By Gavi Tropper, Features Editor
“Those people over there are wearing keffiyehs,” my brother said nonchalantly, motioning out the right side of the windshield. I wasn’t paying attention; by the time I bothered to look, we were already turning into the shul parking lot. But when I was leaving shul after Mincha and saw a large crowd gathered across the street, my brother’s words came back to me. As I walked over to get a better look, the words of their chants became clearer.
“No peace on stolen land!”
“From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever!”
“Libre, libre Palastina!”
It was a September afternoon, and the war against Hamas was still raging. As I learned from the other onlookers, the protesters had come in response to an Israeli real estate presentation the shul had hosted earlier that day.
About 30 of them stood lining the curb, decked out with posters and large Palestinian flags. Many of them had keffiyehs wrapped around their necks, and some covered their faces with hoods and bandanas. One woman with a megaphone stood at the front, leading the chants. She would yell out the line, and then the whole crowd would repeat it. Despite the busy four-lane road separating us, we could hear their chants clearly.
Up until then, I never had any real experience with the anti-Israel movement. As a child, I’d heard about them abstractly at Shabbos table discussions, but aside from a small band of protesters I passed each year while marching in the Celebrate Israel Parade, they had never materialized substantially in my life. Even once the war started and I saw videos of protests and campus encampments online, I never witnessed anti-Israel action personally.
I grew skeptical of the issue entirely. After the war in Israel started, my parents would ask me to wear a hat instead of a kippah on the subway out of fear of anti-semitic attacks; I would struggle to hold back a scoff. I knew incidents happened, but the issue didn’t seem to me to be nearly as pronounced as they made it out to be.
Sometimes I would wonder if the tense fear I sensed among American Jews was part of a broader tendency toward paranoia, the memory of the Holocaust still freshly burned in our inter-generational consciousness. Or, when I was feeling most cynical, I thought it came from American Jews’ guilt about not being directly involved with the war in Israel. Either way, the fact is that even while the media has grown increasingly anti-Israel over the last two years, the majority of Americans still support Israel. To me, the issue seemed to just be a lot of fearmongering.
But seeing a protest in action, I appreciated for the first time the unbridled passion of these protesters. The crowd was energetic, well organized, and did not disperse over time. Even as the minutes dragged on, their cries did not lose any force or volume. We managed to put together a couple minutes of pro-Israel cheers, but the vast majority of people went directly to their cars once shul ended. Obviously, there was nothing to blame in that– they came to shul to daven, not protest– but nonetheless, it made the crowd across the street feel more powerful.
It became easy for me to understand how public opinion about Israel, especially among young people, has plummeted over the last two years. Recent polling suggests that only 14% of Americans between 19 and 29 side with the Israeli people over the Palestinian people. Whether the reason for this trend is a clearer victim narrative for the Palestinians, or the Israeli government’s apathy toward international opinion the last two years, the results are clear: Anti-Israel advocates have been extraordinarily successful at stirring people up. Even if Americans still largely support Israel today, if the anti-Israel can keep up this momentum, that might not be the case in years to come.
But it was not just the level of passion that was surprising. It was the message of the protest as well. I used to naively assume that even anti-Israel advocates in America ultimately had good intentions at heart — an end to conflict and peace in the region. Perhaps out of a misplaced willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt, I subconsciously clung to the rationalization that they were merely exaggerating to get their point across. But the protesters made it vehemently clear that they had another vision in mind:
“We want ‘48!”
“Zionists are not allowed here!”
“We don’t want no Zionists here!”
I finally heard their message loud and clear. In their view, any Jewish presence in the Land of Israel was out of place. A call for 1948 borders meant that for these protesters, even a two-state solution was off the table. They would not be satisfied until Israel was wiped off the map. This was not advocacy for Palestinian rights and “peace”; it was denial of the Jewish state’s right to exist entirely.
I still don’t believe in taking off a kippah on the subway, but I can sympathize better with my parents’ apprehension. Anti-Israel feeling is far stronger and inspires a far deeper passion than I had ever given it credit for. Whatever the proper response is, apathy is not an option.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gavi Tropper