I think the protests you mention including the Vietnam War are/were close to home. The causes noted impacted Americans directly. I don't see the protests creating more real empathy for the Palestinians and by virtue the Hamas leadership.
The Vietnam war protests were much bigger, IMO.
They also went on at scale for years.
They were also very unpopular (That's been edited in the collective memory) which is my point from earlier in the thread.
Protests that we now think of as "done right" were very unpopular while they were going on.
Polls almost all showed that people thought the Civil Rights protests were making things worse for the Black population, for instance.
Other than my most progressive friends, most of them who want to see a cease fire just are tired of 75 years of fighting and fruitless peace discussions. This seems a way to put things on the back burner and avoid more carnage and destruction for the time being. I'm not even sure the protesters have any workable solutions in mind for Palestine beyond a cease fire.
Calls for a cease fire started immediately because most people just want there NOT TO BE PEOPLE KILLING EACH OTHER.
It's horrible and people don't like it.
If you are on the outside, like you say, people just want things to calm the fuck down.
In reality, of course, cease fires happen for other reasons and people involved won't just accept any random cease fire condition once the shooting has started.
That escapes lots of people.
As a separate note, I am not a historian but we know the Germans and Japanese were decimated. They came back with much assistance from the West to build great economies and successful democracies. Does anyone really see the Palestinians grabbing that olive branch and also Western and Mideastern assistance to build a thriving country? It would appear the Palestinians are more excited to get a box of missiles from Iran.
The whole point of giving that assistance was to build something because otherwise they would build resentment.
There was a view that after WWI, the allies should have helped rebuild Germany instead of grinding it down. That may have stopped WWII.
(There are LOTS of debate about all this and whether it is true, of course.)
That doesn't appear to have been tried in Palestine, from what I can see and given the hardliners on both side, I don't expect it to be easy to accomplish. (Much easier to wreck such an approach than to build it.)