Yesterday to honor Martin Luther King day I read a 1960 article by the political philosopher Michael Walzer about going down to North Carolina and hearing King preach. Walzer was then 25, and his main business was to witness the lunch counter protests that were going viral in the segregated south. “a cup of coffee and a seat,” the piece he wrote for Dissent, was a paean to nonviolent resistance to racial discrimination. It is an ebullient piece about the promise and affirmation of young people taking history in their hands, black and white together.
Walzer reprinted it 7 years ago in a Dissent anthology. You can buy the piece at the Dissent site, or read it at googlebooks.
As I read the piece, I called out from Now to the young Walzer, called him to appear again at the nonviolent barricades. Here’s our conversation. I’m offsetting the Walzer quotes:
The number of sitdowners continued to increase [at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro], spilling over into other chain stores. A few white sympathizers joined in–an act of considerable bravery in the South.
There are many Israelis and Jews and internationals joining the protests against occupation and confiscation and oppression in the Occupied Territories. These people have been summoned by the Palestinian committee that organizes the protest. They are brave, these Israelis, I’ve met them.
As in the buses, sitting down together at a lunch counter symbolizes a kind of equality which Southern whites have not been prepared to admit.
The beautiful thing about the Israelis and Palestinians working together is that it is changing the Israeli Zionist mind. Young idealists much like you, Walzer– Joseph Dana, a Ph.D. in Jewish history, is now taking physical risks to document the struggle and is trying to imagine a land of shared hopes and dreams and a kind of equality that Israelis have never been prepared to admit. And at the demo in Tel Aviv the other night there were Palestinian and Israeli flags being waved. Oh believe believe believe in something different from ethnocentrism, Jews; and the young ones answer this call, We must!
“If we negotiate,” the editor of a Negro college paper told me, “my grandchildren will still be worrying about that cup of coffee.”
This is fabulous reporting, poignant and majestic. It is about the refusal to negotiate when someone else is holding all the power. And of course this is exactly what Palestinians have said about the peace process, it is endless negotiations to cover further land confiscation and dispossession by the powerful party (even as the Kosovars get a state, Pakistan gets a state, Turkmenistan, everyone gets their promised sovereignty but us).
[S]everal students have been attacked and beaten up; many more have been arrested. Negro high-school students have imitated their older brothers… and in the meantime, the movement has spread to the deep South
The analogies are obvious. The nonviolent movement is spreading across the West Bank and echoing in Gaza, there are more than 6,000 Palestinians in jail now and in the course of its existence, Israel has imprisoned 700,000. Still the movement grows!
[T]he legal work of the NAACP was important, everyone agreed; but this [direct action], I was told over and over again, was more important. Everyone seemed to feel a deep need finally to act in the name of all the theories of equality. Once the sitdowns had begun, marching into Woolworth’s or picketing outside became obvious, necessary, inevitable activities.
Direct action changes us all, Walzer; experience transforms consciousness. No one will get free from us sitting at our fancy NY/NJ desks surrounded by our libraries of Jewish history. Remember that two great Jews, Henry Siegman and Noam Sheizaf, have affirmed what any Palestinian could tell us years ago, 5 million Palestinians have no rights under occupation. No, and Sheik Jarrah is transforming the Israeli left, slowly but surely, and the actions of the Palestinian popular committees become bolder and more creative, Santa Claus protesters! Avatar protesters! Gandhi masks! Biko t-shirts! and in this way they strike a chord in people who believe in equality throughout the world
But the other students refused to leave; they crowded around the policeman and demanded that they too be arrested.
I wanted readers to read your italics, Walzer, your excitement at 25 at seeing these brave ordinary people before your eyes. And young Jews now who see Jawad Siyam in Silwan, or Jonathan Pollak, or see the incredible video of Adeeb Abu Rahmah, they also will never be the same. The sight will transform them and thrill them.
The most remarkable thing about these students is their self-confidence… They have developed thick skins; segregation is no longer tolerable to them. They have unlearned, perhaps they never learned, those habits of inferiority which have cursed Negro life in the South for a century. They have felt every insult–as an insult… Less than twenty years ago, in the early forties, a Negro soldier was shot and killed by a Durham bus driver when he refused to move to the back of the bus. The bus driver was acquitted by an all-white jury.
Walzer, this is happening every other day in Palestine. The killings are not long-ago. The Israelis kill old men who dare to pursue an agricultural livelihood near the hateful high fence in Gaza. They kill old men in their beds. They kill protesters who are protesting dispossession. They shot out Emily Henochowicz’s eye, they killed Rachel Corrie and maimed Tristan Anderson. They always get away with it. And the young Palestinians have full knowledge of this, and they now have the complete confidence of working with the world community of conscience, and they are overcoming the stereotypes against Arabs in the western world. Will you join us in this refusal to brook destructive insult?
[Inside the church, t]he chant [was] begun by Martin Luther King: We just want to be free. A religion which seizes upon, dramatizes, and even explains the suffering of the Negro people is joined here to an essentially political movement to end that suffering. Out of that combination, I believe, comes the stamina, the endurance so necessary for passive, non-violent resistance.
Imagine what it will mean when Jewish life throws itself to the wheel of equality in Israel and Palestine. When we free ourselves of the terrible burden of the last hundred years that is this selfish colonialist Zionism, produced from the real materials of our suffering in Europe, but producing in turn, for Palestinians, only suffering. We also have stamina, endurance; and we are committed to a non-violent path of resistance.
Walzer ends his piece on a call for brotherhood:
[I]t is not necessary to feel fraternal toward the man you sit beside at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. But what about the man you walk beside in a picket line? For it is there, I believe, on the line, that real equality is finally being won.
Amen.
