By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson
MEVASSERET ZION, Israel –Every Saturday evening a couple of hundred people gather on the nearby bridge that spans the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway. Flags and banners flutter in the breeze and Israeli songs are piped over the loudspeaker system until someone addresses the crowd, makes a short speech repeating our demand for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza and the immediate return of the hostages.
This concludes with the reading out of the names of each and every hostage, whereupon we all shout ‘Bring them home now!’ Then, under the watchful eye of the police, the barricades are removed, we stand in the road and sing ‘Hatikva,’ then disperse to our comfortable homes.
There is no violence. No roads are blocked until the end, when this is done very briefly with the permission of the police. Many of the participants are elderly people, like myself. There is a spirit of friendship that seems to create a bond between like-minded individuals, even though most of us are complete strangers to one another.
Vehicles go past on the road that separates the pavements on either side of the bridge, and many of the drivers tootle their horns to indicate their support. The atmosphere is calm, subdued even, and no one seems to get agitated or upset. If anything, there is a general air of depressed resignation to a situation that we know we cannot change. We do what we can to express our disagreement with the way the government is running things, but we know that in reality nothing we do will have any effect and our protests fall on deaf ears.
But last week something happened which has left me in shock. I haven’t spoken to any of the other demonstrators about it, so don’t know if anything was done about it, or if anyone intends to do anything in the future.
A car stopped and a voice shouted: “Nazis! Nazis! Go back to Germany!” I couldn’t see the car or the driver, so I don’t know whether anyone said or did anything in response. It seemed to me that the car simply moved on, because the traffic continued to flow. No one spoke about the event, but the sound of that voice continues to echo in my mind and haunt me.
“Jews, go home! Go back to your own country!” was the taunt that my people heard for all the long years that we had no country of our own. In Israel it is illegal to call anyone ‘Nazi,’ knowing what that epithet entails. The crimes perpetrated by the Nazis are still fresh in our collective memory.
On what depths of hatred did that man draw in order to hurl that epithet against people who were peacefully exercising their legitimate right to demonstrate in the democratic country we call Israel? I am starting to fear that the forces that are engendering that enmity towards different segments of the population will gather strength and succeed in turning what was once an enlightened liberal democracy into something else, something dark and vengeful, based on chauvinism, messianism and repression. God help us if that happens.
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Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is an author and freelance writer based in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, Israel.