Bannering for Palestine |
A banner drop in Asheville, NC. Photo courtesy of Ken Jones.
For 22 months now, every week, a committed group of us activists in Asheville, North Carolina, have been standing on an interstate overpass holding giant banners and flags. The messaging changes, but the focus remains the same. We are holding Palestine in the light.
As thousands of cars zoom beneath us, we see lots of people waving through their windshields, flashing us the peace sign or a thumbs up, and honking in solidarity. It buoys us as we endure the weather and traffic.
Of course, we do also get a number of people who are angry with us, giving us the finger or a thumbs down. We accept that this comes with the territory of bearing witness for Palestine, but still wonder what it is that drives these negative reactions.
We know that many in our community were raised to believe in the myth that there is such a thing as god’s chosen people and that these people were promised a certain land. And that Palestine before 1948 was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
We also know that many others have drunk the Kool-Aid being relentlessly offered to us as the truth by our corporate media and zionist-controlled politicians. This is the false narrative that Israel is just defending itself against terrorists and that this all began on October 7, 2023, with an unjustifiable attack by Hamas on innocent civilians.
But despite the naysayers, we on the bridge persist, driven by our love and grief and outrage about the genocide and occupation in Palestine. We also believe we are shedding light on what is happening in the world beyond Palestine. We know that as goes Palestine, so go the rest of us. Our turn is coming as we speak.
We look at the Border Patrol and ICE raids in our cities and see a mirror image of the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF, aka IDF) and the violent settlers in the West Bank. Here, as there, white supremacists attack and kidnap “the other” in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and repression. We know that many of the militarized police forces in the US have been trained by Israel and much of the increasingly ubiquitous surveillance technology used on us has been developed and provided by Israel. More than one political analyst has pointed to the increasing “Palestinization” of the US and the West.
We are living in an age of fascism. And it’s not just because of Trump and his allies and Netanyahu and his allies. It’s the system. It’s a global cabal of uber-capitalists who are determined to dominate the world and exploit its resources for their own profit. They own Wall Street, the oil companies, and war profiteering corporations. They take our money and use it for their wars and policing rather than for the good of society. Years ago, comedian George Carlin put his finger on the situation we’re in:
They’ll get it all from you sooner or later ’cause they own this fuckin’ place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people: white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you........