Can SF artists, activists free Palestine? We must try

As the horror suffered by the people of Palestine continues, artists and activists in San Francisco are fighting back by shutting down the Golden Gate Bridge, setting up encampments at UC Berkeley, graffitiing “Gaza” on the streets and blocking entry into SFO. Yelled “¡Viva, Viva Palestina!” during a community theater show. 

Night and day they are quietly thinking or loudly arguing about issues like genocide and apartheid, talking about what it means to be Jewish, a Zionist, a Nazi, a war criminal, a terrorist, a Palestinian.

What might, at times, feel like a useless exercise, can be a critical invitation for action, to awaken, and invite others to do the same, to speak up, to act. Necessary roosters chanting for new dawns. Loud and, to many, bothersome. Like real roosters are.

In this highly divisive moment, where lies the truth? Can we trust our government to “do the right thing?” President Joe Biden has long said, “If Israel did not exist, we’d have to invent it.” Isn’t that the clearest reason for the continuous and nefarious support that the U.S. gives to the right-wing Israeli government? Biden’s phrase implies, loudly, that the U.S. needs Israel to remain exactly where it was implanted, and therefore needs to keep a beachhead position in that part of the world. To protect “our interests.” Our “way of life.”

By calling Israel “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the U.S. pretends to justify the unjustifiable. It is my opinion that the term “democracy” itself and its purported goodness have become akin to a religious dogma. It requires the abandonment of questioning, the sacrifice of our doubts in favor of our faith in the democratic — and capitalist — systems as the only possible alternatives.

It is a hard sell. The current state of our own democracy makes many skeptical. It only seems to work if you throw your bucks to keep that war machine humming. Any war. A constant war. A war that distributes our best-selling product: weapons.

National ideologies attempt to proselytize us from an early age. A healthy questioning of “the established truth” is frowned upon as potential treason. To the owners of most countries, a gullible and poorly educated population is easier to control and manipulate. It creates unfathomable alliances between the very rich and the very poor. Alliances that, of course, favor the rich. The very poor, in supporting those who in fact are their class enemies, hope for magical solutions that can “trickle down” to them.

A few years ago, I showed a film in my “Issues in La Raza History” class, which I taught at San Francisco State University. It is called “La Operación” (“The Intervention” is an approximate translation). It’s a heart-wrenching film about the uninformed sterilization of women in Puerto Rico, that colony of the United States.

As the film ended, a heavy silence filled the air. Then, that silence was broken by quiet and not-so-quiet sobbing. The students looked at each other, some using paper tissues to wipe their tears or to blow their noses. Then, I asked the students if they could verbalize what they were feeling.

Two young women with Puerto Rican roots looked at each other, waiting to see who would dare to speak first. Then, both started to speak at the same time! That caused them to break into a necessary laughter, breaking the tension. Now they could speak.

“I had no idea that happened!,” I remember them saying. They were outraged. Disgusted. I asked them: “Now that you’ve seen that … that you have been moved to tears … that you are so upset … do you think that you might do something about it?”

Someone else in the class jumped in: “We should protest!” Another: “Write letters to our representatives!” Yet another: “There is a demonstration this coming weekend! It is not about Puerto Rico … but is a protest against the US armed intervention in Panama! I am going!”

The young women looked at each other for a brief moment and then said, enthused: “¡Vamos! Let’s go!” As they made plans, the students seemed to be no longer weighed down by feelings of sadness or impotence.

This is how many of us feel today when we see what’s happening in Palestine. Like those students did yesterday, today we are looking for a way — any way — to defeat impotence.

Protests are one way. Art is another. Whatever we do, we need to do it daily, and at various levels. Let us stop the flow of traffic to open the flow of necessary conversation.

A theater production also helps. A poem? Or perhaps a song that we write and sing with hundreds of other people who must also learn new ways to cry -or laugh- in these truly alarming and heartbreaking times.

Ignorance is not bliss! Neither is silence. Let’s talk and co-create, every day.

Once awake, it’s hard to fall asleep again.