Last night I went to hear the reports from Palestine at the Judson Memorial Church in New York. The church is a national historical site. The vaulted hall was designed by Stanford White and has a grand but plain nobility about it. The microphone was set up in front of a St-Gaudens marble relief, the hall was jammed with people, over 300, and there was a sense in the air of a movement gathering power. Speaker Michael Ratner pointed out that a few years ago there would have been 50 people in the room for a Palestine event. I was most impressed by the seamlessness of the crowd: the lack of identity politics, the ways that Palestinian, Jewish and non-Jewish Americans spoke out in Palestinian solidarity. At the end of the night, a number of people went to the mike to make announcements, and there were probably a dozen activists from that many different communities, one after another. Strands are inter-weaving, and the cord they are making is a strong one.
To specifics. The first speaker, introduced by Abdeen Jabara, was Fida Qishta, a young journalist from Gaza who left her family 7 months ago saying she would be back in two months and has not been able to return. This was her theme. This is not a humanitarian issue, she told us. It is not about material things, it is about freedom.
"We don’t need food and we don’t want money. My family ate the same food for a year. Lentils." She shrugged. "It wasn’t bad. We need to be free… to come and go. We need to feel human… Sometimes we are kept three weeks at a crossing. People want to feel free. They don’t want food. We can stay eating one meal a day…"
Can anything be more clear than that?
Qishta also showed a video of a white phosphorous victim of a year ago. He had burns all over his back and arms. It was extremely hard to watch, it was emotionally scarring. The only thing I can say about it is that, He seemed like a boy like any boy you know. A 13- or 14-year-old boy. He had that same innocence about him, a boy who wants to be reading books for school or laughing in the street with his friends. Some day they will show videos like this in a Nakba museum.
Next to speak was Michael Ratner. For me personally it was the most compelling speech because I identify with Ratner as a middle-aged bourgeois NY Jew who has awakened to this issue late but who now seizes on the moral issues and does not mince words. Ratner last visited Israel 50 years ago. He went back earlier this month and was profoundly disturbed. You heard that disturbed feeling in all his remarks. This is a man who has studied human rights and civil rights around the world, and at home, and it was very clarifying to hear him speak with no uncertainty about the conditions that he observed in the West Bank.
"You are seeing apartheid in action, you can’t believe what you are seeing," he said. Israel has no right to be doing a thing in the West Bank, under any international law; "they shouldn’t be taking an inch of it." Yet they go into villages and demolish houses and then Palestinians rebuild and Israel demolishes them "again and again and again." He described the valley leading up to the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, with the separate roadways and the stark differences in quality of life between Palestinians and Jews. The olive trees are cut down all thru the valley and the Bedouins live in tin shacks, then in Ma’ale Adumim there is a great old 400-year olive tree consecrated in a traffic circle and greenery everywhere and houses like Beverly Hills and they are building a swimming pool bigger than this room.
"You’re seeing an area that’s being ethnically cleansed… You’re seeing the architecture of apartheid… This is an open and notorious system of apartheid… and no one, no one is doing anything about it….I never had a sense of this until I saw it.. an open and notorious taking of land, a pass system, an apartheid system…"
The two-state solution?
"Once you see this, it’s completely ridiculous. It’s three Bantustans in the West Bank, with Israel controlling everything."
After Ratner was Jenna Bitar. She is an 18-year-old high NY school student, half Palestinian, slender, sophisticated. She related her experiences in Cairo with the Gaza Freedom March, and though her voice is still girlish, we saw the woman, and a leader, before us.
I know her parents; I know how they pushed back their own awareness of their connection to this place out of emotional/political necessity; and I know the apprehension they must feel about their child being exposed to these tremendous political questions (Just read Lila Abu-Lughod on the issue of Palestinian-American inheritance): but we saw the woman before us, a strong woman who will be engaged on these issues for a long time, and the crowd often whooped and cheered as she spoke of her awakening in Cairo to her own political powers. These were moments when she found herself confronting police, taking space in the street or at the Journalists’ Syndicate and refusing to give it up, lying to police to get through barricades with a suitcase full of posters, etc.
For Jenna Bitar had a clear understanding in Cairo upon the revelation that we would not get into Gaza: "We were really there for political reasons–and that was to bring attention to the siege in Gaza." And so the business of Cairo was to create a movement that had not existed before; and that happened, she said.
Ali Abunimah was the last speaker and he echoed Bitar’s awareness.
"We didn’t get to Gaza, and that was an enormous disappointment. But I’m thankful for having a taste of what Gaza experiences every day… We experienced a small taste of the anger and frustration… We learned that Gaza is harder to get into than a maximum security prison… So 1.5 million people, most of them children, are political prisoners…"
In Cairo, he went on, "Almost nothing went to plan, and I don’t say that as a criticism." The results showed how quickly people adapted, how creative they were, how determined they were to show solidarity with Palestinians. The results, said Abunimah, were evident before us, with the tumult and excitement that filled the church.
I study myself in these situations, and try in my writing to be an everyman; and what do I take away from the night? Well there are the evident political stirrings: A diverse group has come together over an enormity, in a word, Gaza. It is clearly on the left; it has power because it has momentum, and young people of conscience are drawn to it. No one goes up and says, I’m Jewish, anymore. (Except for the amazing women of Jews Say No). That’s a beautiful thing. No one cares what your identity is; we ask, is your conscience shocked by shooting white phosphorous at boys? Yes it is on the left, but it has political significance because it is the only game in town; the right and center are used up, and our politicians are hacks. And all the energy/movement is here.
I insist always that I’m no radical. Too old, too privileged, too immured in the woods and books and reflection. I can’t make fiery speeches. Also, I find that after years of travel and exploration, I have ethnocentric feelings, of concern for the Jews who have made such a mistake by making a religion of Zionism, I worry how to help them get out of it. On that score, I spent a lot of my night with Jews, American Jews, and the feeling is that history lies before us and it is going this way and we want to be with history. This is not an easy path, not anxiety-free, a friend said last night, but powerful decadent political forces have built a nightmare situation for the Palestinians, and there lies the urgency of our presence. I remembered being in a car in the West Bank with three Israeli lefties 2 weeks ago. They were all smoking and upset, going from one demonstration to another. Under my impatient questioning about all the forces that are against us, one said at last with a little shrug, "We want to be on the right side of history." As the event last night showed,There is no question of which way it is going.
