Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker risked her life this week to join a flotilla of boats on a humanitarian mission to Gaza, and she compared the controversial journey to the struggle of black Americans in the ’60s. “Fifty years ago there was hard-core segregation in the South, very similar to what is happening in Gaza,” says Walker. “And we prayed for people to come and illustrate to the rest of the world what we suffered.”
Last year, nine activists, including an American, were killed by Israeli forces while participating in a similar maritime mission. Of the possibility that she could lose her life, Walker said, “There is, for me, an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the South in our time of need.”
At alicewalkersgarden.com, Walker writes of her Jewish ex-husband, whom she calls “as staunch a defender of black people’s human rights as anyone I’d ever met.”
“He was a little boy on his way home from Yeshiva [and] was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and, one day, two of these boys snatched his yarmulke, and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence. Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.”
Walker believes her mission is analogous to the actions of those black boys.
“It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.”
–kathleen cross
