4/22/2002

I'm just going to make a point quickly, despite my urge to recount all the anecdotes of this weekend, as I usually would. I am badly discouraged by the way the protests went in Washington on Saturday. We had huge numbers; estimates range from the New York Times' fifty thousand to the hundred thousand hazarded by the IMC. Either way a whole lot of people. We had a simple protest, without civil disobedience for the most part (excepting Friday night's Critical Mass ride, which generated the only arrests I've heard of from the weekend), and the big media outlets for once disdained to remind their readers about the windows nobody broke, in one case even quoting D.C.'s deputy police commissioner's gracious remarks about the protest's organization.

Wonderful. We had a shining moment in front of the mic, a moment when much of the country was listening. The only problem was the message.

This protest was months in the making; I attended a planning meeting in downtown Manhattan many weeks ago. It was an odd mongrel from the beginning, an anti-war march combined for convenience and solidarity with annual protests against the SOA. It was combined at some stage--I don't honestly know when--with a protest against Israel's continued occupation of Palestine. Stories of Israeli human rights abuses have been breaking with great frequency for months, so I am assuming for the nonce that both events were planned before the newly shocking assault with which Israeli soldiers leveled Jenin, shooting at ambulances and journalists, turning relief workers away, raiding from house to house, making human shields of women and the old.

During this latest genocidal campaign, (one of few to deserve that much-abused label recently) American sentiment against Israel rose to a howl--as, of course, did the equally entrenched American sentiment in support of Israel. This is an old war, and one for which many hold strong passions. Under the shadow of Jenin, the march in Washington gradually came to be understood more and more as a demonstration of support for Palestine. There was some debate, more than I had realized, between the organizing coalitions, and there was some effort to split the protest into separate events again, but perhaps sensing its potential for them, the pro-Palestine organizers stuck to the joint plan.

Well, the people turned out. My sense was that almost half were present only to demonstrate for Palestine; I don't know if anybody has a better count. The other half, by some margin the greater, turned up to protest a broad array of US policies; taking the merger in good faith, many of them moved Palestine to a prominent position in their own banners, but only as one issue beside many others: the inexorable plans for attacking Iraq, the still-smoking ruin of Afghanistan, the fumigation of Colombia's vital crops, US military incursions in the Philippines, the disruption of the peace process in Korea, the return of nuclear proliferation, the administration's guerilla war against civil rights. These, too, are perilously pressing issues, and they're all our business, all bearing the unmistakable imprint of George W. Bush.

No effort--this is my appraisal as an attendee--no effort was made by the pro-Palestine demonstrators to acknowledge any of these other issues. They chanted "free, free, Palestine" for the most part; other than that they mostly railed against Sharon personally. Maybe the deep complexity of Israeli hostility toward Palestinians is easier to understand when reduced to one simple villain. And Sharon has, of course, dedicated himself to being a simple villain.

It was interesting to talk to someone, on the bus ride home, who had gone for the Palestine demonstration, and made plain that he felt it had been "hijacked" by the anti-war protest--his word, but precisely the same description I was thinking about the reverse (which he guessed). I want to emphasize, in case it isn't clear: I agree with everything these demonstrators were agitating for (with the exceptions of those damnable morons carrying signs that equated the Star of David to the swastika--I am grateful, at least, that the big media didn't seem to pick up on that). I execrate the occupation of Palestine in general and the ruinous campaign of the last few weeks in particular. While neither side is guiltless (what the Palestinians need, as others have noted, is a nonviolent organizer), peace cannot come without a return, at the least, to pre-1967 borders. We needed to have a pro-Palestine demonstration.

But we needed a broader anti-war demonstration as well, and the pro-Palestine demonstrators seem simply to have been too incensed over their own cause to give a moment's thought to anything else. They took the merger of the protests to be simple recruitment for their protest, and never did they acknowledge the larger one. I saw a girl waving a Palestinian flag brazenly upstage a troupe of Korean drummers who had formed a ring; they had a lot of attention, and she claimed it for herself, marching into the center of the circle to strut. When I saw those drummers again later I noticed their own signs concerned Korea. Later, as we all marched to the Mall (a massive anti-war march passed the center of the Palestine demonstration and the pro-Palestine demonstrators fell in, mostly at the end), there were a string of chant leaders with bullhorns, leading an unbroken stream of Palestine-oriented chants; cheerleaders of sorts ran around among the crowd, exhorting all of us to join in. They were loud, and they were single-minded, and though their banners were fewer, they ultimately managed by dint of fervor alone to give the impression of being leaders, spokespeople for the demonstration as a whole.

And that, by and large, is what the media heard. The problem is that it doesn't exactly say much to our government. People are entrenched in their views about Israel and Palestine; we couldn't possibly have chosen a better-defended government stance to attack. Many Americans, maybe most, will defend Israel to the bitter end. Of course, this is only more reason to speak out, but it's the hardest sell we could have chosen, the most complex battle to fight. Menawhile the rest of these issues lay fallow this weekend, when in fact they are for the most part even simpler to judge and less vigorously opposed here in the US. Most people supported the assault on Afghanistan, and support the coming assault on Iraq, more out of ignorance than anything. Americans don't know anything about what we're funding in Colombia. Americans don't know anything about Occidental pipelines there or Unocal pipelines in Afghanistan. Americans aren't aware of our ongoing economic embargoes against Iraq. They don't know we're already having our prisoners tortured by contractors in Egypt. And they don't know about half of the damage the Patriot Act did to our Constitutional rights at home.

That ignorance is exactly what a large protest, and a moment of media visibility, can work to improve. We could have reminded some of those sleeping people that wild, erratic, aggressive policies have rained down from Washington in the last months from a failed candidate in the last presidential election. We could have asked them how safe they feel with Enron in the Oval Office. We could have shaken their casual belief that all Americans thirst for violent revenge. And maybe, with luck, we could have persuaded some of them that patriotism is not the fashion choice they think it is.

Instead, we left them remembering "free, free, Palestine." What will the American public do with that message? For that matter, what will the government do? We could stop bankrolling Israel, and then maybe we could threaten to oppose the occupation, which would probably seal the resolve of Europe to do so. Then perhaps Israel would concede, and perhaps it would concede enough to have a shot at peace, if perhaps it found someone to negotiate with on the Palestinian side. It's worth fighting for--but it's a long fight, and Washington is several degrees removed from the needs of the situation. Contrast that to the Patriot Act, the flattening of Afghanistan, and above all to the brewing attack on Iraq, which might yet be stopped if only enough of the populace roared against it.

For the purposes of this weekend's demonstrations, Palestine was a red herring. And we fell for it. I don't know why, exactly. Colombia is current, and similar in that it's a second-degree evil of our government; it lacks the moral clarity of Palestine, perhaps, since the FARC is as nasty as the Colombian government. Our enthusiastic approval of the short-lived coup in Venezuela was even fresher news, and one can't ask for a clearer statement on the part of our current administration that despite its own lip service, it prefers a compliant dictator to a legitimately elected president who gets uppity with the oil industry. But there were few dead in Venezuela, and anyway the Venezuelans handled the situation for themselves, so there couldn't have been the sort of urgency there that there is in Palestine.

Afghanistan, though, is still recent by any reasonable measure, and in Afghanistan the thousands of innocent dead were killed by our own government, and we are still killing people there, and we are still holding prisoners in a grotesquely medieval fashion that violates every accord we've ever signed. When we propose to attack Iraq, we are proposing to do just the same there, in every respect. And then, according to everything Bush has been saying since October, it will be time to pick some other country and attack it the same way. Isn't that bad enough to hold our attention? How could we let it go? How could we say nothing about it when we had the spotlight? Did we really just get distracted?

Rebecca summed it up while I was reading through the first mainstream articles, late on Saturday night: "Nobody's pointing the finger at Bush?" No, I said, looking the articles over again. Not a word of it. "Then he gets off scot-free," she said. "Again." Exactly right. We went all the way to Washington, and nobody came out and said it: we are here to protest against our own policies, to demand changes in the policies made by our own government, right here.

We had the grass-roots; we had a great turnout. We squandered it on a cryptic, useless message. "Free, free Palestine," is a proper demand to make, but not of Washington. Tell that to Tel Aviv. In the meantime we have our own mess. I saw signs in that march proclaiming "Sharon: #1 Terrorist," but it is not so. Sharon is a distant second. We have our own home-grown terrorist to oppose. He is behind the wheel, and by and large we have said nothing about it. Still.

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