Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield.
[U]nder a blazing hot sun and a clear blue sky, and before a crowd of thousands, I marched by choice with the Palestinian contingent in this year’s Independence Day parade in Montpelier, claiming that the Palestinian people who for 72 years have lived under overwhelming Israeli dominance should finally have their independence, too.
Like us in America. Plain and simple.
Note that it was somebody else who killed six million of my fellow Jews, including relatives of mine, not the Palestinians, who have been made to suffer for that ever since. It is a travesty to have taken out our Jewish loss on them, a thousand miles distant.
(That’s the devil we hear now, roaring with laughter.)
I was surprised and disappointed that there were so few liberal/radical/dissenting Jews among us in the Palestinian section of the parade. Other people there were aplenty — 20? 30? — a big turnout for Palestine that was for little Montpelier, actual Palestinians, supporters of Migrant Justice, Unitarian types, and I know not who else.
I feel that it’s incumbent on us dissenting Jews, though, to come out, come out first, with our deep criticisms of Israel as a cruel apartheid state, because of the kinky circumstance that non-Jews nowadays risk being thought anti-Semitic if they utter criticisms of the Israeli state.
But I’m afraid that too many of the “dissenting” Jews in my circle are now too old to come out in the street with their protest.
“You’re doing this for me.” Gentile friends have said that to me when I’ve spoken out publicly in criticism of Israel. There is that invisible hand over the mouths of some of them.
Speaking of “coming out,” I felt a little funny, wearing the kefiyah, the emblematic Palestinian shawl, as I walked with my comrades of the day, my advocacy punctuated in that way. In the days before the parade, as my wife Helen and I prepared our couple of generic anti-war Bread & Puppet banners as entries for the Palestine section of the parade, she found a brand new specimen of kefiyah that had for years lain in a drawer, a forgotten gift, and brought it along with the banners we packed in the car. I put it on in an impulse as we got our gear ready in the hour before the parade, a little uncomfortable with the thought that might occur to some of my few Zionist or “neutral” Jewish friends: “There! See! Jules has really gone over to the other side!”
As I walked in the parade in the wilting heat, though, the historic memory came to me of the quiet “witness” performed by the king of Denmark when he wore a yellow star patch on his breast in the time under the Nazi occupation when Jews were compelled under pain of death to wear the star in public. That example made me think differently — and better — about my little symbolic act of brotherhood with the smashed Palestinian people. My action was obviously minuscule compared with Sydney Carton’s historic act in “A Tale of Two Cities,” but I thought too, mimicking him, that “this is a far, far better thing I do today” — than I’ve done on many another hot day this summer.
And our dear little town of Montpelier — what a festive thing they made of the parade, lining the sidewalks thickly and applauding all the way. Where did so many people come from? And applauding who? Us and our cause, too, here and there, I surmise, from having exchanged probing glances with a few of the many applauding strangers in the huge crowd of onlookers, as we made that good spectacle of ourselves all along the way.
