Pro-Palestine Demonstrators Take Their Message to Museums

Pro-Palestinian protesters over the weekend staged rallies at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both in New York; disrupted a reading by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof; and mounted a sit-in at the British Museum in London in response to the institution’s deal with oil-and-gas conglomerate BP.

At the Brooklyn Museum,Hyperallergicreports, roughly three hundred demonstrators led by Palestinian liberation organization Within Our Lifetime began protesting in front of the institution at about one in the afternoon. Denouncing what they cast as the museum’s complicity with Israel’s sustained drubbing of Gaza and the suppression of pro-Palestine voices, the protesters carried signs calling for a ceasefire. Ten demonstrators were arrested on charges variously including harassment, assault, resisting arrest, and obstructing governmental administration.

Artnewsreports that hundreds of demonstrators (estimations ranged between five hundred and eight hundred) entered MoMA on February 10 and staged a sit-down in the museum’s atrium. Among the protesters’ demands, according to anInstagram postby Writers Against the War on Gaza, which organized the action, were that the institution take a stand against genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism, and that it remove board members Leon Black, Paula Crown, Larry Fink, Marie-Josée Kravis, and Ronald S. Lauder. The demonstrators pointed to what they decried as the board members’ direct funding of the “Zionist occupation” through their ties to arms manufacturing, lobbying, and corporate investment. MoMA closed its doors to the public, and the protesters dispersed at six, the institution’s typical Saturday closing time. No arrests have been reported.

The same day, in Berlin, theArt Newspaperreports, artist and activist Tania Bruguera was forced to halt her marathon reading of Hannah Arendt’sThe Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she had invited the public to participate alongside artists, activists, and others, after a group of protesters twice interrupted the performance. In the first instance, the demonstrators, who had registered to take part in the reading, repeatedly shouted the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which is criminalized as hate speech in Germany.Artnewsreports that this intervention was encouraged by Bruguera. In the second instance, while Mirjam Wenzel, a scholar of German Jewish art and history, was reading, protesters accused Bruguera of providing a platform for Zionist sympathizers (Wenzel has said that the Israeli hostages are deserving of empathy) while failing to invite Palestinians to participate.

On February 11,Artnewsreports, pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a sit-in at the British Museum in protest of the $63 million sponsorship deal the institution signed with BP in December. The action was organized by Energy Embargo for Palestine and Palestine Solidarity Campaign. In a post to X, the former groupnotedthat BP was one of six companies grantedgas exploration licensesby Israel weeks after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, and well after Israel had begun its retaliation against Gaza. “We will not watch idly as energy companies based in Britain fuels Israel’s colonial genocide,” wrote the group. “ENERGY EMBARGO NOW!”

The protesters’ efforts preceded Israel’s Monday evening strikes on Rafah, in the south of Gaza, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are estimated to be seeking shelter from the war. Conducted with the aim of rescuing hostages taken by Hamas during the group’s October 7 incursion into Israel, the raids are reported by theWashington Postto have killed sixty-seven people. Two hostages were freed.Reuterson February 10 reported 28,064 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes since October 7 and 67,611 injured, per reporting from the health ministry in Gaza; the Israelideath tollfrom the Hamas attack of that day is 1,200. Of the roughly 250 hostages taken in the incident, more than one hundred were returned to their families, thirty-one have died, and 136 are still being held in Gaza.