I saw the sign

The local shopkeepers speak

I don’t know what happened between when I left for a 2-week vacation and returned, but some time during that period, the “Parkdale-High Park for a Free Palestine” signs went from an occasional feature (the coffee shop and bookstore that would clearly have these had them) to ubiquity.

It’s not just the stores whose crunchy, omnicause-embracing stance is part of their I don’t want to call it charm but specificity. It’s now the butcher the cheese shop an ice cream shop a birria taco place a takeout sushi place the high-end dress shop the too-posh-to-enter decor boutique etc etc to the point that you go up and down the main drag and it’s weird when a store doesn’t have this sign in the window.

Places I never in a million years would have thought would have a stance on Palestine have spoken, and why not? The signs are apparently being given out for free (no need to donate to freeing Palestine) so why not some homespun, local-aesthetic-embracing, tasteful-anticorporate-vibe signage? Who could possibly say no?

Here’s what’s nuts: When it was just the couple places I was sort of like, this is very them, and I am not going to stop going to the coffee shop or the bookstore because they are (probably? more on the ambiguity in a moment) to my left on this issue. There are almost certainly aspects of what motivated them to put this up that I would agree with! But the idea of THE WHOLE NEIGHBORHOOD having decided, in near-unison, to put up this sign has unnerved me in ways I cannot explain without sounding like a lunatic. I will allow lunacy as a possibility here, and will continue.

What does it mean, a free Palestine? If it means that this war is going terribly, that people including children are suffering and getting killed, and that the Palestinians deserve national autonomy then sure, yes, I’m on board for this, and urgently so.

If however it means that Jewish national autonomy is anathema, that the hoped-for “free” outcome involves freeing the region of (all, or all but the most doormattish) Jews, if it means saying here’s a people genocided in living memory who made do and found the only spot that would (kind of) have us and saying no, that place isn’t home, nor is anywhere, the world is better off without us, then no, I am not for a “free Palestine.”

If it means looking only at the suffering of one side, then I want none of this.

Has the neighborhood just issued a great big fuck-you-Jews message? Or has it not done this? I’m being driven crazy by not knowing how to interpret it. Because when in conjunction with lefty politics/omnicause aesthetics, I sort of think, fine, this is the new thing. But it is ordinary, square, run-of-the-mill businesses who have chosen this as the one thing in the world to break from an otherwise no-comment window display about. What does it mean?

What do the shopkeepers putting the signs up think? Are any of them Jewish? Why do the rare shops that don’t have signs up not have them, is it quiet resistance to the new thing or is it that they haven’t had a moment yet to put up the sign? Why does the every-leftist-message upscale accessories store, the one that stayed closed to indoor shopping for like 400 years’ worth of pandemic, long after lockdowns, not have the sign, this despite someone claiming the owner is all-in for the cause?

I could—this has been snarkily pointed out to me, as if I hadn’t considered it—go in and ask people what motivated them to put up the signs. I could do this and call it work!

I could also choose to be able to go about my business in the compartmentalized way I prefer, as both an observer of local-global events and a basic lady who goes to the fruit stand and the daycare and not a whole lot else, who buys the coffee beans that will one day free Palestine on occasions when the beans from the place whose pastries I prefer, whose stance on geopolitics is unknown, is not convenient enough.