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".