About three hours later, a small group of twentysomethings gathered at the 15th Street Clothespin to hand out fliers reiterating the opposition of "U.S. Jews" to Israel's recent (and past) behavior. Among them were Alissa Wise, a 27-year-old rabbinical student, and her cousins, Nava and Yonah EtShalom. Nava, 25, is a poet who was recently awarded a prestigious Pew fellowship. Yonah, 24, is an activist who considers herself neither a "she" nor a "he" — preferring the gender-neutral pronouns "they" or "ze."

Alissa, Nava, Yonah and about 15 other Philadelphians were participating in a "Day of Solidarity" with activists in the San Francisco Bay Area and in New York, where activists staged a "die-in" at Penn Station — they laid down and pretended to be dead, in a representation of the civilian death toll in Lebanon. All three protests were organized by what Alissa calls "Jewish-identified people."

"Jews, basically," she clarifies.

The cousins know from Jews. All three grew up in religious households with Zionist relatives, and spent time in Israel in their youth. But gradually (and independently — Nava and Yonah didn't meet Alissa until their 20s), they grew skeptical of Israel's international policies.

"I [had gotten] the 'land without a people for a people without a land'" spiel, says Alissa. When she began to learn about the Palestinians and the occupied territories, "I felt really betrayed by my family."

Her family thought the betrayal was the other way around. When Alissa "came out," as she describes her shift in political convictions, her brother refused to go on a vacation with her. More recently, a cousin considered taking out an ad in her hometown's Jewish paper, denouncing her and her beliefs.

The views that Alissa's family finds so heretical are fairly consistent with traditional leftist positions vis-a-vis Israel: there is a cycle of violence; Israel, as the stronger participant, is causing not just more casualties among its rivals, but also a prolonged state of destitution and misery; therefore, it is Israel's (and, as its benefactor, the United States') responsibility to break the cycle.

In spite of the cousins' connections to the country — there is a street in Jerusalem named after their mutual ancestor, Yosef Rivlin — they express little sympathy for the Israeli predicament. When it's pointed out that Hezbollah initiated the latest round of violence, Alissa says, "Hezbollah's intent was to promote a prisoner swap," and Israel's response "seemed a little bit too calculated to have been a reaction to what Hezbollah did." When it's pointed out that Hezbollah rejects Israel's right to exist, she argues, "Those situations aren't static." If Israel used diplomacy instead of force, she believes, it could break the cycle and win the acceptance of its neighbors.

Nava even expresses doubts about Israel's current incarnation as a Jewish state. "I stopped believing in the state of Israel as a liberatory project," she says.

Often, this sort of sentiment is met with charges of anti-Semitism, especially from older generations of Jews who see Israel as a necessary haven for a persecuted people. Indeed, last Tuesday, one middle-aged man said to the cousins, "Oh, you're Jew-haters," as he passed.

"No, we're Jews," Alissa replied.

The man blanched. "You're a disgrace to the Jewish people," he said. "Better you should let the Moslems come in and murder the Jews ... You don't look like you got all your marbles."

He climbed onto a bus.

Of course, "self-hating Jews" exist, too. The activists concede that anti-Israel sentiment is sometimes rooted in anti-Semitism. "There are wingnuts who say Israel's part of an international conspiracy," Nava says. But, she insists, "it's not anti-Jewish to criticize Israel ... this isn't about Jews. It's about a Jewish state."

She makes this point later to a woman who says, "It's terrible the Jews are doing this, considering what happened to them." Nava tells the woman that she's Jewish herself, and the woman expresses pleasant surprise.

This is the sort of result the activists hope to achieve — to, as Nava puts it, "interrupt" the perceived consensus about Israel in the Jewish community.

"I feel less safe [as a Jew] in the world when Israel's acting in my name," Alissa says.

And so they work the lunch crowd, passing out fliers that catalog U.S. military assistance to Israel, trying to catch the eyes of passersby, and telling anyone they can draw into conversation that "We are Jews."

"It's surprising," says Nava, "how surprised people are."

(doron@citypaper.net)