Palestine Comes to D.C.

Pretty good crowd at the demonstration yesterday in D.C. I looked for the local DSA chapter that was supposed to have a contingent somewhere but Freedom Plaza was so packed I couldn’t find them.

The striking thing to me was that the many Arab participants spanned the age spectrum, including very old folks and families with young children. The white people skewed young, but still with a number of old-timers. Very few African-Americans.

What I take from that is that for Arab-Americans, this massacre will have very long political legs. Perhaps they will come to loom as large in the U.S. Left as Jews used to do. Their outsize influence in DSA is already obvious.

It seems possible that Gaza will be transformative for a high proportion of younger Arab-Americans, opening up interest in a broad spectrum of progressive issues, as the Vietnam War was when I was coming up. The evident pointlessness of the war, among other issues, made us receptive to radical analysis of everything.

For we geezers of a certain age and politics now, I think developing constructive relations with Arab-Americans will be an important task. I'm reminded of Michael Harrington's early blunders with Students for a Democratic Society. He alienated himself from the sharp edge of the anti-war movement, to the disadvantage of both over the longer term. We would have benefitted from his influence, though I still have problems with his politics.

Harrington had difficulty separating himself from the old social-democratic warhorses associated with George Meany’s AFL-CIO and U.S. Zionist organizations. Some of this was just, “You kids get off my lawn.” At any rate, he lost the anti-war plot. The radical movement mostly disintegrated over the course of the 70s, and what remnants Harrington could eventually link up with stayed a tiny political formation for the next thirty years, until the coming of Bernie. No thanks to Harrington. Bernie has yet to join DSA, which is more of a commentary on us rather than him.

Back to yesterday, the universal slogan was "Ceasefire Now." I saw one problematic sign -- some text along the lines of "Zionist terrorism," which didn't faze me, with a Jewish star, which did. As I’ve explained before, say whatever you like about Israel, just don’t put it on The Jews. That means avoid Jewish symbols as objects of protest. Conflating Israel with Jewry is the Zionist game.

The A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition apparatus collaborated on the organization of the demo -- they're good at that -- but was it otherwise inconspicuous. Chief sponsors were mainline U.S. Arab and Muslim organizations.

Ordinarily at huge demos you see a great diversity of signs. Not so much yesterday. Message discipline was tight, which tells me the Arab and Muslim sponsors dominated the proceedings, and A.N.S.W.E.R. stood back, a good decision for them since their own politics are farkakte (don’t ask).