‘Encountering Jews Who Are Progressive about All Issues but Palestine Is an Awful and Uncomfortable Situation for Non-Jewish People’ –Anne Silver

How
did I come to this movement? How did I come to be opposed to the
occupation of Palestine and the contortions of reality and morality
used to justify it? First of all, and I am not quite sure why
you suggest/ask it, I am not-GOOD LORD!-an anti-semite of any stripe,
although I am not sure what a nativist antisemite is. [I think I used that phrase once, in corresponding with Anne.]

So, as
I said, I am not Jewish, but I was married to
and very merged with a Jewish man, Hyman Silver, much older than me,
and we had two daughters. They are pretty grown up now. I helped Hymie
in his work but my personal work and engagement was as a mother. Hymie
was my professor of psychology at San Francisco State, and I had fallen in love with
him at first sight, precisely. His parents were immigrants from Russia and Romania, a
tailor and a seamstress-his mother also played poker at home to make
extra money. [Weiss's emphasis] Hymie spoke only Yiddish until starting school.

I was
always a radical in my inclinations, identified with the underdog and the causes of justice,
and was drawn from childhood to the knowing and wise outsider role, the smart, urban, witty and
wonderful role occupied by Jews (oh, you have no idea of the heady appeal
of this to a little girl in North Carolina longing for escape– meaning,
exaltation). And of course, like anyone growing up in the 60's the Holocaust
occupies and defines much of my consciousness and all of my
understanding of horror and what must always be fought.

Hymie was a
former communist, very left, a clinical psychologist, active in the big
strike at San Francisco State of 40 years ago (when I was little).
Palestine was not yet an issue for him when he died 13
years ago today, but I have no doubt at all that it would be now, and
that
he would be an active and vocal proponent of Palestinian rights as well
as a critic of the whole Zionist project. The Jewish tribal thing that
you talk about very eloquently is something  I feel I can easily
understand-because you are very articulate about it and I have this
background. However, it is not the same reality or situation that Hymie
experienced (as a son of very poor immigrants who exhorted him to not
work
with his hands, whose father embarrassed him with his accent, whose

mother incurred the contempt of his (academic) first wife because she
was more excited
about Hymie getting his PhD than concerned about the Rosenberg
executions which occurred at the same time). I think it is also very
different on the East Coast than here in California.

Palestine is, I believe, the issue of our time. I became informed about
this issue around the time of 9/11 and the our attack on Afghanistan as I
began reading about US history in the region. I would
often feel affronted and
threatened-frightened really- by the negative view of Israel I
received. For a brief time it was difficult
for me to accept. I am very far away from that emotional place now. The
occupation of Palestine is not somehow different from or better than
other occupations-and that is the essential, crucial truth that the
rest of of the world knows. I think that if
you are someone who struggles for justice and you
learn the truth about Israel–not always easy to do in this country–you conclude that
the occupation must end, along with excuses for Israeli brutality. It is
really not that complicated, and
while the road to this understanding might begin a bit tortuously, it
does not end with ambivalence.

Encountering Jews who are progressive about all issues but Palestine is
an awful and uncomfortable situation for non Jewish people,  and I am a shy and introverted
goofball, not quick on my feet or clear-talking, but I no longer allow
myself to ever not make my position clear. I am an "activist" only in
that I attend every protest, write some letters to editors, and
volunteer with a Berkeley group that provides humanitarian assistance to Palestinian and Iraqi
children.

My daughter Charlotte has been very active in the
divestment and Palestine solidarity campaign at Stanford (where she is
on full scholarship- I am poor). Her group is SCAI, or Students Confronting Apartheid by
Israel, and her experiences with students is
very heartening. Apart from the die-hard and entrenched Zionists,
it seems that smart college students including Jews, are very receptive to information
about the situation which they frequently know nothing about, and very
open to hearing and then taking on a view that challenges all their
assumptions about a virtuous Israel. There has been some ugly talk
about this movement by the right-wing Jewish student groups, and the
usual presence of nuts from the outside community at all their events,
but nothing close to what I understand has gone on at Berkeley, where
the reprisals have been quite vicious and organized.

What has my involvement with this issue cost me? First of all, I am
such an insignificant being with no measurable influence–I only wish I
were as mighty as the feelings in my heart. But I am sure that many of
the
people in the rather affluent and heavily Jewish town of Burlingame
south of San Francisco
where I raised my children did look askance at
me and it may have cost all of us the good opinion of some of them. In
truth though,
I probably had little standing to lose since I was the crazy woman who
was
first wife to the old man and then girlfriend of the young punk rock
musician. (I only mention that to express that perhaps for me losing
social support is easier than it might be for others, as I am used to
it.)

Whatever, I would lose so much more if I did not stand with
Palestine-or any other  oppressed people- I would lose my very soul. I
truly and
deeply know that. So the choice is not really hard.