[We asked cousins Mimi Asnes and Ben Keller to cover yesterday's peace conference at Annapolis, Mimi from the outside and Ben from within. Read all their coverage here.]

While Chabadniks danced and sang Hanukkah songs and protested Annapolis at Gate One, a very different kind of demonstration was going on in Annapolis; a demonstration supporting the Bush administration and the Israeli government, alongside the Israeli and Palestinian people. Nine progressive Jewish organizations united to present an hour-plus-long program of speeches, chants and songs (“If I Had a Hammer” by Pete Seeger and “Down By the Riverside” were crowd favorites.)

“We did it in a week because we didn’t have any longer, and we were able to pull together people from New York, Rhode Island, Colorado, DC, Israel,” said Tammy Shapiro, director of the Union of Progressive Zionists and MC of the rally. “There were a hundred people there representing the thousands who weren’t able to make it.”

Wait—people came from Israel for to demonstrate in Annapolis? “We had Mossi Raz (former head of Shalom Achshav and MK from Meretz) and Gavri Bar Gil who is the head of the Peace Movement and another former director of Peace Now,” she added. These two came for five days specifically for Annapolis and to raise awareness about the Geneva Initiative. Another Israeli civil society activist was Eyal Raviv from MePeace, which he describes as “the MySpace of Middle East peacemaking.” There was also an unaffiliated continent of teachers who showed up specifically to call out Olmert on his domestic education policy—they had a truck driving around with a sign that said, “Ehud fled to Annapolis” (and away from his domestic obligations).

While the pro-Annapolis rally was held far from the Academy itself, the demonstrators were right in the path of the motorcade of the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and staged a showing of signs with (pre-approved) slogans for when he was scheduled to pass. Did Olmert see the demonstrators? One student claimed that “he passed by the people who were holding signs before the rally.” “We saw a motorcade pass by” that was close enough to see the signs, another added; the demonstrators remained hopeful that Olmert who was scheduled to be at a nearby building, was there for lunch at the Governor’s Mansion.

Even days before Annapolis, the Progressive rally was in peril after having their permit to demonstrate in public shot down by the Secret Service. Luckily, the Chief of Police and a local parish at St. Anne’s teamed up to help the grassroot activits secure a location that might make a difference.

Despite these regulatory confusions, the group was happy with the outcome of the rally. “We spoke to lots of press from TV, newspapers and radios,” said Shapiro. “We had been told that there were only permits for 30 people at the gate and we wanted more. But we didn’t want it to be a competition or a fight, distinguished for other things going on. It would have been nice to be closer. We could be positive without having to respond to someone and have our own message. And we were closer to Olmert and where he was—our message was for him, and Bush, and the American and Israeli public.”

In terms of what can be gained from Annapolis, Meretz USA chair Charney Bromberg told us that the “best case scenario is that precisely what was presented today in the signed statement that Israelis and Pal endorsed, initiation of ongoing negotiation through December the 12th with full working committees on each of the four major issues will be underway. One of things Meretz most proud of is that Geneva was the branchild of Yossi Beilin, leader of Meretz in Israel. We know that PM Olmert’s neg team has been closely studying the Geneva Agreements and Legislative history. We can take the Geneva Initiative as a “dress rehearsal of what parties will ultimately come out with.”

Bromberg’s conclusion was that “however frightening the record of the Bush Administration has been in pursuing things they shouldn’t have pursued and ignoring things they shouldn’t have ignored, they still represent the US which is the gravitational source of political direction in the world.” This is perhaps why he began his speech today in Annapolis by asking repeatedly, “can you hear me?” After a couple of go-rounds he noted that he wasn’t asking for a shoutout; he simply actually wanted the leaders to be listening.

[We asked cousins Mimi Asnes and Ben Keller to cover yesterday's peace conference at Annapolis, Mimi from the outside and Ben from within. Read all their coverage here.]

Annapolis is a pretty city, especially its main square overlooking the port. So it was a bit of a shock to happen upon a street fight in this orderly military town—especially a street fight between two ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.

“You are a terrorist! You are not Jewish!” one shouted at the other.

“You are a murderer! Go to Iran!” screamed the other as they led groups jostling for space on the cobblestoned street.

“Why do they hate each other?" I asked. "Aren’t they on the same side?”

My companion just shook his head. He had been variously called a terrorist, a faggot, a murderer and a worm, despite the fact that he hails from the same neighborhood as many of these protestors.

Meet Kobi Skolnik. He was my guide through the black-coated, black-capped groups of men amassed at Gate One of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. Without Kobi, I would not be able to explain to you the fine difference between a Kahanist and a Lubovitcher and a Sadmer Chasid and someone belonging to Neturei Karta. Not to mention those Kobi calls “regular Israelis” who were demonstrating against any potential concessions to be made to the Palestinians.

Neturei Karta (or the Sadmer Chasidim) are a religious group who renounce the validity of the State of Israel—they are most infamous for attending Iranian summits convened by ever-beloved President Ahmadinejad which have called into question the historiography of the Holocaust.

Lubovitchers, according to Skolnik, believe that their Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shnorson that died more than a decade ago is the Messiah and they believe in a “complete” Land of Israel from the Jordan River to the sea. They oppose the idea of a Palestinian state on religious grounds and don’t believe that “land for peace” is a legitimate option since the Land of Israel must be whole as it is holy.

Kahanists believe that the Palestinians should be expelled to other Arab countries; those protesting were saying, “They have many states, and we have only one.” Expulsion should happen by force if necessary. They are a terrorist organization in Israel. When Kobi saw one kid with a Kahane T-shirt holding a sign that said “Not one more Terrorist Arab country,” he tried to get into a philosophical debate with him about the fact that he was promoting and decrying terrorism at the same time. It didn’t go over well.

And where were the Palestinians? Or even the pro-Palestinian community? Notably missing. One very left-wing friend in the area told me that most of his contingent didn’t want to even legitimize the conference by protesting. But the right and even center pro-Israel contingent was also not represented. Said a longtime progressive Jewish activist: “They’ll wait to see what happens, and then if it’s positive, they’ll swoop in and take credit.”

We did run into a group of students from Johns Hopkins, Baltimore and Towson Universities, some of whom were of Pakistani origin. Mohsen Rahman explained to us that they were there to bring a pro-Palestinian perspective and were thoroughly inspected and followed by security, their names taken and their posters documented. These five young students were roundly harassed by the anti-Annapolis demonstrators who called them “terrorists,” and “murderers.”

While milling about the Gate One crowd I ran into Lane Berg, a longtime activist who said she had witnessed “every violent demonstration” in the US, as well as having traveled to Israel and South Africa at key historical moments of protest. She said that she’d never seen so many people with violently diverging opinions demonstrating mostly peaceably in the same small space and was amazed—“it brings me hope,” she said, and then asked me why I thought this was. I hated to tell her what I perceive as the truth; that the Big Boys stayed home today.

Here are some of the slogans we heard:

• “Zionists no. Judaism yes.”
• “Am Yisrael Chai.”
• “Im ashkakheikh yerushalayim eshkakh yemini.”
• “Free Palestine”
• “Arabs, Palestinians—Murderers!”
• “No terrorist state!” (from anti-Anapolis pro-Israel evangelicals).
• “—in Israel!” (added subversively by the Towson students).

[We asked cousins Mimi Asnes and Ben Keller to cover yesterday's peace conference at Annapolis, Mimi from the outside and Ben from within. Read all their coverage here.]

I'm on the overnight train from Boston to Washington, DC with a Darwin’s sandwich steadily disappearing next to me and a lot of hours to fill. As of my last functional wireless connection, the world is abuzz with preemptive talk about the failure of Annapolis. Haaretz has a lead story on Ismail Haniyeh’s refutal of Abbas’ mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians. Over on Al-Jazeera's Arabic site, an article about the deaths of four martyrs in Gaza is accompanied by a picture of a young boy crying and cradling the head of one of the militants in his arms. The message is clear; headsof state can have all the congratulatory dinner parties they want:here, it’s still war.

Tabling the discussion: The conference room early this morningIt’s remarkable how some days, being able to read fluently in Arabicand Hebrew just reaffirms the futility of my very motivation forlearning these languages: to be able to Make A Difference in thePalestinian-Israeli conflict. People are often amazed at how quickly I can switch between Israeli-sounding Hebrew to Palestinian dialectand exclaim, “if only there were more people like you, this conflictwould be over tomorrow!” Or if there were more people like me, everyone would give up right here and now.

I am 27, born and raised in Watertown, Massachusetts with anexcellent early education at the Solomon Schechter Day School ofNewton. My parents sent me to Jewish school less out of their ownlinguistic or religious conviction (neither speaks Hebrew or believesin a traditional God) and more because I was a miserable failure atmaking friends in public school kindergarten. If they figured thatthere might be a higher percentage of the socially awkward in privateschool, they were right.

Fast forward through the requisite drama geek high school experience—incollege I (re)discovered my connection to the Middle East, thistime fueled by a beginning knowledge of the Arabic language and adesire to see Israelis and Palestinians on my own terms. I spent twosummers working in Nazareth with a Palestinian-Israeli women’sorganization before and during the al-Aqsa Intifada and went on to pursuea Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies. I've recently begun curating aseries of Talkbacks following the performance of the play MASKED, anIsraeli-authored drama about three Palestinian brothers.

Where the magic happens: Setting upMy cousin Ben, 24, is trying to grab a few last hours of sleep before his 5 AMcall inside the Naval Academy to set up computer systems to monitorthis seminal conference. Ben grew up mostly in Silver Spring, MD, withforays into Canada and Queens during his formative years. He is partof a third generation of tinkers and builders in the Goldsman-Kellerfamily; Ben’s grandfather’s reputation for being able to fix anyelectrical gadget (as long as you aren’t in a hurry) turned into anaptitude for fixing up cars and computers in his grandsons. Not manypeople can claim to have bought a BMW “fixer-upper” for $100, or tohave driven in a caravan of such cars from Maryland to Philadelphia fora cheese steak.

After graduating from Blair High School, Ben enlisted in the US Armyand as a Private First Class was in charge of what he explains is “awhole lot of important computers at Fort Lewis”; he ended his serviceafter over two years and went on to work for Boeing before moving intojournalistic tech support. Ben looks forward to pursuing a BFA, and eventually an MFA, in photography; his specialty is sports photography but unless Olmertand Abbas really go at it, he’ll have little use for that particularskill at Annapolis.

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Previous posts:
A little family background

Prelude:  What We Have Won

[We asked cousins Mimi Asnes and Ben Keller to cover yesterday's peace conference at Annapolis, Mimi from the outside and Ben from within. This is their first post. Read all their coverage here.]

When our great grandfather Akiva Holtzman landed in America and changed his name to Maurice Goldsman, he was 24. He had fled the pogroms of Byelorus and conscription into the Russian army never to see home again; he traveled some 6,000 miles across Russia on the TranSiberian railroad and worked in China and Korea until passage to the Land of Opportunity was obtained.

Akiva’s brother Shmuel had different plans. A hard-core political Zionist, he believed that the solution to persecution of the Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement and elsewhere in the world was the establishment of a Jewish homeland. He too tried to escape the Russian army and was caught and jailed once before succeeding in smuggling himself and a friend out on a ship bound for Mediterranean shores.

Akiva-now-Maurice married his first cousin Bluma and they settled in Maryland. They bore three children; the eldest one was Celia. Shmuel met a young woman who remembered his family from their chicken-raising days in Russia, and they settled in Israel; they too raised a family and awaited the day when Israel would be a true country.

On my bookshelf, I have a leather-bound volume that Shmuel sent to his American brother in 1951, just after Israel’s War of Independence. It is a commemorative volume telling, in high literary Hebrew, the story of the Jewish refugees arriving in Haifa and Tel Aviv, the brave battles with the hostile indigenous Arab population, the odds against the Hagana in 1948 and the incredible victory and unfathomable loss of that war. Most arresting are the pictures, pages and pages of sparse landscape, nascent cities, broken and resolute people. “I hope this will help you understand how hard we struggled, and what we have won,” Shmuel wrote to his brother in an inscription on the title page. He wrote not in Yiddish, the language of their childhood, but rather in Hebrew. This is my life now, the writing says. This is who we were meant to be.

My grandmother, Maurice’s eldest daughter, sits today not far from Annapolis in an elder care home in Silver Spring, MD, the town where she raised her own children and grandchildren. She has dementia, which is why she doesn’t know that the Israeli Head of State Ehud Olmert is here to ostensibly try and broker peace with the Palestinian Authority amidst representatives of the countries that fought Israel in 1948, 1967, 1973. She struggled mightily during her more active years in support of the new State of Israel here in the diaspora, co-founding Pioneer Women and leading initiatives with the Labor Zionist organization Na’amat. She kept attending meetings long after she could remember anyone’s name. She sent her children to Labor Zionist summer camps and to Israel; she supported the family there and saved money for her international phone calls and trips to the region.

Perhaps my cousin Ben and I will go visit Grandma after today’s conference is come and gone. He will tell her how it came to be that he is sitting inside the US Naval Academy as a technician for a major international newswire, brushing past heads of state, ministers and dignitaries and honing his skills as a photographer. I will try to explain to her why her eldest granddaughter speaks Arabic as well as Hebrew, and how my two years of living and traveling in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel have led me back to the United States with the slim hope that it is as an American, not in spite of being American, that I can contribute to internationally responsible polity in the Middle East.

I know exactly what she will say. “I’m confused.”

“It’s okay, Grandma,” we will tell her.

“I love you,” she will answer.