    Re: Lone fighter

    From Noel Ignatiev

    Dear Shamir,

    I applaud your reprinting (message 388) your March 2002 article “The
    Battle for Palestine,” in which you called upon Israelis of conscience
    to cross over and fight on the side of the native Palestinians. U.S.
    history offers an example of one who did just that: On October 16, 1859,
    John Brown, a “pitchpine Yankee” from Connecticut, led a band of
    twenty-two men in an attack on a government arsenal in Harpers Ferry,
    Virginia, with the aim of seizing weapons for a war against slavery. The
    raid failed militarily, but it succeeded in other ways: In the six weeks
    between his capture and his hanging, Brown was the focus of national
    attention. Millions, including many who thought his act ill-advised,
    cheered his courage and acknowledged sympathy for his goal. Thoreau
    declared Brown the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century Puritan hero;
    Emerson said his hanging would make the gallows as glorious as the
    cross. As usual, Wendell Phillips, the great abolitionist, saw farthest;
    in a speech at Brown’s gravesite on December 8, he said Brown had
    “abolished slavery in Virginia…. History will date Virginia Emancipation
    from Harpers Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest
    uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months—a year or two.
    Still, it is timber, not a tree.”

    Brown, said Phillips, “startled the South into madness.” The
    slaveholders reacted with fury to the raid: they imposed a boycott on
    northern manufactures, demanded new concessions from the government in
    Washington, and began preparing for war.

    When they sought to portray Brown as a representative of northern
    opinion, southern leaders were wrong: he represented only a small
    minority. But they were also right, for he expressed the hopes that
    still persisted in the northern people despite decades of cringing
    before the slaveholders. By the arrogance of their demands, the
    slaveholders compelled the people of the north to resist.

    Phillips attributed Lincoln’s election to John Brown’s raid. Lincoln’s
    election touched off the Civil War. And the Civil War, which began with
    both sides fighting for slavery (the South to take it out of the Union,
    the north to keep it in) was transformed within two years into an
    antislavery war, and a grand army went marching through the land singing
    (to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”) “As He died to make men holy, let
    us die to make men free.”

    On the one hundred forty-fifth anniversary of Harpers Ferry, John Brown
    remains the only “white” man to be universally revered by black people,
    even as he is regarded by whites (if he is remembered at all) as crazy.
    But one John Brown—against a background of slave resistance and
    abolitionist agitation—was enough to bring down slavery.

    Who will be the John Brown of Palestine?

    Noel Ignatiev

    Boston