The rally was standard enough for one of its kind in the area. The crowd was comprised partly of Arabs and Muslims with some vested interest in the situation, and largely-to-mostly of self-righteous white people with no reason to express an opinion on the matter other than their superior moral and intellectual skills of judgment. These are human beings of the most irritating variety: the ones who subscribe to the Daily Worker (there’s a delightful contradiction in ideologies), circulate cartoons about Karl Rove eating children, and rant on LiveJournal about how Warren Buffett is destroying the planet’s fragile ecosystem and how the barista keeps overfrothing their chai. (Not to racially profile, of course; statistically, there were probably also blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and/or Pacific Islanders to be found in the crowd, but these were not present in large enough numbers to noticably stand out.)
The activity at the rally was also pretty par for the course. The crowd, speaking as a remarkably unified whole, called for an end to Israeli terror while defending the Palestinian right to fire rockets into Ashkelon; demanded that Palestinians not be forced from their homes while chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free”; condemned racist bigotry while insisting that “the Jews have no right to force their presence on the land of Palestine”; and decrying Israeli PM Ehud Olmert’s reprehensible bloodthirstiness while praising the “proper” course of action thus far taken by Hamas, among other things. One particularly lurid gentleman beat a tom with a pair of hammers while chanting “Death to the Jews.” Still, the only thing that especially struck me as disgusting was the common display among the rally’s constituency of signs equating the Star of David with the swastika – on one sign, going so far as to depict the Israeli flag with the symbols swapped.
I feel the time has come to here put into print the response I’ve given to the people at Berkeley who’ve called me a Nazi since I arrived in 2006: I, a blind Jew, would in Nazi Germany have been classified, simply enough, as target practice. For this and other reasons, I do not take the use of the swastika lightly. I believe firmly in the nearly unmatched power over people of iconography, and I will here go on the record as saying that regardless of context – where it’s used, what it may have meant to any other culture at any point in time – the swastika is off limits for use, stretching back to 1933 and to eternity. I would violently condemn its use in ignorance; how much the more so, then, when the guilty party knows and laughs at its connotation?A man approached me and my brother, Asher, at the tail end of the rally and asked why we supported the side we do. At some point in the interchange, I told him that Israel is desperate for peace, but that this was impossible as long as the opponent’s government was headed by a cadre of terrorists. He responded that the onus was on Israel to bring peace about: after all, they are the ones “growing strawberries in the desert,” while the Palestinians remain lamentably undereducated. My question for the attendees of yesterday’s rally and all who are like-minded is, “Shouldn’t men too ignorant to broker peace not be allowed access to Kassam rockets?”
Regrettably, I’ve come to terms with the fact that they’ll never give me an answer.
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