Decades ago, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said that socialism would leave capitalism in the dustbin of history, or words to that effect. That's still a work in progress, but I made progress in a dumpster this week. I found Israel there.
This phrasing recalls the religious zealot who asks, "Have you found Jesus?" My reply, "I didn't know Jesus was lost."
"Boy Scouts for Israel?" the hotel clerk asked a janitor on the phone.
"Boy Scouts for Israel?" I puzzled humorously to myself. I had told the clerk that the pin said "Boycott Israel." The janitor might have opposed the sentiment might have purposely thrown it out.
"It's hard to replace. I got it in Edmonton," I explained. I remembered the Palestine Solidarity Edmonton table at the north end Islamic cultural centre and high school. There in December, 2012, a fundraising event for medical aid to Gaza raised tens of thousands of dollars. There I got the pin, and another that said "BDS" for "Boycott Divestment and Sanction."
History will leave Israel in the dustbin, but how did my pin get into a dumpster? And how did I find it?
The hotel in question was the site of a two-day seminar on Canadian indigenous education. South Africa got its apartheid idea from Canada's treatment of indigenous people. This seminar was an effort to restore indigenous dignity through education. One might argue that any parallel system, even one run by indigenous people, perpetuates Canadian apartheid; but that argument was absent at the seminar. I would argue that a parallel system improves on the pathetic public system and anti-democratic private systems of education, and that this indigenous system should continue until the public system is really inclusive. Indeed, the seminar argued for inclusion, against the racism that continues in the non-indigenous systems.
That afternoon, my pin was absent from my coat, which I had taken off at the seminar. I went to the hotel desk to ask if anyone found the pin. Two friendly women there were happy to call the janitor who cleaned the seminar site. I explained the pin, which features a graphic of the Israeli apartheid wall. I was happy not to meet a wall of indifference or hostility in seeking the pin.
Nikita Khrushchev's Berlin Wall is in the dustbin of history, waiting for the Israeli Apartheid Wall to join it. The Soviet system wasn't perfect, but it aimed for that, aimed for a better future, unlike the Zionist system, which aims for a non-existent past at the expense of the present and future of Jews and non-Jews.
"Yes, the janitor found a pin," one clerk told me as she talked on the phone. "'Boy Scouts for Israel,.'" she confirmed into the receiver.
She confirmed something that doesn't exist. The United Nations made in 1948 confirmed something that shouldn't exist when it allowed a Jewish state on Palestinian land. Religous states should have disappeared with the Reformation, but a few hang on, like the greasy discarded food, coffee grounds, and napkins I found in the garbage bag in that dumpter, after I climbed in.
A bag of discarded seminar papers confirmed that I had found the one bag which the janitor had used for the site's garbage. I poured out the bag. I used one piece of garbage to poke through the rest of the garbage. The United States, perched on stolen land, uses Israel to poke the land it stole in 1948.
On the point of giving up, I saw the pin glint, among coffee grounds.
Climbing out of the dumpster was much harder than climbing into it had been. I commend the dumpster divers who troll these metal behemoths for beverage cans and bottles, for which recycling agencies pay deposits.
Climbing out of Israel apartheid will be harder than sliding into it had been, for Zionists, Palestinians, and the world. Palestine has room for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as it had for centuries, until Zionism sabotaged peace and progress.
As I dug in the garbage, as I struggled out of the dumpster, as I walked away into a sunny winter day in my mountainous home in Western Canada, a home on indigenous land, I thought of Gaza, thought of Palestine.
People in Occupied Palestine suffer more than I did. Soldiers stop them as they go about their peaceful daily duties, governments and courts rule against their human rights, jailers detain them unjustly, a few outsiders help by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning the Zionist state of Israel, and the world watches, wrings its hands, and does little, lest the United States, and increasingly Canada, attack the world for trying to bring justice in Palestine.
I live on stolen indigenous land, which is America, that New World which meant to improve on the Old World of European empires and wars. That improvement is not here, but it is coming, thanks to such as the seminar I attended, thanks to people in solidarity around the world, thanks to justice, sometimes weak, but never dead, thanks to the harm that injustice does to others and to itself.
Khrushchev's dustbin still has room for obsolete, hurtful ways of thinking and living, including capitalism, racism, and anti-semitism and its spawn Zionism. English poets Percy Shelley and Samuel Coleridge wrote of "Ozymandias" and "Kublai Khan," whose empires fell to dust.
I recently re-read Ancient Greek tragic plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. They put their cultural myths on stage. The myths and the plays taught people how to live justly in an unjust world. They showed history driving people to tragedy despite their efforts to avoid it. Modern dramatists could stage our era's historically-driven tragedy of indigenous land called home by competing people. Cassandra claimed "There's no way out." Khrushchev and I beg to differ. If not, better art as Aristotle might confirm, but worse life, as indigenous suffering implies today. The Athenian Empire did suffer the fate of Ozymandias and Kublai Khan.
Well, readers. Get to work. Get writing.
