It comes back, over and over again, to the basic choice of civilization. Either some people are more important than others, and they should make the decisions – OR – everyone’s voice matters and we only get good decisions when everyone’s voice is heard.
I’m not the kind of person who can feel satisfied or sustained by a constant diet of bad news, anger and grief. I recognize that some other people can find it very energizing, but I don’t. It weighs me down. Like fast food, corporate news leaves me feeling both over-full and totally unsatisfied. Add in a side of social media, and it’s less nutritious than chewing sand.
So, in this moment, I’m in need of something sustaining. I found some last Tuesday night at the Senior Center. Actual conversation, although it was both curated and facilitated, gave me the kind of information that leads to thought, and reflection. Based on what I heard, I have changed my mind.
For more than a year, many members of the community have used the “Items Not on the Agenda” space to ask the City Council for a Resolution condemning the war on Gaza. As the council had put out a resolution in October of 2023 supporting Israel, the calls for support of Palestine did not come out of a vacuum. That the city has had a long term policy of non-response has kept people coming back to insist that it be addressed.
The Equity and Human Relations Advisory Committee stepped up to the plate, organizing a ‘community conversation’ on how the crisis inthe Middle East is affecting us personally.
My usual feeling on this kind of thing is that if it’s not local, the council should not get involved. We have plenty going on here, and putting a municipal stamp on any national or international affairs we have no jurisdiction over is not the best use of time. BUT – having made an official statement supporting Israel, we were already in the game, for better or worse. A statement for Gaza would be the least the city could do.
The high tide of emotion has led to the need to do something, and the community has been frustrated there as well.
The Community Conversation on “How the Middle East Affects Me” organized by the city’s Equity and Human Relations Advisory Committee was not on my calendar. I’d heard people talk about supporting, about boycotting, but I was keeping it in the ‘not my issue’ category – I was asked to be a facilitator.
The task of helping to guide the small group conversations that were a part of the event was given to more than a dozen people, and we all got a brisk walk-though on training before the meeting began. Despite the calls for a boycott, almost a hundred people came to be a part of the evening.
The ‘modeled’ conversation between Zahra Sakkejha and Ben Ginsburg offered some ground-floor insights into identifying as Palestinian or Jewish or Israeli – and how the war had changed all of those. Sakkejha spoke about her grandparents abandoning an orchard of orange trees near Yaffa when they were forced to flee in 1947. Ginsburg noted that he’d been critiqued for not being “Jewish enough – or just the wrong kind of Jew” when he was visiting in Israel. They both said that they no longer felt comfortable wearing clothes or jewelry that would identify their ethnicity.
The small group I was with offered up some candid, heartfelt insights into their own identities and connections – familial, political, emotional – and more than a few tears were shed. People spoke about parents who survived the Holocaust, about partners being pulled out of an airport line to be questioned by security, about keeping their own names private to participate in a protest where they might have been assumed to be in opposition. The thick tangle of travel restrictions imposed on some, and the guilt of free access by others. The ongoing grief of being ignored.
We listened, and we spoke more.
The woman sitting next to me – from a family of Asian immigrants – has cousins who live in the same place where those orange trees once stood. The college student who had been traumatized by police violence at pro-Palestine campus protests last spring was still unable to speak to their Israeli family about it.
When the group broke up and the evening concluded, I felt the world had become significantly smaller.
We are seeing, more clearly every day, that some people are not more important than others, and allowing their choices to be create policy is harming everyone. We can only get good decisions when the process is really inclusive.
Conversation – even challenging conversation – can be a feast.
Judith Martin-Straw
