Reimagining a Night in Chicago in 1966

 I didn’t check any news sites yesterday. I didn’t even check Instagram for kindred spirits in time of war. I scheduled a day of deep discussions with people I love and trust. 

“What can we do?” one friend asked me. 

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I responded. 

Our most primitive nervous system responds to perceived danger without thinking: fight, flight, or freeze. 

Our rational, so-called “executive reasoning” system figures out what is right and who is right, and on the other side of that is always the opposite: wrong, other, not me. 

Calming our nervous system – not interrupting or interpreting it – but sitting with it, being curious about it, is something we can always do. This pause is an essential tool of the nonviolent warrior who wants to imagine and create something new. 

How did we get here?  How did I get here? How did I let us get here? 

I go back, first, as a historian:  Which signs did we miss over all the years this conflagration was smoldering behind the scenes? How did our default ways of thinking fail us? Are there moments we might have guided differently to prevent this chaos and loss? 

I reimagine May 31, 1966, the night Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh met in Chicago, and both men’s work was changed. King saw how structures of racial discrimination and segregation were essential to U.S. foreign policy, insisting the U.S end its imperial war in Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh – the beloved “Thay,” teacher and leader of modern Buddhist thought in Vietnam – saw how King’s work for racial and economic justice was part of a larger effort to end not just the war in Vietnam but war itself. Together, they forged nonviolent resistance as spiritual means to counter deeply embedded structures of racism and colonialism, including in our own thoughts. King died less than two years after this meeting; Thay, exiled from Vietnam, set up his monastery in France and went on to have his core works translated and published in 22 languages. Both of them described that meeting as deepening their spiritual practice and commitment to nonviolent resistance. 

Last week, in the midst of Israel raining bombs down on Gaza, I asked my husband Jed, “Is there any Israeli leader you could imagine in that meeting, who would be transformed as they were?”

“Yitzhak Rabin,” he said, referring to the Israeli prime minister who ran on the platform of peace and was negotiating a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority when he was assassinated by a Jewish Israeli right wing terrorist. 

The three men were just seven years apart in age (the same age as my father) and Rabin almost attended UC-Berkeley after high school. But by the time of this meeting in 1966, when all three men were in their forties, Rabin was on a very different life course. 

Yitzhak Rabin grew up in a Labor Zionist family in Israel; he was not religious. He wanted to study Agricultural Engineering to grow the kibbutz ideal of collective farming. Instead, he joined the Israeli army (IDF) and proved over time to be a key operator for the Jewish state. He wrote the IDF’s first training manuals; he oversaw operations for the 1967 war; and from 1968 to 1973 he was Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., forging the deep, economic and military alliance we see in full force today. 

Although Rabin’s entire career had pushed the Palestinian people into more and more submission on less and less land, late in his life something shifted. And as Prime Minister from 1994 - 1995, Rabin assiduously pursued peace. Perhaps he was finally and pragmatically accepting that the only way to security is peace, holding together a broad political coalition and negotiating multiple agreements with the Palestinian Authority, when a right wing religious settler assassinated Rabin, detonating the peace process. 

Describing Rabin’s dramatic shift from fierce opposition to the Palestinian Intifadas (armed rebellions) to the one who brokered the Oslo accords, Guardian reporter Jonathan Freedland describes the possibility of peace that died with Rabin: “To this day, the killing of Yitzhak Rabin by a man determined to halt the Middle East peace process remains that rare thing: an act of political violence that wholly achieved its aim. Judged by the goal it set itself, it is surely the most successful assassination in history.” 

The death of Rabin also destroyed the fragile liberal coalition he brought together, and the religious zealots who wanted Rabin murdered are now in charge of the Israeli government. Comparing Palestinian people to animals, they justify bombing Gaza – the place and its people – into dust. And, as of yesterday, religious extremists are in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives as well. 

So we are here. Oh my brothers and sisters, lovers of peace and liberation, we have a lot of work to do … 

What if Martin Luther King and Thich Nhat Hanh, two men who called themselves “spiritual brothers,” had the chance that night in 1966 to urge Yitzhak Rabin to pursue peace rather than perpetual colonization of the Palestinian people? Could they have prevented Israel’s – heroic for Israelis, catastrophic for Palestinians – Six Day War in 1967? What if Rabin had spent the years when he was brokering increased militarization with the U.S. creating instead the economic foundations of lasting security and peace?

Rabin came to the conclusion much later that peace was the only path to security; that peace would benefit not only Palestiniams, but also Israelis. What if someone of Rabin’s socialist temperament and tactical genius had been negotiating with the U.S. for a Jewish state that was egalitarian, agricultural, and anti-racist in those critical years of 1968-1973? What if Jewish Israelis’ collective Holocaust trauma had urged them – from the beginning in 1948 – to never render any other people stateless? 

These are not rhetorical questions; they are alive in us again now and it is never too soon to come back to the twin demands of security and peace.  

Those newly peaceful cells at my core imagine what comes next. I cool my red hot anger and turn to the sober work of tending and mourning everyone’s dead. That is the only way. 

The Jewish narrative of revenge – “in every generation” they want to kill us and we must pursue survival at any cost – is hard to lose. And once that narrative takes hold, revenge fuels the need to be right, to othering and dehumanization, the kind of generations’ deep hatred that allows and even justifies apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. 

The word “genocide” was created by the United Nations to describe Nazi atrocities against Jewish and Romani people. How excruciating that the state that claims to be the voice of the Jewish people is doing something so similar to the Palestinian people today. 

Like many of my Jewish friends – in Israel and the U.S. – I want to live separate from this exhausted and exhausting binary of “us vs. them.” But I too struggle to change the default mindset of so many generations. Continued fighting is easier; accepting the status of victim and choosing our words and actions as an endless, repeating and unending loop of the past, is so much easier. 

But it is never enough. A few days into Israel’s horrific bombing of Gaza, something shifted, and I felt for a brief second that each of us holds the whole Us, the ashes and dust, past and future all of Us. Once you see that, it is always there beckoning me forward, asking not only how did we get here, but what can I possibly do today to tend the grieving ones, to prevent further carnage? 

Again and again, I calm the part of me that wants to be right, that wants to live with what is known and can be known, that wants my separate self more than it wants all of Us – flawed and broken, each of us – building and living under a capacious and ever-expanding new tent. Every cell of my body is longing for and in that longing creating that tent: liberation here, now, right this minute, all of Us today. 

Later is now. We will never get it perfect. But if we cannot imagine and build peace and liberation for everyone, we will never get past where we find ourselves, raging and dying inside, right now. 

Calming our individual nervous systems is an essential tool of the nonviolent warrior. When I pause to make my cells peaceful, I can take daily actions to change the structures of oppression. 

A ceasefire is a collective pause, a nonviolent power move, a moment to calm our rage enough to uphold both our own experience and someone else’s as equally valid and true. 

Thank you to the beloved teachers who have gotten me to this moment: Arlan Hamilton @arlanwashere | Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie @amichailaulavie | Reverend Derrick McQueen @revdrrock | Resmaa Menachem @resmaa | Bayo Akomolafe @bayoakomolafe | and Anissia West @anissiawest. Next week I hope to share my thoughts about what a future tent might look like. If you have ideas about the posts that hold up that new tent – one where we can imagine our own and others’ traumas dissolved in future generations – I’d love to hear from you. No hating; nothing perfectly nasty or oppositional; we all need space to heal.