“We Are the World” for Palestine Runs into Trouble

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!)

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.

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'

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'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009

A Very Political Landscape, Part Deux

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.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak, 2009