On the eve of Nakba remembrance day, a young rabbi led an observance of the catastrophe "that cannot be denied, ignored, or wished away" in Union Square in New York last night before a largely-Jewish group. She said that four rabbis in four other American cities were also marking the event.
Alissa Wise, who is about to graduate from rabbinical school, told the Jews who had gathered that they had made a "courageous choice," to face the truth that "Israel's founding is inextricably bound up with the dispossession of hundreds of thousands." She seemed charged with an awareness of Jewish history when she said that four other rabbis were leading similar remembrances in the Bay Area, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia.
She then led the group of about 60 people in a ceremony that echoed the Passover seder, or liberation festival of Jewish tradition, including the ritual reading of the names of Arab villages that were removed from the Israeli map in the early days of the Nakba, May 9-16, 1948.
"These are 63 of the 531 villages that were destroyed," Wise said, "the violence that began in 1948 continues to this day,"
As the names were read aloud, to the bang of a drum, you could hear New York Jewish voices struggling with Arabic, and Arab-Americans pronouncing the names with authority.
Several Palestinian-Americans were on hand, including a young woman and her father, who was born in Jerusalem. At 10, in 1967, he said, he had seen American-made napalm containers in the street after the Six Day War. He and his two brothers later made it out to the States, where he has avoided the issue all his adult life, largely out of fear. Then the recent Gaza war broke something in him, he said, leading him to seek out progressive Jews-- "my cousins."
That sentiment was echoed by Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian-American poet who performed alongside Wise. "It's an honor to be a Palestinian ethnically because it's one of the great fights against injustice in the world," he said, before chanting a poem that included the names of Steven Biko and Bobby Sands, and lines addressed to Israelis:
"I'm the best solution you have.. One man one vote.. Look at the sea.. I'll never drive you into it... We may not be brothers, but this neighborhood has made us cousins..."
After that, Wise led a reading of the Jewish litany, Dayeinu, or "Enough," which is chanted at Passover, but these "Enough"s marked signal events of the Nakba, like the massacre at Deir Yassin and the expulsions of Palestinians from the cities of Haifa, Lydda, and Jaffa.
The observance was organized by three groups: Women in Black, who gather at Union Square every Thursday, Jews Say No, and the ad hoc rabbis' group, Rabbis remembering the Nakba.
Last night I went to a Gaza fundraiser in New York City (hosted by Helen Schiff in the Village) and came away with the impression that the Gaza war has brought the Israel/Palestine issue deeply into progressive American political life as never before. Gaza is destroying the old orthodoxy we call PEP: Progressive Except for Palestine.
PEP was based largely on a Jewish cultural resistance to discussing the treatment of the Palestinians, out of generational Holocaust fear or the fear of stoking anti-Semitism. And of course Jews were central to American liberal activity.
That resistance is what I say is breaking down. Dorothy Zellner, of Jews Say No, a post-Gaza group, urged others in the room to join her group's activities, saying boldly, "This is Jewish resistance to the state of Israel's policies." In the bedroom of the apartment, a video played of Code Pink's recent trip to Gaza, featuring Iraq war activist Medea Benjamin, who is Jewish woman and who has, I am told, largely stayed away from the Israel/Palestine issue until recently. Yesterday I spoke with both a Jew and a Palestinian-American who told me that Gaza had politicized them. And Alissa Wise, the rabbi who led the Nakba remembrance in Union Square, told me that Gaza had "radicalized" another of the rabbis in her Nakba group.
This is important because in previous years the organized Jewish community was successful in labelling harsh criticism of Israel as being anti-Semitic. The American Jewish Committee did it in a famous report 3 years back; Larry Summers, then of Harvard, did it; and left leaders like Mark Green of Air America enforced a Dershowitzian line among their adherents; and such warnings scared people off the issue. The Palestinian-American I met last night is a Manhattan professional; and he said that he was loath to speak about Palestine because Americans saw Palestinians as suicide bombers, nothing more. That's changed; now he's reading Norman Finkelstein.
What struck me last night was the fact that the Palestinian experience has at last fully entered the progressive movement's space. A young man played the oud, beautifully. The Palestinian-American poet Fareed Bitar read poetry. "One day Goliath will end. Long live Palestine!" Vinie Burrows read the play "Seven Jewish Children," with its specific condemnation of Jewish attitudes towards Palestinians; and no one flinched. On the video, a Palestinian boy described the murder of his mother and siblings in the Samouni family massacre in Gaza City, and then the Martin Luther King "I had a dream speech" played over the Gaza imagery.
Two questions: how powerful is this movement? Well, we are part of Obama's base, by and large. And what is the agenda? Rage at the occupation and America's involvement in it, and fairness to the Palestinians, no matter the terms, one state or two.