Instead of doing my reading for class tomorrow, I decided to do a quick diary about a recent event here in the bay area, one so thuggish and despicable I feel we all here at Dkos should be aware of it;
Last night, up to a dozen members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, a right-wing Israeli advocacy group with a documented track record of aggressively taunting and intimidating grassroots peace activists, attended a Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace community meeting at a South Berkeley Senior Center with the intention of disrupting, intimidating and possibly assaulting Jewish Voice for Peace members. Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest U.S. Jewish peace group dedicated to a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on democracy and full equality --- the Bay Area chapter is the founding chapter of the organization. Approximately
Here's the video from this past June, which I attended:
On June 6th, 2010, peace activists including Bay Area Women in Black and Jewish Voice for Peace held a silent vigil outside the main entrance to the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation's annual "Israel in the Gardens" celebration. The peace activists called for an end to Israel's occupation of Palestinian Territories and an end to the siege on Gaza. Their silent, dignified march was greeted by members of StandWithUs and other affiliates who called them "kapos" (concentration camp prisoners who carried out Nazi orders on other prisoners) and suggested that Israel should "sink the next flotilla with you on it." One man made explicit threats against the peace activists and their families. No one from StandWithUs intervened. Rather, they kept up their vicious and abusive chants. StandWithUs hosted a booth at Israel in the Gardens and is an approved charity at the San Francisco Federation's Jewish Community Endowment Fund. Are their values the values the Federation promotes?
And here is the latest act of violent intimidation:
On Sunday, November, members of StandWithUs/SF Voice for Israel went to a Jewish Voice for Peace chapter meeting in the California Bay Area armed with video cameras and pepper spray. Members aggressively tried to videotape individual faces of attendees- they were invited to stay on the condition that they put down the cameras. Instead, the interrupted, intimidated, provoked, and finally pepper sprayed to Jewish Voice for peace members who had attempted to nonviolently obstruct the cameras with touching the operator.
Here is some eyewitness accounts of the pepper-spraying and more:
About 15 minutes into the meeting, as one of the invited speakers began to talk, one of the women with a video camera stood up and began shouting very loudly and pacing back and forth. She was shouting down the speaker and shouting at us for what we were doing. And she was doing so very forcefully and angrily. She paced back and forth in a frenzy. Attendees of the meeting became flustered. Some meeting attendees began asking her to stop shouting and sit down. Others started to shout down the disruptor, in turn. I could see those in cahoots with the shouting women begin to focus on the mayhem, filming those most flustered, sticking the cameras in our faces. This created even more tension and chaos and then to my horror I heard groans of pain. The shouting woman had sprayed some unknown substance in the face of at least two people. They were hit directly in the face; tears were streaming down from their eyes and their faces were bright red.
At one point, an attendee participant snatched away the text from Faith, and he received a disapproving rebuke from JVP’s Cecilie. Cecilie appealed for calm and for everyone to not engage the disrupters until the police came. JVP members and their guest speakers starting singing "Shalom Aleinu" to drown out the shouting and pacify the hostile crowd, and some of them eventually started singing with us. Within this melee, I didn’t notice that the woman wrapped in the Israeli flag –I think she had identified herself as Robin– had used a pepper spray on two of JVP members, a man and a woman, who were asking her to stop filming.They ran out to wash their faces but the woman’s face stayed red thereafter. At this point, a number of the disrupters left the main room, as did some JVP leaders, and closed the glass doors to wait for the police.
And let's not just pass this off as nothing; over the years these attacks have become more and more violent and threatening, as I can attest to from personal experience:
This deliberate confrontation is part of a pattern of escalating intimidation and attacks against peace activists in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, the home of Tikkun Magazine editor Michael Lerner was covered in threatening posters. In addition to the videotaped harassment of Women in Black and JVP members, several months ago someone grafiited outside of the JVP offices "Jewish Voices for Palestine: Viva Barch Goldstein."
Just this evening, I was at Safeway and talked about this event with a friend and fellow I/P activist, and I said it that it really felt like a micro-level parallel to the Flotilla massacre. Through acts of violence and intimidation, certain people and groups are actually making it quite clear the choices we have to make, as Jews, Americans, and most importantly as human beings. We can side with those who use violence and intimidation to preserve their power and privilege, or we can stand against such thuggish neo-fascism, and choose peace, truth and solidarity instead.
As I have said before, which side are YOU on?