Wheels of Justice

It’s a beautiful day here in Milwaukee - a clear blue sky and a surprisingly (at least to me, a Californian) warm sun. Today is a down day for us - no public activities scheduled, unfortunately - so we’re relaxing, showering, and catching up on e-mail.

The Wheels of Justice fall 2008 tour has now been on the road for about a week. I missed the very first stop - a vigil in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, last Saturday - but, after taking a red-eye flight from Oakland to Minneapolis, I joined up with the rest of the current crew (driver Bill Hill, as always; bus manager Josh Brollier; and Iraq vet Paul Melling) in time for a very nice Voices for Peace festival in a park in Eau Claire, Wisc. Monday we did a couple of presentations at the University of Wisconsin campus in Eau Clair. Tuesday we spent the day at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. Wednesday we headed back to Wisconsin for tabling and a public meeting at the UW campus in Platteville. That night we drove to Madison so we’d be there in time for a class at Edgewood High School (a Catholic high school) that we thought was to start at 7:15 a.m. on Thursday (turned out the class was really at 7:50, so we got there in plenty of time). We did another class at the same school in the afternoon, then a oublic meeting of a fledgling progressive students organization at UW. Friday we traveled here for a spirited Iraq Moratorium vigil in the heart of downtown Milwaukee, then had supper and a discussion seesion at the local Friends meeting house.

As always, I guess, there’s a fair amount of downtime between events (but at least we haven’t gotten snowed in, as we did on my last turn on the bus back in April, when a late-winter snowstorm shut down the Interstate and trapped us in a motel in Rawlins, Wyoming for 48 hours!). And at our public events attendance has been relatively sparse, ranging fro a half dozen or so at a lunchtime meeting at UW Platteville to about 30 at our evening event on the Platteville campus.

Still, it feels good to be getting some of the truth about Iraq and Palestine out, even if only to relatively small numbers. And of course the bus gets appreciative (mostly) honks and waves wherever it rolls. For me, coming from the Bay Area, the best thing about the two tours I’ve done is that we’re in the heartland of America, and mostly in smaller cities and towns that don’t get as many progressive speakers as Berkeley, Oakland, or San Francisco. (Not that we don’t have plenty of work to do there, too!)

Last spring I was bus manager; this time I’m the Palestine speaker. I worked hard to pick out photos from my four trips over there and to put together a good presentation. Originally I was planning to borrow liberally from the excellent presentation of Hannah Mermelstein, the Palestine speaker during most of the time I was on the bus last spring), who in turn had based her talk in part on the terrific work on Anna Baltzer, who has appeared before hundreds of groups all over the country. Both of them organize their talks around an outline of the main features of the Israeli occupation in Palestine - checkpoints, home demolitions, etc. - bringing stories and pictures from their personal experience into that framework.

That approach seems to work great for them, but when I tried to adapt it for myself, it didn’t feel quite right - what I found myself wanting to do was to focus specifically on few of the communities where I’ve spent time in Palestine: Jayyous, a West Bank agricultural village that’s seen 70 percent of its land cut off by the Separation Wall; Gawawis, a tiny hamlet in the South Hebron hills, that’s under constant siege by fanatical settlers from nearby outposts - and by the Israeli authorities who back up the settlers in trying to force the residents off their land; Tel Rumeida, a neighborhood in the heart of the big Palestinian city of Hebron where settlers routinely harass, threaten, attack, and steal from their Palestinian neighbors; and Rafah, the city and refugee camp at southern edge of the Gaza Strip, which has probably suffered more violenece and destruction than any place else in this whole tortured land.

So I finally decided to go with the flow and put together a presentation organized around these communities, with the hope that using them as microcosms will provide a way to bring out the essence of the situation in Palestine. I decided, though, that I’d better provide at least a bit of geographical and historical context before digging into my experiences in those four communities, so I start out by showing and explaining the well-known four-panel map illustrating “Palestinian Loss of Land 1946 to 2000.” (This map, and others like it, are posted at many Internet sites - just google the phrase in quotes to find it.) It’s a powerful visual in its own right, and it fits in nicely with the main point I try to make when I move on to talk about the specific places I know in Palestine: the thread tying together the varying experience of these diverse communities is the Zionist drive to take over the maximum amount of Palestinian land - with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. I conclude the talk by urging listeners not to be distracted by the endless chatter about this or that peace plan or negotiating session, but instead to keep their eyes focused on the concrete realities ordinary Palestinians have to deal with on a daily basis - what Israelis call the “facts on the ground.”

My main prblem I have with this presentation is time - on a couple of occasions this week I didn’t even get past discussing the map and Jayyous. That’s frustrating, but I guess it’s OK, because the story of Jayyous by itself encapsulates so many aspects of the larger picture - not only the landgrabbing and the humiliations, but also the steadfastness (and non-violence) with which grassroots Palestinians continue to resist.

It is of course a challenge to squeeze both Iraq and Palestine into a single session, especially in a school class or other event with strict time limits, But in addition to the substantive parallels between the two occupations, my talk and that of my comrade, Iraq vet Paul Melling, have something else in common: we both concentrate on concrete facts and personal experiences, rather than high-level political analysis. It’s an approach I think is working pretty well, and I’m looking forward to trying it again next week with more audience in Milwaukee and Kenosha.

Henry Norr henry@norr.com –––––––––––––––-