Babel revisited

Today, big day in Jerusalem: the Sheik Jarrah Solidarity Movement (see post June 19, 2011: "Chain of solidarity") had called for a major solidarity march, expecting people from all over Israel to join the regular Friday protest. It worked! Numbers vary of course: some talked about 1500 people, others about 3000... in any case, the march was quite impressive, stretching from Jaffa Gate to New Gate (and beyond) when it started, which represents a good portion of the Old City’s walls! I heard this was one of the biggest joint protests, gathering Israelis and Palestinians, in the past 20 years... and I was there!

Hearing a mixed of Hebrew and Arabic is what moves me the most when I attend the Sheik Jarrah march. It reminds me that everyone belongs to this place and that people are struggling for the same cause. Here, this is very powerful: languages being spoken indiscriminately, a Babel revisited where linguistic differences are not a curse, but a gift!

After the march, I went to a lecture given by the historian Ilan Pappe (http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/iais/staff/pappe/). In the Q & A session, someone asked him about the role of the Israeli peace movement and how it could become more influential. He said (I am paraphrasing): you cannot look at numbers every year or you get depressed; you need to look at numbers every ten years, like an historian would, in order to evaluate its growth. If the opposition goes from 3% to 6% in two years, it is a significant change!

Maybe, today, numbers went up, a tiny, tiny bit, and yet, this is big!