Black Friday

The only thing more Berkeley than having an inflammatory opinion is gathering together a cadre of similarly-minded people and staging an unimpressive display to annoy passers-by. Cue the Women in Black, a group of incensed nonagenarians standing together to protest the bloodthirsty, imperialist Israeli occupation of the land of Palestine. To paraphrase their flier, for nearly 20 years they’ve been blocking foot traffic, mouthing off, and toting decorative umbrellas each Friday in front of Sproul Plaza.

These women have nothing to do with the Middle East: they are your standard white Berkeley residents, who, despite no familial or friendly ties to the region and no education or training on the history of the conflict, feel it is their duty as outraged mothers of children who don’t call to tell foot pedestrians about the “Apartheid Wall.” They demand “[a] shared Jerusalem for everyone” – which is to say, one under Hamas control. They demand that “Palestinian workers… be allowed to work to survive” – which is to say, they blame the Israeli government, and not the incompetent Palestinian one, for the backwards-assed Palestinian economy. They demand “[a]n end to the highly militarized… checkpoints” – which is to say a cease-and-desist order to the Israeli army against racial profiling based on backpacks filled with plastic explosives. The list goes on; these women recommend you join the fight by calling California Senators Feinstein and Boxer to complain about something that infuriates both them and incompetent one-time Head of State Jimmy Carter (and as such, must infuriate you) halfway around the globe.

Distressing though it admittedly must be to watch the flower of your youth wilting literally right in front of your eyes, I, in my youthful naïveté, believe there must be a more constructive way to vent the resulting bitterness towards the world. For instance, macramé. Practice of the knotted arts is just as time-consuming as making 15,000 photocopies, one by one, of a poem written in 1986 by Mahmoud Darwish, but far less irritating to the people who have some actual, compelling reason to care about what goes on in the Middle East.

That said, though, one has to admire the unity displayed by these 5 women, insistent on proclaiming their ill-informed point of view to a disinterested world, armed with nothing more than their dwindling Social Security checks, AARP discounts, and doctors’ assurance that even decked out completely in black, people are rarely known to get sunstroke twice in a month. Or not.

They assert that “[w]hen the Oslo Accords began, many women felt that peace was close and that protest was no longer necessary.” Overlooking the fact that ever since, these women have self-righteously continued to protest, they also willfully ignore the reason the Oslo Accords didn’t get us anywhere: the bitter, unquenchable hatred of Yasser Arafat.

It’s appropriate that these women have chosen to associate their cause with darkness, since it’s abundantly clear they’ll never see the light.