Any other boomers out there experiencing acute déjà vu? As children of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, the transit that radicalized our generation, many of us are getting flashbacks from the Gaza protests happening right now.
We might be remembering the Oscars in 1978 when Vanessa Redgrave caused such a stir, speaking out against Zionist extremists. The Hollywood establishment was furious at her for defying the sanctified secularism of their pretentious
ceremony. The Jewish Defense League burned her in effigy.
The “liberal” press pilloried her, too. Even some of us self-described radicals rolled our eyes: we admired her boldness but dismissed her as an eccentric. Palestinians? What was she on about, pushing a topic in our faces that we’d never even thought about?
We were even a little pissed at her, worried that she was setting us up for ridicule by championing so random a cause. As far as we were concerned, apartheid was something that only happened in South Africa.(1)
That Promethean moment on the podium almost cratered Redgrave’s career. Way ahead of her time, was Vanessa. Bless the Aquarians. With Pluto in Aquarius upcoming, we’ll each have our chance to take a cue from her courage, and perhaps be chained to a rock accordingly.
Two Different Wars
Since October 7th, the violence in the Middle East has aroused a furious taking of sides among Americans. It’s a sign of the times that the most predictable indicator of where you stand isn’t so much being Jewish or not. It’s not even about being “conservative” or “liberal” (a dichotomy which has become politically meaningless). It’s about whether you’re old or young.
How do we explain this gaping generational divide, the most extreme in sixty years?
A lot of it has to do with where we get our news. Older Americans are mostly learning about Gaza from watching an anchorman employed by a telecom conglomerate whose scripts are green-lit by Washington.
The scripts dole out the official narrative, the one that has justified U.S. support for Israel since the 1960s. You know the story: centuries of antisemitism give Jews a pass to dehumanize others and colonize their lands; Israel is a bright and shining democracy, a civilized oasis in a volatile region, whereas Palestinians are wild-eyed savages whose violence erupts out of nowhere.
Digital natives are hearing a different story. They are witnessing a different war.
The student activists are watching civilian videos from Gaza. They are seeing on their phones, in real time, gut-wrenching images of child amputees, bombed hospitals, traumatized survivors digging through the rubble to find their dead. They are following
…the bombing of every university in Gaza; …the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets….what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education. – Naomi Klein
Children of Pluto
These protesters came of age when America’s most cherished stories about itself were falling apart. For the last 15 years, Pluto (breakdown) in Capricorn (enduring structures) has been exposing the hypocrisy of long-venerated institutions, including those presumed to be above the
political fray, such as universities.
These great bastions of truth-seeking have been stripped of their facade of incorruptibility, just as the electoral process, the Supreme Court and the Oval office have been. Indeed, perhaps the only thing that both sides of the Gaza issue have in common is a massive disillusionment in the humanistic ideals of the ivory tower.
Many Jewish students, in the face of a nationwide rise in antisemitism (not new, but newly shameless since Trump and the Proud Boys), feel abandoned by their colleges’ inability to keep them safe amidst the anti-Israel anger surging among their peers.
And the supporters of Palestine, whose organizations are being shut down, flags outlawed and speakers censored, are finding that the traditionally sacrosanct right of freedom of speech on campus does not apply to those demanding a ceasefire and financial divestment from this war.
Sixties redux
All over the country, university chancellors are calling in the cops. The most notorious overreaction so far has come from the president of Columbia, where demonstrators were set upon by squadrons in riot gear and snipers on rooftops. Students are being beaten, suspended, evicted, expelled, and held in solitary confinement.
To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? …. a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one. – Zadie Smith
You’d think these campus administrators — some of whom must have chanted and marched, themselves, on those same college greens, years ago — would’ve learned something about how all this cop-vs-protestor violence played out last time round.
Have they not considered the way history remembers the role of demonstrations in ending the Viet Nam War? Did that New York cop who fired into the crowd last week never hear the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song about Kent State?
Have the Berkeley chancellors, as they stroll to their offices, stopped to read the plaque they erected at Sproul Hall to Mario Savio, whose legacy they proudly tout in their recruitment literature?
…the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. – Mario Savio, U.C. Berkeley, 1964
Context
It is from the protesters, not the corporate media, that we are more likely to get the truth about what’s going on in Gaza. Informed young people are educating the general public about the decades-long humiliation and desperate poverty of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. Some are pointing out the parallels between the man-made famine in Gaza right now and the campaigns of starvation perpetrated by Stalin in the Ukraine and the British in Ireland.
Historical context is a main focus of the UK protests. In Edinburgh and Cambridge, blockades and hunger strikes are taking place at the colleges associated with Lord Balfour,
the guy who authorized the expulsion of the native Arab people from Palestine in 1917. The Balfour Declaration was a cynical political decision, as the history of the British Empire makes clear.(2)
But it was also, bizarrely, cult-driven. His Lordship was a devout Christian Zionist, a movement that long predates Jewish Zionism. American fundamentalists are the latest devotees of this paradoxical ideology, which is simultaneously fanatically pro-Israel and profoundly antisemitic.
The protests, whatever else they may accomplish, have already achieved much consciousness raising on one point: that Jewishness is not the same as Zionism.
Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred – including against us as Jews. – Naomi Klein
Big Media
Big Media seems to have realized that if they put too much focus on the actual facts of this war, it would reveal how obscenely one-sided it is. At this writing, the casualty ratio is 26 Palestinians killed to every one Israeli. 13,800 Palestinian children are dead, as compared to 33 Israeli children.
It should go without saying that the killing of innocents, whoever, whenever and wherever, is an abomination. 
But the discrepancy in the numbers tells the tale, and it is a tale that some do not want told. The last thing Washington and its propagandists want is to provoke the public to ask questions such as: Why are our taxes financing ongoing mass murder?
An uninformed public is a docile public. So instead of covering the issue as a blood war, the conventional media covers it as a culture war. CNN viewers are being shown a lot of tents.
Colorful, haphazard rows of tents. News programmers know that these images of the student encampments will push buttons. Tents visually link up to the charged issue of homelessness, a cultural hot potato with which audiences are already viscerally engaged.
It’s a journalistic bait-and-switch, like the one that turned the anti-war protests in 1968 into an operatic melodrama about unruly hippies. Look at the protesters, said the news. Don’t think about what they’re protesting.
Thanks to non-coverage like this, most Americans have no more idea about what’s going on in Palestine than we had, back then, when Vanessa Redgrave blew our minds at the Oscars.
Blackout
The blackout of unbiased reporting on Gaza is nowhere more flagrant, of course, than in Israel itself. Israeli critics of the Netanyahu government, including Jewish Voice for Peace, are being marginalized, banned and jailed. On May 5th, under the Dark of the Moon, Israeli police shut down the last office of Al-Jazeera News in Jerusalem.
Internationally, the chilling tentacles of censorship are reaching into online media, where the major outlets are blackballing the most knowledgeable war correspondents one by one, such as the historian Norman Finkelstein. Investigative journalist Chris Hedges, another expert with decades of experience in the region, just lost his platform on The Real News Report.
For the moment, at least, their Promethean voices can still be heard on the internet, our new public square. Thanks to this magic medium, information is as accessible to us boomers as to the young, about this most documented genocide in history.
Finding our role
Each of us, in our own way, has a role to play in what happens in our world. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been born when we did. That role is peculiar to our unique context, our own mysterious soul path, and is often not obvious. Situations like this may inspire us to look harder for it.
If we keep our minds and hearts open, we will begin to see how we fit in. Our role will arise out of the understanding that here we are, all alive at the same time, under the same skies.
Today’s campus demonstrators have found their role. It’s on the front lines, where Prometheans have always been. Bless them all.
Images
Crosby Stills & Nash, The PopHistory Dig
Vanessa Redgrave, Wikipedia
Protests in Texas and California, CTV News
Pluto in Capricorn, Nyssa Grazda yahoo.com
Mario Savio, Wikipedia
Sign at Gaza support camp in Newcastle, observed by Rubin Kazan
The Earl of Balfour, portrait by George Charles Beresford
Tents at Columbia U., NPR
Norman Finkelstein, Wikipedia
Notes
- How karmically appropriate it was that it was South Africa — a place that knows whereof it speaks about human rights – which brought the charge of genocide against Israel in international court?
- Also perversely apposite, as Chris Hedges has noted, is the background of the most brutally repressive of all the university presidents cracking student heads right now. Minouche Shafik, president of Columbia U., is a British-Egyptian baroness who built her career at institutions such as the Bank of England, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
