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Alice Walker: Why I’m joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza
an article by Alice Walker reprinted from the Bay View National Black Newspaper
Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself
this, even though the answer is: What else would I do? I am in my 67th
year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am
content. It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good
to reap the harvest of one’s understanding of what is important, and to
share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?
Passengers who will sail aboard the U.S. boat to Gaza, The Audacity of Hope, prepare for the flotilla’s departure.
click on photo to enlarge
Our
boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of
Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will
consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they
attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of
history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering
us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom
Flotilla I, what is to be done?
There is a scene in the movie “Gandhi” that is very moving to
me: It is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the
armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully,
but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray,
keep coming.
Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is, for
me, an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights
activists who faced death to come to the side of Black people in the
American South in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael
Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who heard our calls for help – our
government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to
non-violent protesters – and came to stand with us.
They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few “good ol’
boys’” of Neshoba County, Mississippi, and were beaten and shot to
death along with James Chaney, a young Black man of formidable courage
who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity
of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner flag in my own
heart.
And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our
president’s latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose
impoverished, terrorized, segregated existence was mocked by the
standing ovations recently given in the U.S. Congress to the prime
minister of Israel?
I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious
resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will
always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in
casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the
Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish
child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the
Israeli child, the Native American child etc. is equal to all others on
the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior
that makes children everywhere feel afraid.
(This article is continued in the discussionboard - see righthand column of this page)
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(The following is continued from the main article listed above.)
I
once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation,
who was as staunch a defender of Black people’s human rights as anyone
I’d ever met: How did you find your way to us, to Black people, who so
needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice
facing people of color of that time?
I thought he might say it was the speeches, the marches, the
example of Martin Luther King Jr. or of others in the movement who
exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he
recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to
our struggle.
He was a little boy on his way home from yeshiva, the Jewish
school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a
bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed
by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys
snatched his yarmulke (skull cap) and, taunting him, ran off with it,
eventually throwing it over a fence.
Two Black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke.. . ...more.
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