New Mexico Mercury

Last Sunday afternoon about a dozen old Jews and a handful of non-Jewish comrades, most dressed in black to signify mourning, gathered on a sidewalk outside the Jewish Community Center on Wyoming NE.  All in their sixties, the women seemed uniformly tiny, their height diminished in recent years, while the few men present sported pot-bellies at least and thinning hair.  The members of Jewish Voice for Peace--veterans of protest and organizing since Vietnam--hadn’t been able to come up with any better way to respond to Israel’s massacre of two-thousand people in Gaza than this grief circle.  So, in the hot noonday sun, against the noise of three lanes of Sunday afternoon Heights traffic, they recited the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, then read aloud the names of hundreds of Palestinian children killed.  It took over an hour.

Mohammed Atta Al Najjar, 1 year old.

Samaa Mohammed Al Najjar, age 15.

Rafeef Atta Al Najjar, age 3.

Mona Jehad Al Najjar, 1 year old, Oh God, they’re all from the same family, all from Khan Younis.

After they finished, the general feeling was that reading the names of the children had allowed their grief some expression, and that there was some sort of loosening of the bonds that had tied up their hearts.   But there remained lots of frustration at their inability to get the word out that not all Jews support mass murder.  Still, it was felt, the grief circle was of value.

Who should be included in the grief circle?

Excluded were those inside the Jewish Community Center and also the members of the mainstream synagogues, not that they wanted to get in, all of whom support Israel’s right to murder Gazans at will, either because of rockets, or tunnels, or because they might have voted for Hamas in the first place.  What grief are these American Jews carrying in their hearts?  Were they traumatized as children when they first heard of the gas chambers and the crematoria of the Holocaust?  Should we enlarge our circle to include these grief-stricken neighbors?  Or as supporters of Israel’s occupation and militarism, should they not be invited into the grief circle, relegated to the role of “enemies?”  Don’t we want to open their hearts, too?

It’s not just Jews.  A cloud of grief seems to have settled over Albuquerque.  The parents and families of the more than two dozen murdered by APD in recent years formed themselves into a grief circle and have been tirelessly crying out to anyone who would listen, which wasn’t many at first.  Finally, after a video appeared of police officers shooting an unarmed homeless man as he was trying to get away, their circle enlarged, and their voices got heard via protests and mainstream media.  For a few weeks, amazingly, all of Albuquerque was included in their grief circle.  

Whose grief is valid?  Should we invite our public officials?

What about the Mayor, so tone deaf that he welcomes an international police shooting competition to this city?  (It’s impossible to make this stuff up).   What grief is he carrying?  Or the Police Chief who ignores all facts and the law to reflexively defend the police force?  Or the officers who pulled the triggers?  What misery do they bear?  Isn’t it reasonable to believe that all cops should be in therapy all the time?

The circles get larger.  What about the children held in detention in Artesia, refugees from brutal gang and drug violence in Central America?  What terror remains in their souls till death?  Do our policies in the past--the war we waged in the eighties, for example--have anything to do with these children’s plight?

Or the Governor of the state, so embarrassed by the grandfather who emigrated without papers from Mexico during the revolution that the only thing she can think to do for immigrants is take away their ability to get drivers’ licenses?  What grief causes her to not want to help the kids in Artesia?  

The Governor knows that the New Mexican schools are failing the children of this state:  40% don’t even finish high school and of those who do, the majority are not ready for higher education.  Basic skill levels are abysmal while knowledge of history, science, art, literature, the planet, as well as the ability to think critically are next to non-existent.  What does the Governor, with her misery-filled hardened heart, propose?  Simple, ideologically-determined solutions:  blame the teachers and propose to turn the whole system over to corporations that write tests.  

And the poor feeble Democrats?  In their grief they can’t even produce a candidate who appears to have a pulse.  So the Tea-Party governor will be re-elected for four more years in November by a tiny number of voters, the rest distracted or unengaged, preoccupied just surviving, cynical or grief-stricken, most not even aware that there is an election.  Perhaps instead of an election involving only a few, we should hold a giant grief circle for the whole state.  

Grief doesn’t recognize state boundaries.  Last week the President announced a war on the Islamic State, promising to kill enough of their fighters in three years to put an end to the insurgency.  No one, including himself, believes that this new war will succeed any better than the last wars in the Middle East, but everyone knows that there will be untold numbers of deaths, injury, refugees, infinite suffering, and the creation of new enemies.  What grief compels the President to declare war?  What humiliation causes religious zealots to behead innocents in the name of God?  

Wait!  Things are looking up.  This Sunday hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, will march in New York City and around the world against global climate change.  It’s a giant, glorious grief circle. Monday they’re going to Flood Wall Street with direct action.  But it’s still not enough to change policy.  That will take something else, the next step after we deal with our grief:  the organization of a mass movement with political goals to save the planet.  

Back in Albuquerque, the dozen and a half movement veterans who gathered on the sidewalk outside the Jewish Community Center on Sunday vowed to turn their anger and hurt into building a movement to help the Palestinians find justice and to save Israel from itself.  Around the world people are already advocating boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel as pressure to end the occupation.  In Albuquerque their next step will be to petition the City Council to demand that Albuquerque’s federal tax money that is being sent in the form of weapons to Israel--about $9 million annually--be reallocated for use right here.  It may not work, but at least it’ll put the issue before the public.

After grief comes action.  It starts with reciting the names of the dead.

Ziad al-Reefy, age 9, Rafah…

(Photo by Karin Dalziel)