The Political Landscape: Stories from All Over

“We Are the World” for Palestine Runs into Trouble

2011-06-02T19:45:00.002-04:00

When the megagroup calling itself USA for Africa recorded “We Are the World” in 1985, no one put out an opposition message. But a new international effort called “Freedom for Palestine” is having a little more trouble getting its message out.

Kickstarted by the British Palestine solidarity movement with the support of the band Coldplay, the “Freedom for Palestine” video by artists calling themselves One World is on YouTube (at www.youtube.com/watch?v=V28HnPTYz-I). Along with clips of the “Freedom for Palestine” performers, it shows the terraced hillsides of the West Bank and the faces of Palestinians young and old; it shows the refugee camps that dot the land, and the 26-foot high “separation” wall that snakes through it; and it shows the graffiti that cover miles of the wall and that constitute a continuing act of nonviolent resistance to the Occupation and the Wall.

But when Coldplay listed the video’s URL on its Facebook page, Facebook received complaints that the song was “abusive”—and deleted the URL. YouTube, on the other hand, is blithely showing both “Freedom for Palestine” and an anti-Freedom for Palestine video that was put up two weeks after the original appeared on YouTube. Same song, different video: Viciously pro-Israel, it juxtaposes clips of children being educated as terrorists with shots of huge convoys of aid allegedly being sent from Israel to Gaza and images of a “prosperous marketplace in Gaza.”

It’s at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mphlU96qIyg, and its existence and placement on YouTube is a blatant act of intellectual property theft that violates YouTube’s most basic rules. Presumably when the theft is brought to YouTube’s attention, they’ll remove the counter video; meanwhile, we can help bring it to their attention—and support the real “Freedom for Palestine” video, including demanding that Facebook restore the URL.

Palestinian Nonviolence—Alive and Sometimes Victorious

2010-10-20T13:23:00.008-04:00

Some landscapes are more political than others, like the village of Budrus, in Palestine (that is, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory called the West Bank).

Like many other such villages, Budrus is dependent on its centuries-old olive trees for its economic survival and for the villagers’ connection with their past and their land. But in 2004, the village’s survival was threatened when the State of Israel announced that its 26-foot high barrier wall would pass through Budrus, requiring the uprooting and destruction of 3,000 of the village’s olive trees. (In flagrant violation of international law, the wall would pass well within the “Green Line,” the border between Israel and the Palestinian Territory.) At that moment, Budrus was like many other villages in the path of the wall in one other respect: It was threatened with slow death as a viable community.

Budrus, however, was not without resources. It had Ayed Morrar, a five-times imprisoned Fatah activist for Palestinian self-determination. It had his 15-year-old daughter Iltezam. It had Hamas activist Ahmed Awwad. And, in the end, it had friends—friends from the international community and from within Israel itself.

Morrar called a meeting. He and Awwad agreed to work together to unite the village. They called on the whole community to resist—and Morrar persuaded the village that nonviolence was “in the best interests of the Palestinian people.”

The morning that the bulldozers were scheduled to arrive, the men of Budrus marched en masse to the site of the proposed uprooting and put their bodies in the path of the earth-moving equipment. The bulldozers—and their military escort—backed off, but, of course, returned the next day.

That was when Morrar’s daughter Iltezam observed that the resistance had to that point been all male and told her father that the women of Budrus had to join the protests (pictured above). When he conceded the point and asked the women to join in, Iltezam led the way by leaping into the hole a bulldozer had dug. Soon after that, international supporters came to Budrus to join the villagers; so did Jewish Israeli peace activists. After ten months of blustering insistence by Israel that no protests could make it back down, it did exactly that, moving the route of the wall away from Budrus and its olive trees and closer to the Green Line.

(Depending on your definitions, the defense of Budrus was almost entirely but perhaps not 100 percent nonviolent. There were moments when the youth of Budrus were provoked to the point of throwing stones at the armed intruders, who responded by firing guns. But Morrar and Awwad begged for absolute nonviolence, and in the end, the villagers complied.)

After their victory in Budrus, Morrar and his comrades organized nonviolent resistance to the wall in other Palestinian communities. Now the map of the West Bank is dotted with such pockets of resistance—and the struggle for Budrus itself is available in Budrus, a documentary by filmmaker Julia Bacha and the Just Vision production company. Using footage of the events filmed at the time, plus interviews with Ayed and Iltezam Morrar, Ahmed Awwad, one of the Jewish defenders of the village, and two members of the Israeli military who attacked it, they answer the often-asked question, “Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?” They make it abundantly clear that Palestine does have its Gandhis—and that, as happened in India, Gandhian resistance can sometimes defeat armed aggression. Budrus will inspire all nonviolent activists, although it may also make you wonder why you’re here and not in Palestine, putting your own body on the line for justice.

Budrus, a Just Vision production directed by Julia Bacha, is in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, with English subtitles and at this writing is playing at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village. For more information, see www.justvision.org.

©2010 Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Blight: A Meditation on Indigenous People’s Day

2010-10-12T13:47:00.003-04:00

October 12, 2010—For 80-plus miles, from just north of New York City to the upstate city of Poughkeepsie, the Metro North railroad tracks run along the eastern shore of the Hudson River, only yards away from the water. In my childhood and youth, that ride along the Hudson was merely “home” to me—I was raised in Croton, which sits more or less halfway between the two cities. It was only later, after I had seen the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio, the Nile and the Rio de la Plata, the Rhine from beginning to end, and the Danube, the Thames, the Avon, and most of the rivers of France–only then did I grasp how extraordinary that stretch of the Hudson shore is. Across the river, which widens at the Tappan Zee and then narrows again, are the cliffs of the Palisades; in every direction, hills rise out of the water, somehow rising out of mist even on the sunniest day. Its beauty never fails to thrill me, nor have I ever seen anything to match it.

Only a few score miles away is its opposite number in every sense, the ravaged country along the Amtrak railroad between New York City and Washington, DC. The first time I rode that train was on August 28, 1963, from New York to Washington. (That was the day Martin Luther King told the world he had a dream.) Between family visits—my oldest son and his family have lived in Maryland for decades—and protest marches, I’ve taken it scores of times since. For mile upon mile, the tracks pass a nightmare spectrum of blight: dying trees and poisoned waters give way to long-abandoned factories, windows broken, walls graffiti’d, which yield in turn to piles of garbage and old tires dotting tract after tract of decaying homes and broken neighborhoods.

Yesterday I traveled from New York to Washington and back on Amtrak (headed, as it happens, for a family wedding). As I looked out the window, I was struck by a curious thought. Inspired, no doubt, by the fact that it was Indigenous People’s Day, I wondered, what if a Lenni Lenape Indian of 500 years ago—one of the First People of New Jersey—were to time travel along this very route today, as Amtrak skirts the toxic land along the water we call the Hackensack River? What would she think?

What would she think of the deadly marshes? What would she think of the now-useless buildings? What questions would she ask in the face of this endless blight, the bitter fruit of “development” and greed?

Only two, I should imagine, one of which we know the answer to, the second of which is as agonizing for us as it would be for the time traveler: “Who has done this to our Earth, and how can we heal Her?”

For My Mother, on Gandhi’s Birthday

2010-10-02T11:31:00.002-04:00

There are dozens of lovely, tree-filled squares in London, but only one—Tavistock Square, in northern Bloomsbury—is dedicated as a peace park. Surrounding a statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s Mahatma (“Great Soul”), are benches with plaques asserting the commitment of one Londoner after another to Gandhi’s vision of peace and the “soul force” of nonviolence.

One of the plaques, however, carries the name of someone who would have loved to be an honorary Englishwoman, but was in fact a New Yorker, born and bred. It says, “From Beatrice Kelvin of New York City, who works for world peace and loves London.”

Bea Kelvin was my mother, and thanks to her determination and that of her daughters, the plaque was placed there in her lifetime, as she wanted it, on a bench facing the back of Gandhi’s statue (why the back of his statue is a different story, equally typical of my mom). Today being Gandhi’s birthday and the World Day of Nonviolence, I put this out in my mother’s memory and his.

The Hotel Tavistock, across the street from Tavistock Square, is a little the worse for wear since its construction in the Art Deco-mad Thirties. But it’s still a handsome example of that then-modern school of architecture, and the slight wear-and-tear has brought the price down to my family’s preferred range. So it was that my peripatetic mother discovered the Tavistock in her world-traveling heyday, learned that the square across the street was a peace park, and began to conceive a desire to have her own plaque there, talking about it from time to time as another might talk about where she wanted to be buried. So it was, too, that she and her two daughters continued to stay there even after Bea could no longer travel alone and I had to accompany her when she left the country. And so it was that in 2005 my sister Joan and I found ourselves at the Tavistock without Bea, who had had a stroke the year before and couldn’t go anywhere at all anymore.

We had stepped across the street to look at the square for her, so to speak, and were talking wistfully about her desire to have her name represented there. Then it occurred to us that there probably was a sign somewhere in the park that could tell us how one went about acquiring a plaque on a bench, and faster than you could say “Mohandas K. Gandhi,” Joan was speaking to the very parks department representative on her international mobile phone …

Back in the States, I told Bea about our research, thinking it was another installment in our increasingly frequent conversation about her post-mortem arrangements. “So you see,” I said, “we can get you a bench there after you, um—after—well, you know—”

“I don’t want it when I’m dead!” she said. “I want it now, when I can see it.”

She got it. She never did see the real thing, but she saw pictures. She was very proud of it. For the last years of her life, she kept a photo of the bench—taken by one of her sons—in a prominent spot on her piano, along with her pictures of her grandchildren. (She was convinced that the park had put her plaque on the wrong bench and that she had requested it facing the front of Gandhi’s statue, but in fact she had misread the diagram they sent and insisted that the spot she chose—the one where the plaque is—was eye-to-eye with him.) When she died, four years after the plaque was installed, we displayed a large photo of it at her memorial service and noted in her death notice in The New York Times that a “bench in London's Tavistock Square is dedicated to peace in her name.”

On this International Day of Nonviolence, “The Political Landscape” salutes Mohandas Gandhi and everyone else—including my mother—who has ever dreamed of a world without slaughter or cruelty and put their lives to the service of bringing that world to birth. May we finally make it so.

Guest Column: Searching for the Jews, I Find the Muslims

2010-09-12T12:07:00.004-04:00

By Sarkis Pogossian

I visited Kaifeng recently in search of traces of China's one indigenous Jewish community, which flourished in the city from the ninth century. By official histories, the last of the Kaifeng Jews disappeared in the 1860s, when the dwindling community sold their synagogue—or, by some accounts, 1841, when the Yellow River burst its banks and the temple was removed to strengthen the city walls. The claim that the Kaifeng Jews do not survive was recently contested by reporter Matthew Fishbane of the New York Times, who visited living self-identified Jews in the city this spring—despite the fact that Jews are not one of China's official nationalities.

The Jews of Kaifeng, who also arrived on the Silk Road from the west, were known to their Han neighbors as the "blue-turbaned Muslims"—the exotic faith of Judaism apparently considered to the Han a mere variant of Islam. Having not yet seen the New York Times article, I arrived in Kaifeng cold—and the responses to my inquiries indicated that the confusion persists to this day.

Kaifeng, China's capital in the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127), is today a chaotic modern city, with much more of a "third world" feel than Beijing. Like all Chinese cities, it is rife with KFCs and crass commercialism—until the main drag ends in a traditional arch guarded by carved lions. Beyond this lies Old Kaifeng. Crossing over is like going back centuries in time.

Asking locals through my interpreter where the old Jewish district could be found, I was directed to Zhuxian, a peasant village a 20-kilometer bus ride south of Kaifeng—which turned out to be inhabited almost entirely by Hui Muslims. Not a trace of Judaism was in evidence, but a beautiful mosque, probably dating to the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty—in classical Chinese style, but with Arabic calligraphy in the intricate wood-carvings and relief work.

I finally figured out that the city's most precious Jewish artifacts are sequestered in the Kaifeng Municipal Museum—literally kept under lock and key in a secret room on the building's top floor. With special permission from the museum management, I was allowed entry. No photos were permitted. When the lights were turned on, the dusty "Exhibition on the History & Culture of the Ancient Kaifeng Jews" was revealed.

The principal artifacts are three stelae which stood outside the synagogue, telling the history of the Kaifeng Jews—dating to 1489, 1512 and 1679. The interpretive material in English refers to the synagogue as a "mosque." The caption for the 1489 stele, which was erected after the demolition of the original synagogue dating to the 12th century, reads: "Stele of Rebuilding the Mosque." The badly worn writing is all in Chinese.

On a China tourism website, I had read that relics from the last synagogue—particularly blue tiles from its roof—were still guarded by the Muslims at Kaifeng's Dongda Si, or Eastern Grand Mosque. So the following morning, I took a bicycle-taxi to the Dongda Si, another magnificent centuries-old mosque, which lies hidden amid a warren of alleys invisible to the eyes of Kaifeng's few foreign tourists. My interpreter's questions about the Jewish relics were met with incomprehension, but we were welcomed to look around the mosque and take photos. Amid the exquisite wood-carvings with both Arabic and Chinese calligraphic work were two cross-beams which were a special historical prize—carved with lines in an ancient and esoteric script, which I was unable to certainly identify, despite my queries. This was possibly Kufic, the archaic form of Arabic in which the early Korans were written. Or possibly it was the ancient Uighur script, which was loosely based on Kufic through the intermediaries of the Persians—speaking to the ancient roots of the Hui culture.

The New York Times article indicated that a couple of small tourism companies are offering trips to Kaifeng for those seeking the city's Jewish heritage, and perhaps I would have seen more of what I was looking for if I had known about them—for instance, the site of the old synagogue on Teaching Torah Lane. But my blind probings led me to an unexpected look at Kaifeng's unique syncretism and fortuitous confusion.

My friend Sarkis Pogossian wrote this as part of a longer piece on "The Mosque Controversy--in China" for Bill Weinberg’s excellent web journal, World War 4 Report.

A Communist Party

2010-09-12T10:14:00.008-04:00

On Friday, September 10, while New York was thinking about 9-11, I went to the opening day of la Fête de l'Humanité at the Parc de Corneuve, just outside Paris. The Fête de l'Huma is the annual three-day festival held by l'Humanité, once the paper of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français), now independent but still close to the PCF. The fête occupies a 173-acre site (that's about one-fifth the size of Central Park) and has, like any fair, a midway, vendors, panels, forums, rock concerts, and booths serving food and drinks. The primary difference between the fête and your local county fair is that the booths represent Communist parties from all over France and from around the world. For someone who grew up in a country (I mean, of course, the United States) where "communist" was a word for scaring children in the culture at large--a word that has since, simply, disappeared from that same culture--that difference is mind-boggling. (More photos at Picasa.)

My Mistake—Happy International Women’s Day!

2010-03-08T14:10:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, “Contested Terrain” blogger (and my former Guardian Newsweekly colleague) Dan Cohen suggested that awarding the Best Picture Oscar to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker “would be a great way for Hollywood to celebrate … International Women’s Day.” He was referring to the fact that none of the previous Best Pictures was directed by a woman, nor had any woman ever been recognized as Best Director.

Last night, in accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Precious, Mo’nique said, “I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all she had to so that I would not have to.” She was referring to the first Academy Award given to an African-American, which McDaniel received in 1940 for playing Mammy in Gone With the Wind.

My own predictions, based on all that history, were thrillingly off the mark. Handicapping the Oscars in the Indypendent a couple of weeks ago, I said it would be “Avatar all the way,” and added, “Prove me wrong, Academy, Please.”

And just in time for International Women’s Day, the Academy did. I had failed to take into account certain subtleties of Academy Award demographics, to wit, that people in groups that have historically gone unrecognized and un-awarded are more likely to get awards for work that subordinates members of that group.

I've written about this extensively. For example, the first eight Oscars presented to Black actors—from McDaniel’s in 1940 to the historic first presentation of both top acting awards to African-Americans in 2002—were given for performances in movies that were predominantly about white people. In other words, from 1940 through 2002, when Black actors won Academy Awards, it was for playing roles secondary to white people in the cast. Not until 2005, fifty-five years after McDaniel’s Oscar, did a Black actor get an Academy Award for a movie that was actually about African-American life. (The actor was Janie Foxx, playing singer Ray Charles in the biopic Ray.) No movie about Black people has ever gotten the Best Picture Oscar, nor has any by a Black director; indeed, no film by Spike Lee, arguably the country’s most prolific and creative filmmaker, has ever been nominated as Best Picture.

Thus, when I declared that history made Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker an unlikely prospect for the top Oscar, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that it had become one of the most acclaimed films ever made by a woman yet was in no way a “chick flick.” That’s an understatement, of course. The Hurt Locker is a war movie, in which there are almost no women at all—and as such it was, let us say, a little more likely to become the groundbreaking first woman-directed Best Picture. I mean a lot more likely, certainly more than was, say, Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education, which is very much a “chick flick.”

None of this is can or should diminish Bigelow’s achievement, which stands on its own, as did McDaniel’s performance in Gone With the Wind. The Hurt Locker is a powerful film (if not, alas, an antiwar film), and Bigelow’s victory brings us closer to the day when a movie by and about a woman may actually be declared the Best Picture of its year. (And she beat out her own ex-husband—James Cameron, director of Avatar, in case you don’t read Hollywood gossip—which may give a little extra frisson of triumph to all the ex-wives out there.)

Happy International Women’s Day, sisters and comrades.

©Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2010

The Future of Nuclear Non-Proliferation (Wake Up!)

2010-03-02T14:03:00.011-05:00

When I reviewed movies and other pop culture for the late, lamented Guardian Newsweekly, I urged, from time to time, that, as the paper of record for the U.S. Left, the Guardian also run meeting reviews. As some might surmise, I proposed to do the job myself.

Were I writing such reviews today, I would use adjectives like "riveting" and maybe even "spellbinding" to describe arms expert Frida Berrigan’s talk on nuclear non-proliferation last night at New York City’s West Side Peace Action.

I should disclose here that I am not a nuclear non-proliferation fan. Not that there’s anything wrong with nuclear non-proliferation—au contraire, I’m sure it’s lovely—but, unfortunately, the term itself has always had a profoundly soporific effect on me; indeed, last night may have been the first time I ever stayed awake for all nine syllables. So did everyone else in the room, and almost all of them were even older than I am—that’s how riveting a speaker Berrigan is. (I should also disclose that she and I are friends and colleagues on the national board of the War Resisters League; I don't, however, habitually describe people in either category as "riveting" speakers.)

I said I’d use the word "riveting." “Lucid” would be another, and amazingly, considering the subject matter, “entertaining” would be yet another. Berrigan, an arms analyst at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative, was at Peace Action to drum up enthusiasm for the peace movement demonstrations planned for New York City this coming May, when the U.N. Non-Proliferation Treaty talks come to town. In language consistently clear and peppered with engaging asides, she laid out the 65-year history of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the equally long, parallel histories of the nuclear disarmament movement and the efforts, by the first nuclear powers, to limit the possession of such weapons; and the relationship of the Bush and Obama administrations to such efforts, particularly the early promise of Obama’s arms reduction rhetoric and the betrayal, in large measure, of that promise. Finally, having roused the entire room to a sense of urgency, she handed out flyers for the May actions.

Joe Friendly was there filming and said he’d post the presentation on YouTube. Keep an eye out for it. If you want to know anything about nuclear non-proliferation, watch it. If you want to know how to speak to an audience, watch it over and over. I will.

2009-12-31T11:34:00.004-05:00

CAIRO, December 30–After long meetings into the night and a heated confrontation between protesters at a Cairo bus station, the leadership of the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) here has rescinded its acceptance of an Egyptian government offer to allow 100 of the 1300-strong delegation to cross the border into Gaza. The group gathered in Cairo to travel together to a Dec. 31 march in Gaza against the Israeli blockade of the territory and to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Israel’s 22-day bombing and invasion that killed 1,400 and left thousands wounded and more homeless.

GFM participants had spent the early part of the evening yesterday at a rally at the Journalists Syndicate building to protest a visit to Cairo by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Local Egyptian groups initiated the action, and invited GFM to join. The steps of the building were crammed with people chanting in English and Arabic and, as usual, the street was lined with two rows of Egyptian riot police.

After they left the demonstration, newly energized by the spirit and enthusiasm of the protest. GFM participants learned that Egypt had offered to allow 100 delegates plus a truck of material aid through the Rafah border crossing, and that the GFM leadership had only a few hours to give authorities a list of people to go.

Many activists were outraged that the leadership had accepted an offer that would split the group. They felt the GFM was in a strong negotiating position, noting that the government of Hosni Mubarak has been taking a beating in the Arabic-language media for its refusal to let the GFM through. In addition, Egyptian authorities have been criticized for beginning construction on a wall between Egypt and Rafah that would entail a 17-foot underground steel barrier to prevent goods getting in through smuggling tunnels, which is currently how much critical material, including food and medicine, gets in to the people of Gaza.

Delegations from countries such as France, Italy, Scotland, and South Africa refused to provide names for the list of 100, saying they were not willing to send anything less than their entire delegation was allowed to go. Some individuals who were selected as part of the 100, including 85-year-old hunger striker Hedy Epstein, declined to go because they disagreed with the decision to accept the limited offer. Meetings and impromptu discussions went late into the night. Although GFM organizers attempted to consult the broader delegation in choosing who would go, the short deadline and logistical difficulties made it impossible to get any meaningful input from much of the group. Through limited discussions with some participants, a list was put together that attempted to represent different constituencies and nationalities.

Fuel was added to the controversy when the Egyptian foreign minister, Abu Al-Gheit, held a press conference saying that the 100 being allowed to go to Gaza were from organizations that his government deemed “good and sincere in standing in solidarity with Gaza the same way as we [the regime] do,” while the rest of the GFM participants were “from organizations that are only interested in subversion and acting against Egyptian interests, to sow havoc on the streets of Egypt.” He stated that the Egyptian people knew enough to stay away from these hooligans.

This morning at 7 am, two buses were waiting to take activists to Rafah. Feelings ran high among the assembled Gaza freedom marchers who came to see the 100 off. As those chosen to go got on board, other GFM participants made impassioned pleas that the group not allow itself to be split. Many of those preparing to leave were torn between their desire to go to Gaza and their belief that sending a smaller group was not in the spirit of the project, which had been organized as a massive show of opposition to the blockade, not as a humanitarian aid mission or a chance for individuals to travel into Gaza.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright, a member of the march steering committee, speaking through a megaphone for the GFM Steering Committee, declared, “It’s a wonderful morning [on which] some of us are going to Gaza.” Tomorrow, she said, the Gaza Freedom March would be in Gaza, she said, and “you all will be watching in solidarity in Cairo.”"We go all or none,” responded Catarina of the Italian delegation, which had refused to send a representative on the bus. A journalist, Sulieka Jaouad of Princeton, insisted it was important that conditions in Gaza be documented. “I feel like the march has recreated the conflict,” she said, and “part of me feels like I should stay, but journalists can report back.”

The decision had been contentious even among the GFM leadership. March media and communications coordinator Max Ajl, a Jewish activist from Brooklyn who had been selected as one of the 100, said, “All we’re doing if we go in a group of 100 is collaborating in the collaboration. We’re letting them set the terms. This is just a move to divide us.” And pointing to the two buses waiting to leave, he added, “These buses shouldn’t be going to Gaza until there are 20 more.” Echoing his thought, many in the crowd had begun to chant, “Where are the buses? Where are the buses?”

‘INCORRECT DECISION’

It became clear that the leadership was trying to think through the situation even as the buses stood ready to leave. A few minutes after Ajl’s bitter statement, Felice Gelman, one of the coordinators, said, “The Steering Committee decided after lengthy deliberation that accepting the offer was an incorrect decision because of the divisive impact on the march and because of the conditions imposed,” which included calling the group a humanitarian aid mission of CodePINK (one of the main groups behind the international delegation), rather than the Gaza Freedom March. Gelman explained that the Egyptian and Israeli governments–and the U.S. government–”do everything they can to prevent civil society from having a voice. Israel would like to say, ‘There are a million and a half people in Gaza, and they’re all Hamas, so we can starve them and ill them.’ But it’s not true. There’s a million in between, who just want their lives to go on, and [supporting them] what the Gaza Freedom March was for.”

As the morning wore on, the divide between those who supported the decision to send the two buses and those who thought it should be all or none grew deeper and more bitter. A documentary filmmaker who had been chosen to go but changed his mind just before boarding wept as he explained,”I’m not going to be fuckin’ privileged again.” Two Palestinian-American sisters from Chicago, Dana and Lara Elbrno, had been chosen to go and refused. Lara said, “We are Gazan, and every cell in my body wants to go. [But] the Gaza Freedom March is not just about giving people a chance to see Gaza. It’s a political movement, and to be strong and effective and united, we have to continue to be a political movement.” Emily Ibsen of Toronto echoed the thought. Bringing “critical mass [to Gaza] is what it’s about,” she said.

A turning point came when Ziyaad Lunat, the press liaison for GFM, put Omar Barghouti, aleading organizer of the Dec. 31 march inside Gaza, on a speakerphone inside one of the buses. Barghouti told the delegates that it was too divisive for the group of 100 to come through to the march, and it was better for them to stay with the larger GFM delegation. Amid cheers from the activists outside, many of those on the bus got off. Some were clearly still undecided, and one Palestinian woman who remained aboard begged for the caravan to continue so that the material aid could get through. Another woman remaining on the bus called out, “This is divide and conquer! We have medicine on the bus!”

Julia Hurley, who had raised $17,000 in material aid, was distraught at the idea that the buses might not go. She described her first encounter with Palestinian children in a refugee camp in Bethlehem: “I saw them playing in garbage. And it’s not right. They’re not given the opportunity to have the education they deserve because of the blockade, because of the siege, because of the occupation. We need to change that and the only way to change that is to get in there and bring their voices out. So I really feel we need to go, even if it’s just a hundred people.”

‘SAD SITUATION’

Former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn was one of those who disembarked, but she was deeply disappointed: “I think it’s a very sad situation that our delegation became divided around this issue. I think it was an issue that could have gone either way. For reasons that I think are fully human and also sectarian and small-minded, a lot of people felt bad about this decision, and of course the Egyptian government totally predictably seized on it for their own despicable aims… . The divisions were very sad to see. I think they ultimately influenced the committee in Gaza to decide it was probably too divisive and we shouldn’t come. And when they spoke to us by speakerphone on the bus, that made many of us decide that we had to get off the bus.”

Eventually, the two buses did leave for the Rafah crossing, but they were not full and were no longer considered part of the Gaza Freedom March. The GFM leadership sent out a press release saying it was rejecting the Egyptian offer and activists turned their attention to continuing to press for permission for the entire group to go to Gaza, and to planning an action tomorrow in solidarity with the march in Gaza.

Said Dohrn: “Now I think our job is to heal the wounds very quickly here and to try to get hundreds of buses and get our asses over to the Rafah crossing.”

--Ellen Davidson and Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Photo: Dana and Lara Elbrno, by Ellen Davidson

Gaza Freedom March - 'You Are Our Voice'

2009-12-30T18:16:00.003-05:00

CAIRO, December 28—Cairo was waking up as we made our way to the first of today’s actions. We were going to gather at the bus depot in the section of the city called Ma’arouf. It was from that depot that a convoy of buses was supposed to be taking us this morning on the first leg of the journey to Gaza, to join the historic Freedom March there on New Year’s Eve.

But days before Christmas, the Egyptian government announced that it would not permit us to go to Gaza. Now the marchers are protesting, trying to pressure the government to rescind the ban and asking other governments to intervene. This morning, we were making that demand at the site from which we had intended to leave Cairo.

We were looking at our map of the city when, as happens so often in Egypt, a passerby murmured to us, “Welcome to Egypt.” Gesturing toward the map, he asked where we were going. To Ma’arouf, we said. He told us how to get there. Then he noticed that two of us were wearing buttons that said, “My heart is with Palestine.”

“Are you with the Gaza march?” he asked. It was the first time any Egyptian had spoken to us about the march. When we said we were, he said, “We are honored that you are here. No matter what our politicians say.” He talked for a moment about the fact that many of the Egyptian people oppose the government’s shutdown of the march, although that fact doesn’t show up in media accounts of the events. “You are our voice,” he said. In turn, we thanked him for his support.

He gave us only his first name: Ali. He has seven children, he said. He can’t afford to get detained or questioned by the police. But for the omission of his last name, he was open and voluble. He works in a nearby hotel. He said that the government claims that it “has to act to secure our borders,” an assertion he declared is “poison sweetened with honey.”

We had to leave. As we made our goodbyes, thanking him again, he spoke about how painful he finds it that his country is “completely stopping everything from getting into Gaza, a land where they have nothing.” To him, that makes Egypt no different from the Israeli and U.S. governments. “We should play a different role,” he said sadly.

Photo by Ellen Davidson

Gaza Freedom March -- ‘You Have to Put Your Own Life On the Line'

2009-12-30T18:01:00.004-05:00

CAIRO, December 28—At 85, Hedy Epstein is one of the oldest of the Gaza Freedom Marchers. She may also be the only Holocaust survivor among them.

This morning, Epstein began a hunger strike to up the ante for the Egyptian government’s attempts to prevent delegates from around the world from participating in the march. We spoke during the protest at U.N. headquarters in Cairo, as the Freedom Marchers demanded that theUnited Nations intervene to allow to march to proceed to Gaza.

“I was born in Germany,” she said. “I was eight years old when Hitler came to power. My parentswanted to get out and were willing to go [almost anywhere], but there was one country they wouldn’t go to: Palestine, because they were ardent anti-Zionists.”

Epstein, however, did get out of Germany. She was brought to England, which “took in almost 10,000 children in the nine months before World War II.” At the end of the war, by then in her 20s, she went back to Germany to work for the U.S. government and “to try to find my parents.”In 1948, she came to the United States—at “almost the same time as Israel became a state.” She had mixed feelings about Israel, she said. “I was glad that there was a place for Holocaust survivors to go, but on the other hand, I remembered my family’s anti-Zionism, and I was afraid that no good would come of [the Jewish state].”

In 1956, she finally found out what had become of her family: Her parents (and other relatives) had perished at Auschwitz. In the United States, Epstein became an activist for, among other causes, peace and affordable housing. But she described Israel and Palestine as “on the back burner of my interests” for almost three decades—until the 1982 “wake-up call” that was the Sabra and Shatila massacres, when Lebanese militia forces massacred hundreds of Palestinians in two Lebanese refugee camps. From that point, her primary cause became the Palestinians and the end of the occupation.

She was in Cairo this morning, she said, “because I was on my way to Gaza with the Gaza Freedom March, at this point being stopped by the Egyptian authorities.” The march is “trying tobreak the siege of Gaza imposed by the Israeli government, and I suspect that the Egyptian government is under pressure by the U.S. and Israeli governments” to stop the march.

There was a protest going on around us, and we had to finish our conversation. Epstein summed up: “I’ve been in human and civil rights struggles for a long time, and I’ve never been on a hunger strike before, but I [also] never saw a government deny humanitarian aid before. There comes a time in a struggle when you have to put your own life on the line, so I decided to go on a hunger strike to try to persuade the Egyptian government to let us go.”

The attempt to persuade Egypt to let the marchers into Gaza continues. So does Epstein’s hunger strike. Other freedom marchers are joining her.

Photo by Ellen Davidson

Gaza Freedom March Asks U.N. for Help

2009-12-30T17:54:00.003-05:00

CAIRO–Participants in the historic Gaza Freedom March (GFM) here turned to the United Nations this afternoon for help in getting the 1362-strong delegation through the Rafah border crossing to Gaza. Egyptian authorities have declared the crossing closed for December, stating that tensions are too high and it is unsafe.

The marchers have countered that they are willing to undertake the risk and that the Egyptian government claim that the situation is too dangerous is really a pretext for keeping protesters from joining thousands of Gazans for a massive march against the Israeli blockade of the territory. GFM participants traveled from 42 countries for the action, planned for December 31.

This afternoon, hundreds of march delegates converged on the U.N. Agencies and World Trade Center in Cairo to request that U.N. officials here help in negotiating with the Egyptian government for entry into Gaza. GFM representatives Walden Bello, a member of the Philippine parliament, and Ali Abunimah, author and cofounder of the Electronic Intifada website, asked U.N. representatives here to help the group break the impasse with the Egyptian government by pressing the authorities to allow the entire group entry; short of that, GFM organizers hoped that the United Nations would either make arrangements for the aid to be brought in through U.N. channels or pressure the Egyptians to allow a smaller group of two busloads of delegates and one busload of material aid into Gaza. The U.N. representative agreed to bring the group’s requests to the Egyptian government.

On a large sunny plaza in front of the U.N. Agencies and World Trade Center building, the GFM participants drummed, sang, chanted, and billowed a gigantic flag. The atmosphere was festive, especially compared to the somber mood of yesterday’s commemoration of the 1,400 Palestinians killed in the monthlong Israeli assault on Gaza that began a year ago. Some activists met in smaller groups to discuss strategies for the rest of the week, which increasingly appears as if it will be spent in Cairo, as the Egyptian authorities are not even allowing marchers to travel to Al-Arish, which is near the Rafah border crossing (see “Egyptian Authorities Harass Palestinian Solidarity Activists“). The protesters who held banners at the edge of the gathering engaged in friendly discussions with the policemen who faced them in a line surrounding the plaza.

The group was diverse, comprising Palestinians, Arabs from other countries, Palestinian-Americans, Filipinos, representatives from many European countries and the United States, African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Japanese, among others. The delegates from the Coalition of South African Trade Unions received a particularly warm welcome as they unfurled their banner.

As the afternoon wore on, some of the police arrived with batons at the ready, and a second row was added to the first line of police, making participants uneasy that the heretofore peaceful actions would be marred by police violence or arrests. Some of the activists chose to stay in the plaza until a response was given by the Egyptian government to the group’s requests. At 4 pm, there were still more than 100 protesters at the site, and some had vowed to sleep there if necessary.

--Ellen Davidson

Gaza Freedom March - Material Aid, All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go

2009-12-30T17:49:00.003-05:00

CAIRO, 28 December–At 7 am today, about 100 Gaza Freedom March (GFM) delegates met near the bus station from which the marchers were originally planning to set off today for Gaza. No one was actually going anywhere, because the Egyptian authorities had cancelled the buses that organizers had arranged, but the GFM participants gathered anyway, to draw attention to the fact that they have been prevented from bringing material aid to the residents of Gaza because the Egyptian government is refusing them entry to the territory through the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing. The marchers stood on the sidewalk holding banners that could by seen by passing drivers, chanting and singing songs. As has become usual, they were faced with a solid line of Egyptian police directly across the barricades the police had set up.

The 1362 GFM participants from 42 countries have brought tens of thousands of dollars worth of material aid to deliver to Gaza. This includes supplies bought with $17,000 raised singlehandedly by Julia Hurley of New Jersey, much of it contributed by the Arab-American of Passaic County, N.J. Several laptops and some 700 backpacks filled with school supplies, hygiene products, toys, and jackets for ages 5 to 17 are sitting in a warehouse in Cairo waiting for a way to be found to get them to schoolchildren in Gaza. Other material aid items waiting to be delivered include water filtration systems, textbooks, and art supplies.

--Ellen Davidson

Gaza Freedom March - Vive la France

2009-12-30T17:33:00.004-05:00

CAIRO, 28 December–The French delegates to the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) spent the night in front of their embassy here, pressuring their ambassador to support them in negotiations with the Egyptian government, which has so far refused permission for marchers to enter Gaza. As of 7 pm this evening, the site was locked down by the Egyptian police, who were not allowing anyone in or out of the protest site. Activists from GFM who came by to document the action were told to put their cameras away.

The French delegates to the Gaza march began their protest last night, taking over the street in front of the French Embassy, which is near the Giza zoo. After blocking traffic for five hours, they agreed to move their protest to the sidewalk in exchange for a commitment from the French ambassador to negotiate with the Egyptian authorities on their behalf.

When I visited the site this morning, the street opposite the embassy was lined with green trucks filled with riot police. The sidewalk of the entire block in front of the embassy itself was taken up by the protesting delegates, who were completely surrounded by two rows of police. The French marchers had pitched tents and set up sleeping bags on the sidewalk.

Many GFM participants from other countries came to the site to show solidarity; some brought coffee, which they handed in to the grateful protesters over the heads of the riot-gear-clad Egyptian police. The police alternately allowed the solidarity efforts to continue and harassed the activists who were not inside the police line to either move inside their blockade or move on and put their cameras away.

--Ellen Davidson

Gaza Freedom March: No Candles on the Nile

2009-12-28T19:34:00.006-05:00

CAIRO, 28 December–Yesterday afternoon hundreds of people converged at the spot on the Nile in Cairo from which the feluccas–traditional Nile sailboats–depart to take tourists. We were going to take dozens of feluccas out into the middle of the river and set afloat candles to commemorate the 1,417 killed by the Israeli assault on Gaza a year ago.

We never got to the river.

The feluccas had been shut down, we were told, for maintenance, but the large number of police present suggested a different reason. Instead, we gathered around for an impromptu rally. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, one of the main organizers of the march in the United States, spoke of our determination to get to Gaza, despite the Egyptian government’s refusal to let us through the border.

As more and more activists from the Gaza Freedom March (GFM) gathered on the shore of the Nile, so did the Egyptian police. In Egypt, any gathering of more than six people without a permit
is technically illegal. As we walked along the river, chanting, “Gaza, Gaza, we are coming,” the police surrounded us, forming a line along the busy street and closing off both ends. They only allowed us to leave in groups of twos or threes.

Earlier in the day, according to a GFM press release, police had stopped another action by GFM participants to commemorate those killed in the Israeli invasion of Gaza that began on December 27, 2008. GFM activists had tied hundreds of strings with notes, poems, art and the names of those killed to the Kasr al Nil Bridge, one of the main bridges connecting Zamalek Island, in the

“We’re saddened that the Egyptian authorities have blocked our participants’ freedom of movement and interfered with a peaceful commemoration of the dead,” said Ann Wright, a GFM organizer.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian government continues to refuse to allow us to go to the Rafah border crossing and into Gaza. March participants have brought tens of thousands of dollars worth of aid for the residents of Gaza, and were planning to participate in a massive march with Gazans to protest the ongoing Israeli blockade of the territory, which has prevented rebuilding materials from being brought in following the destruction of the Israeli bombing and invasion of a year ago.

At this time, according to GFM organizers, hundreds of French delegates to the march are camped outside the French Embassy, pitching tents and laying sleeping bags on the sidewalk, chanting “Palestine Freedom!” The French ambassador and his wife are outside negotiating with the delegates and the police and Egyptian authorities.

GFM organizers are planning more events today, including solidarity actions with the French delegates; an action at the U.N. Agencies and World Trade Center to ask the United Nations to help get them and their supplies into Gaza, and delivering a letter to H.E. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

--Ellen Davidson and Judith Mahoney Pasternak

This post and the Gaza Freedom March stories that follow also appeared on the Indypendent blog, www.indypendent.org/category/indyblog.

Gaza Freedom March - Day 1, Christmas 2009

2009-12-25T11:45:00.004-05:00

It’s Christmas day and we are preparing to leave tomorrow for Cairo to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, along with nearly 1,400 other activists from 42 countries.

As of now, the Egyptian government has vowed not only to refuse us entry into Gaza but to prevent us from going to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, and has “canceled our orientation space,” leaving us two days to find an alternate venue that can hold a group this size.

Undaunted, march organizers are moving ahead with contingency plans for activities against the Israeli blockade of Gaza whether or not we are allowed into the territory: “Our efforts and plans will not be altered at this point. We have set out to break the siege of Gaza and to march in Gaza on December 31 against the international blockade. We are continuing the journey,” according to a press release from the group.

From Cairo, retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright, one of the march organizers, says: “Keep flying to Cairo! The Gaza Freedom March is historic, even if the Egyptian government will not let us into Gaza! The people of Gaza and the world are watching. We are NOT silent about Gaza!!! See you in Cairo!”

Yes, see you in Cairo, Ann.

--Ellen Davidson and Judith Mahoney Pasternak

(also published in The Indypendent, www.indypendent.org/2009/12/25/gaza-freedom-marchers-undeterred-by-egyptian-government)

The Other Profile

2009-07-28T09:00:00.012-04:00

This is for Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose misadventure inspired these thoughts, with thanks to Scott M. Sommer of United Auto Workers Region 9, whose Facebook comment lit a firestorm of denial.

Riding the New York City subway—the Number 1 line, that runs from Harlem through Times Square to Greenwich Village and the southern tip of Manhattan—I’m reading the Lonely Planet Guide to Mediterranean Europe. A voice says, “Excuse me,” and I look up and see, sitting across from me, a Black woman more or less my own age, strikingly dressed in clothes that aren’t traditional African garb but evocative of it. “Do you travel much?” she asks.

“A fair amount,” I tell her, and we strike up a conversation about travel. After a bit, she says, “But you know, everything takes longer now, since 9-11. They ask me so many more questions at check-in and security than they used to that it’s actually gotten harder to travel.”

I look at her for a long minute, gauging whether to utter the response that’s on the tip of my tongue, which is, “Not for me.” She and I are, as I have noted, similar in many ways: both New York City urban, both middle-aged, both showing the insignia of a certain level of middle-income comfort. But there’s one salient difference: She’s a middle-aged woman of color, and I’m a middle-aged woman of no color—and as such, invisible to security personnel and police.

That’s not a complaint. For instance, speaking of 9-11, for a few days in mid-September, 2001, southern Manhattan was off-limits to everyone except people who lived or worked there. To travel south of 14th Street, people had to show ID at police checkpoints. People, that is, who weren’t—well, me. I got waved through every time, without producing any identification at all.

Then there was the time I was coming back from Palestine. I had been in the West Bank on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We had been advised to have the Palestinian materials we had collected during the two-week visit mailed to us, rather than attempt to carry them through the Israeli exit check at Ben Gurion airport. We were told that security officers often checked cameras, too, and that if we didn’t want to be questioned and delayed it was wise to move photographs—of, say, the Wall of Separation—off our digital cameras and onto other digital storage media. I spent my last day in the West Bank moving photos and going through everything I had acquired to make sure that on the way out of Israel I couldn’t be identified as pro-Palestinian.

It was wasted work. The Israeli security forces waved me through the way the police officers at 14rh Street had. When I got home, I discovered I had overlooked one item: In a front section of my pocketbook was a beaded bracelet that said, “I [HEART] PALESTINE.”

Once, while on that same delegation, my apparent invisibility extended to half a dozen other people, not all of whom were middle-aged, not all of whom were female (although all of us were in at least one of those categories).

It was the night of the West Bank championship basketball game in Ramallah. We were staying at the Ibdaa Cultural Center of the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, and the Ibdaa team had just won the championship from the Bethlehem team. We were on the Ibdaa bus, going back with the team and their coaches from the West Bank into Israel. In other words, the bus held perhaps twenty-some young Palestinian men and seven very pale Americans—five women, most but not all middle-aged, and two middle-aged men.

The bus stopped at the check point into Jerusalem. Several Israeli Defense Force soldiers, all armed, boarded the bus and walked up the aisle, asking each Palestinian youth for ID. They took the IDs, left the bus, huddled outside for half an hour, looking over the IDs with flashlights, then re-boarded the bus and handed back the IDs. Twice, they walked past all seven Americans without stopping or saying a word.

• • •

The recent disorderly-conduct arrest of Black Harvard scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., after he spoke with some heat to a white police officer who was demanding that Gates identify himself in his—Gates’—own home, started a national conversation about racial profiling. President Barack Obama even offered his opinion on the subject—twice, the second time moderating if not rescinding his original assertion that the police officer had acted “stupidly.” When my former Metropolitan Council on Housing colleague Scott M. Sommer, now of United Auto Workers Region 9, posted a comment on his Facebook page to the effect that Obama had been right the first time, he ignited an explosion of responses—51 so far, and counting.

None of them, however, noted that racial profiling can and does go in two directions. Indeed, the benefit of the doubt accorded people of no-color happens so often and so routinely that, like me at a checkpoint, it’s usually invisible—at least to most of us who reap that benefit. Sharing stories like these should help make that privilege more visible to everyone.

A Very Political Landscape, Part Deux

2009-07-17T12:27:00.004-04:00

Café Rendez-vous, Place Denfert Rochereau, Paris, 14 juillet—Beyond the table in front of me, beyond my poached salmon and glass of Sancerre, are camouflage-painted tanks, guns at the ready, rolling down the Avenue du Général Leclerc. Later, when I get back to my Paris home-for-the-summer, a television special will combine patriotic songs (by no means limited to “The Marseillaise”) with film clips of France’s newest contributions to military technology, including the latest in the pilotless, unstaffed bombers called predator drones.

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the Fête Nationale—July 14, France’s National Holiday, which the rest of the world calls Bastille Day. It commemorates the July 14, 1789, storming of the royal prison called the Bastille that marks the start of the French Revolution. Amazingly, the Fête Nationale vastly outdoes the U.S. Fourth of July in celebrating military might—in this case, of course, France’s.

I’m in this café conducting my own celebration. I’m toasting both a different French revolution and what turned out to be the perfect observance of my first Quatorze Juillet.

I’ve never before been in France in mid-July. I’ve celebrated aspects of Bastille Day in New York, although not the guns and tanks and drones. I got up this morning thinking about how to observe the day without joining the military hoop-la tonight at the Eiffel Tower.

I went for a walk. In the course of it, by sheerest accident, I discovered another monument to the world’s first socialist-anarchist revolution, the Paris Commune (see “A Very Political Landscape,” June 9.

I’ve visited the Mur des Fédérés—the Wall of the Communards—at Père Lachaise Cemetery every time I’ve come to Paris. My mother told me to, on the occasion of my first visit here. Go to the Louvre, she said, and see the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and the Venus de Milo—and go to Père Lachaise and see the Mur des Fédérés. (If she had known that Eugène Pottier, the poet who wrote the words to the communist-anarchist anthem, “The Internationale,” was also buried there, she’d have told me to see his tomb as well. I come from a long line of leftists.)

Living in Paris this summer, I’ve also dropped in occasionally at the Montparnasse Cemetery, the final resting place of two of France’s great political philosophers of the Left, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I stopped to say hello to them today for Quatorze Juillet, then turned to leave the cemetery—

And came face to face with a map I had never seen before that informed me I was yards away from the “Monument de Fédérés.”

It’s smaller than the wall at Père Lachaise, and the inscription on it is a little worn and hard to see. Also, it wasn’t exactly where the map placed it.

Finally I found it. I took a few pictures. Then (I was quite alone there) I lifted my fist in the communist salute and sang one chorus of “The Internationale,” for Quatorze Juillet and in memory of my mother.

The Adventure of the Art Students from Xi'an

2009-07-01T11:04:00.005-04:00

I was in Beijing with a hundred or so friends, traveling with the New York Oratorio Society, which was giving two concerts in China.

The trip included a tightly scheduled tour of the country under the aegis of the Chinese government tourism office. Like all tourists in China, we saw the Great Wall and after Beijing would go to the central province of Xi’an to see its famous terra cotta army. Our guides—all young, stylishly dressed representatives of China's emerging middle class—declared in every lecture that the new China, with its "special Chinese" version of communism called "capitalism," was an improvement on the old China.

On the day of the second concert, however, those of us who weren’t singing had a precious hour or so of free time. Two of us had already taken the Beijing subway once and gotten lost in the middle of the city. This time we headed, more prudently, for the nearby shopping area called Silk Alley.

No sooner were we well away from our hotel, than we were approached by two young Asian women who asked whether they might walk with us and practice their English. Hardly more than twenty and respectably dressed; they looked harmless enough. “Sure,” we said, and along they came.

As we walked, they said they were art students recently arrived in Beijing from Xi'an. After we told them we ourselves were going to Xi’an the very next day, we felt as if we knew each other better. They seemed like country girls, a little lost and alone in the big city.

Right after that, one of them said, "Oh, our studio is right here—won't you come up and meet our teacher?" Ah, I thought—they're salespeople, shilling for customers. Or worse, a voice in my head warned, suggesting sinister scenarios of which robbery at gunpoint was the least terrifying. But the two young women really did seem innocent and the dire possibilities in my head not really very likely, so with only a little trepidation, we went along with them.

It looked like a real studio, full of tables holding art paraphernalia and paintings lining the walls. Their teacher was nowhere in sight, but they fixed us jasmine tea and led us around to look at the paintings. They were for sale, the young women said, and asked us which ones we liked.

So it really was only a sales hustle. I liked some of the paintings; one set in particular seemed like just the thing for my son the water-colorist. They named a price and when I hesitated, translating into dollars in my head, they offered me a "discount."

I bought the set, and my friend bought another. The jasmine tea wasn't drugged, and no one robbed us. When we got back to the hotel, the packages the students had wrapped so carefully did indeed contain the paintings we had chosen. There was no crime at all, in other words—only another face of the new Chinese communism.

But there was, after all, a mystery: At a late, post-concert supper that night, it turned out that everyone at our large table had been approached by two young women art students from Xi'an. They, too, had been brought to studios, where they, too, had bought paintings. But we had all been brought to different studios—and, from the descriptions, by different young art students from Xi'an.

The small-time entrepreneurs of Beijing, it seemed, have discovered that Western tourists who might boggle at going to a strange place with a strange man will go almost anywhere with personable young women who say they're students from the provinces. And then they’ll do what Westerners do around the world: Shop.

Mystery solved.

Sculpting Empire

2009-06-26T06:41:00.008-04:00

Paris, June 2009—In New York City, in front of the American Museum of Natural History, stands a sculpture of a man on horseback, accompanied by two men on foot. The man on the horse is U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, friend of the museum, and, of course, the soldier who won Puerto Rico, Guantánamo, and the Philippines for the United States. He appears to be dressed in the Rough Rider uniform of those victories.

The other two men are nameless, meant to represent not individuals at all, but continents. A generic African and a generic Native American, they’re leading TR’s horse, and they’re dressed in almost nothing at all. In my youth, during the years that the movement for racial equality was becoming militant, I wondered how that statue, so near Harlem, was allowed to stand, unmolested, not even graffiti’d. No one else even complained about it, at least not publicly

I met its ideological twin in Paris the other day.

More precisely, I met its ideological sextuplets. They’re also in front of a museum, in this case the Musée d’Orsay, and all six of them depict continents: Six larger-than-life female figures representing, from left to right, Europe (yes, Europe comes first), Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and “Oceania.” Like Roosevelt, the statue of “Europe” is somewhat military, despite being female; she seems to be modeled on Athena and is dressed head-to-toe in flowing robes and a suggestion of armor, with a helmet on her head. And, like Roosevelt’s companions, the other five are all half naked.

This is so curious it bears repetition: Seven generic “natives,” created on separate continents and in different centuries, are nevertheless all bare-breasted and accompanying fully clothed white people. What were those sculptors thinking? Surely they never let themselves think what the figures imply …

This is what we know about the sculptures: The Musée d’Orsay sculptures were made for the Trocadero Palace and the Universal Exposition of 1878. Six sculptors were commissioned to create them: Alexandre Schoenewerk, to sculpt the figure representing “Europe”; Alexandre Falguière to create “Asia”; Eugène Delaplanche, “Africa”; Ernest-Eugène Hiolle, “North America”; Aimé Millet, South America; and Mathurin Moreau, “Oceania.” Each did his job; the six works graced the Trocadero during the Exposition and then were discarded and found after the Orsay railroad station was converted into a museum in 1986. The Roosevelt statue was sculpted by James Earle Fraser and placed on the museum plaza and dedicated in 1940.

Those are the bare facts, so to speak. Their meaning would be clear to a child and indeed has presumably been clear to the generations of children who have been taken on school trips to those museums. There is, however, one difference worth noting between the two groups; they are very close ideological relatives, but not quite identical.

The French group was created when Europe truly ran the world, its mastery supported by the ideas shouted by those statues. The group in New York was sculpted just at the moment when the mantle of empire was passing to the United States, which might do well to take to heart the lesson Europe had to learn, the sequel—what empires do after they rise.

They fall.

A Very Political Landscape

2009-06-09T02:21:00.004-04:00

For a century and a half, almost anybody in Paris who had been anybody in life was laid to rest at Père Lachaise after death—along with many who had been nobody of note. Once, a hundred odd who had been less than nobody, who were of the canaille (“rabble,” “riffraff,” "mob,” sometimes “scum”), were slaughtered there.

Atop a hill in the 20th arrondissement of eastern Paris, Cimitiére Père Lachaise is named for a 17-th century priest who lived there before the cemetery was built. At 48 hectares (118.5 acres), it is the city’s largest cemetery. It holds the remains of more than 300,000 people, including the beloved French singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963), U.S. rocker-poet Jim Morrison (1943-1971), composer Georges Bizet (1838-1975); medieval lovers Héloïse (1101-1164) and Abelard (1079-1142); actor-spouses Simone Signoret (1921-1985) and Yves Montand (1921-1991); and writers Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Colette (1873-1954), and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Under one monument, in the southeast corner of the cemetery, lie “a few of the ashes of the seven thousand French martyrs murdered by the Nazis at the camp of Neuengamme.”

Few tracts of real estate in the world are as politically charged as that corner. Within a few yards of the Neuengamme stone are monuments to the victims of half a dozen other concentration camps, to the French volunteers of the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic, and to the Central Committee of the French Communist party.

They’re not there by accident. Those memorials are directly across a narrow roadway from the Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Communards. Against that wall, on May 28, 1871, the French Army shot 147 defenders of the Paris Commune, the world’s first—albeit tragically short-lived—socialist-anarchist revolution.

The Commune was born out of dire circumstances. After the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, in the spring of 1871, the poor and hungry workers of Paris—including both socialists and anarchists—declared the city an independent political entity and held elections for a governing council, or commune. The existing government fled to Versailles; the Commune, flying the red flag of revolution rather than the French tricoleur, took office on March 28. It elected as its leader the jailed socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) and rapidly instituted a series of laws and regulations meant to create political and economic equality, mandates that included a strong feminist component as well.

Blanqui never took office. The French government in Versailles sent the army out against the Commune. After weeks of skirmishes, the army re-occupied Paris. The last 147 defenders of the Commune were shot by a firing squad in Père Lachaise on May 28 at the end of what is still called la Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, which saw the summary executions by the French troops of tens of thousands of suspected communards.

One survivor, the poet Eugène Pottier (1816-1887), later wrote a poem that, set to music by composer Pierre De Geyter (1848-1932), became the anthem of socialists and anarchists around the world as “The Internationale.” It was sung for me once at the Mur des Fédérés, which remains a beacon for the hope for economic equality; French fighters for freedom and justice, including Blanqui and Pottier, have been buried or commemorated near it ever since.

The events of 1871 are also commemorated beyond the walls of Père Lachaise. A Parisian café is named for the Commune’s favorite song, “The Cherries of Springtime,” and a few miles south of the Mur des Fédérés, a boulevard in the Left Bank’s 13th arrondissement bears the name August Blanqui.

Courtesy

2009-06-05T16:00:00.003-04:00

12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS—I’m at a dinner party in Paris; I am, in fact, the reason for the dinner party, the guest of honor, the visiting American. Five of us sit around a table, eating, drinking wine, and chatting, amiably and aimlessly, about the world situation, music, theatre, travel, and whatever else arises. My hosts are a French sociologist—whose research brings her from time to time to the United States, which is how I met her—and her student-son. The other two guests are a scholar in the slightly rarefied field of Southeast Asian tourism, and her husband, the director of international relations for a town just outside Paris. (His specialty is also Southeast Asia.)

Among them, the four speak several languages: French, of course, Spanish, Portuguese, German, I think, Indonesian, and smatterings of other Asian languages. And English. Everyone here speaks English, mostly as a third or fourth or fifth language rather than as a second, and mostly less than perfectly. But tonight, they’re all speaking English—

Because the American in the room is competent in only one language: her own. I speak enough French for shopping, but not enough to be comfortable conversing in it.

If any of my companions are equally self-conscious about their less-than-perfect English, it doesn’t show. All evening, as a courtesy to me, they speak my language. Sometimes they fall into French for a moment, but after a couple of sentences, the conversation stops, one of them checks to see if I understood, and they go back to English.

During one such moment, I wonder if I’ve ever seen this happen in reverse. Have I ever been in a room in the United States in which everyone present was speaking a language not their own—that they didn’t even use in their work—to accommodate a non-English-speaking visitor?

My companions stop and explain the last two sentences to me, and I lose the thought. Half an hour later, during another French moment, I come back to it, this time with the answer: Never. I’ve never been at a U.S. party at which everyone spoke a visitor’s language instead of English.

Are the French, then—by custom or nature—more courteous than the people of the United States? Possibly. Could there be another explanation for this particular act of kindness, one that doesn’t involve ethnic or cultural stereotypes?

Well, Europe and the United States are almost exactly the same size—Europe’s area is 3.9 million square miles, the United States’ 3.79 million. But Europe’s population is more than double the U.S. population—700 million to some 300 million. And while the United States has one national language, Europe has dozens. As one corollary among many, Europeans are far more likely to learn multiple languages, to speak some better than others, and to be used to a world in which people speak multiple languages—some better than others.

I find the thought—that these four Parisians are less uncomfortable speaking imperfect English than I am speaking imperfect French—more comforting than credible. They may simply be more willing to get past their discomfort in order to make me comfortable—that is, they may, after all, simply be more deeply courteous than I am.

Either way, the evening is lovely and memorable. I leave wishing to acquire at least a bit of my hosts’ language habit, to speak French more while in France—and perhaps someday, in the company of another visitor to a country not her own, to return the courtesy shown to me tonight.

A Change in the Landscape,Magnitude As Yet Unknown

2008-11-05T08:28:00.008-05:00

It is finally possible, in this nation so profoundly and for so long divided by race, for a Black man to become president.

"War, Peace, Justice, and the Elections"
A War Resisters League Statement

Election Night, 2008—A commentator on CNN this evening mentioned that it had been 43 years since the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A little later I spoke with someone who was on that march, who said that if you had asked her then whether the United States could elect a Black man to the presidency, she'd have said, "Not in my lifetime!"

The march, in the spring of 1965, was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign to make the franchise a reality for African-Americans in the South. Almost a century after the ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which declared that the right to vote could not “be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” poll taxes and lynch mobs still stood between most Southern Black citizens and the vote. Thousands—Southerners and Northerners—had worked to change that; some, like Southerner James Chaney and Northerners Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo, had died to change it. Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Let me be clear: I expect almost nothing from Barack Obama that we wouldn't have gotten from Hillary Clinton--indeed, almost nothing we didn't get from Bill Clinton. Obama, like all the presidents before him including George W. Bush, represents the war machine--although it is possible he represents a somewhat more prudent element of that machine than did Bush; he represents capitalism, although it is almost certain that his domestic policies will be less devastating than Bush's; he uncritically supports Israel.

Yet for me, and, I suspect, for many of us who lived through and participated in the civil rights efforts of the '60s, the fact that this has happened in our lifetime after all is, in itself, deeply moving. My African-American nephew DeShawn (above), now seventeen months old, unlike his own mother, will never have known a world in which it could not have happened.

This past weekend, I was on a family road trip. My white brother was driving, I was sitting next to him in the front seat, and a bunch of Black teenagers were sitting in the back of the car carrying on like--well, like teenagers. My brother played Mavis Staples' "We'll Never Turn Back" cd, and I was singing along with "We Shall Not Be Moved," when a voice asked from the back, "Aunt Judith, you like that music?" It was clear she meant, "You like that tired old music?" I admitted to liking it, old as it is. I said, "Once, it moved a movement."

So this is all: What has happened is not revolutionary. It represents no change in the structures of power that allot so much to so few, and so little to so many. It will feed no hungry children; it will house no homeless. It won't change, by the smallest increment, the proportion of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, in this country and in the world, who are people of color.

But a generation ago, we had to march--some of us had to die—so that Black people might vote. Something has changed. We have something to build on—and our work cut out for us if we are to build on it.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2008

A Shameless Plug

2008-10-23T11:50:00.010-04:00

(For a while there I was seeing more places than I could write about. Trying to catch up now.)

Do you know what happened in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in May of 1886? Or from what Arizona town 1,100 striking (or allegedly striking) copper-mine workers were “deported” in 1917? Or where the first prolonged sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter was? Or the address of the Maryland draft board that was “raided” by the “Catonsville Nine” in 1968?

Those radical history stories and 52 more from all over (all over the United States, anyway) have just been published in a collection of political landscapes, The Path of Most Resistance: A U.S. Radical History Tour, the War Resisters League 2009 Peace Calendar.

I edited it. And wrote a number of the stories. It was inspiring to work on, and it’s inspiring to read.

Don’t take my word for it. Historians Howard Zinn and Robin D. G. Kelley say so too.

I’m gonna lay down my stylus and palm pilot and study anti-war and more … Thank you War Resisters League for this remarkable calendar, our daily reminder that peace, real freedom, the preservation of humanity and the environment, justice, and more of the fruits of our labor were won by collective struggle alone. We are inheritors of a tradition of resistance, the source of light in dark times, and if we forget, each page of this calendar will remind us of our real daily agenda.
—Robin D. G. Kelley
Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

The 2009 Peace Calendar is wonderful, truly inspiring. These are unknown moments in history, and the best moments, because they show resistance to war, courage, and comradeship. It is not only a calendar, but a piece of literature.
—Howard Zinn
Author of A People's History of the United States

I didn’t create the calendar alone, of course. There were the radical historians whose work we built on—historians like Zinn, Kelley, and Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote the foreword for the calendar. There was the hard-working committee that included WRL staffer Liz Roberts and editors Wendy Schwartz and Ellen Davidson; they collaboratively conceptualized it, critiqued early drafts, proofread it, and helped find graphics for it. There were journalist Erin Thompson, writer/editor Ethan Young, and activists Mike McGuire and R. Stokes, who contributed calendar entries. And there were small labor museums and radical history sites all over the country, including the wonderful Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, whose staffs gave unstintingly of time and research to help us collect the exciting graphics that illustrate the entries.

Together, we compiled this specific record of exactly where dozens of acts of resistance—and a few acts that evoked resistance—happened. Collecting and writing down these accounts was a little like going to those places and seeing those things happen.

So is reading them—you’ll see.

Lost Wages: Coming to Las Vegas

2008-07-31T19:45:00.007-04:00

The Las Vegas Strip—formally known as Las Vegas Boulevard South—is unbelievably hot under the midday sun: 105 degrees, declares one sign. It’s also unbelievably cheesy, even to this Miami- and Los Angeles-loving eye.

“It’s so ugly!” I blurt as the bus wends its way from McCarran International Airport to downtown Las Vegas via the Strip, giving me my first sight of the fabled thoroughfare. I’m shocked—shocked!—at its shoddiness.

Here’s Paris, for instance—the hotel—signified by a 50-foot plastic hot-air balloon and a half-size reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. The real Eiffel Tower, standing 1,063 feet tall on its lonely eminence between the Champs de Mars and the Seine, overwhelms the visitor with its grandeur; this one, at 540 feet about the same height as the towers of the hotel itself, and its neighbors, looks shriveled and pathetic. Once in Paris the city, I bought a ball-point pen as a souvenir for one of my children. A tiny tower floated in the barrel, and when you clicked the pen, it played a digital version of “The Marseillaise.”

This is tackier.

Many people, judging by my above-admitted affection for Miami Beach and Los Angeles, have concluded I have a bottomless toleration for tackiness. I’ve loved the bright lights of Times Square all my life, although I preferred the old mix of vice-and-neon Great White Way to today’s Disneyfied 42nd Street. (I’m not knocking Disney, either, in its place. Taken to Disney World last year for the first and so far only time, I thought it was swell and loved the animatronics.)

The Strip is tackier. It seems to exceed even my acceptance of the tasteless.

Yet within 24 hours, my eye acclimates. I stop judging Las Vegas and start being there. No longer an inaccurate and inexpressibly vulgar rendition of my home town’s skyline, New York, New York becomes just the New York-themed hotel on the Strip. My body is less accommodating, however, and the heat actually makes me a little sick on the second day. But then I learn how to cope with it: Lots of (uncaffienated) fluids, wear a hat, and make up your mind early whether you’re spending the day on the Strip or Downtown.

The first two rules are standard for hot climates worldwide, but the last is just for the carless in Vegas. My traveling companion and I, you see, don’t drive. We’re depending on Las Vegas’ mass transit, such as it is, and, born and bred New Yorkers that we are, we’re in Sin City for a day and a half before we truly get how inadequate that is. We finally understand after we walk a mile under the broiling sun to the nearest bus stop and then wait, under that same sun, for forty minutes for a bus.

So let’s see: It’s really hot. It’s really tacky. I forgot to say, we go to see Elton John, and he’s awful. I’m never coming back, right?

Wrong. I’ll be back. In the end, I liked it. I like parties, and Las Vegas is one, at least for the people who are betting with their heads, not over them.

There’s the rub, of course. Your real hosts in Las Vegas, the folks who are paying for the party, are the ones who are betting way over their heads. They’re the ones who sit for hours at the slot machines, winning two or three or a thousand dollars once every so often, and putting in two or three hundred or five thousand. They’re the ones who generate the profits that put everything but the kitchen sink on the Strip: Paris’ Eiffel Tower, New York New York’s Statue of Liberty, the grand Bellagio fountains and the Venetian’s Grand Canal—everything but the kitchen sink and decent public transportation.

Crossing Streets in Cairo

2008-07-14T12:28:00.008-04:00

The sun was setting when we rolled into Cairo. Talaat Harb Street teemed with people, entire families on foot, scooting between and among tiny cars in every state of disrepair. Lights glimmered through the dusky air—or was that the Cairo smog, a unique mix of dust from the desert only a few miles away and the exhaust of a million tired automobiles?

Men in djellabas glanced into our cab and leaned down and murmured, “Welcome to Egypt.” I was in love before we got to our hotel.

Fellow-journalist Ellen Davidson and I had decided to see Egypt before joining the Middle East Children’s Alliance delegation to Palestine(see “Lifta, Which Was His Home”). The Hotel Luna in downtown Cairo, where we had reserved a double room with bath for 110 Egyptian pounds (US$19) per night including breakfast, offered a free airport pickup service.

Countering our usual impulse to begin our visit on public transportation were the late hour and our intimidation at the idea of finding our way, jet-lagged and exhausted, through a subway system labeled in Arabic. So we had accepted the Luna’s offer and had been met at the airport. Air France had fed us several times on the long flight from New York to Cairo, and we were more tired than hungry. We settled into our room and went to sleep and got up the next morning ready to see Cairo.

That was when we learned about crossing the streets. Talaat Harb, which was now our home, turned out to be a Cairo rarity: an avenue of pedestrian-jammed, slow-moving traffic. One block away on either side of it, we found ourselves in very different territory: street after street of cars and buses, honking incessantly and whooshing by nonstop—nonstop even in the face of traffic lights, which appeared to be issuing advice rather than orders, nonstop even in the face of the occasional traffic police officer, who generally took care to keep well out of their path. We saw people crossing the street between onrushing cars and buses, but the prospect of trying it ourselves was terrifying. For half an hour or so, we wandered up and down Talaat Harb and the two parallel streets.

It was about 95°F in the sun, and there wasn’t much shade. At least half the women and children on the street had ice cream cones. Some women were covered and veiled from head to toe; a few wore bareheaded and in short skirts; most were modestly dressed, with or without head scarves. They didn’t speak to us, but many men, in djellabas or western clothes, said as they passed by, “Welcome to Egypt.” That was one of the only two English phrases we heard. The other became clear through the din of car horns and street sounds: Taxi drivers, slowing down as they drove by, honking at us, and calling out, “Cheap taxi to pyramids and Egyptian Museum!”

I was still in love, but it began to look as if I wouldn’t get to see much of my new beloved. At last, however, bored with Talaat Harb, we marched to the square at its end, Midan Al-Tahrir. Then we stood there, hopelessly waiting for a break in the traffic—

Until one of the djellaba-clad men grabbed my arm in one hand, Ellen’s in the other, and, dodging the cars and buses, pulled us across the street and deposited us on the other side. As he walked away, he said “Welcome to Egypt.”

We had learned to cross the street in Cairo.

Brussels’ “Little Boy Who Pees”

2008-07-07T12:36:00.008-04:00

I was born in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Later, I walked on London Bridge and stood beneath the Eiffel Tower. Then I decided I wanted to see Brussels’ icon: the Manneken Pis, a two-foot-tall statue of a little boy, naked (most of the time), taking what the British call a wee. What kind of world capital, I wondered, embraces a peeing little boy as its symbol?

There’s no question that the “little boy who pees” is Brussels’ most beloved emblem (thanks to the Belgian Tourism Office for the translation). From time to time, the city dresses him in fancy costumes, which are then kept in the municipal museum. All over town, arrows point to him as chief among the important sights. The chocolate shop next door (this is Belgium—there’s always a chocolate shop next door) is even named after him.

The bronze statue by Jerôme Duquesnoy has been standing at the corner of the rue de l’Estuve/Stoofstraat (as the capital of a two-language country, Brussels and all its signs are bilingual in Dutch and French) since 1619, when it replaced an earlier stone version. Its origins are lost in myth, but one story is that it represents a little boy who saved Brussels by urinating on the lit fuse of an attacking army’s bomb.

After a few days in Brussels and much wandering around narrow cobbled lanes and grand squares, I got at least an inkling of an answer: Brussels is the capital of a culture that cherishes more than grandeur the small details of daily life. Its signature dishes are frites—what we call french fries—and waffles, its most famous poet the cabaret singer Jacques Brel, its public art more likely to celebrate comic book characters and mayors than kings and conquests.

In that respect, Belgium is rather like the other Low Countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; think, for example, of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” or most of the work of Vermeer. Yet that answer only begs another question: How did the Low Countries get that way?

There’s no scientific answer to that question. We can’t know for a fact what makes one culture law-abiding and another anarchic, what makes one give every guest enough food to choke an army, and another, right next door, serve exquisite miniatures.

Yet history gives pointers and suggestions. The Low Countries did share Europe’s propensity for conquests—there were the Dutch East Indies and the Belgian Congo (the latter having been one of the most appalling instances of European empire-building). But the Low Countries’ history varied in some fundamental respects from that of their more grandiose neighbors, Britain and France. Britain was unconquered for centuries; France was defeated more than once but emerged each time as a proud nation.

In both, as feudalism metamorphosed into mercantilism during the Renaissance, and then into capitalism, the ancient aristocracies vied desperately for power and prestige with the new merchant and business classes. During that same crucial era, however, the Low Countries weren’t independent nations but possessions of the Hapsburgs—the Holy Roman emperors and Kings of Spain. The Netherlands didn’t achieve independence until 1648, and Belgium not until 1839. And at independence, neither had a home-grown ruling nobility or landowning class.

So when, with independence they threw themselves into the business of business, there was no genuine royal or landed class to fight the merchants—and no one to say that business was one whit less respectable than land ownership. Respectable it was—to invent, hustle, trade and profit—and respectable it remained. Today in Brussels, the main square, the famous Grande Place, is not the site of a palace, but the site of the city’s carefully preserved City Hall and 17th-century guild (trade association) halls.

The Manneken Pis is only a few meters away.

A final note: In a much more recent development—in 1985, to be exact—Brussels unveiled Jeanneke Pis, a statue of a little girl squatting to urinate, in an alley just across the Grande Place from the beloved little boy. No signs point to her location.

Bomb Story #1: The Arab, the Bomb, and the Website

2008-06-26T14:24:00.004-04:00

This is about a writer in cyberspace, and telling it involves another confession: I play trivia games online. I play every morning at a website called Boxerjam. It’s how I start my day.

Now you know.

Boxerjam provides players with a range of free trivia and word games and supports itself by selling ads. The ads pop up while Boxerjam members are playing our games, and, although we try not to look at them, we can’t help seeing them, at least peripherally. Many are of the “hit a moving target and win a cell phone” variety.

One morning, I was on a roll when the moving target caught my eye and spoiled my game. The ad was offering me a free phone if I “hit Osama.” I was supposed to aim through cross-hairs at a target: a bearded man in a caftan and kaffiyeh, carrying a bomb with a lit fuse.

The thing is, the trivia games aren’t part of my real life. They’re not about writing or activism, which take up most of my time; they’re how I gird up for writing and activism. The last thing I want is for the boundary between them and reality to blur.

It had just blurred. I finished the game I was playing, then clicked on Boxerjam’s “report a problem” button and informed them that I found the ad offensive. I had done my duty. The boundaries could be firm again.

The next morning, I went back to the Boxerjam website and to the old rules: Play the games. Don’t look at the ads.

But I didn’t get a response from Boxerjam, and the bomb-wielding Arab was still there. I couldn’t persuade myself that I had done enough. A couple of days later, I fired off another problem report to Boxerjam, more strongly worded. It said, “Problem Description: The problem is the racist, offensive ad you carry with the caricature of an Arab holding a bomb. You wouldn't run an ad with a similar caricature of a Jew or an African-American, yet you feel free to stereotype Arabs negatively and offensively. Please stop carrying the ad!”

Within an hour, to my surprise, I got a response from Boxerjam’s Customer Support Manager, who told me that Boxerjam, like most sites, uses “third-party banner advertising.” She added, “We are limited in what we can specify will be displayed. I have forwarded your message to our Advertising Department.”

I thought, if the ad department is really getting involved, maybe they should have a more precise explication of the problem. I sent her another note. “Thanks for responding,” I said. “Please forward this to your ad department: Would you feel unable to refuse an ad showing an African-American behaving like Step'n Fetchit? Would you feel unable to refuse an ad showing a bearded man in a yarmulke caressing his money? The Arab-with-a-bomb ad is at least as bad--that is, all other things being equal, it would be morally equivalent, but all other things aren't equal, and at this moment both Arab-Americans and Arabs in the Muslim world are enduring real damage because of the credence given to such stereotypes. Thank you.”

Later that day, I was at a meeting at the office of the War Resisters League, where I used to be on the staff and where I now volunteer. After the meeting, I checked my email.

There was another note from Boxerjam’s Customer Support Manager. In its entirety, it said, “Just to let you know that we have disabled that particular banner ad.”

A writer’s life doesn’t get much better than that.

The Water Is Wide (My Political Landscape)

2008-06-22T13:48:00.000-04:00

The joint is jumping at the Clearwater Great Hudson River Revival Festival. It’s the Summer Solstice, Clearwater weekend at the riverside park in Croton-on-Hudson, the small town one county and 30-odd miles north of Manhattan that’s been home to the festival on and off since 1978. The Bluerunners zydeco band is rocking the dance tent, the wood floor packed with dancers of all ages, toddlers to graybeards (though of few colors, being almost all white), and I’m sitting on the grass, watching the dancing and beyond it the wide and mighty Hudson, at once keeping time and traveling through it, because, in more than one sense, this is where I’m from.

My answers to the question, “Where do you come from?” depend on context. “Brooklyn,” I often say, because I was born there. Or, “the Lower East Side,” because my first home was in Knickerbocker Village, a middle-income housing complex just south of the Manhattan Bridge. The first home I remember, though, was in Westchester County, on Radnor Avenue in Croton, about a mile from where I’m sitting at Clearwater, the festival.

Clearwater is a ship, a cause, a nonprofit corporation, and a “music and environmental festival.” The ship is the sloop Clearwater, conceived in 1966 as “a boat to save the Hudson” by veteran activist-folksinger Pete Seeger, who lived on the shores of the great but dying river. Then in his 40s, Seeger had been blacklisted during the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s; unlike many, he had remained committed to activism and the socialist ideal. When he realized that his beloved Hudson was in danger of irreversible degradation, he began singing for the money to build a ship that would sail up and down the river, helping to clean it up and raising consciousness about the environment. He called the ship the Clearwater, and it succeeded. Today, the Hudson is clean enough to eat from, and each summer, Hudson Sloop Clearwater, Inc., and Westchester County co-host Clearwater, the festival.

It’s a festival of many kinds of music—folk, jazz, blues, and dance music—and also of storytelling, children’s activities, environmental education and food and crafts. If, as noted above, the thousands who come are mostly white, they’re also almost all left-of-center, many of them activists in a wide range of good causes, most prominently peace and the environment. They come as families; many came in their youth and come now with their own children.

Me, too. As I said, this is where I’m from, in more than one sense. I was brought to hear Pete Seeger sing in my own childhood. The first time my son Adam heard him was just before Adam’s second birthday, at a Hiroshima Day protest. Today Adam and his family, are here, visiting from Maryland. My eight- and three-year-old granddaughters, too, have heard Seeger’s songs for children—

And this evening they'll hear him in person for the first time. Now 89, Pete doesn’t perform often anymore. He’s not scheduled to sing today, only to be interviewed live at 6:30 in the Children’s Tent.

It’s getting late. The girls are tired, and we have to get back to the city. But there’s a big crowd at the Children’s Tent, and as we pass it, we hear a familiar voice, and then a lot of voices, raised in song.

Pete is leading the audience in “Amazing Grace.” We sing along, of course. I take a blurry picture for the girls to have when they’re older, and we head home.

Lifta, Which Was His Home

2008-06-21T09:02:00.001-04:00

Last summer, activist-journalist Ellen Davidson and I traveled the length and breadth of Israel/Palestine on a delegation with the California-based Middle East Children’s Alliance. We stayed at the Ibda’a Cultural Center guest house in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem in Palestine; we talked with Palestinian and Israeli NGOs and grass-roots groups; we visited Palestinian homes, a Bedouin village in the Negev, and clinics in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley; we walked around the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Ramallah, along with the newer city of Haifa and a very new suburb of Nazareth. We saw what Israel calls “settlements” in the Occupied Territories, new towns built by Jewish colonists in violation of the Geneva Convention that bars building by occupiers in lands under occupation; we saw the 30-foot-high concrete wall Israel is building, often between Palestinians’ homes and their farms and olive trees. We heard accounts of what Israel calls the “war of independence" and Palestinians call “al nakba”—the catastrophe—and its aftermath. This was one such account.

On a rocky hillside near Jerusalem, the shells of old stone houses cling to the steep slope. Once, they made up a village called Lifta. Yacoub Odeh points to one house: “This was my home,” he says. “Where I was born.”

At the bottom of the hill is the spring that provided Lifta’s water, along with the ruins of the village mosque and the communal oven and olive presses—two of them, so rich in olive trees was Lifta. The trees are there still, but no one has harvested their olives since the Palestinian villagers were chased away in 1948, during what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians call al Nakba—the Catastrophe. Yacoub was a child then. Now in his 60s, he’s the human rights and housing supervisor with the Land and Housing Research Center, an international human rights coalition. For these 12 days, he’ll be our guide to the West Bank.

Yacoub lives in Jerusalem now. Jerusalem residency is a special status for Palestinians—they carry neither Israeli nor Palestinian passports, but rather Jerusalemite IDs. This gives them a little more freedom of movement than Palestinians have in the Occupied Territories.

But Yacoub can’t go back to Lifta. No one can, because to build or rebuild so much as a doorway would require an Israeli building permit—and Palestinians don’t get those permits. Ever. Sometimes they build without them, and then the police or the Israeli Defense Forces come with Caterpillar bulldozers and demolish what’s been built and fine the Palestinians for the cost of the demolition. Yacoub knows this all too well; everywhere we go, he shows us the sites of demolished homes. No one can build or live in empty Lifta now. Its olives ripen and fall and lie on the stony ground.

Yet Lifta isn’t quite a ghost town. The ancient spring has some religious significance to the Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem, and they come there to picnic in the shade of Lifta’s olive trees and bathe in its waters. They’re here today, staring as Yacoub walks us around what used to be his village. It seems they’re not used to seeing Palestinians here.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Versions of this story appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of WIN,the magazine of the War Resisters League and in the online journal World War 4 Report.

The Parisian Job

2008-06-20T22:51:00.003-04:00

This embarrasses me, but I’ve eaten many a Paris breakfast at the McDonald’s around the corner from my favorite Left Bank hotel (the Résidence les Gobelins, since you asked).

I try hard to do as the Romans do when in Rome, and likewise in any other city, but I have a problem with breakfast in France. I don’t mind breakfasting on caffeine and carbohydrates, but I can’t bring myself to pay twelve dollars for a cup of tea and a piece of bread, even if the morning-fresh French bread is like no other.

The high price is actually due to a quirk of Gallic hospitality: When you sit down at a table in a French café and order anything, no matter how small, you have the table until you choose to leave it. You can read the paper or a whole novel, you can write postcards—or a whole novel—you can stare out the window at Paris going by outside all day and indeed into the evening and until closing time, if you care to. That’s the rules. They haven’t changed since the young, unpublished Ernest Hemingway was too poor to buy wood to heat his studio and used to write entire short stories over a single glass of wine.

Thus, if you arrive at the café first thing in the morning, it has to charge you what amounts to rent for the day—and thus the eight-euro breakfast (less if you eat it standing at the bar), which comes to something over twelve dollars at current exchange rates. A cup of tea and an Egg McMuffin at the aforesaid McDonald’s, on the other hand, costs two euros.

But if I have a problem with the French café breakfast, much of France has a problem with McDonald’s, which represents to many the worst of globalization. Farmer-protester José Bové actually did prison time for taking a bulldozer to a Mickey D’s in the south of France in 1999. So I was never comfortable with the Left Bank Egg McMuffins, but I kept eating them, until the Great McMuffin Heist, otherwise known as the Parisian job.

My sister and I were in Paris with a couple of teenagers in tow. We keep early hours when traveling, but the teenagers partied late and slept in mornings. So my sister and I took to starting the day with a walk around the quarter, then stopping at the very McDonald’s, picking up breakfast, and bringing it back to the hotel.

It was working fine until the morning that, carrying the bag with the caffeine, I pushed open the swinging door of the hotel and was holding it open for my sister when she screamed, “Voleur!” She said afterward she hadn’t even known she knew the word. I knew it—it means “thief.”

The concierge, who knows me—I’ve stayed there several times—dove out the door to chase the voleur. My sister and I stood staring at each other, realizing slowly that her pocketbook was still hanging from her shoulder, but that in her hand was only the stub of the paper bag that had held the Eggs McMuffin.

After a couple of minutes, the concierge returned, crestfallen. He hadn’t caught the thief. We all laughed a lot when we told him what had been stolen.

We never knew whether our breakfast had been stolen by a hungry thief or an anti-McDonald’s prankster, but I haven’t had breakfast there since. I eat it like a Parisian now, grabbing a croissant and a cup of tea standing at the bar of the café across the street.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

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My Mistake—Happy International Women’s Day!

The Future of Nuclear Non-Proliferation (Wake Up!)

Gaza Freedom March - 'You Are Our Voice'

Gaza Freedom March -- ﻿‘You Have to Put Your Own Life On the Line'

Gaza Freedom March Asks U.N. for Help

Gaza Freedom March - Material Aid, All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go

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Gaza Freedom March - Day 1, Christmas 2009

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A Change in the Landscape,Magnitude As Yet Unknown

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Lost Wages: Coming to Las Vegas

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The Parisian Job

Gaza Freedom March -- ‘You Have to Put Your Own Life On the Line'