As thousands of Jewish community members were gathering at vigils and ceremonies on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel, several dozen people were celebrating “one year of global resistance” during an anti-Zionist demonstration at a Palo Alto shopping mall.
“There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!” protesters chanted at the Stanford Shopping Center on the evening of Oct. 7, repeating what a leader had yelled through a megaphone. “Stop bombing children!”
Palo Alto police said they arrested two suspects for vandalism and evading arrest. One was a 26-year-old Berkeley woman, whom police say spray-painted illegible text on the front window of the Apple Store before jumping into a getaway vehicle.
“When officers attempted to detain the suspect, she ran from officers and attempted to enter the passenger seat of a waiting vehicle occupied by a male driver,” the city of Palo Alto wrote in an Oct. 11 release. “As an officer attempted to extract the struggling female suspect from the open door of the vehicle, the male driver abruptly pulled away from the curb, slamming the officer’s hand in the door, knocking him to the ground and running over his foot.”
The officer was “treated and released at a local hospital for moderate injuries to his hand and foot,” the release added.
Police say the suspect also vandalized the exterior of the nearby Sephora store. The vandalism was estimated to have caused more than $1,000 in damages, the release noted.
Police arrested the suspect, Fatima Yahyaa, later on Oct. 7 with help from Berkeley police. She was booked into jail in Santa Clara County and charged with three felonies: vandalism, conspiracy and resisting arrest with violence. She was also charged with a misdemeanor for resisting arrest.
Three days later in El Sobrante, on Oct. 10, police arrested 25-year-old True Brading of Berkeley, the suspected driver of the getaway car. Brading was charged with two felonies, assault with a deadly weapon and conspiracy, as well as a misdemeanor for resisting arrest, according to Palo Alto police.
Dotan Russo, 54, an Israeli native who lives in Los Altos, arrived alone at Stanford Shopping Center on Oct. 7 with an Israeli flag draped over his back.
Russo approached the gathering of protesters, many of them wearing masks and kaffiyehs and carrying signs with slogans such as “Occupation is a crime! Free Palestine!” and “Support the resistance.”
“I told them, ‘Hey guys, you should be ashamed that you’re supporting what happened on Oct. 7,’ justifying the Hamas actions and so forth. And then they started gathering toward me,” Russo told J.
Russo said he asked the demonstrators if they supported Hamas raping women on Oct. 7. One replied, “How about the rape that the Israeli soldiers have done?” as several protesters began surrounding him, he said.
“They got closer and closer,” Russo said. “They were pushing me there. And then after a couple of minutes, someone came from behind and basically took my flag and ran away.”
Russo reported the stolen flag to nearby Palo Alto police officers, who in the department press release confirmed they are investigating the incident as a hate crime. The whereabouts of the flag are unknown and “the suspect remains unidentified,” the Oct. 11 Palo Alto release stated.
Russo said he notified several pro-Israel groups on WhatsApp about what happened to him. That notice reached Isa Marcus, a pro-Israel community organizer and the founder of the nonprofit One Tribe One Star. She arrived at Stanford Shopping Center with three friends as the demonstration was still going on, carrying a portable speaker and an Israeli flag.
As she recorded video with her phone, Marcus and her friends approached the gathering. Marcus shouted at the protesters, calling them “rapist sympathizers.” A chaotic screaming match ensued, according to the video Marcus shared with J.
In it, a woman gives Marcus the finger using both hands. “It’s not a country! It’s all Palestine, it’s all Palestine!” a man screams, pointing at Marcus. Marcus shouts back, calling the protesters “rapists” and “terrorists.”
Marcus told J. her flag was taken out of her hand by a protester, and another one shouted at her, “Go back to your home country. Go back to Poland.”
Marcus, a native of Paris who is Sephardic, responded by blasting what she termed “oriental music” from her portable speaker, and chanting “yu yu yu yu yu” — a reference to the cheers shouted at Sephardic celebrations.
“I’m still a bit shaken,” Marcus, who lives in the Peninsula, told J. three days after the encounter.
“We wanted to stand our ground, to show that we are not intimidated by them, and we won’t let them intimidate us in a public place,” she said about why she hurriedly went to the protest. But the main reason, she said, was to take a stand against the “propaganda” being chanted and promoted.
“That was unacceptable — to have this kind of mob who was celebrating Oct. 7,” she said. “That was beyond anything imaginable.”
The demonstration was promoted on social media a week earlier by the anti-Zionist group HERO Tent and by Apples Against Apartheid, a collective aimed at getting Apple to divest from Israel.
“This is a continuation of what’s been going on in downtown Palo Alto,” said Lori Meyers, a grassroots pro-Israel organizer and Palo Alto resident who briefly observed the Stanford Shopping Center commotion. She noted that anti-Zionist groups have held recurring protests outside Palo Alto City Hall and earlier this year used city flagpoles to hoist and fly the Palestinian flag.
She told J. she contacted Palo Alto police a few days before the demonstration, alerting them to the social media posts and asking for a stepped-up police presence at the shopping center.
Jewish WhatsApp chat groups were also on alert ahead of the Oct. 7 event.
The Jewish community “knew from community chats that they could not go to Stanford Shopping Center because their safety could not be guaranteed, that there was a protest there that was advertised with images of a tank on the same Instagram, a call for armed resistance with an image of an assault weapon,” Meyers said.
She said she worries about these types of demonstrations continuing, adding that “Jews are increasingly feeling unsafe and unwelcome in civic spaces and in public spaces.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article mistook Dotan Russo of Los Altos with Dotan Rousso of Canada, whose nephew was killed on Oct. 7. The error has been corrected.