I'm no longer much of a demo kind of guy but I went to the pro-Palestinian demonstration in Times Square today to express my solidarity with the battered people of Gaza. On the way there I saw a billboard with Sean Penn's name on it, and the thought came to me, Where is Sean Penn? Where is Tim Robbins? Susan Sarandon? Meryl Streep? Where is the fleet of political celebrities who could be so influential right now. Oh I know, we have performance artist Jack Fertig, known as Sister Boom-Boom, a descendant of Holocaust survivors in San Francisco. But George Clooney? Pardon my career.
The rally was set up on 7th Avenue, south of 42d Street, in pens at the side of the road, taking up a lane or two. As one pen filled, another was opened. I think we filled three or four pens going south. Felt like 1500 people, maybe 2000. The organizers spoke from the back of a truck.
The crowd was mostly Arab and it was an interesting feeling to be an Anglo among them. It felt a little privileged. The main thing I sensed was enormous grief and rage and impotence. In a word, anguish. Many of the people in the crowd have relatives at risk in the slaughter. There was a palpable terror and sense of being alone and hunted in the mood of the crowd. I don't blame them, but many of the posters people held up were grisly and horrifying. Pictures of children, pictures of surviving children with their dead mothers. Pictures of burnt babies. At the end of my day the sun came out and two youths walked by with scores of white helium balloons with red handprints on each balloon, a symbol of civilian slaughter, but that poppy feeling was missing generally. The most affecting placards were handmade. "Might don't make right." With images of F-16s and the dead.
Or, best of all, a woman walking around with a page torn from a legal pad, on which she'd written three words, 850 to 13.
I saw a few friends. Rashid and Mona Khalidi. Saif Ammous. David Judd. He'd been in D.C. yesterday. I heard a lot of rage directed at the Times story this morning describing Hamas's use of civilians. It seemed opaquely one-sided when Israel is bombing schools. That was the impotence I felt. Then too, many of the signs said Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea. That also seemed impotent.
There were a number of counterdemonstrations from Israel supporters walking by with their flags. One pro-Israel woman became absolutely hysterical screaming. A guy in our pen did a Heil Hitler to their flags as they went by. There was plenty of Nazi analogizing going on. Warsaw ghetto posters. I had Jewish feelings of my own, memories of when we talked about the 6 million in the 60s and marveled at the world's silence.
But I thought the most effective Holocaust analogy came from the other side. A man across 7th Avenue had a big orange poster that he taunted us with: Israel won't stop till it finishes the job. That struck me as purely genocidal. Israel won't stop till it finishes the job. And who can stop them?
