WASHINGTON (RNS) — Many of the Mennonites who marched over 135 miles from Harrisonburg, Virginia, to the White House had someone in mind as they walked, nursing blisters and removing ticks as they crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley in 11 days.
For Aidan Yoder, an organizer and college student at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, it was the people he met while visiting the West Bank in Palestine during the summer of 2023 on an intercultural college program. One of them was a dancer from Gaza who could not visit her family due to Israeli restrictions on movement, and another was an Arabic teacher who told him she is afraid that her community will face the same devastating bombings that have decimated Gaza.
Outside the White House on Sunday (July 28), the core group of about 15 who had walked with Yoder every day from the main Mennonite hub in the Southeast U.S. had grown 10 times larger, all gathered in prayer for a cease-fire. The Mennonite tradition developed as a peace church believing that the Gospel teaches nonviolence. Organizers said the group included Mennonites from at least 40 different churches in the U.S. and Canada, as well as interfaith supporters from Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, evangelical Christian and Southern Baptist traditions.
“We need to do something that doesn’t make sense because what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t make sense,” said organizer Nick Martin, explaining the rationale behind “All God’s Children March for a Ceasefire.” Martin continued, “It violates all common sense. It violates basic tenets of human compassion.”
Martin said the group had marched through parking lots, along highways and through suburban neighborhoods. “We felt like we needed to go into places where we would see everyday people and disrupt these spaces where politics supposedly doesn’t exist, but everywhere is political,” he said.
The group had timed their arrival to coincide with the first day of the Christians United for Israel summit, where thousands of pro-Israel activists are expected to gather in National Harbor, Maryland. An interfaith coalition including Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims has planned counter-protests for the duration of the event, which Mennonites plan to join.
In February, an interfaith group led by Faith for Black Lives organized a similar march called “Pilgrimage for Peace” from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to the White House over eight days, starting February 14, a day that commemorates abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
This July march followed months of other actions and organizing by Mennonite Action, a group formed in November to protest for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In January, about 130 Mennonites were arrested after holding a cease-fire hymn sing in the Cannon House Office Building. Song leaders kept the group in time and four-part harmony, even after their arms were zip-tied behind their backs, by stomping their feet. In December and March, local groups across the U.S. and Canada visited their representatives’ offices with quilts and more hymns.
On Eastern Mennonite University’s campus in March, students rang the campus bell for each of the people who had been killed in Palestine and Israel since the beginning of the war. At the time, it took three days of ringing the bell from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. each day.
Now, more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of Israel’s military campaign, in addition to the 1,200 people killed in Israel during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, according to their respective governments. The students would have to add another day of ringing if they repeated the protest.
In prayer, Sunday’s protesters uplifted current dire conditions in Gaza, where polio is beginning to spread. We repent of “dehumanizing the dead in Gaza, by counting them as numbers, but not as people who have dreams and aspirations,” said one protester. “How long, oh Lord, will this nightmare continue?”
