrests sometimes occurring at a single event. We have seen reports of property damage at 41 pro-Palestine events (2%), almost all of it graffiti or broken windows, while none of the pro-Israel events we’ve recorded have involved property damage.

Another notable feature of the current pro-Palestine mobilization is its demographic diversity. Unsurprisingly, many of the actions throughout this wave have been led by Palestinian community, youth, and student organizations acting in concert with other Arab-American or Muslim ones. From the start of the wave, those organizations have also been supported by the same diverse array of anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer organizations that have supported calls for Palestinian liberation for decades. Anti-Zionist or otherwise “progressive” Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow are also not new, but they have become particularly active in this wave, and they have led many of the large acts of civil disobedience we’ve seen in recent weeks. As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza has climbed, we have also seen more actions in places like Amarillo, Texas, and Irvine, California, that are led by individuals who are not experienced organizers but have nevertheless been moved to act for this cause. Also notable, the crowds in the videos and images we’ve seen from these pro-Palestine events have also ranged widely by race and age, often involving families and including everyone from small children to the elderly. The crowds at many pro-Israel events have also included people of all ages, but they have featured noticeably less racial and ethnic diversity than the pro-Palestine ones.

Since the start of 2022, CCC has also routinely recorded protesters’ demands or other claims from the signs, banners, flags, and chants we see or hear in photos, video, and other reporting from the events we track, allowing us to analyze the nature and evolution of protest rhetoric within and across movements. We don’t always have video or audio evidence from which to capture these claims, but when we do, we record as many unique references as we can. (By “unique,” I mean that we only record a single instance of any given phrase at a particular event, even if it appears more than once.)

In the ongoing pro-Palestine movement, we’ve seen an expansion over the past eight weeks beyond the long-standing focal points of pro-Palestine activism — claims of occupation, apartheid, resistance, and return — to regular references to genocide and the need for a ceasefire in Gaza to stop it. If “free Palestine” and Palestinian flags have been the common thread throughout, the emphasis on other signs and chants has shifted over the course of the current wave from phrases like “end the occupation”, “lift the siege on Gaza”, and “no U.S. aid to apartheid Israel” to things like “ceasefire now”, “stop funding genocide”, “bombing kids is not self-defense”, and “stop killing children”. The former still appear regularly, but they are now often joined by the latter, and a fair share of recent events have focused exclusively on alarm over genocide and calls for an immediate ceasefire.

One focal point of the broader politics around this moment and movement has been the frequent use by pro-Palestine protesters of the phrase, “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free!” While many Jewish community organizations and other pro-Israel groups assert that the slogan is inherently antisemitic and threatening because, to them, it necessarily implies the destruction of Israel and killing of its inhabitants, many Palestinians — including some asked by reporters during protests what they intend the phrase to mean — reject that characterization and describe their own use of the phrase as a broader call for Palestinian dignity and liberation. What our data confirm is that this phrase has regularly featured in the rhetoric of recent pro-Palestine actions. As shown in the chart below, we have seen or heard this phrase or just its first part, “from the river to sea”, in images, videos, or other reporting from nearly 400 events since October 7, making it the second most common phrase behind only “free Palestine” and just a bit more common than “ceasefire” or “ceasefire now”.

The single-largest events on both sides of this wave so far came in Washington, DC, in November: a rally and march for Palestine centered on Freedom Plaza and the White House on Saturday, November 4, and a March for Israel held on the National Mall just 10 days later, partially in response to that pro-Palestine gathering. Reports on the size of both events varied widely, from “tens of thousands” to about 300,000. We generate a point estimate for crowd size in our dataset using standard rules. Specifically, we convert phrases like “tens of thousands” to their most conservative numerical equivalent (so, here, 20,000). Then we split the difference between the highest and lowest reported estimates, which was (probably not coincidentally) 300,000 in both of these cases. In the case of the March for Palestine and the March for Israel, those rules produce an estimate of 160,000 for each event.

Direct consideration of video and photographic evidence, however, suggests both crowds were considerably smaller than that rules-based point estimate would indicate. Talia Jane, an independent journalist who reported from the March for Israel, used her observations from the day and careful analysis of overhead images to estimate the crowd size for that rally at about 25,000, give or take several thousand. Using the same strategy, she estimated the crowd size for the March for Palestine, which she attended as well, at about 30,000. I also attended the March for Palestine, and it struck me that the number of people who attended it was especially hard to estimate because a) the event lasted so long (about 12 hours), with many people coming and going over its course; and b) the crowd flowed throughout a large multi-block area for much of that time. By contrast, the “March” for Israel was actually a stationary rally on an easily visible and barricaded section of the National Mall, and it only lasted a few hours. Given those aforementioned features, I suspect the total crowd size at the March for Palestine was substantially larger than Talia’s point-in-time estimate, but we have no way to know for sure, and, so far, we haven’t seen other careful third-party estimates. The National Park Service used to report crowd sizes for many large gatherings in DC, but it stopped doing that in the 1990s after facing a firestorm for its estimate of participation in the Million Man March in 1995. Meanwhile, most press accounts of large protest events either report organizers’ numbers or describe the crowd size with vague phrases like “tens of thousands,” as was the case for these two gatherings in November. This just goes to show that once crowds grow beyond a few hundred observed participants, estimating their size is exceedingly difficult — and, often, controversial.

Pro-Palestine Wave Persists and Grows

November 6, 2023

Over the past few weeks, the burst of pro-Palestine protests, rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and direct actions in the U.S. that followed Hamas’ October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response to them has swelled into a sustained wave that is almost certainly broader and larger than any previous pro-Palestine protest wave in U.S. history. As Jeremy Pressman and I noted in our recent interview with Good Authority, by late October, the current wave had already surpassed its 2021 analogue in size and spread, and the ensuing 10 days have only brought more and larger actions across many more localities.

Since October 7, Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has recorded more than 950 pro-Palestine protest events in 317 different cities and town across 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Across the 609 (64%) of those events for which we have information about the number of participants, our total estimated crowd size is about 520,000, with a median crowd size of 150 and maximum of 160,000 in Washington, DC, on Saturday, November 4 (per our usual practice, we arrive at that 160,000 figure by averaging the lowest reported size, “tens of thousands”, which we conservatively treat as 20,000, and the highest, “an estimated 300,000”).

The stack of charts below summarizes our protest event data by week to identify trends in the growth and evolution of this mobilizational wave. The weeks used in this summarization run from Monday to Sunday, so Week 1 is actually just two days, October 7–8. The final week, Week 5, ends yesterday, November 5. Among the notable trends in those charts, and bearing in mind that data for the most recent week are subject to the most change as we see additional events:

While the weekly count of events have recently stabilized in the low hundreds, that’s still a large number, comparable to the mobilization we saw in 2022 in response to the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade at its peak.
The past week saw the largest crowds by far, led by that massive march in DC; a smaller but still huge one in San Francisco on the same day; events that drew thousands to the streets in New York City, Portland,and Minneapolis; and dozens of other events in places like Anaheim, Baltimore, Boise, Dallas, Detroit, LA, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Seattle that brought out many hundreds.
In their signs and chants, protesters often made references to “apartheid” at the start of the wave, but the rhetorical empahsis in the past few weeks has shifted to “genocide” and calls for a ceasefire as the death toll in Gaza has climbed beyond 10,000, including more than 4,000 children. As that’s happened, protesters have also called out President Biden by name (or the nickname “Genocide Joe”) more often.
We saw no direct actions in the first nine days of the wave (Weeks 1 and 2 in the charts), but they have become increasingly common over the past three weeks, with more than 20 in the past week alone. Many of these were sit-ins or blockades at the offices of U.S. lawmakers led by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow that led to most of the hundreds of arrests summarized in the chart above, but we have also seen, among other things, an attempt to block the departure of cargo ship from the Port of Oakland; a die-in blocking the entrance to a Raytheon facility in Tuscon at rush hour; and graffiti and other vandalism at the offices of Israel-based military tech company Elbit Systems and its subsidiaries.

What the charts don’t show but you can see in reporting from these events is how diverse the crowds have been across all sorts of dimensions, especially as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has dragged on and calls for a ceasefire have grown louder. Movements rarely achieve this kind of breadth and diversity, and the ones that do often have more durable effects on policy and attitudes.

Many events have been family affairs, with crowds ranging from infants to the elderly.
Established Palestinian– and Muslim-led groups have organized many of these actions, but Jewish groups supporting Palestinian liberation have also played a big role in the past couple of weeks, leading many of the direct actions accounting for the lion’s share of the 100s of arrests shown in the chart above.
Pre-existing coalitions of anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist organizations have coordinated activity in some areas, especially larger cities, while in other places we’ve seen the emergence of new coalitions and even individual organizers leading repeated events.
Student groups — including but not limited to Students for Justice in Palestine — have organized many of the events on college campuses, but most of the events in this wave have not taken place at schools.
Flags spotted at these events suggest broad international solidarity as well. In addition to the nearly-ubiquitous Palestinian flag — and, occasionally, the American flag — we’ve seen protesters carrying flags of Algeria, Armenia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Chile, Columbia, Cuba, Iraq, Ireland, Lebanon, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen. We’ve also had occasional sightings of the Wiphala, Communist, Peace, and Anti-Fascist flags.
Flags representing Hamas have been reported or evident to us in photos or video at just one protest: this past Saturday in Evanston, Illinois, where organizers reportedly asked the protesters carrying them to move away from the main crowd.
We’ve seen signs, flags, and banners identifying participants as gay, queer, or feminist at a smattering of events as well, though those have certainly been scarcer.

For more information about CCC and access to the most recent public compilation of our data, please visit our GitHub repository.

Pro-Palestine Wave Accelerates

October 23, 2023

Over the past 10 days, the wave of U.S. street activism supporting Palestine has accelerated. Since October 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants launched attacks on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, CCC has logged 420 pro-Palestine rallies, protests, demonstrations, and vigils in more than 180 different cities and towns across 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Nearly 130 of those events, or about 30 percent, occurred in just the past three days (October 20–22).

The belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza appears to be an important factor in the growth of this movement. As shown in the chart below, explicit references to genocide in protesters’ signs and chants were infrequent in the first several days of this wave, but they have become commonplace since October 12–13, when Israel announced it was cutting water and electricity to Gaza, issued an evacuation order to Gaza’s 2 million residents, and then accelerated its bombing campaign on the Palestinian territories. Over the ensuing 10 days, signs saying things like “end the genocide in Gaza”, “this isn’t war this is genocide”, and “there’s no two sides to a genocide” have become commonplace at pro-Palestine demonstrations in the U.S., as have references to Israeli forces bombing children, hospitals, and churches. According to the United Nations, more than 5,000 people have been killed and more than 15,000 injured in Gaza in the past two weeks; women and children comprise about 62 percent of those 5,000 fatalities; and more than 1,000 other people in Gaza have been reported missing and “are presumed to be trapped or dead under the rubble.”

With reported crowd sizes for three-quarters of those 420 U.S. events, we conservatively estimate more than 200,000 total participants in pro-Palestine actions across the U.S. over the past two-plus weeks, with a median crowd size in the hundreds. As shown in the chart below, the peak date for participation in this wave of pro-Palestine actions so far was this past Saturday, October 21, which saw crowds in the thousands or tens of thousands in at least nine cities, including Chicago, Denver, LA, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, and Washington, DC.

Despite the rapid acceleration of this wave, appearances by elected officials at pro-Palestine events in the U.S. remain rare. We have only seen reports of local, state, or federal officials at 7 of these 420 events, or less than 2 percent. Recent exceptions include speeches by U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush at an October 18 rally and direct action organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow in Washington, DC, and a speech by Colorado state representative Iman Jodeh at a rally in Denver on Saturday, October 21. By contrast, we have seen reports of elected officials at 67 of 292 pro-Israel events during that same period, or about 23 percent, including numerous governors and U.S. senators and representatives.

For more information about what kinds of events CCC tracks, how we find and record information about those events, and how we estimate crowd sizes, please see the project’s coding guidelines. For access to the data, see our GitHub repository.

Recent U.S. Protest Activity in Support of Israel and Palestine

October 17, 2023

Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, the U.S. has seen hundreds of vigils, rallies, demonstrations, and protests in response to those attacks and the political and military reactions to them.

Specifically, in those 10 days, CCC has recorded roughly 270 U.S. events expressing solidarity with Israel, compared with nearly 200 in support of Palestine. Using our (conservative) counting methods, we estimate similar total crowd sizes across those two sets: nearly 90,000 for both. We have seen reports or visual evidence of crowd size at a smaller share of pro-Israel events, however — only 67%, compared with 85% for the pro-Palestine events — so our estimate for the former is probably more of an undercount than the one for the latter.

The largest pro-Israel event we’ve recorded so far was a rally outside Chabad Lubavich in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on October 9, with a crowd size described by one source as “thousands” and another as “20,000“. The largest pro-Palestine event was a rally and march near the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles on October 14, with a crowd size described by various sources as “thousands“, “easily a few thousand“, and “tens of thousands“.
So far, we have seen an almost identical number of protests with at least 1,000 participants across both sets: 22 in support of Israel, and 21 in support of Palestine.

Apart from the political claims they have made, the sharpest contrasts between the two sets of events have come in a) the frequency and character of counter-protests and b) the frequency with which elected officials have joined the crowds.

Across the nearly 270 pro-Israel events, we have seen reports of counter-protests at just 10 of them, or 3%. At only one of those 10 events — at UC Berkeley on October 10 — did pro-Palestine counter-protesters directly confront and then physically fight with rally-goers. At another, in LA, a group of students who shouted at pro-Israel demonstrators from their car were allegedly surrounded and threatened with a knife while another standing nearby with a flag was shoved and spit on. None of the other eight situations escalated beyond verbal clashes, according to our sources.

By contrast, some 67 of the 199 pro-Palestine events we have recorded, or 34%, have seen counter-protests. While most of those counter-protests have not escalated beyond verbal clashes, violence initiated by counter-protesters has been more frequent and, in some cases, more intense. For example:

In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on October 13, a man got out of his car at a rally of Palestinian-American families, shouted racial slurs, and brandished a gun at the crowd before fleeing. He was arrested the next day.
During a pro-Palestine rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on October 8, a group split off from a larger crowd of pro-Israel counter-protesters to confront a small group of the rally-goers, reportedly punching one in the face and pepper spraying the group. Police on the scene made no arrests.
At that large gathering in LA on October 14, several men wearing Israeli flags approached and scuffled with pro-Palestine rally-goers, and then one sprayed the nearby crowd with pepper spray. No arrests were made.
In Kirkland, Washington, on October 8, a group of pro-Israel counter-protesters reportedly approached pro-Palestine ralliers, spit on them, and started throwing punches, leading to scuffles that police on the scene broke up. Police on the scene made no arrests.

As noted above, we have also seen a sharp contrast in the frequency with which elected officials have participated in these events. Specifically, we have seen reports of elected officials at 60 pro-Israel events in the past 10 days, compared with just four pro-Palestine events. The elected officials present at those pro-Israel events have ranged from city council members and state lawmakers to state governors and U.S. senators and representatives. The highest level of elected official we have seen reported at a pro-Palestine event is an appointed state legislator in Colorado whose refusal to specifically condemn Hamas at a rally in Denver on October 7 led to calls for his ejection from the legislature.

As always, our collection is ongoing, so these statistics will probably change marginally as we learn of events we’d previously overlooked, or find new information about ones we’d already seen. We also know that we will never achieve a complete record of all relevant events, and we know that these statistics grossly flatten a complex and emotionally profound array of experiences and concerns. That said, we hope they can provide some factual context for discussions and analysis of the popular response to the ongoing surge in violence in Israel and Gaza.