Everybody Scream for War
At the anti-Zionist protest in Brooklyn.
If someone were to steal the land you lived on and then go try to sell it at real estate events overseas, I bet you would be upset. I bet you would be happy if people protested it. This, in essence, is the situation unfolding at the series of “Great Israeli Real Estate Events” being held this month in the New York area, and the public outrage accompanying them. These events market land in Israeli settlements to buyers in America. Last week, there was a raucous protest of one of these events held in a Manhattan synagogue. Yesterday, there was another such event at a synagogue in South Brooklyn. Another protest was announced. Another chance for confrontation. A miniature local theater in a sprawling global war.
The event was advertised as being in Flatbush, but I would call it Midwood—Avenue L and Ocean Avenue. It is a heavily Jewish neighborhood, just down the street from the grand facade of the East Midwood Jewish Center, where a banner advertised “The shul with the indoor pool.” Yet this slice of South Brooklyn is too diverse to be an enclave. Get off the Q train at Avenue M and you see Jewish families and Middle Eastern families and black people and white people and Mexican people and everything else. There are kosher bakeries but also sushi and Italian ices and a Georgian Khachapuri restaurant. The sun was still shining bright at six PM. A group of Latino kids played handball in the park on East 18th Street, right next to a group of Jewish kids playing basketball in their athletically disadvantageous outfits of long black pants and white button up shirts. A girl threw a ball to a dog. Birds chirped. Leaves bloomed. A fine spring night in the city.
A block away, Ocean Avenue was closed by a long police barrier manned by dozens of cops shifting from foot to foot. To get over to the action you had to walk the long way around, down East 19th, a lovely and leafy block of spacious suburban-esque homes surrounded by mature trees and trimmed hedges. Then you could walk down Ocean Ave itself, also blocked off and eerily quiet. Some people loitered on fifth and sixth floor balconies, peering down at the intersection of Ocean and L, fenced off with metal police barriers and rapidly filling with angry people.
Most of the angry people, numerically speaking, were pro-Israel counterprotesters. Hundreds of them filled a designated area on Avenue L, waving Israeli flags and American flags and pro-Zionist signs. Directly next to them was the designated press pen, which I avoided getting in on the principle that you never want to be in an enclosed area when shit goes down. I don’t generally believe in press passes—the First Amendment is every American’s press pass—but I did put mine on last night. At things like this it can help you avoid being snatched by cops or swung on by angry protesters, at the margins. It was not enough for one twitchy photographer who slid up beside me and whispered, “Watch your back. They don’t like press either, this community.”
The first actual protesters to arrive were a group of Orthodox Jewish people from NKI, who oppose Zionism for religious reasons, and who show up at many pro-Palestine protests. They set off a back and forth round of jeers. “State of Israel, shame, shame! You don’t speak in the Jewish name!” they chanted. “You’re not Jewish!” chanted the other side back at them.
Some standard issue keffiyeh-clad pro-Palestine protesters began to trickle in. An old woman holding a miniature Israeli flag sidled up and said “Animals. Animals” at a bored-looking white guy slumped across the handlebars of his bike. Swarms of neighborhood Jewish teenagers had formed around the protest area, and were posturing and yelling and zipping back and forth on electric scooters. “I’m right next to the jihadist!” one kid hissed into his cell phone with a grin plastered across his face. Cops were everywhere. Every few minutes a fight would almost start, but there was always a cop a few feet away to break it up. Even those of us who favor police reform would admit that this was in the category of “good uses of an army of cops.” Without the NYPD lining every surrounding block the entire thing would have degenerated into a wild street brawl in two seconds.
The vibes were vicious. Testosterone permeated the air. It smelled like cologne. Whether that was from the men of Midwood or from the cops, I’m not sure. The Jewish teens, seized with the energy of being on the bigger side of a crowd, hollered increasingly vicious taunts, egged on by a handful of middle aged right wing men who were poor role models.
“You can shove your Palestine up your ass!”
“Fuck Palestine and your mother!”
“Muhammad is a rapist! I’ll break your face!” This sort of thing. It was not an atmosphere conducive to reasoned conversation about the difference between Zionism and Judaism and the actions of the Netanyahu government and so forth. Not that some of the pro-Palestine people didn’t try. “They’re using dogs to rape prisoners,” one explained to an impassive cop standing between him and a red-faced screaming man in a yarmulke.
After a while the protesters filed out of their little area in the middle of Ocean Avenue and marched back around the block. They walked briskly down the sidewalk, surrounded by a line of police, and then a pack of hooting and enraged pro-Israel people strode beside them in the street, issuing insults and threats. A moving gauntlet, for three blocks, back around to Avenue M, where the protesters gathered in the intersection, finally together in numbers, slightly less intimidated. Some people threw eggs at them, which broke on the dark asphalt of Ocean Avenue. An NYPD chopper hovered overhead. The protesters were standing in the street which was arched like a small hill, so that from the edges all you would see, every couple of minutes, was a surge of photographers running towards a bunch of people’s backs, where some minor scuffle was popping off. Here, the protest played out as most protests do, albeit one taking place on a little concrete island surrounded by unusual levels of menace. A kid wearing a sheisty shot down the street on a scooter with a huge Israeli flag. An angry middle-aged white guy of a familiar type poked his finger towards college students in keffiyehs and screamed “You and me! Let’s go! As a matter of fact, bring three of you! You and me!” The mutual anger settled into balance.
I have but little to add to the substantial global commentary about the atrocities and oppression that the government of Israel has carried out against the Palestinians. There was a right side at this protest: The people defending the beleaguered Palestinians were right, and the people in the grips of religious-nationalist fervor screaming for their blood were wrong. For an American, though, the most useful thing about these particular protests may be a chance for us to get a new perspective on what it looks like when a nation acts just like us. The historical precedents of Israel and of the United States are quite different, yes, but the basic dynamic of “religious minority feeling the sting of persecution secures homeland by forcefully taking the land of other, weaker people who were not the ones persecuting them, while being extremely self-righteous about it”—well, that should ring familiar to anyone who has ever watched the Dallas Cowboys play the Washington Redskins.
When you stand surrounded by hundreds of flexing young men drunk on rage, testosterone, and politics, you can really feel part of a tradition running through all of human history, and through all of the world’s nation-states. Any country that wants to draw borders and motivate its young men to kill for them must whip up a crowd like this, at scale. Give all these teenagers uniforms and machine guns and you have an army. Call them heroes and point them at your enemies and you have geopolitics. Drape them in flags and make up songs celebrating them and lavish praise on their dead bodies and you have patriotism. Some causes are righteous and some are not, but if you know the exhilarating, giddy feeling of standing in a big group of your friends and feeling collectively ready to beat someone’s ass, together, then you can understand much about why it is so difficult to achieve peace on earth. There will always be young guys soaked in testosterone and high on dreams of Defending Their People, and, thus far, there have always been older men willing to send those wild young men to fight to protect the things that older men have. It is easy to get young men to fight. They will fight for a girl, for their family, for each other, or just for the sheer hell of it. It’s not really their fault. We can work to dissipate that energy, to channel into less murderous arenas, and we can hold up love of humanity as our highest virtue, or we can wave flags and extol the need for Real Men to protect God and Country at gunpoint. All societies make their choices.
Eventually the protesters and their infuriated entourage began to march back to where they began. I broke off and slipped into Falafel Tanami, on Avenue M, where you could see all the police right out the window. “What’s going on out there?” a portly Orthodox man with a beard asked the kid working the counter. “I have no idea,” the kid shrugged. The man behind the counter handed out fresh falafel balls to everyone waiting in line, as a little treat. They make a great falafel there. Everyone was happy. Everyone likes falafel.
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More
Previously, in street reporting: Minneapolis when Alex Pretti was killed; Springfield, Ohio waits for ICE; New Orleans versus the fascists; At the Houston Rodeo.
Where is the best falafel in New York? If you know the answer, sound off in the comments. Otherwise I will be forced to do the hard work of finding out myself.
"a group of Orthodox Jewish people from NKI, who oppose Zionism for religious reasons, and who show up at many pro-Palestine protests"
Fascinating...thanks for the link to NIIK...Will tuck into this evening. I would have thought Orthodox Jews would have been the MOST 'Zionist'
delighted to be wrong!
I'm not sure about best overall, but in the category of Falafel After 10PM, I vote the Falafel Guys truck right off the Astoria-Ditmars N stop, on Ditmars. Open late all year round, they often hand you an extra, free toasty falafel while you're waiting. Crisp! Impeccable service! Lovely!