Peace Kills (16 page)

According to the Sunday, April 21,
Washington Post
, “Organizers at the march privately urged participants to strike swastikas from their posters.” They didn't comply. But many of the protest signs had the swastikas turned backward, perhaps in an effort to soften the Nazi reference:
= SHARON
=
. Thus some placards could be construed to mean “American Indian decorative motif = Prime Minister of Israel = Hindu good luck charm.” Jews were among the marchers.
JEWS FOR PEACE
, read one sign.
JEWS SAY NO TO ISRAELI STATE TERROR
, read another. A chant went up nearby: “Two, four, six, eight / Israel is a racist state.” Diverse advocacies mixed in the crowd:
THE RICH MUST SHARE; DOWN WITH CORPORATE CAPITALISM; DESTROY ALL BORDERS
; and a giant cardboard turtle labeled
MOBILIZE
. Everyone
got along fine. A young man carried a crude birch-bark mock-up of a television captioned, “How much of your life is lived through a screen?” Another young man, a representative of something called the Independent Media Center, pedaled through the march on a bicycle equipped with a homemade duct-tape-and-PVC-pipe rig that held a video camera. Messages ranged from the disprovable (
WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS
) to the dumbfoundingly true (
TREES ARE NOT TERRORISTS
—although the day before, in Washington, a tree had blown over in a thunderstorm and killed a passenger in a van.)

Some messages conveyed no sense:
GIVE ME FREEDOM OR GIVE ME PALESTINE
. Some conveyed too much:
PRO PALESTINIAN AND PRO ISRAELI HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES.
Some messages were open to interpretation. A young woman carried a picture of herself smiling broadly and embracing a large, happy mutt. Written beneath was “My dog has more rights than Palestinians.”

Relations between the police and protesters were cordial. When the march reached the Connecticut Avenue tunnel under Dupont Circle, some of the marchers balked at entering, not without reason. The ventilation shafts rising from the underpass into the park were unguarded stink-bomb invitations. Washington police chief Charles Ramsey stepped in and led the way through.

The Solidarity March went down Eighteenth Street to the World Bank headquarters, where it was greeted with cheers and shouts of “Free, free Palestine!” There was pogo dancing at the Global Justice rally, and bare feet, and dissonant beating of drums, pots, and empty five-gallon plastic buckets. The effect was
Riverdance
if Ireland had been conquered by the
deaf instead of the English. A baby carriage without a baby was pushed around with bongos and tambourines bungeecorded onto it and a sign reading
RHYTHM WORKERS UNION.
A couple was parading on stilts carrying
GROW
posters. The man's beard was braided. An American flag was burned, and so was a flag with yellow, blue, and red stripes. I asked what flag it was. No one seemed to know. “Colombia?” said someone. Two women in their twenties, festooned with buttons and stickers for various causes, ran toward the demonstrations holding hands and uttering squeals of gleeful anticipation.

I wasn't getting much information from the demonstrators. I have reached the stage in life when there's nothing I can do to keep from looking like a fifty-some-year-old man who should mind his own business. I had brought along Max Pappas, who does research work for me. Max, at twenty-six and with a couple of days' worth of stubble, can pass for an activist of some kind. Although, personally, I thought the cloth cap and olive-drab short-sleeved sport shirt that Max had selected, to blend in, made him look like a sports-car enthusiast on the way to bowling league. Max spotted a pack of bouncy coeds in yellow
MOVEMENT
T-shirts and immediately went to interview them. They were from Colby College, and the purpose of their organization was to go to lots of demonstrations. “If anyone has an idea,” said one of the coeds, “you just come to the group and everyone will support you.”

Other collegians had an even more supportive environment. An item in the Sunday
Washington Post
noted:

Students from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Milwaukee Area Technical College said their schools paid
most of their expenses because they belong to a campus group, Students Peace Action Network. The schools provided vans for the trip and paid for hotels.

While Max was talking to the Colby coeds, a young woman with a tape recorder thrust a microphone in my face. She had a black hankie tied across her nose. I suppose she didn't mean this as a parody of a Muslim woman's veil. “Why are you at this protest?” she said, in a necessarily muffled voice.

“I'm a reporter,” I said. She backed away.

Max talked to a man who was carrying a placard showing rainbow stripes, a peace sign, and a suggestion to “Envision a World.” He was walking a tiny Pomeranian that did or did not have more rights than Palestinians. “Yeah, man,” said the man, who appeared to be over forty, “when I get older, I want to join Greenpeace.”

A fifteen-foot-wide balloon had been erected by the Rainforest Action Network. The balloon was decorated like a globe with a
FOR SALE
banner across it, but it was shaped like a small-town water tower or, maybe, a mushroom cloud. On one side of the balloon someone was speaking to not many people in Spanish while a young priest with blond streaks in his hair and wearing a fashion-forward sport coat got ready to take the mike. On the other side of the balloon was a protest against Citibank, whose Washington office is catty-corner to the World Bank. A speaker asked Citibank to “finance solar mortgages.” The small group of listeners chanted—though not, I gathered, as a response to the speaker's request—” Hey, Citi, not with my money.”

Max found campus feminists to interview. One admitted that the Taliban's treatment of women was terrible and
said the United States should have done something earlier, “in the name of women.”

“Wouldn't that involve war?” Max asked.

“Yeah, it's a tricky one,” the feminist said. “There might be some nonviolent approach such as micro-lending.”

A man stood inside an enormous, ill-made papier-mâché head of George Bush. The head did not bear a label. A bad portrait of George W. seemed to be the point. Other points being made in front of the World Bank:
MORE WORLD/LESS BANK; PEACE THROUGH PEACEFUL MEANS; FUCK YOU CIA; NO MORE BHOPALS; REFUSE WAR/CHALLENGE DEMOCRACY; WE ARE ALL PALESTINIANS
(on cartoons of Tibetan monks being beaten by Chinese soldiers and Vietnamese peasants being beaten by GIs);
KEEP INDIA SECULAR; WE ARE COMPLICIT
; and
STOP THE COMMODIFICATION OF WATER
(in a crowd where almost everyone was carrying a brand-name bottle of same). There was also a placard announcing that the carrier was a representative of an organization, “Suffering for African People,” which critiqued the IMF's “structural adjustment programs.” Both protester and protestee are in dire need of acronym consultation.

The Mobilization for Global Justice smelled of cats and patchouli oil and body odor. It joined with the Palestinian Solidarity March, and everyone moved in ragtag formation along H Street and down Thirteenth to Freedom Plaza, on the far side of the White House.

Counterdemonstrators were few. A Dockers-dressed mom and dad stood on H Street with their ten-year-old son. They held signs:
GO BUSH
and u.s.
IT OR LEAVE IT
. A few college-age protestors came out of the march to argue, though not with the parents, just with their child.

Some of the marchers—though none of the Arab-Americans—affected threatening attitudes. Their faces were
masked. Their body language was angry. They shouted. But they didn't do anything. Several hirsute and not very clean young people wore bicycle helmets and
MEDIC
armbands. They hopped around nervously, giving, perhaps, a preview of some future socialized medicine. A kid waved an American flag that had corporate logos instead of stars on the blue field. He was wearing Adidas shoes, a Swiss Army watch, and a Mountain-smith backpack. Four of the Palestinian Solidarity marchers carried a makeshift litter bearing a girl wrapped in bandages and pretending to be injured or dead. The day was growing muggy, and the girl's companions sprinkled Evian on her face. A tourist bus got caught up in the march at Thirteenth and New York Avenue. Someone bobbed around in the crowd wearing an enormous gold-fringed Trojan helmet. The fur hats of a group of Hassidim were almost as large. I tried to talk to them, but I couldn't get through a coterie bearing
USA/ISRAEL AXIS OF RACISM/WHITE SUPREMACY
signs. I must rely on my reportorial betters at
The Washington Post:

“The Palestinians here in the crowd look at us mistrustfully at first,” said Rabbi Yisroel Weiss, 45, of New York. “But then they speak a few words with us, and they show us respect and friendship.” … He said his group favored dismantling Israel and returning it to the Palestinians.

A sign reading
PRO-PALESTINIAN IS NOT ANTI-SEMITIC
was carried next to a sign reading
SHARON MAKES HITLER PROUD
. A delegation of Iranian women in chadors was preceded by a delegation announcing
LESBIAN, GAY, BI & TRANS PEOPLE SAY STOP THE WAR
. One of the LGBTP was wearing, with panache, a Palestinian flag as a cape. A middle-aged Arab-American man sipped from a Starbucks cup. A college student held a
placard:
STARBUCKS SUCKS
. Enlarged wire-service photos of Palestinian casualties were held aloft, as were
THE MEDIA LIES
posters. And one banner stated
CANNABIS SMOKERS ARE NOT CRIMINALS.
A woman ran through the march with a dollar bill dangling from the brim of her baseball cap. On her T-shirt was printed
IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.

At the edge of Freedom Plaza a young couple had brought their baby in a stroller and several sheets of cardboard decorated with crossed American and Israeli flags, and slogans:
SUPPORT ISRAEL
and
U.S. AND ISRAEL, BROTHERS UNITED.

“You can't just do nothing,” the husband said. Arab-Americans politely ignored them. The rest of the protesters steered away. The only tension on April 20 came from excessive support.

A dozen members of the New Black Panther Party marched (in the military sense) into Freedom Plaza. They were dressed in black fatigues, black motorcycle helmets, and combat boots. They scowled and did drill maneuvers, about-facing and attentioning. The New Black Panthers carried pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Their picket signs were professionally printed:
THE STATE OF ISRAEL HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST; THE AMERICAN/ISRAELI WHITE MAN IS THE DEVIL; JIHAD
. They hollered, “Death to Israel,” “Holy war, holy war, holy war,” and “Kill every Zionist in Palestine.”

For a moment the other demonstrators were silent. They fidgeted. They backed away. “Excuse me, I'm so sorry,” said a courteous Arab-American teenager who stepped on my foot. Then a chant began in the crowd: “Killing is not the answer, killing is not the answer.” The chant grew louder. Demonstrators raised their fingers in peace signs and began to press in on the New Black Panther Party. Cacophonous drumming came from the Global Justice mobilizers. They shouted, “No
more hate!” A woman about my own age began screaming into a bullhorn: “Jews and Arabs unite!” The New Black Panther Party, with somewhat less military élan than before, marched away.