Thanks for posting your experiences in NYC. While certainly it is no doubt a hotbed of Zionism, it is difficult to fathom that such a normally tolerant–or perhaps, indifferent–city could offer such personal violence against you.

I will be googling for one of the T shirts.

Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a US city or town and seeing a enormous sign that says, ‘The war is with the Blacks’, says Hannah Mermelstein.

I saw this sign as I was entering Nablus last week, again on my way to Ramallah, and again near Bethlehem. The phrase is printed in Hebrew, presumably by Israeli settlers, on huge signs throughout the West Bank. Israeli racism rarely shocks me anymore, but its blatant display still makes me stop and catch my breath as I translate it into other contexts. Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a US city or town and seeing a enormous sign that says, “The war is with the Blacks.”
link to middle-east-online.com

I truly don’t know what to say

Over the years I experienced many incidents as a result, most of them very positive and supportive, but I was also physically attacked on several occasions. In my first week or so wearing my shirt, I had one person – a candidate for city council at the time, I later discovered – stop me in the street and tell me that when he found out where I live he would kill me. That was the first of many times that I was threatened like that, and it made quite an impression on me. I had my door painted with swastikas. I was spit on several dozen times, and other times kicked, tripped, shoved and slapped by strangers in the street. A popular kind of assault consisted of walking into me so violently, shoulder-first, that I would be thrown backwards to the ground, while the attacker would simply keep walking on as if nothing had happened. I had ribs broken two or three times, and a toe broken on another by someone who walked up to my face and slammed their foot down abruptly on the top of my foot. I was kicked from behind and knocked to the ground once by a group of kids who ran off, calling me “terrorist!” I once had a person get out of a passing car, grab a bag of garbage out of a dumpster and hurl it at me.

The vast majority of negative incidents were simply verbal attacks. I was called “nazi” at least several hundred times. Old Jewish ladies called me “Adolf.” I was stopped in the street many, many times by furious Jews who wanted to bombard me with various questions and declarations. I had one guy who told me to take my shirt off immediately and said that it was illegal to wear that flag; he wouldn’t let me pass him on the sidewalk and insisted that I was going to take the shirt off right now if I knew what was good for me. I had an MTA bus driver stop in mid street, open his door, and scream “fuck you” at me. Innumerable people made quiet comments about me being a “terrorist” or “anti-semite” to their friends as I passed. I had a group of Moishe’s Movers guys – all Israelis, judging from their heavy accents – chase me out of a park while I was walking my dog; one of them said that although he doesn’t feel bad about what my face is going to look like when he’s done with me, he does feel bad for what he’s going to do to my little dog. I was kicked out of a few shops and restaurants on the grounds that my shirt was disrespectful or offensive to customers. One shop owner called the police on me. The police on the subway were so bad – particularly after the London bombing – that I eventually took to turning my shirt inside out before entering the subway. Palestinians would sometimes stop me to warn me that living in this country I probably didn’t understand how dangerous it is to wear such a message. Israelis live HERE, they cautioned.

I finally understood very clearly when, after an attack by a group of 3 Israelis at a small demonstration, I had had to get my first Palestine-related medical treatment: aggressive antibiotic treatment for human bites. One of them actually jumped on my back and bit me. While one tried to crush my windpipe and claw at my eye sockets another kicked me repeatedly in the groin and ruptured some blood vessels in my inner thigh, and my entire upper leg turned black over the course of a few days. One of the attackers ripped the eyeglasses off the faces of several people at the demonstration, including my own, ripped them to pieces and threw them into traffic.

After the swelling went away it turned out that they had left a much more serious injury: multiple fractures in the head of one of my femurs, at the point where it connects with the pelvis – an injury which eventually became so painful that I was completely unable to walk for a few months. 5 years later it still hurts and I haven’t been able to run ever since.

I mention all of this because I thought that perhaps readers might get the mistaken impression that these displays of Jewish racism might be something confined to Israel. It absolutely is not.

I recently stumbled across a series of 12 videos on youtube – grotesquely entitled “This is why people hate the Jews” – which show a group of haredim apparently harrassing the owners of a Christian shop in Israel. What struck me most was that it all seemed absolutely, disturbingly FAMILIAR. Having attended many hundreds of Palestine solidarity demonstrations around the NYC area, I feel I have seen this exact scene play out – down to the smallest detail – dozens of times. I don’t know any of the back story, but if you can get past the appalling anti-semitic titles, it’s fascinating viewing:
link to youtube.com

Do you have the courage to do it for a week? A month? Imagine the stories you could tell us of your experiences…