The minute I recovered sufficient from again surgical procedure I plopped my boomer butt on my e-bike and checked out the Free Palestine encampment on Northwestern’s Deering Meadow. The colours! The indicators! The younger individuals glowing with ardour and goal!
My thoughts rewound to my first demonstration at Deering, in the spring of 1970, following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. It was May Day, and I dressed the half: blue work shirt, pink bandana and black Che beret.
I chanted and held indicators and had little question that the invasion was evil (I nonetheless do).
My mother and father, bless their reminiscences, had ready me effectively for the barricades, which blocked Sheridan Road at the intersection of Chicago Avenue. They had taken me and my siblings to each civil rights and anti-struggle demonstration in Chicago since 1963, together with the “big one” in August ’68. (Getting tear gassed and working from swinging batons in the glare of klieg lights is exhilarating whenever you’re 15.)
As a end result, demonstrations by no means intimidated me. Neither did the one at Deering, with its earnest, youthful power; its variety; its optimism? Its name for peace?
Wait! Something was lacking. I didn’t hear any requires peace.
“Til death.” And “Liberate Al Quds (Jerusalem). We are all martyrs,” learn two pithy indicators.
Messages about stop-fireplace have light. The imaginative and prescient of Palestinians and Israelis coexisting not solely is absent however appears antithetical to the objectives of the radicals of the Free Palestine motion. Placard by chant, they’re degaussing the ethical compass and turning the goodwill of all who abhor struggling into the justification for extra struggle.
“There is only one solution, intifada revolution” say those that would encourage and justify the slaughter, dispossession and exile of almost 10 million Israelis.
My grandparents have been refugees; my nice-grandparents and their households have been victims of genocide. Israel, slandered as a “white settler colonial” state, the place right now half of all Jews stay, was created by greater than one million Jewish refugees and survivors from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Yemen and elsewhere. They fled again to the land of Jewish indigeneity as drowning individuals drawn to a lifeboat.
Don’t anticipate them, their kinfolk and fellow tribe members, like me, to downplay the jihadist tropes or eliminationist goals discovering voice in the Gaza demonstrations.
“Free Palestine” nonetheless resonates with me. Indeed, none of us are really free till all of us are free. But there isn’t any simply means to free Palestine with out additionally accepting a free and impartial Israel. By making the elimination of Israel its paramount aspiration, the Palestinian polity has persistently eschewed the chance of peace. (Palestinians say that Israel’s creation erased that chance.)
Hamas, as all the time, on Oct. 7 killed underneath the genocidal banner it shares with Hezbollah, Iran and all the martyrs, be they suicide bombers or the harmless kids of Gaza, whose sacrifice is required to cleanse the world of Jews. “Itbah Al-Yahud,” (“Slaughter the Jews”) their rallying cry in the Middle East for many years, has been rebranded in locations like Deering Meadow, with the slogan, “By any means necessary.”
“S,” a Palestinian American scholar some 50 years my junior, saved me my descent into boomer nostalgia for the good outdated demonstrations of yesteryear. Somehow, we bought to speaking. She was open, pleasant, calm and sincere, and I reciprocated. We mentioned, and disagreed, about sizzling subjects like the proper of return to Israel for Jews and Palestinians, why Palestinians have refugee standing, whether or not the Jewish individuals “deserve” self-dedication, and so on.
“So where do we go from here?” I requested her. “The zero-sum game of the past 100 years has brought us to this bloody abyss. We don’t agree about the past, but hadn’t we better agree about the future?”
S was noncommittal. A second in the past, she had argued for a one-state resolution, wherein Jews might stay as a minority. I countered by speaking about the historic necessity, and present actuality, of Jewish sovereignty and what crimes could be required to destroy it. She listened respectfully.
S wanted to return to her current-day barricades. She turned to go however didn’t flip her again on me. We tacitly agreed that the greatest means ahead for all individuals is the path of mutual recognition and reconciliation, which should be hacked via a thicket of hatred and damage.
Let the boisterous chant, for chanting has its place. But as I age, I more and more really feel that the path of peace will not be marked by superb slogans and colourful flags, photos of watermelon or posters of hostages.
It begins, I pray, in the coronary heart and with quiet dialog.
Aaron Cohen, Seventh Ward