Bannering for Palestine

For 22 months now, every week, a committed group of us activists in Asheville, North Carolina, have been standing on an interstate overpass holding giant banners and flags. The messaging changes, but the focus remains the same. We are holding Palestine in the light.

As thousands of cars zoom beneath us, we see lots of people waving through their windshields, flashing us the peace sign or a thumbs up, and honking in solidarity. It buoys us as we endure the weather and traffic.

Of course, we do also get a number of people who are angry with us, giving us the finger or a thumbs down. We accept that this comes with the territory of bearing witness for Palestine, but still wonder what it is that drives these negative reactions.

We know that many in our community were raised to believe in the myth that there is such a thing as god’s chosen people and that these people were promised a certain land. And that Palestine before 1948 was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

We also know that many others have drunk the Kool-Aid being relentlessly offered to us as the truth by our corporate media and zionist-controlled politicians. This is the false narrative that Israel is just defending itself against terrorists and that this all began on October 7, 2023, with an unjustifiable attack by Hamas on innocent civilians.

But despite the naysayers, we on the bridge persist, driven by our love and grief and outrage about the genocide and occupation in Palestine. We also believe we are shedding light on what is happening in the world beyond Palestine. We know that as goes Palestine, so go the rest of us. Our turn is coming as we speak.

We look at the Border Patrol and ICE raids in our cities and see a mirror image of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF, aka IDF) and the violent settlers in the West Bank. Here, as there, white supremacists attack and kidnap “the other” in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and repression. We know that many of the militarized police forces in the US have been trained by Israel and much of the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance technology used on us has been developed and provided by Israel. More than one political analyst has pointed to the increasing “Palestinization” of the US and the West. 

We are living in an age of fascism. And it’s not just because of Trump and his allies and Netanyahu and his allies. It’s the system. It’s a global cabal of uber-capitalists who are determined to dominate the world and exploit its resources for their own profit. They own Wall Street, the oil companies, and war profiteering corporations. They take our money and use it for their wars and policing rather than for the good of society. Years ago, comedian George Carlin put his finger on the situation we’re in:

They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on.

We on the bridge understand that we live in an oligarchy, not a democracy. At the same time, we know that it’s not possible with our bridge messaging to get to the bottom of the mainstream  narrative and hidden agendas. Even in person, as we have learned from a few encounters with some fierce zionists, it’s pretty much impossible to break through the wall of belief that some of these angry people have built up around themselves. Mostly, to the cars expressing anger towards us, we just return their hand gestures with waves or peace signs as they drive by.

We do find hope in the fact that the positive responses to our messages far outweigh the negative. We have a couple of young children, eagle-eyed scouts, who have been doing a regular count for us. The ratio of positive responses to negative has consistently ranged from 4:1 to 10:1, and has been increasingly positive over the months that we have been doing this. More and more people see through the lies and grasp the evil reality of what Israel is doing to Palestinians. And maybe how this affects us as well.

The truth can be seen with just a little searching on the internet or social media. It is, after all, the first live-streamed genocide in history. And even if you’re not aware of the long history of Israel’s land-stealing and ethnic cleansing, the images alone are enough to tell you that Israel’s attacks on Gaza, just since October 7, 2023, have been vicious and indefensible. The indiscriminate and relentless bombing, the pinpoint sniping of children, the massive starvation campaign. The utter decimation of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools – at this point, virtually all the buildings in Gaza City and northern Gaza.

And while numbers fail to convey the horror of all this, it is still worth noting the massive scale of this genocide. At this writing, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza says that Israel has:

+ Murdered at least 70,117 people, overwhelmingly civilians, including at least 20,179 children.

+ Wounded at least 170,999

+ Starved to death at least 463, including at least 157 children

+ Killed more than 270 journalists.

We know these numbers are a serious undercount due to the unreported missing, buried under rubble. The actual number of dead is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Every day, more and more people are killed, despite the so-called ceasefire. Israel has never abided by a ceasefire agreement, while its opponents pretty much have. The wry saying is that for Israel, ceasefire means, “You cease, we fire.”

In the most recent “ceasefire,” where Trump triumphantly, and falsely, declared that the war was over, Israel almost immediately killed scores of Palestinians trying to go home and destroyed water treatment plants. Then, they used the excuse that Hamas didn’t return all the dead Israeli bodies (which Israel understood even before the agreement were hidden under rubble, killed by Israel itself) to shut down the Rafah border and cut the agreed-upon humanitarian aid.

On Sunday, October 19, 8 days after getting all of its living hostages back, Israel resumed its attacks with over 100 airstrikes, killing god knows how many, and cutting off all humanitarian aid.  They blamed on it on Hamas for supposedly breaking the ceasefire. True to form. Every day now, there are more reports of Israeli bombings and killings. 

And have you seen the gaunt and beaten look of the Palestinians released from Israel’s torture chambers? And heard their stories of the conditions and treatment in those prisons? It’s monstrous. Most recently, we gotten this report from Drop Site News about Marwan Barghouti, the long imprisoned leader considered to be Palestine’s equivalent of Nelson Mandela:

Qassam Barghouti, the son of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, wrote in a social media post on Friday that his father was severely beaten and abused in prison. “I woke up to a phone call from a recently released Palestinian prisoner this morning. He told me: ‘Your father was brutally beaten. They broke his teeth and ribs, cut off part of his ear, and fractured his fingers gradually for their amusement,’”

The Israeli regime is truly a depraved and sinister entity. 

Also horrifying is that Israel’s genocidal behavior is supported by a huge majority of Israeli society. For example, a recent poll showed that 82% of Israelis agree that Palestinians should be expelled from Gaza. Largely, Israeli people believe that the land belongs to them, and that includes the notion of “Greater Israel,” which refers to Lebanon, Jordan, and parts of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Zionism is not just a racist project. It is also imperialist.

And let’s understand, Trump’s twenty-point plan is not the end of the occupation, apartheid, and genocide. It is just the next phase. The US-Israel proposal recently approved by the UN for a US-controlled Board of Peace and an International Stabilization Force is nothing but a mechanism for a sanctioned neo-colonization and subjugation of Palestinians. The beat(ing) goes on.

This settler colonial process has been going on for over 100 years now. The daily massacres of Palestinians we are witnessing didn’t just start after October 7, 2023. They have been the going on ever since the project for a Jewish homeland was formalized by the UK with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The killing and land theft accelerated when the UN created the state of Israel in 1948, and has been supported ever since by the U.S. and its Western allies.

And let’s keep in mind that Gaza itself has been a refugee camp, full of 2.3 million people displaced by Israel in the 1948 Nakba, along with their children and grandchildren (half the people in Gaza are children, below the age of 18). And indeed, with Israel’s occupation and siege, it has been rightly called the largest concentration camp in the world. Many have characterized October 7, 2023 as a jail break. 

What is and has been going on in Gaza is not a war, with both sides having equal blame. It is a mass murder of civilians by Israel done with the disingenuous rationale of self-defense, enacted in a vicious spirit of revenge and conquest. Genocide is the word.

This and the larger history of Israel’s genocide and occupation of Palestine is very much like what the settler-colonial U.S. did to the Native Americans. We should recognize it since it mirrors our own history so well.

But how many of us in this country where we are saturated with propaganda from and about Israel, can see this? Many of our younger generations seem to grasp it easily. But many who are not so young have trouble overcoming the years of conditioning we have experienced. For example, think of the book and movie Exodus. Realizing that the U.S. and Israel are not forces for the good is a hard pill to swallow. It’s been a long-standing and pervasive information war leveled against us.

And who benefits from this information war?

Certainly not those of us who are just going about our daily lives. We have more in common with the Palestinians on the receiving side of US-Israeli violence than we do with those inflicting it.

Who is benefitting are the billionaires and war corporations who profit from it and the globalists who believe they are entitled to rule the world.

It is also the religious zealots who believe there is a “chosen people” who have a god-given right to create an apartheid state that is constantly at war with its neighbors. The vision in a so-called Christian rapture in the end times may not be anything other than a mass delusion, but it sure seems to be driving us, for real, right over the cliff of human existence on this planet.

What’s happening in Palestine is a trigger for an even greater calamity in the larger geopolitical struggle for hegemony in the region. The genocide is accelerating wars beyond its own borders. And existential wars they may well be. 

Let’s remember that Israel has nuclear weapons and, in its mad rampages, may not hold back from using them if push comes to shove. And, of course, the US not only has thousands of nuclear warheads, but is actually the only country to have used them.

It’s looking like the predictions about the end of the world coming in the Middle East are not so far fetched. With Iran next on Israel’s hit-list, it’s actually looking imminent. We have the US joined at the hip with Israel, and Iran is now part of a tight alliance with nuclear-armed Russia and China. Damnation. 

We on the bridge can see that more violence and repression is likely headed our way, in the world and also here in the US. Especially to our BIPOC communities and those of us who stand up against the  madness. But what is our choice? Stand up, or bow down? We on the bridge, in our small way, have chosen to keep standing up, every week, using our giant banners to raise our voices. Sometimes it feels like a lonely mission, sending out the word about Palestine and trying to make connections from there to here.

But the recent huge No Kings rallies around the world show us that we dissenters are many, even though many may not see the deeper nature of the beast we are up against. Still, we all clearly have to sustain our resistance, whatever that looks like, and even do more. We have to go after the system, not only the personalities who front it. If we don’t, the powers behind the curtain will remain in power, and will simply replace one set of politicians with another. The existing parties in the US are two sides of the same coin – which they own. What we need is a new currency. 

How we get there is beyond our understanding. We don’t even know if what we are doing is having any effect at all. But as Dan Berrigan once said, “You just have to do what you know is right.” 

And so we keep showing up, not worried about effects, holding our banners, waving our Palestinian flags, bearing witness, expressing hope and solidarity. Our action may not change much in this world gone amok, but we are letting our Palestinian brothers and sisters know they are not alone. That’s enough for us.

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