I Left My Heart in Deir el-Balah

A rally took place in San Francisco yesterday – that is, December 30 – in front of the Israeli consulate to protest the armed conflict in Gaza this week; I attended a concurrent counter-rally. I debated for a (short) time whether or not to include this here, given that the blog is about Berkeley, but have decided to because (a) Berkeley is very much a part of the San Francisco Bay Area and (b) the only reason that a similar event didn’t take place in Berkeley is because the students are on break, leaving the older unwashed masses to take their VW buses (which fittingly enough, given its hypocritical drivers, are exempt from smog checks) across the bridge in the name of their great crusade.

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.

It Ends Not With a Bang

A letter was circulated on December 19, 2008, authored by UC Berkeley Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard and addressing the “fight” that got me started on this blog in the first place. It related the news that as of December 12, the Alameda County District Attorney has decided that there will be no charges filed. JP further informs us that “the D.A. has indicated that statements provided by witnesses to the altercation were both inconsistent and ambiguous” – that to the D.A., it remains “unclear who among the participants initiated the physical confrontation.”

The eyewitnesses to the “fight,” who saw Husam Zakharia end a heated verbal exchange with Gabe Weiner by punching him in the right cheek, have been successfully drowned out by a group of dissenters who apparently feel no compunction about lying under oath. For once, the blame doesn’t lie with the school, or even with its much maligned police force, but rather, with its dishonest student body. The most infuriating part of the entire enterprise is the way these students – the ones who by their actions render the law-keeping force incapable of activity – then turn around and berate the admittedly inept police to the equally incompetent ASUC Senate, telling them that nothing is being done to ensure the security of “ethnic” students on campus. I’m not sure if it's the taxpayer, the (unfortunately) white man, or the rational thinker in me that takes offense at all this, but I’m willing to wager that all three have a legitimate right to be pissed.

I suppose the lesson that needs to be learned here is that in our modern society – in which the worst form of defense is your fists, and the best your lawyer – when it comes down to “he said, she said” (figuratively, of course; if it ever actually came down to “he said, she said” in court, “he” would be fucked), having the truth on your side doesn’t win you any points. If anything, it loses you the wiggle room that comes with the opportunity presented by a lie to stretch your imagination to its fullest. I guess from now on, anyone planning on stirring controversy in Berkeley should hire a cameraman to follow them around, to provide incontrovertible video evidence for the inevitable trial date.

Until then, I’ll just have to come to terms with the fact that dishonesty pays huge dividends, especially in Berkeley, and especially when there are “ethnic” concerns involved. Still, that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to be angry about it. I swear, it really always comes down to the argument I would make back in first grade: Justice would be so much better at her job if she would just take that goddamn blindfold off.

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.

Conflict Studies

This response took a long time. This is unlike me – usually I find myself hammering away at the keyboard in very short order after whatever sets me off has done so, yet this time, it’s been allowed to ferment in my head. This is in large part due to circumstance. Between a giant history paper and everything else going on in my head, there hasn’t been much room for Berkeley claptrap. Still, this issue has hammered away at my thoughts, standing tall (relative to its hunchbacked associates) among the worst that this claptrap has had to offer over the last few weeks – which incidentally have been a veritable Renaissance of what Borat Sagdiyev would refer to as “anti-Jew warrior” activity.

An unfortunate article appeared last Friday in the Daily Cal entitled “Historical Meaning of The Palestinian Flag,” offered by Matthew Taylor, an ostensibly 35th-year student in Peace and Conflict Studies, and another in Berkeley’s proud tradition of people who publicize their Jewish heritage to lend credulity to their assaults on things that many other Jews hold dear. The article can be found here.

The problems begin with the very concept of Peace and Conflict Studies. In the realm of what my elitist sensibilities deem “bullshit majors,” this takes the crown of being the “most Berkeley” of them all; truly, one would be hard-pressed to come up with any subject Berkeley considers itself to be more qualified to teach than just why it is that violence exists in the world today. Typically, what I hear from P&CS majors betrays a complete ignorance (willful denial?) of how things really work in the world. As usual, this entails sympathy for terrorists and befuddling support for countries and governments that stand for the exact opposite of the liberal ideals these men and women smugly advertise as the basis for their entire identities. As usual I grant that I could be entirely wrong: it is possible that I have misjudged these people, or indeed, even that the world really can be the puppy-sunshine-gumdrop cocktail they envision. However, my deep-seated cynicism leads me to suspect that all of my observations and resulting prejudices against people who feel sufficiently satisfied with themselves that they major in Peace and Conflict Studies are on the money. I hope I’m wrong; I suspect not.

I don’t have the strength to go about a complete point-by-point rundown of what about the article I find repugnant, yet there are a few points that merit individual mention. Mr. Taylor’s condemnation of Tikvah’s use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Israel will soon be free” – which is reported without mention of the Students for Justice in Palestine’s use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will soon be free,” which I read as equivalent – is terribly biased. The equation of life in the Middle East to South African apartheid and the heart-wrenching tale of how watermelons saved free speech are but two of the many things found inside I wish I never had to read again. Sickening though I find these (particularly the former, which given the wretchedness of what happened in South Africa I find unforgivable), though, what strikes me as most troubling is Mr. Taylor’s equation of life in the Middle East to life on the Berkeley campus.

UC Berkeley is perhaps most culpable to blame for perpetuating the laughable assumption that people going to university in America can actually understand what life is like elsewhere. Men and women like Mr. Taylor, who steady Peace and Conflict and take a few tours through the “occupied territories,” think they’re well-placed to judge what they’ve seen – and more troublingly, what they haven’t. The smugness with which Mr. Taylor reports that the petition to recall Senator John Moghtader from the ASUC Senate was begun by “[f]ive conscientious Boalt Hall law students” shows just how much he and his comrades-in-arms see themselves as Messianic purveyors of truth; they’re even resentful that the Revolution Will Not Be Televised, because it means less face time to promote the understanding that they themselves are out to save the world.

A statement of what I consider to be an undeniable truth: Husam Zakharia punching Gabe Weiner in the face – to say nothing of John Moghtader being nearby when it happened – does not hold a candle to the launch of Kassam (Qassam, if you prefer more modern Arabic transliteration) rockets into heavily populated areas. Even as “Tikvah's vision [becomes] more real every day,” no one has been hurt – much less killed – over the pro-Israel/pro-Palestine feud on campus. The “fight” (which again, I feel compelled to mention, happened near a month ago, not that that apparently matters) did not constitute a “microcosm of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians,” even if you want to lend credence to the latter half of that absurd statement.

Berkeley would be better off if its loudmouths stopped seeing the situation here as representative of what goes on where people are physically dying; it will be better off when Mr. Taylor finally graduates and takes his hateful, prejudicial diatribing with him.

Mumbai Vigil

In loving memory of the 164 civilians killed, 11/26-9/2008.

Inflammatory Flyers (And a Goodbye)

A day and a half ago, I posted in a note on Facebook announcing the launch of this blog that I hoped nothing in Berkeley would ever happen again that prompted me to write here. Though I knew this was a hopeless hope, even I didn’t anticipate returning so soon. To jack a line from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (and, by extension, The Verve), “so it goes.”

This morning on Sproul Plaza, I was unsurprised to find flyers being distributed advertising a teach-in scheduled for this evening (co-sponsored by the Berkeley Stop The War Coalition, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Muslim Students Administration), offering a clinic on “racism, Islamophobia, and US imperialism,” in reaction to the evidently not-so-distant memory of the scuffle on the balcony overlooking the Pep Love concert on Nov. 13. Admittedly, I am ill-informed on many of the modern world’s most pertinent issues. I am willing to concede, too, that the larger causes and consequences of the “fight” (I use quotation marks because I maintain that paraplegic lepers could have staged a more harmful fistfight) may elude me. That said, I nonetheless fail to see how US foreign policy is responsible for “blows” exchanged between two college-aged men. Further, for the record, I would like to state that I do not in any regard fear Muslims – not the 1,000,000,000+ who have no interest in doing me any wrong, and least of all the relative handful who would like to see me dead. I would like to believe that all my friends share these sentiments.

More inflammatory statements than these were issued on the back of the flier, authored by the Campus Antiwar Network and reproduced below:

At around 6pm last Thursday (11/13) [sic], three Palestinian students (1 male, 2 female) were beaten up on the UC Berkeley campus by members of a right-wing Zionist group, the Zionist Freedom Alliance. A second incident occurred the following night in which another Palestinian student was attacked by unknown assailants on campus.

My first complaint is an admittedly petty one, though I believe it legitimate: is it wrong of me to think that, in the interest of public safety, anyone distributing literature publicly should be able to tell the difference in the time lapse between one week and three?

Dispensing with the levity and skipping an umpteenth recap of the correct chronology of the scuffle (succinctly documented in Archive post #2), the author’s condemnation of “this despicable act of racist violence” is an exemplar of the Berkeley hogwash that birthed this bounteous font of vitriol in the first place.

To begin with, the inference cannot help but be drawn from this piece that it is because the “fight” (as represented by the members of BSTW, SJP, MSA, and CAN) was directed against Palestinians – especially given that two of them were female – that action need be taken! I am shamelessly adamant in my position that violence against a white man is no less blameworthy than violence against a “noticeably ethnic” woman! Further, the imagery conjured in the first sentence lies uncomfortably closer to describing hired goons waiting in an alley with baseball bats to mutilate their targets than it does to the tiff I witnessed. Finally, the direct juxtaposition of the phrase “Zionist Freedom Alliance” and the report of the “second incident” clearly insinuates that organization’s participation in the “attack.” I am in no position to judge whether or not any of the three of these points were intentional, but regardless, the author should have been aware that it was his/her responsibility as a distributor of public literature to be more careful.

An addendum: I believe the time has come to publically make the distinction between blind hatred of members of ethnic minorities and unshakable hatred of assholes. To state this as clearly as I am able: the former is called racism, and is both dimwitted and illogical in addition to being morally reprehensible, while the latter, to me, qualifies as both rational and laudable behavior. In a truly progressive and tolerant society, people would acknowledge both the existence of races within humanity and the complete irrelevance of a person’s race to their character. This is to say, that an asshole’s skin tone has no bearing on his being an asshole; neither can it make him any more or less of one.

In light of the events that took place on the evening of Nov. 13, I resent Husam Zakharia for giving in to his intense hatred of Gabe Weiner and for popping Gabe in the face. I begrudgingly applaud his ability not only to get away with it, but even to turn it into a hate crime going the other way.

* * *

On a personal note, I was dumbstruck today to hear of the death of Dan Kliman, which occurred under stupefyingly freakish circumstances. He was a giant in Bay Area Zionism and an even better man. He was also 38 years old. Any death that takes place full decades before its time, as this one did, is tragic; in this case, I feel the world was particularly wronged. Dan was a kind, intelligent, and funny man, and one who took upon himself the unenviable chore of proving that advocacy of traditional liberal causes – most notably gay rights – and of Israel are not mutually exclusive. I feel particularly sorry that he was taken from us only as I was getting to know him better personally. I am consoled by the knowledge that his memory will continue to inspire myself and everyone else who knew him to stand up for what’s right – under any circumstances and in gleeful defiance of what anyone else may consider "odds."

זכרונו לברכה

May his memory be a blessing.

ARCHIVE #4: “We Support ASUC Senator John Moghtader” Description (11/18/08)

[NOTE: This post is the first in a series of four retrospective posts to this blog, all of which are relevant to its theme and were instrumental in prompting the author to see to its inception. This post originally took the form of the description of the Facebook group referred to in the title. The Daily Cal article referred to in the body can be found as it was printed here.]

In light of the confrontation that took place at the Israel Liberation Week Concert on Thursday, Nov. 13 between a group of those running the concert on one side and protesting members of Students for Justice in Palestine on the other, the Daily Cal reported on Tuesday, November 18 that Yaman Salahi, a UC Berkeley senior and SJP higher-up, was in the process, in conjunction with unnamed "current ASUC senators," of collecting a petition with 1000 Berkeley students' signatures to "begin the recall process of... senator" John Moghtader. This group is dedicated to the proposition that John Moghtader should – indeed, must – not be recalled because such an action would be a perversion of justice and an abominable waste of funds.

Under the current political climate on campus, the vast majority of any support for the aforementioned petition would come from students who associated Moghtader with the physical altercation – one which thanks to shoddy reporting is tied to his name, but also one in which neither John Moghtader nor any current Berkeley student associated with Tikvah: Students for Israel or the Zionist Freedom Alliance (the group that ran Israel Liberation Week) engaged. Moghtader's lack of involvement has been corroborated by eyewitnesses and is verified by his lack of citation by the UCPD.

Salahi also cited as a reason for the recall campaign the disruption by Moghtader and other members of Tikvah of an Oct. 15 lecture hosted by SJP. However, this is a highly hypocritical allegation: SJP has traditionally made its name disrupting pro-Zionist events on Berkeley's campus, and in personally conducted interviews, security personnel at an Oct. 16 lecture hosted by Tikvah revealed to this author sighting several presumed UC Berkeley students, some of whom were sporting what they deemed "anti-Zionist"-themed clothing accessories (pins, etc.), leaving disgruntled after sighting the metal detectors. Whether or not these people were indeed intended disruptors, and in that event whether or not these were tied in any way to SJP, can, of course, simply not be verified; however, in keeping with the ASUC Senate tradition of reporting "I" Statements, the collective, non-representative suspicion of the interviewees was that these were indeed thwarted disruptors associated either with SJP or else with some other local anti-Zionist organization. Regardless, the point stands that disruptions take place regularly on both sides, and that Moghtader has gone no further on this count to alienate members of "all student groups" than has any Senator that is also a recognized member of SJP (a notable example being Kifah Shah).

But perhaps there is no readily publicly-expressible reason for Salahi's pursuit of the Senator. Bay Area Zionism activist Dan Kliman described the proceedings as a "witch hunt," and he is hardly alone in possessing this opinion in the Zionist community – not only within the confines of Berkeley or the Bay Area, but even on a much wider scale, where the whole unfolding drama has come to be symbolic of the unfortunate situation of Zionist collegiate youth nationwide. For his part, Moghtader was quoted in the Daily Cal: "Salahi and his associates never wanted me elected in the first place, and they're looking for any opportunity to remove me from the Senate."

To interject another "I" Statement, this author understands that both witch hunts and money wasting are time-honored Berkeley traditions. At the same time, though, he is firmly opposed to the relocation of "tuition" funds to pay for the ASUC Senate to begin with, and was appalled by the absurd waste of time that was Monday, Nov. 17th's Community Forum. In this author's opinion, the last thing the collective student body needs is the recall of any current Senator from our self-righteous student government, much less the recall of one of the few who serves without pretention on charges that are either merely puerile attempts at retribution or else simply completely fraudulent.

Join this group if you express agreement with the arguments formulated above and oppose the planned attempt to recall ASUC Senator John Moghtader.