U.S. Jews act for Palestine and Lebanon!

Dear friends,
The coordinated actions among U.S. Jewish people of conscience are getting stronger and more inspiring by the week! Below are links to great photos and reports about actions in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and New York on Tuesday, August 22.
If you hear of other folks doing similar things, let me know... we have to keep building this network. And a reminder to all of you U.S.ers out there who aren't Jewish: The U.S. gives more than $10 million to Israel every single day, most of which is used militarily... You don't have to be Jewish to stand against Israel's war crimes! (But it helps with the banners...) :)
Struggling onward,
Hannah

Philadelphia banner drop (this is the one I took part in):
http://phillyimc.org/en/2006/08/28410.shtml

San Francisco lock-down at Jewish Federation:
http://freckle.blogs.com/

New York die-in at Penn Station:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/08/74947.html

And in case you missed it last time, here's a link to the action that Boston folks did a few weeks ago:
http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/186754/index.php

creativity in action

Dear friends,

I want to say I'm home but I think it's more that I've moved from one semi-home to another. I'm back in the U.S. My experience leaving wasn't all that different than last time, in that the Israeli security check went pretty quickly and that the U.S. security check was far more intrusive. This time I didn't write "Palestine" on my customs form, I just wrote "Israel", but I was pulled aside anyway. I won't bore you with all the details now but I have to say it was really frightening, it IS really frightening, to think about the direction this country is going. They read every word of every piece of paper I had (including translating everything that was in Arabic), and asked me questions like, "Do you think this is fact or propaganda?" I shudder to think about what my experience would have been if I were not a white U.S. citizen. Please, let's all work towards not letting this country slip all the way into fascism.

But that's not why I'm writing. I want to give you a link to some photos of the past week. My brother came to visit and we roped him into some small actions that gave us a lot of pleasure. The photos have captions so I won't say any more about it now. I'm conscious of the fact that I've been sending more photos and reports of fun and creative actions that I've been a part of recently than reports of what's actually happening to Palestinians in Palestine. Unfortunately, you can always assume the worst. But for now, enjoy the photos...

http://community.webshots.com/album/553293200PVUIQa

Love Hannah

Carrying Wood

Photos of our Tisha Ba'av action mentioned in this report: http://community.webshots.com/album/552838558jiEfjj

It is said in the Quran that when the prophet Mohammad began to disturb the status quo by working for economic and social justice, many wealthy people tried to get in his way. There is one story I have heard a couple different ways in the past week, so apologies if I do not portray it entirely accurately (I have not read it). One way I heard the story is that there was a woman who did whatever she could to stop Mohammad from what he was doing, and that she literally stopped him on the road by building a roadblock out of wood. The other way I heard it is that a group of people was building a fire that they intended to throw Mohammad in, and that this woman was mainly responsible for gathering the wood to keep the fire going. Either way, they call her “hamelet ilkhasheb,” or “the wood carrier.”

Last week when Condoleezza Rice came to town, an Arabic news station announced, “The wood carrier has arrived.” She is trying to block all roads to peace and justice, my friends tell me. She is adding wood (and oil) to the fire, opposing a cease fire in Lebanon, my friends tell me. So the name is apt.

Yesterday I felt a bit like a wood carrier myself, although the purpose of my wood carrying was to disturb the status quo, rather than to maintain it. Yesterday was Tisha Ba’av, the Jewish holiday of mourning. It is supposedly the anniversary of the destruction of both the first and second temple, as well as the crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman occupation. The holiday has come to encompass not only these events, but everything bad that has ever happened to Jewish people. It is, traditionally, a day of mourning for Jews who have died.

A group of five U.S. Jewish people took the responsibility to mourn seriously and extended it to mourn for the people who are dying today as well. We made a flyer/sticker saying “Today we mourn exile, persecution, destruction, and occupation for all people,” followed by a list of dates: destructions of the temples; crushing of the resistance against Roman occupation; expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain; the Nazi holocaust; the Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948 for the Palestinian people; the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982; the Israeli massacre of civilians in Qana, Lebanon in 1996; the beginning of the construction of the Annexation Wall; Israeli re-occupation of Palestinian cities; and the current Israeli invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, as well as the continuation of policies of occupation, destruction, and murder in the West Bank. There was a photograph of this week’s massacre in Qana on the flyer, as well as a call for Israel and U.S. to respect international law and human rights for all people.

Three of us made our way to the old city of Jerusalem, more heavily policed yesterday than most days. The road to the Kotel, thought to be the outer wall surrounding the temple from 2,000 years ago, was packed with people. We handed flyers to people along the way, and hung stickers up on our way into the old city. We tried to cover every place we saw “Arabs out” or “Death to Arabs” but there were too many, we only had 40 stickers, and we wanted to save a few for later.

We arrived at the Kotel, a place I had a fraught relationship with even before I began to question Zionism. The dividing wall between men and women had been extended all the way through the plaza for the day, as they were expecting so many people. The women’s side was packed, since it’s only about 15% of the whole area. The men have more room to pray on the other side. People were crying, praying, leaning on the wall, placing their prayers into its cracks. I peeled a sticker off its backing and approached the Kotel. I took my glasses off, just in case I were to get attacked. I waited a few minutes before I found a place to squeeze in and touch the wall. I said the beginning of the Mourners’ Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and placed the sticker on the wall. The woman to my right glanced over, but everyone seemed too caught up in their own prayers to notice me. I walked away slowly and another woman quickly took my open spot, put her arm on the wall over the sticker seemingly without noticing it, and prayed. For just a few minutes, the sticker became part of the Kotel, part of the scene. Mourning for all death and not only Jewish death.

We returned to the plaza and hung a few more stickers. People began to notice, began to read. A few people approached us asking if we were Jewish and why we were not ashamed of ourselves for being traitors to our people. Others read it and moved on. One group of Canadian women loved it and chatted with us for a few minutes. It turns out they are on a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Teams) delegation.

After the stickers were mostly gone, we began to flyer, thinking our work was mostly done. “Do you read English?” I would ask people, and then hand them the flyer. We were almost out of the plaza when a woman approached us and began to yell about her friends who are soldiers and have died in Lebanon in the past few days. Another woman began to yell about how she hasn’t been to her home in the north for more than a week because of fear from Hizbollah rockets. I listened to these women, to both their suffering and to the hateful venom that was coming from them about Arab people in general, and I did not feel hatred in response. I am not usually above hatred or violence in my heart, and these women were saying much more racist and hateful things than I have heard in a long time, but for some reason I felt only sadness and even pity. And a sense of righteousness. Every time one of them would say, “This is not the time or place to mourn others. We can only afford to mourn our ‘brothers’ right now,” I knew that we were doing the right thing. That this was exactly the time and place to mourn everyone because what sense does it make to mourn the soldiers who died trying to occupy southern Lebanon without mourning the people they killed in the process or the context surrounding the situation? It seems quite clear that if Israel stops sending soldiers to Lebanon, they won’t be dying there. But I didn’t say this. Out of respect for the women’s actual suffering, I did not say this. I simply said that we think it is important to mourn all people who are dying.

There were political arguments, there were discussions of facts, but not as much as I would expect. More than this was an expression of suffering and stories of pain. We got people to feel, and judging by the number of spectators and people who came up asking for a flyer because they wanted to see what the commotion was all about, we got people to think as well. To some degree, we stopped people from going about their normal business. To some degree, we added wood to a fire that needed stoking.

We left the Kotel area, borrowed a prayer book from one of the hundreds of people who were entering or exiting the Kotel, and said the Mourner’s Kaddish. Our wood carrying for the day was finished.

Jewish youth against Israeli attacks

Dear friends,
I'm proud to know these people. It's the same group I worked with on the Passover seder outside AIPAC and JCRC a few months ago. Please take a look at the photos, and I'm sure I speak for the group when I say you should feel free to take ideas, words, designs, and inspiration from this and replicate them.
Love Hannah

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Youth_Die_In_2006

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

Die In at South Station- Young Jews Denounce Israeli Attacks on Civilians!

Boston, MA – August 1, 2006 – A group of young American Jews staged a "Die In" this morning at South Station, and on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street in downtown Boston to demonstrate their opposition to recent actions by the Israeli government in Lebanon and Gaza.

"We want to break the false consensus of unequivocal support for Israel and make it known that many American Jews disagree with our government's support of Israeli aggression. We also want to call attention to the human rights crisis occurring in Gaza and Lebanon," commented group member Matt Soycher, of Jamaica Plain. "As young American Jews, we are outraged and frightened. Recent rallies called by Jewish organizations in support of Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza have not spoken for us. Now, we are speaking for ourselves."

Participants wore black clothing with stickers that read "Not all U.S. Jews support Israel's actions!" They fell to the ground in dead-like positions among the morning commuters to re-create the devastating effects of violent attacks on civilian populations.

Distinguishing themselves from other recent protests led by Jewish groups in the Greater Boston region, these American Jews take the position that Israel's attacks on civilians, UN observers, infrastructure, and refugees is unethical, counterproductive, and contrary to the Jewish tradition of respect for human rights. Since Israeli bombing began on July 12, more than 750 Lebanese and 51 Israelis have died in the violence. Over one third of the Lebanese casualties have been children.

Liz Jackson, of Cambridge, explained her motivation to initiate the action, "We mourn the Israeli dead, and our thoughts are with the people of northern Israel, Lebanon, and Gaza alike. Our concern for all people of the region moves us to question the utility of Israel's horrific aggression towards its own neighbors. If Israel is willing to kill UN observers, civilians, and especially children, how will the violence end?"

Participants began the action at 8:00 am, on Tuesday August 1st, inside the South Station commuter station, and ended on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Summer Street.

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