To Celebrate Or Not to Celebrate?

There are other anniversaries that could be / have been discussed. In April, it was 75 years since the boycott of Jewish stores shortly after Hitler was made head of the German government. There were SA brownshirts in front of my father's shoe store, “persuading” people not to buy there; and in the evening some came to pick up my dad; who wasn't there, apparently having been warned by someone.

But many would find it odd, if I didn't say anything on the occasion of sixty years since the State of Israel was proclaimed in May of 1948. All the media seem to be fascinated by it. The mainstream ones celebrate wth mainly Israeli Right wing stuff, now highlighted by the big show starring US president George W. Bush and (meanwhile unindited) Israeli PM Ehud Olmert; with a supporting cast of heads of governments/ states that once used to view themselves as major powers themelves (France, Germany et al) . The alternative dissident media (with e-mail notices) exhibit a similar near monopoly of anti-Israeli propaganda by the StopPeace Left: don't celebrate! It is 60 years of occupation since the Nakba.

I could really make do with just recounting that in a letter sent to the Israeli consulate in San Francisco the (1977) day the first prime minister of the Zionist ultraright (Begin) took office, I wrote a Yizkor for the State of Israel; something that is done for the deceased. This has long no longer been the state I participated in founding. When I refer to their affinity for the fascist movements/regimes of the 1930-40s, I do not have to rely, like most others, on literature, which might reflect phoney propaganda; I still heard them bragging about it in person. In day to day practice, like sending mail there, I could not, of course, pretend that there is no state by that name. But I did not request my campaign medals for the War of Independence when I wrote for the WWII ones; and do not feel duty bound to pay attention to those “former” terrorists.

In Vancouver, the “Organized Jewish Community” got the fancy Queen Elizabeth Theater for its show. Outside, before the start, were pickets by something I hadn't heard of, possibly because of failure to exist: the Vancouver Anarchist Jewish Youth. Although the picketing had been “endorsed by Jews for a Just Peace”, there were only three pickets, possibly including total membership. They handed out a small leaflet, headed “No Time to Celebrate” and “Jews Remember the Nakba”. A few steps on, a burly character (security guard?) took it away saying he'll recycle it, but let me take it away again. The text seems to be copied from a standardized version of what is becoming sold as “the Palestinian narrative”, but with the number of Palestinian villages destroyed (over 500) and refugees created (over 800,000) somewhat higher than the highest I had seen. If the “Community” has to be worried about their people reading such a leaflet, they can't have much faith in their own propaganda.

In San Francisco, twenty Jewish protestors were arrested when they disrupted the celebration of the “Community” at the Jewish Community Center; where in the 1970s a meeting of Breira, the (thoroughly infiltrated) first US Jewish peace outfit held its irst local meeting, and their entrance was obstructed by two characters later identified as Revisionists (but at least one of them also of the JDL). From that report, it would seem that the flip-flopping toward a StopPeace Left that I deplored here earlier is not confined to Vancouver or Canada; and that again a would be ultraleft is not all that different from the ultraright.

From sunsets