Taking Back the Night

November 25^th, 2006

International day of struggle against violence against women. The annual march, organized by the rape crisis centers, is again to be "a-political", all-inclusive, respectable.

The march leaving Rabin Square

But something happened in the march today. Maybe it is the famous serial rapist, who escaped from the police just two days earlier, in the same neighborhood. Maybe it is the president, facing charges of rape. Maybe it is the explicit violence all around us, reaching another peak. Something openned, and hundreds of women marchers were suddenly sitting across King George Street, blocking one of the busiest streets in Tel Aviv.

"We Are All A." (the initial used in the media for one of the women who filed a complaint against the President).

"Women Struggling for Social-Civil Equality and Peace"; "How Come There's Money for War but not for Welfare?"

"I am Black, You are White, Go Fuck Yourself", (reversing a recent well-publicized racist remark told to a Mizrahi woman by an owner of a cafe chain in TA)

The chants started with "No means No" and "My Body Belongs to Me" and then "Remove President Katsav, Social Justice Now", and then "Women Protest! Take to the Streets!" and suddenly the shouting gave way to a scream, a collective scream that rose from my stomach and from women around me sitting on the road, and seemed to have engulfed all of us, along with the stopped cars and the policemen and the cafes and the big mall and the city became a scream.

"War is Violence against Women" ;"Poverty is Violence against Women"

An eruption of spontaneous protest-fire, one infinite moment of NO, which ended, like all such moments, with police brutality and an arrest of the only Palestinian they could find.

S giving an interview to the Military radio station, after her release...

These days, it is highly recommended. Take an hour a day, sit in the middle of the street somewhere, and scream your head off. Walking back home through the same police looking for the same escaped rapist, I could feel again the angry blanket laid over this city. I have lost all feeling in my throat, but regained some in my heart.

Bloody Tanks

November 18^th, 2006

Today, in a parking compound of tanks, APCs and military bulldozers just 5 km from the Gaza border across from Beit Hanoun, a group of Israeli activists (Anarchists against the Wall) has managed to "take over" the tools of war and call for their dismantling. Here are some pictures...

Preparations:

making vegan fake blood

our banner says: "dismantle the murder machines"

Arrival:

after waiting for hours and hours, we sneaked into the tanks parking area...

...and straggled to climb on top of the monsters.

The police and army were immediately there, threatening to use violence, but politely

Here we are:
We could see Gaza City just in front of us, it's houses rising in the flat plain. The army's reconnaissance baloons turned over our heads, and blasts from heavy weaponry went on and on in the distance.

We have brought pictures of the wounded and dead from the previous attacks on Beit Hanoun, cut-out cardboard figures of dead bodies, a few dead-body dolls and lots and lots of fake vegan blood...

We expected to be immediately attacked by the soldiers, and we have discussed ways of appearing non-threatening to them, of stalling until the police would arrive to arrest us... To our surprize, the police has arrived immediately and kept the angry soldiers away. When we declined to leave, they collected our IDs and started a long process of figuring out the legal options... That gave us the time to make our point more visible...

Some of us held on to the two monsters we took over, and the others spread throughout the compound, taping the images of the victims unto the machinery that was used against them...

A unit of young conscripts was marched over from a nearby military camp, to "clean" the tanks from those horrid images. We called out to the soldiers, as they were tearing the pictures into pieces: "take a look! - this is your doing!" - "what is this for? go home, let's put an end to all that killing..." and back to chanting: "in Sderot and in Gaza, girls want to live".

soldiers being rushed to the compound

Bulldozers too are tools of death in Gaza

When we have finally left the place, we left behind a few souvenirs to the soldiers who might return to operate the monsters on the next morning...

During the entire time, the attacks on Gaza never stopped. Qassam rockets were fired again into Israel later that evening. Two more people were reported dead by Israeli attacks that day.



Many of the pictures here (all those with a stamp) are by the fabulous photogragher-activists' collective activestills, see more of their pictures here. All other pictures are mine.

See also: Ha'aretz report, TV Channel 10 report (Hebrew), Ilan's report, Adam Keller's, Story in Arabic and picture from Al Quds Palestinian newspaper, and the campaign's website.

GUM STRIKE

November 7

Crisis in Gaza.
New heights of obscenity. Months of siege - no power, no water, no entrance, no exit, no work, no fishing, no money... Israel destroyed the only power station and then constructed a power line with the Palestinian Authority's confiscated money... nightly supersonic booms over Gaza - "so they will not sleep", jokes our general. Last week, an invasion into Beit Hanoun. A military expert on the radio explained: "there is talk of a Hudna, a 7-year long cease-fire, and the army has to go in there before it goes into effect. You know what they can do in 7 years?"

About 60 killed in that week, 200 more injured, wide scale destruction. Pictures of women shot dead in a demonstration in Beit Hanoun, pictures of school children killed by a missile.

So here we meet again, the spot for ad-hoc demonstrations in Tel Aviv - across the street from the Army headquarters and the Ministry of Defence. I have been here so many times!
Today I am surprised to see there is hardly any sidewalk, the city has erected some fancy wall due to construction work. It is surreal, we are lined against a wall with painted houses and gardens and pedestrians and trees...

pic by activestills

We forgot the signs. Who was supposed to bring the Coalition's signs? Two people made their own, someone brought some signs made by "The Communist Youth" (Banki) for the Rabin rally on Saturday. Someone brought candles. Old friends gather. We chant the old goodies: "All government ministers are war criminals", "Peretz, Minister of Defence, how many children have you murdered today?" and I think of the power of rituals, and how many names of ministers we have used before in the same chant...

pic by activestills

("Lift the Siege off the Palestinians", and "No Military Solution, Only Negotiations")

pic by activestills

("Refusing to be Enemies - Israeli Communist Youth)

We start banging on the decorative wall. Someone starts a new chant: "Peretz, you have promised education and welfare, we got tanks and bodies". The van full of police in riot gear leaves the gate to the militry compound across the street. Only two bored soldiers are left on guard. We respond by the all-time favorite "Gaza, Gaza, do not despair, we will end the occupation".

("Prisoners' exchange YES, Bombings NO")

(The picture on the sign is of a Palestinian baby in hospital, and the inscription says:
"The State of the Jews has no God")

Finally, we march towards the big intersection nearby. We are an odd bunch. It's getting cold. Someone suggests a gum strike: we should announce that we would stop chewing gum until the occupation ends. Someone else feigns fear: No! the stock exchange would crush! I leave the dwindling group and continue walking to my next meeting. There we discuss future state formations that will allow for the right of return. One secular democracy? a confederacy with open borders? and what about the economic implications?

Pathetic? Audacious? Cute? Enraging? What are we doing here?

The next day, which is today, nineteen more Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli artillery in Gaza. We are going back to the same corner this afternoon. I hope we remember to bring the signs.

TEL AVIV IMAGES 3

Across the street from the same Rabin square, two graffiti inscriptions on a row of columns:

What is a good dissident?
Why marry and create children?
Do bad dissidents have ugly children?
Are beautiful Arab children good or bad dissidents?
Who is giving all these orders?
Why is it all in English?
What is the Hebrew for "dissident" anyhow?

FestiRabin

November 4^th, 2006

So where were you when Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated?

(Sounds familiar? We also learned our assassination culture on American TV…)

I was there, in the peace rally, on November 4^th, 1995. Since then I seem to be doomed to return to the same place every year…

I have lived in Jerusalem at the time, not far from the Prime Minister's residence, and every week I had to make my way home through angry demonstrations of the Right against the Oslo Accords. The demonstrators' blood-thirst kept startling me, and it didn't help that many of them were armed.

That peace rally in 1995 made me so happy! I wandered around the huge crowd, humming the songs and cheering the speakers. Belonging, you know, is always relative. I wasn't a follower of the Labor party, but like many others, I felt optimistic about the Oslo process, and for the first time ever, I was surrounded by many others who felt the same.

I am not sure what it was about the murder that made me become more active afterwards. Maybe it was the realization that things could get much worse, that men with guns would use them, or that songs were just songs. Embarrassing as this may sound today, maybe some of it was the exhilaration of that rally, the feeling of possibility, that power of a great wave of people. That was my first experience of belonging in a mass movement, and I have not managed to reproduce it since…

The same event that helped politicize me was immediately depoliticized. That rally is reproduced every year as a memorial to Rabin, a show of national grief and unity. Always the same old songs and the new Rabin-songs, and mournful speeches about the loss of Rabin, of "Peace". Rabin has become "Peace", the last chance for the Ashkenazi State, and Rabin, i.e. "Peace", was murdered. Years go by and the youth in the rally do not age, they come in blue shirts and sit in circles and cry, longing for the big father that took "Peace" with Him, and left us all orphaned.

I have returned to the rally again and again, in wonder or irritation, alienated or disgusted, alone or in a group. Settlements, Intifada, Occupation and Re-Occupation, Demolitions, Closure, Ethnic Separation, Wall, Disengagement, Repression, Massacres, War, Assassinations, Bombings, Destruction, and the same square with thousands and thousands of people having a good satisfying cry over some lost "Peace".

Once I helped build a human Wall across the square, with the Women's Coalition for Peace… Once we held giant placards in front of the TV cameras… Always drawn back to the rally, always drowned in its deafening narcissism. This year I came to the rally with the "Gaza Coalition", calling for the end of the Siege and the Massacre in Gaza. We had fine brochures and pictures of the carnage and bumper stickers and Helium black balloons, and we walked around the square chained to each other and got some attention and even managed to get our message into some news-sites…

(these pictures and more by Yair Gil)

(These pictures and more by activestills)

And when the rally and our fliers were all over, I found myself back at our Helium-balloons corner, where more and more black balloons were handed out to the leaving crowd.

The old Zionist songs kept booming from the main loudspeakers, and suddenly I found myself dancing, with other radical, queer, anti-Zionist activists in black…

We danced in a circle, and then a second circle formed, in a mock Israeli folk dancing fashion, holding the chains around us. We sang too, knowing all the lyrics. The mournful crowd was streaming past us out of the square. And we, irreverent, span around thumping our feet, jingling the chains, and shouting each word of the old sticky songs to each other, surrounded by black balloons saying "SOS Gaza".