How Oakland's Leaders Started a Riot

In April 2001, about six months into the Second Intifada, an Israeli human rights activist named Jeff Halper wrote an article called “How to start an uprising.” He explained how the Israeli government created the conditions for Palestinian unrest, which it then used to justify increased repression and oppression of Palestinian society. He described how they created a powderkeg by strangling the Palestinian economy and confining people in a virtual prison while stealing their land and portraying them in the media as the terrorists. Ariel Sharon then lit the fuse when he marched onto the Temple Mount with 1,000 soldiers, and the army (then controlled by the Labor party under Ehud Barak) added accelerant by firing a million bullets at nonviolent protesters in one week.

If Oakland’s political leaders didn’t read that article before last night’s demonstration in response to the Johannes Mehserle verdict, they should have.

Here’s how they started a mini-riot:

First they - not by themselves, of course, but as part of a system that is based on denying equal rights to Black and Brown people - created a tinderbox of high unemployment, political disenfranchisement and police harassment. Tony Pirone and Johannes Mehserle lit the match by killing Oscar Grant in cold blood and in plain view of dozens of witnesses; BART management and the DA’s office (no doubt in consultation with the mayor and other political leaders) accelerated the blaze by not charging Mehserle for weeks and keeping Pirone on the payroll for more than a year; the court helped by moving the trial to LA, where the judge allowed all the African Americans to be kicked off the jury and a number of whites with family members on the police force to be seated.

Okay, you might say that all of that was the result of long-term systemic injustice and not under the control of Mayor Dellums and police chief Batts and all the others. And you would be right, except that they have had a full year to offer African American youth in Oakland something that would make them part of the life of the city, they’ve gotten stimulus money that could have been used creatively to employ people who have never had a chance to start innovative community-based projects for health, literacy, training, entertainment – you name it – and they have not done it.

But here’s where they bear direct responsibility for dumping buckets of turpentine on an already smoldering fire.

First, they allowed, or even encouraged, the media to hype and hype and hype the threat of violence for weeks in advance of the verdict, and to film the cops practicing draconian riot-control tactics using dangerous new equipment bought with Homeland Security money. This sent a clear message to young people in the community that once again, they were guilty before they stepped out of their houses. The media whipped up the threat to white people into hysteria that led to every state office building in the Bay Area being closed down at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday. At 5:30 on Friday evening, during our Women in Black vigil near Montgomery St. BART in San Francisco, there were still cops prowling around, “just in case” of a demonstration (I’m not making that up – they told me that’s why they were there).

Next they played the nonprofits and the well meaning street peace groups off against independent activists and community people who don’t identify with those groups. The people doing the 6-8 rally were the good protesters, and everyone else were bad protesters. The nonprofits did their part by worrying so much about how to keep people from doing things that they didn’t give people anything to do with their energy. No one wanted to stand around listening to speeches for two hours. There was no march, so guess what people who wanted something active to do did? You got it – went to face off with the cops.

Then they brought literally tens of thousands of cops into downtown Oakland, armed to the teeth and packed in like sardines. They outfitted them with riot masks and face shields, giving them the look of an army of Darth Vaders. They huddled with each other, targeting people they decided were trouble. A friend of a friend was busted for no reason, on such a whim. This in itself would have likely been enough to spark some confrontations, because for young people who had just been told –again – that their lives are not valued by this society, the presence of this armed camp was a slap in the face. What I saw and filmed as I was wandering around was mostly young African American men ranting at cops who remained stone-faced and silent. Some of the young men were quite sincere in trying to explain how it feels to be in their situation. The individual cops were restrained, yes. They stayed calm and did not rise to the bait. But the mere fact that they were there was a provocation.

As soon as the permitted rally was over, they declared an unlawful assembly, announcing “Anyone who is in this area, regardless of your purpose, is in violation of section 409 of the Penal Code and is subject to arrest.” Of course, to me it sounded like “blah blah blah” but I heard it very clearly on the news. I ended up giving a ride to a guy who came out of work (he works at Earth Justice) at 9:00 p.m. only to find the BART station closed. Great way to get people to leave the area – close off their exit routes.

Whenever the police are engaged in crowd control maneuvers, there’s this thing they do that I’ve never understood. For no apparent reason, about 200 of them suddenly go running down the street, straight at the back of whatever crowd they’re (allegedly) trying to control. As I say, I have no idea what the purpose is supposed to be, but the only thing it actually accomplishes is to create panic. It also obviously pumps up the adrenaline of both cops and crowd, the exact dynamic that caused the tragic killing of Oscar Grant.

What should they have done instead? I’ll tell you. They should have kept most if not all of the cops at home, saving all those millions spent on overtime and paddy wagons and jail space for schools and summer camps and youth job programs. And any cops that were out there should have been in regular uniforms, not riot gear. If all those heavily armed robots had not been on the street, there would have been no looting and no windows broken. I can absolutely tell you that from experience, and from my limited knowledge of psychology.

Yes, there were people who came from Berkeley and San Francisco and probably Walnut Creek, and even maybe a few from Oakland who planned to loot and break windows. That’s what they do, it’s what they believe in. Some of them are even friends of mine, but in this context, they’re the disrespectful assholes who spraypainted “Oakland is our amusement park tonight” on the side of a building –NO IT’S NOT, GUYS! But even those people, or maybe especially those people, would not have bothered destroying stuff if there hadn’t been an audience or anyone to give them counterattack.

It’s true that if the cops and the City had not been out in force, if they had not been guilty of overplanning, and there had been one window broken, the media and the white pundits would never have let them hear the end of it. What the media and the pundits are not pointing out, now that it has passed with the tedium of a badly scripted play, is that all that overreaction did not prevent any looting or property damage. The businesses that wanted to avoid having their windows broken knew what to do and did it – they boarded up. I watched a Vietnamese restaurant throwing up plywood sheets over their storefront as their last customers walked out with bags of takeout. It took them about 20 minutes and doubtless saved them a thousand bucks and a lot of heartache.

Anyone who was seriously interested in looting would have known that any other street in the East Bay was a better bet for it that night than downtown Oakland. You could probably have knocked over banks in Fremont and Hayward that night and gotten away with it, since nearly every cop in Alameda County was in that ten-block area of Oakland. So the people who chose to break the windows of Footlocker and Subway in downtown Oakland did it because they wanted to provoke a reaction. If the police had not obliged them, they would have gone home and the less privileged kids who followed their example, whether lured by the appeal of new shoes or the excitement of the conflict, would not have been left to pay the price.

If Oakland's leadership, political and civil, spent as much time trying to prevent the periodic recurrences of the Rodney King-Sean Bell-Oscar Grant killings as they spend trying to prevent people's anger at injustice from overflowing in unproductive ways, we might not be doomed to keep playing out this pathetic scenario over and over again.

The Movement and the Moment – Part II, Defining the Moment

Marx was wrong. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s undeniable. He was not all wrong, but he was seriously wrong.

He was not wrong, of course, about his historical analysis, and he wasn’t wrong about what was going to happen in the immediate future of capitalism. But he was wrong about the inevitably of socialism and he was wrong about capitalism’s inability to adapt to the challenge of an organized proletariat.

Okay, so maybe that’s old news. But why, then, do leftists continue trying to deny it? If there is one reason why global capital has been able to proceed unfettered by meaningful resistance, it’s that leftists in the capitalist countries persist in trying to cram the 21st century reality into a nineteenth century solution.

The people who sell Socialist Worker at demonstrations, and those of us who secretly sympathize with them, are the Luddites of our time.

Luddites were not were not irrationally opposed to technology. Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian, calls them “simple-minded laborers … smashing the machines which they thought responsible for their troubles,” but that is unfair. They correctly saw that the machines were taking away their livelihood. They were simply deluded in believing that they had the power to hold back the march of capital and its brainchild, mechanization. If we do not want to be described by some twenty-fourth century historian (aboard the Enterprise, no doubt) as “simple-minded activists smashing at the banks they thought were responsible for their troubles,” we need to acknowledge that we have no power to stop the consolidation of capital.

What we might have the power to do is push forward the historical process we’re in, if we can figure out what it is. In Wiccan circles, we sing a song that goes, “Even though it is the darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn.” The Luddites forgot that, or they didn’t realize that they were at the dawning of the Industrial Age. So what age is dawning now?

I imagine a cell of radical dinosaurs hunkered around the campfire at the La Brea Tar Pits, plotting to overthrow T-Rex, when out of nowhere, along comes a meteor and punches a massive hole in the forest. So what do the Socialist Brontosauruses do? Do they continue trying to organize the foliage-growers and rodent-hunters or do they go help rebuild tar pits for the displaced pterodactyls? Or do they look at what is seeping through the hole in the earth and try to figure out how to turn it into food and shelter, maybe getting there before the ruling dinos do? Well obviously, they didn’t do that, or we would not be here today, but we’re supposed to believe in evolution, so theoretically, we can learn from their mistakes.

There are big historical shifts, like the Industrial Revolution and the rise of nation-states in the Renaissance, there are small shifts, like the difference between Carter’s foreign policy and Reagan’s, and there are medium shifts, like the creation and breakup of the Soviet Union. I maintain that we’re in a massive shift right now. Massive, but not unprecedented. It’s easy to imagine that things are more terrible now than they’ve ever been in history, because we know so much more about conditions in so many places. But in fact, it’s hard to believe that things are worse now than during the Plagues in Europe, or the slavery era in Africa or the famines in Ireland, or the nuclear bombing of Japan. Like many times in the past, it’s a time of great crisis and a time of great promise. When people sound the death-knell of life on the planet, I can’t help recall the predictions of total collapse on Y2K which so many leftists embraced with thinly veiled glee. I called it the Millenialist Bug. Whether you’re a religious or secular apocalyptic, it’s comforting to believe that it’s out of our hands, that the world is about to have its way with us and all we can do is try to ensure we’re standing on the right side when the end comes.

I don’t believe it. People are going to suffer, people are going to be forced to move, but, sadly, that’s been the case many many times in human history. Climate change is how the first people ended up on this continent, right?

Does that mean we don’t try to reduce carbon emissions, lessen our footprint, and all that? No, of course not. But it means that we recognize that usually, political changes come about as adaptations to new geophysical conditions, not the other way around. So I propose that we look at the new geographic and demographic conditions taking shape, and try to imagine what adaptations to those conditions might look like. And that might suggest political paths that are with the tide rather than against it.

So one of the new geographic conditions is that an increasing number of people have national identities which are not tied to the place where they live. Combined with that is the rise of transnational identities, some of which are religious, some cultural and others related to other social classifications. This shift in primary identity creates a lot of anger and nervousness in people who have grown up believing (because it’s been drilled into them) that loyalty to the nation we live in is the highest value that there is. And that translates into reactionary social policy not only in places like Arizona, but also in places like Iran, where openly gay people are considered “West toxified,” in Switzerland, where mosques are being banned, in Cambodia, where feminist activists are imprisoned, in France, where schoolgirls are forbidden to wear hijab, and in Sudan, where women are flogged for wearing pants.

I think one big historical shift we’re on the verge of is the disappearance of national borders. Or they might exist as more or less fictional boundaries, like in much of Europe now – something that determines which soccer team you root for (or whether you call it soccer or football) but doesn’t have too much to do with where you can live or work. And to the extent that is true, it’s sure to be scary to people who have never had a passport.

What are people afraid of, that makes them seek policies like the Arizona laws calling for profiling of immigrants and banning accented English? In its most distilled form, they are afraid that these “newcomers” (many of whom are hardly new, but that’s not here nor there – what they stand for is new) are going to force them out of their homes. And that’s something we should be able to empathize with, even while we reject both their analysis and their solutions.

So while boycotting Arizona, blockading their borders, marching against their policies, ostracizing their sports teams are all legitimate and satisfying responses to hate legislation, we also have to look at those opinion polls saying that 58% of people in the country support those policies. And while the accuracy of opinion polls can be questioned, that number is probably not off by that much. That raises a few interesting points. One is that if we don’t figure out how to calm those fears, we are soon going to be boycotting nearly every state in the country, including our own, which is hard to do. Another is that given the demographics of the country, some of the people who support anti-immigrant legislation are immigrants themselves, and many more are the children of recent immigrants. Which means that much-heralded date in 2024 when people of color become the majority in this country cannot be counted on to produce a more compassionate society.

If indeed, borders are about to become more fluid, then it doesn’t make sense to continue promoting statist solutions to social problems. So one thing the left needs to do is let go of our attachment to the state and start envisioning forms of social organization that can remain constant while the population around them is ever in flux. Another thing we need to confront is how to create a sense of security in a rootless world. For that we can certainly look to immigrant and migrant communities, who have shown remarkable abilities to replicate the institutions of “home” often in a series of new locations.

I am the last person to suggest that we should make common cause with the Tea Parties or the Minutemen. But what I do suggest is that we are as nostalgically attached to the salvation offered by the state as they are to that of the nation. And possibly, if we can find a way past our own nostalgia, we might discover a way past theirs.

I wrote the above yesterday, after thinking about it for the last several weeks. Then this afternoon, I heard Peter Ward, author of The Flooded Earth, on the radio predicting that borders will be erased because of flooding. He also suggested that countries will respond by using nuclear weapons to safeguard their borders. If, however, we look at what happened to Europe, when the Berlin Wall came down, it seems more likely that the surge of refugees across borders will result in new regional forms of units of government. But certainly, it is on us to lay the historical groundwork for the latter, rather than the former.

The movement and the moment – Part 1, Give Up the Electoral Strategy

I mentioned to some friends this morning that I had just in the last week realized what historical time we are in. They got very excited.

“Tell us,” they said.

I was kind of sheepish, because I felt like my realization was not going to sound like much. I imagined the thud of a flat balloon when I told them, but that wasn’t what happened. They got very excited, and said we need to get together and talk about it more. So I decided to try to write it down, fearing, as I often do, that my ideas will evaporate when I try to commit them to print (or LCD).

It started when I was listening to the election coverage on Wednesday. On Democracy Now! and Letters to Washington, progressives were doing post-mortems on the valiant efforts made by progressives to unseat right-wing or disappointing Democratic congresspeople, all of which had failed. The person who was speaking for the Bill Halter campaign, which had been expected to make a stronger showing against Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, said that they had spent $8 million for a primary challenge. The speaker considered it money well spent. It struck me as a total waste.

“Think of all the social movements that could have been jump-started by that money,” I thought. Now I often have thoughts like that, and I dismiss them as just my bias because I don’t like electoral politics. It’s true. I don’t enjoy it, I’m not well suited to it, and the people who are can always tell immediately that I’m not someone they want to court, so I never end up being asked to do anything that might make me think better of it. But in fact, listening to these people talk about what they’d hoped to accomplish, I realized that it’s not just sour grapes.

So my first realization was this: It’s too early for an electoral strategy.

By the electoral strategy I mean the effort to make large scale social change by electing progressives to national office. Local elections are a totally different ball of wax – I won’t go into that now, but San Francisco is a pretty good example of what a well crafted electoral strategy can do on a local level in a community that is fairly progressive to start with. The national electoral strategy started being thrown around about 10 years ago by people who were frustrated with the inability of progressive movements to do more than criticize. These included groups like MoveOn and Color of Change. They saw in the huge outpourings of opposition to the WTO and IMF/World Bank in 2000 and 2001 a potential for social change that was unrealized, and they concluded that it was because the movements were too negative, our negativism turned people off, we didn’t know what we were for, we were too idealistic and not realistic enough.

They believed turning our energies into getting progressives elected would do two things: It would bring leftists into the political mainstream, force us to moderate our views to reflect the values of left-leaning non-activists (read middle class voters), and require us to become more pragmatic and concrete in our objectives. And in return, it would give us a platform to put progressive solutions on the national agenda, identify those on which there was a broader consensus, and elect smart, savvy, politically appropriate people who could wield real power to help enact those solutions.

The Obama candidacy was part of that strategy, though I don’t think his campaign team was any part of those discussions. He’s an ambitious individualist who took advantage of a political moment, but many of the people who joined his campaign on local and state levels did so for the reasons I just outlined. And there was one good reason to believe that if he won, things might go in that direction: his awareness and invocation of the power of popular movements. He basically said, “I can be the progressive candidate if you can create a progressive movement.” But what he did not say was, “I will use my candidacy to create a progressive moment.” That would be a very different statement, and I think a lot of the progressives who favor an electoral strategy heard that because they wanted to.

Someone mentioned yesterday that Obama has gotten more money than any other candidate from the oil industry (she mis-remembered – the news that came out recently is that he got more money from BP than any other candidate). With this revelation (disseminated, in part, by oil-industry-hating Republicans like Sarah Palin), some people believe they have found the reason why the Obama administration didn’t properly regulate BP’s offshore drilling. But they are wrong. It’s not that I don’t think Obama’s in the oil industry’s pocket. But he didn’t let them do their high-risk drilling without oversight because they gave him campaign contributions. He did it because in his opinion, which is the opinion of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and the rest of his gurus, we need the oil. And there’s one reason they are not willing to do anything to radically decrease our dependence on oil: Jimmy Carter. Received wisdom is that Carter lost the election because of the energy crisis, because he wanted us to acknowledge there’s a crisis and conserve, rather than expand our sources of oil.

Let’s go back to the Blanche Lincoln race for a minute. The person from the Halter campaign who thought their $8 million was well spent was pointing to the fact that Lincoln surprisingly introduced an amendment to the financial reform bill to stop banks from engaging in the risky credit default swaps business. Indeed, Lincoln presumably did that in order to boost her chances of beating Halter. But look now! Yesterdays’ news?

“Sen. Blanche Lincoln, one of the lawmakers ironing out differences in the House and Senate financial reform bills, has refined her legislative proposal to highlight that big banks can keep their swaps businesses — in separately funded units:
‘Although it appears to water down the proposal, the proposed change would be costly for Wall Street. Banks would have to set aside billions of dollars to protect against losses in these affiliates. The provision doesn’t specify the capital requirements, which would likely be decided by a bank regulator.’” …
[T]he plan doesn’t appear to lessen the risk of major swaps dealers being interconnected.” (Bnet)

Having survived the primary challenge, Lincoln presumably will go back to being Blanche Lincoln, a conservative Democrat from a conservative state.
For much less than $8 million, the people who poured energy into building Halter’s campaign could have built a movement for serious financial reform. With that $8 million, they could have hired thousands of high school and college students all over the country to go door to door, learn organizing, develop themselves as public speakers, do all the things that would make them grassroots leaders for life. And with that movement, they could have gotten not just Blanche Lincoln but most of the Democrats in Congress – maybe even some of the Republicans – to back serious financial reform that would not be watered down because the Congresspeople knew there was a loud, angry, mobilized population ready to punish them for ignoring us. That’s what the people who are pouring money into the Tea Parties know. It’s what anyone who was in Congress during the late stages of the Vietnam War knows.

We do not get progressive legislation because we have progressives in Congress. We get progressive legislation because we have a progressive climate in the country. If we can create a progressive moment, many people in Congress who are not currently progressives will suddenly become more progressive.

Last week, I heard two examples of this on the radio. One was a guy who wrote a book on the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He mentioned that FDR campaigned against the Hoover Dam –supported by his rival, Herbert Hoover - and all such “big spending” infrastructure projects. Right – that’s FDR, the father of the TVA, the CCC, and all those other big government stimulus projects we love to love.

The other was someone who was talking about the more familiar story of Lyndon Johnson’s flip-flop on civil rights. He mentioned that Johnson, when he was Majority Leader of the Senate, used his position to stop the implementation of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He was a Texas Dem himself, and politically very beholden to the Dixiecrats. But, says the History Learning Site, “By January 1964, public opinion had started to change - 68% now supported a meaningful civil rights act. President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act in July of that year.”

In the current right-wing climate, a few more progressives in Congress will be just like the ones we have now – admirable, ineffective tokens. We in Oakland/Berkeley have had progressive representation for a long time. We had Ron Dellums, now we have Barbara Lee, who (usually) Speaks For Me. It’s very nice to feel like I have a voice, but it’s not that helpful when my “voice” is drowned out 96% of the time. Take Dennis Kucinich, probably the most high-profile progressive in Congress. What did he get for his noble effort to hold up health care in pursuit of a public option? Zero, zilch, nada. A lesson in just how irrelevant the progressive voice is right now.

We often say that there is no progressive movement, which is true, in the sense that there’s not a single progressive political party like the Communist or Socialist Party of the thirties or even the Progressive Parties of the teens or the late forties. But there are a number of progressive movements capable of turning out impressive numbers of people to do impressive things for short times, and I think if you combined all the people who are doing progressive things in their communities for extended periods of time, that would be an impressive number too. What we do not have, and are not close to having, is a progressive moment. And I maintain that without the moment, the movements are not going to get very far.

Coming Soon: Part 2 - The moment are we in, and how to move toward the moment we need.

What Else? Budrus and the Gaza Flotilla ...

It's intensely ironic to read my last post in light of what happened last weekend.

For some, the attack on the Mavi Marmara proves that when nonviolence fails, the consequences are deadly. For others, it's proof that nonviolence is useless against military force, that without armed self-defense, more people would have been massacred.

What I think is more true than either of those things is that in our violence worshipping culture, only those who are willing to use violence are taken seriously. And because of that, more than because of any inherent virtue in the tactics, violent confrontation often succeeds in creating an incident of global proportion where nonviolence fails to do so.

Consider the fact that last week's was not the first maritime convoy or even the second to try to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Eight previous missions set out for Gaza; two even made it through, which arguably, should have been the biggest news of all. Yet there was relatively little attention paid to those actions, especially here in the U.S. Hence very few of my coworkers, for instance, even knew about them. And that fact enabled the attack on the recent flotilla, because no one said, "Why are you treating these ships so differently from the previous ones." Especially since they have been building up to this - previous ships were rammed, disabled, sabotaged, towed, passengers arrested, all provoking very little outcry at any level likely to have any impact.

The difference? On all of those boats, the passengers adhered to strict nonviolence, what Americans always claim to admire the most. Yet when they did that, no one was interested in their story.

Another thing to consider: Palestinians were engaging in nonviolent resistance throughout the years of the Oslo process (1993-2000). There were tree plantings and attempts to block construction of settler roads; there were Israeli-Palestinian occupations of homes scheduled for demolition, some very dramatic; people sat in front of bulldozers just like Iltezam Morar and Rachel Corrie; Palestinians refused to carry permits and ID cards just like the activists in South Africa; thousands of people participated in these actions and no one heard one word about them. Came October 2000, a very few people blew themselves up in Israeli towns, and it was suddenly an "Intifada," all over the international media.

So you tell me: Do we really admire activists who use nonviolence? Or is that just another way to silence people whose militance we fear?

Is Failure the Chicken and Success the Egg?

(Thinking about chickens because of Nevada's new law that you can't wear a chicken costume to the polls.)



More reflections on Budrus, the Movie.

After seeing the movie, I went back and looked at my journals from those early days of action in Budrus. Here is a little bit of what I wrote after the first day:

After two hours or more, another group of soldiers arrived with two police jeeps. Ayad asked us to get in front. Ted and I did. The army commander came toward me and I pointed the camera at him.

He said, “You can put away the camera because I didn’t come to make a scene.”

“Why did you come?” I asked.
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I came here to build the Fence.”
“Well, I did know that, but I meant right now, why did you come?”
He said, “We both know the Fence is going to be built. We can do it today, or tomorrow we come in with hundreds of soldiers, we close the school, put the village under curfew. But my government wants to build the Fence, and I know and you know we are going to do it.”

I got a sinking feeling, because of course he is right. If they want it, they can do it. But I said, “No, I don’t know that.”

Reading that now, of course, I think, “I should have had more faith.” But nothing in my experience gave me reason to. And this is the little piece that I think doesn’t come through so well in the film: People did not go out there knowing or even believing that they could win. The villagers did not tell their kids to go to the fields that day instead of to school because they knew no one would be shot. Iltezam didn’t jump into the hole and sit there under the blade of a bulldozer, and her father did not stand there and encourage her to do it, because they knew the bulldozer would stop. Quite to the contrary, they knew that Rachel Corrie had recently been killed, in a situation not so different from theirs.

I can’t help wondering what international reaction to the film would be like if that were the story. (Of course, probably there would have been no film if that were the story.) Would Ayad and Naami be known, not as the brilliant organizers of nonviolent resistance who raised a brilliant daughter to follow in their footsteps, but as proof that Palestinian parents don’t value the lives of their children enough to keep them from sitting in front of bulldozers? What would all those people who say, “This film is so wonderful, these people are so brave, if only the Palestinians had used this nonviolence from the beginning, they would have won in a day,” be saying then? Presumably the same things they are saying about Rachel Corrie and Tristan Anderson, who were equally nonviolent and brave: they shouldn’t have been there. What happened to them was their fault, because they had an irrational hatred of Israel and the Jews.

I’ve said this before, but people have a tendency to read social movements through their outcomes. Working backwards, we make a coherent narrative out of their strategies and tactics, their power struggles and organizational styles, leading inevitably to their successes or failures. We subject both our own and other people’s movements to this torturous dissection, and we pretend that we are deciding what to participate in based on our clairvoyant ability to determine which movements are going to succeed. All of us would have stood with Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, but none of us would have been killed at Haymarket; all of us would have joined the French Resistance and none of us would have joined the Judenrat (the Jewish Councils in Nazi-occupied Europe, which cooperated with the Nazis in the belief that they would be able to help their people survive). A few years ago, I asked my friend’s son, who was 9 at the time, if when they taught him about Martin Luther King, Jr. in school they made it clear that the government, and many of its citizens, did not approve of what King was doing at the time. He said no, they teach that everyone always loved King. Okay, I said, then do they tell you that they put him in jail? Yes, he said, but I’ve never understood why.

The movements that succeed are not only a result of their forebears which succeeded. When we credit Gandhi’s march to the sea with helping to win India’s independence from Britain, we should also remember that he opposed the creation of Pakistan and that his hunger strike failed to prevent a bloody civil war.

The campus anti-apartheid movements in 1986 were no different from the ones in 1979. I was part of both, and I can absolutely tell you that. The 1986 movement didn’t succeed because it had better strategy than its predecessor. It succeeded because the movement of eight years earlier, along with so many other things, most of them in South Africa but some as far away as South Korea, had changed the conditions under which the students were struggling. And nonetheless, in 1987 it did not look like that movement was going to succeed in helping to dismantle apartheid.

My favorite book is Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy’s tapestry of interconnected stories of World War II. Toward the end of the book, one of the heroines, a captured resistance fighter, with her fellow prisoners is forced to watch the execution of inmates who carried out an act of sabotage at Auschwitz. She says, “No one cheered.” When I read that, I thought, well of course not. Why is she saying that? And then I realized that she meant they wanted to cheer, not for the execution but for the resistance. They were not standing there thinking, how stupid and reckless those women were to do something that could result in not only their own deaths but others’ too. It’s not that every act of resistance is the right one, but sometimes you don’t know which is going to be the right one until you’ve taken a few or many wrong ones.

Everyone loves a winner, and we especially do in this country. We don’t like to be reminded of our failures. But next time you hear an inspiring story of resistance and triumph, take a minute to think about how you would be feeling about the resistance if there was no triumph. Because most of the time, that’s likely to be the case.

Ordinary People Can Change the World

(Photo: Iltezam and Hanin)

A couple weeks ago, the movie "Budrus" had its west coast premiere at the SF International Film Festival. This was an event I’ve been eagerly anticipating. I would probably have loved the movie even if it were terrible, because it's about people and a place I’m very close to. But it’s not terrible, it’s great. What’s great about it, besides being exciting and infinitely watchable and featuring the oh-so-lovable Iltezam Morar, is that it is the true story of an ordinary village which defeated the Israeli army using nonviolent protest.

Now of course, everyone wants to know, if this could be done in Budrus, why didn’t every village do the same thing, and why didn’t they all win? Those are hard questions to answer, and producer Ronit Avni did a great job of answering them without pretending that the truth is neater than it is. The truth is that Budrus was a special village to start with, a small village that is more unified than many. They benefited from the experience of some other villages which had resisted the wall earlier, and the fact that by that time, there was an international-Israeli presence that they could call on for consistent support. They were able to sustain the daily demonstrations partly because no one was killed in their protests, which may have been because of the high number of women participating but was also partly luck, because there were plenty of live bullets fired at people, as you can see in the film. They also won because the leadership was not held in prison for a long period of time, and whether that was because they had better legal support or just luck again, I don’t know.

Certainly, one of the reasons they had the strength to persevere was that the women were able to break through the army lines on the first day that their trees were being uprooted. What happened – I was right there, so I know – was that Iltezam, who was only 15 years old at the time, ran around the soldiers, jumped into the hole that the bulldozer was digging, defiantly opened her schoolbook and pretended to read it (I assume she could not have been so calm that she could actually read). And then other women broke through and swarmed the bulldozer, climbed into the bucket of the digger, opened the cab door and shouted at the Palestinian driver. The presence of so many women and especially schoolgirls that day probably accounted for the fact that the army pulled out that day instead of using a higher level of force to get rid of the opposition. I think if they had not succeeded that day in driving the bulldozers off the land, everything might have gone very differently. And since Budrus ultimately inspired Bela’in and Ni’lin, the whole course of nonviolent resistance in Palestine might have been changed by the events of a few seconds.

And that is what is so great about the film, because it actually captures (and I can claim a little credit for this, because I helped the producers track down a small bit of critical footage) the serendipitous moment when history was changed. Of course it’s an oversimplification to suggest that what happened was the result of one moment. It would certainly have been possible for the people to have won that day but lost the next. In some other villages, the bulldozers came in the middle of the night to avoid protests. On the other hand, if the women had not succeeded in getting in front of the bulldozers that day, someone else might have found a way to stop them, that day or another. But there is no question that that one incident both infused the people with the idea that "We can do it!" (as they would chant over and over in English) and instilled in the army a sense of what can only be called awe.

The last few weeks have been dominated by another story about a moment that changed history, this time not for the better. This of course is the oil spill in the Gulf, a disaster of unprecedented scope, in a region that seems like it can hardly withstand another environmental catastrophe. I’ve noticed something about the coverage of the spill, and some people’s reaction to it. It’s something I noticed during the first Gulf War as well. The media – especially the mainstream media, but even the progressive media does its part, for different reasons – promote the idea that dangerous offshore wells are drilled and wars for oil are waged so that we in this country can drive our cars and watch our televisions. And that in turn has a silencing effect on people who might otherwise want to criticize those policies. I heard someone essentially say on KPFA the other day that if you drove a car to work today, you have no right to complain that somewhere between half a million and 2 million gallons of oil are leaking into the Gulf every day.

I beg to differ.

Neither Deepwater Horizon nor the Iraq/Afghanistan war are being waged for my benefit. I like having a car, but it’s not because I love cars. In fact, I would much rather be driven, whether in a bus, a minivan or a horse-driven cart (okay, forget about the cart, but only because it’s cruel to horses). I think I need a car so I can get to meetings after work without taking an hour’s worth of buses, which would cause the meeting to be over by the time I got there, and so I can get home from KPFA at 1:00 a.m., after the BART has stopped running. I think I need a car because I don’t live skating distance from a grocery store that carries the products I like to buy, which are grown semi-locally without pesticides. In San Francisco I never had a car and I never really thought I needed one, because it’s so small that I could get wherever I wanted to go by skating, walking, BART or occasionally a bus. I like watching television, despite the fact that there’s nothing on it I can really stand to watch a lot of the time, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to go to war for it. If that were really the choice, I would give up the TV and read mysteries by lantern.

U.S. policies are not proof that Americans are so selfish that we want to keep using fossil fuels despite their enormous cost to the planet and its inhabitants. We want to live well, sure. But so do the people of every other country on earth. No one says, "I want to be starving and cold and bored all day and die a miserable impoverished death." (Well, maybe Gandhi, ….) We are told that the only way we can live well is by stealing resources from other people, and/or by stripping away at the earth’s protective layers, and so we say okay, if that’s what it takes. Few of us are going to decide to make our lives a lot harder than they need to be, like No Impact Man, unless maybe we see it as a chance to star in our own reality series or something. But most of us would just as happily climb into shared taxis if they were zooming around our streets the way they do in Palestine, and avoid the hassle of parking our cars. Pretty much all of us would be happy to take solar showers in the sunny middle of the day if we were not expected to be in some other town performing meaningless wage slavery at that time.

Our lifestyle is at least as much a product of our addiction to oil as it is a cause of it. That is, it’s the economy which has grown up around oil, and coal, and dams, and nuclear reactors, that makes it hard for us to do without the convenience of being able to get places fast and eat fast food from disposable containers. Many people I know are very happy to grow their own lettuce and tomatoes and even corn, pick apples from their trees and sew quilts made from their old clothes, but these are not people who are having to work two minimum wage jobs and somehow get their kids to school across town.

We do not have to accept that just because this is the way things have been for the last 150 years or so, it’s the way it needs to be for the next 150. We do not have to simply swallow bad news with our morning coffee. We can be like the women who stood in front of the Israeli army that day in Budrus and said, no, we won’t accept reality as you have declared it to be. We are going to change reality.

My coworker, who is sort of a bad news junkie, insists that protest can't accomplish anything, ordinary people cannot make a difference, we need to wait until someone with power decides to take action. But I know that ordinary people can win, even against tremendous odds, because I've seen it. It just takes an Iltezam, to step into the void and lead the way.

I decided I am going to collect stories of seconds that changed the world, and maybe think about a short film. Do you have any? Please comment if you do, or if you have an idea about where to look.

You Got Feelings, I Got Feelings - An Open Letter to My Jewish Community

To my Jewish community,

Last night I sat in a room filled with passion as I watched the UC Student Senate listen to arguments on its very modest proposal to divest from two U.S. companies which sell arms to the Israeli military. As I listened to Palestinian students pour out their stories of the abuses and humiliation and terror endured by their families, I was moved sometimes to tears. As I listened to Jewish, Muslim, secular, Christian, queer, African American and many other kinds of speakers argue that this is nothing more than a call for justice, I was filled with hope and pride. But as I listened to you talk about your fears and feelings of victimization, I was filled with sadness and despair.

One after another of you got up to say that you feel targeted because of this resolution. You feel unsafe, you feel unwelcome.

You asserted that the green stickers worn by those of us who supported the resolution somehow made you feel attacked. Those green stickers bore the names of the people who had sent in messages of support, and were meant to remind the Senate how many people each of us who was there represented.

One of you complained that we who were wearing green stickers never asked him how he feels about Palestinians, or about a Palestinian state.

As I sat there, feeling alternately moved and hopeful, and sad and despairing, I thought of what I wanted to say to you, and wished I could make you hear it.

If I could, this is what I would say.

I am sorry that you feel attacked. I am sorry you feel threatened by our simple desire to end a 60-year-old injustice. I am sorry that our green stickers somehow make you feel silenced. But this debate is not about how you feel. It is not about how you feel about Palestinians, or how I feel about you, or how either of us feels about Israel.

It is about what we are doing with our money, or in this case, simply what the University of California is doing with its money. And what they are doing, whether you want to admit it or not, whether they know it or not (though by now they certainly must) is profiting from the sale of white phosphorous, an internationally banned weapon, to a military that has shown itself willing to use that banned weapon in densely populated civilian areas – a war crime.

You say that you oppose this resolution not because you don't oppose war crimes, but because we, the divestment movement, reject the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which you persist in describing as a "democratic Jewish state." It is true, I do not believe that a Jewish state can be democratic, any more than an Islamic state or a Christian one can be democratic, and I believe in democracy, so I reject the idea of a Jewish-only state. But in fact, this resolution said nothing about that, and nothing in its language was intended to reward or punish Israel for characterizing itself as a Jewish state, or even to address the newest attempt to curtail freedom of speech for Arab citizens of that so-called democracy, known as the Nakba Law. There are people who are supporting this resolution who believe in two states and who do not accept the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. You can support this resolution and still believe apartheid is the way forward.

If it is true, as you allege, that there is any connection between the divestment resolution and swastikas on Jewish students' doors or rocks thrown through the windows of a kosher bakery in Oakland, that is completely unacceptable. The people who took those actions certainly do not speak for, and have no place in, the movement for divestment from Israeli war crimes. But you have presented absolutely no evidence that any such connection exists. It is much more likely that these acts of hatred are part of the general rise in racism and white supremacy that is rampant in our country. Why do you focus all of your fear and outrage against Muslim and Arab communities and critics of Israel? Why aren't you busy demanding the resignation of Russell Pearce, the Arizona state assemblyman who both authored the state's hideous new anti-immigrant law, and circulated a letter complaining about "the inerrant nature of the Jewish 'Holocaust' tale"? If you decided to make that your struggle, I think you would find that every green-sticker-wearer in that room was happy to join in coalition with you.

If you feel isolated and marginalized, it is only your actions that are causing you to feel that way. You say that it is anti-Jewish sentiment, masquerading as criticism of Israel, but hundreds of Jews sat in that room feeling otherwise.

You have an answer for that. You say that we are not "real" Jews, that you and only you can speak for the Jewish community. Unlike your claims about what we mean to communicate by wearing green stickers (which, for those who were not there, said things like "Another Jewish mother for human rights. Divest from war crimes."), I am not simply interpreting your words. This is a quote from the talking points which members of the Zionist Jewish organizations circulated in advance of the meeting two weeks ago: "There will always be dissenters; they don't represent the voice of the Jewish community. WE are the voice of the Jewish community at Cal…." Numerous speakers seized onto this talking point and made that claim, that those of us – many more of us in fact than there were of you at the debates at Cal – are not part of the Jewish community.

How do you think that makes ME feel? I grew up in an observant, Zionist family. It was also a family very committed to human and civil rights. As I grew up, I realized that some of these values were inconsistent, but I did not reject Judaism or my Jewish identity. Most of my family disagrees with me about a lot of issues in regard to Palestine, but we are still family and Jewish culture remains a very important part of my life. Now you tell me that I must choose between my Jewish identity and my identity as someone who believes in human rights and equality for all. How is this any different from members of my queer community who have been told they must choose between the LGBTQ parts of their identity and their religious or cultural identities? How do you think it makes me feel when you stand in front of a room full of people and assert that the entire Jewish community is unified in its support for a country that has killed over 1,400 children in the last nine years?

In the war of feelings, you, my sisters and brothers, are doing more harm to Jews than the people you accuse of anti-Semitism.