Chaining themselves to cars and unfurling banners, protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza sought global attention Thursday by shutting down the Bay Bridge and snarling traffic for miles as some of the world’s most powerful leaders gathered just a few miles away.
The protesters kept morning commuters in westbound lanes east of Treasure Island stranded for hours in what became the largest disruption yet tied to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit of world leaders in San Francisco. The massive conference has attracted demonstrators for myriad causes as nearly two dozen heads of state — including President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping — meet for San Francisco’s largest gathering of world leaders since World War II.
Authorities arrested at least 80 people during the protest that began around 8 a.m. when organizers blocked traffic and laid out massive banners reading “stop the genocide” and “no U.S. military aid to Israel.”
In their Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, Hamas militants killed around 1,200 people and took some 240 others hostage. Israel responded with airstrikes and a ground offensive in Hamas-ruled Gaza, which Gaza’s health ministry says have killed more than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children.
Videos posted to social media showed some protesters chaining themselves to vehicles parked along the roadway. Others abandoned their vehicles and tossed their keys into the bay, according to California Highway Patrol Commander Ezery Beauchamp. Authorities towed at least 29 vehicles from the bridge before re-opening all lanes minutes before noon.
Protesters hailed the demonstration as a necessary step to put pressure on Biden and other world leaders to end Israel’s siege of Gaza.
“The community of the Bay Area was being very explicit in the way they were shutting down a main artery of our community, to say that the Bay Area does not support genocide,” said Rami Abdelkarim, a 24-year-old San Franciscan and spokesperson for the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Until Thursday, most protests remained within San Francisco’s city limits, or near the famed Filoli Estate, where Biden joined Xi earlier this week for the leaders’ first meeting in the United States since 2017.
Yet in a shift, Thursday’s bridge shutdown appeared to have little effect on the APEC attendees themselves — most of whom were staying at hotels in the city — but carried an outsized impact on commuters trying to get to work.
Stuck for hours, motorists posted videos to social media of a backup that spanned nearly the entire length of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge, turning a bustling commute that normally moves in fits and starts every morning into a standstill. Some people complained about missing work. Others took to social media to ask for food, but some appeared to welcome the headache after learning that organizers were showing support for Palestinians.
The protest caused issues far beyond the Bay Bridge. The delivery of transplant organs was delayed as a result of the traffic jam, according to a University of California, San Francisco, spokesperson. Despite the postponed delivery, no adverse effects were anticipated for people who later received the organs.
Coordinating legal and medical logistics for a protest of the magnitude seen Thursday likely took substantial planning, said Nolan Higdon, a California State University East Bay professor in communications history. Its setting also wasn’t a surprise, Higdon said, given the iconic nature of the bridge and the number of people who traverse it every day.
Organizers likely cared little about the demonstration’s local impacts, given the number of reporters hailing from elsewhere in the nation — and even the world — who are in the area this week to cover APEC.
“If you live in the Bay Area, you’ve seen it, you’ve crossed it, you know how insane it seems to be able to walk around on the Bay Bridge or shut down traffic on the Bay Bridge,” Higdon said. “The symbolism of that strikes a lot of us.”
“We have protests here in the Bay Area, it seems like, every minute of every day,” Higdon added. “I would think these protesters are looking at a much larger audience than just the Bay Area.”
The size and scale of the protests — along a main thoroughfare that thousands of people and first responders rely upon on a daily basis — drew criticism from several corners of the region.
“Nobody expected that there weren’t going to be protests,” Rufus Jeffris, a spokesperson for the Bay Area Council. “Doing it in a way that does not disrupt, does not inconvenience people, does not create safety hazards — those types of things — that’s what we’d hope to see.”
Tyler Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Resource Center Bay Area, was more pointed in his condemnation of the protest.
“This week is really about San Francisco shining to the international community, and it was really inappropriate,” said Gregory. He said the scale of the disruption caused by Thursday’s protests, as well as other protests in the Bay Area, and ongoing anti-Semitic speech and attacks he said were related — reflected poorly on the message that protesters had tried to send.
“They’re not going to win friends” with such a move, Gregory said.
Protest organizers, however, appeared unbowed — brushing aside criticism that their protest had gone too far, citing a humanitarian crisis in the midst of the fighting.
“We understand that this is an inconvenience for everyone,” Abdelkarim said. “But I think the question that I want to pose is: What would you do if, day after day and night after night, you were watching your loved ones back home be targeted and killed by the Israeli military?”
Staff writer Harry Harris and The Associated Press contributed to this report.