Rachel Is at a Protest, by Esther Alter

SUMMER 2024, SHORT STORY, 4500 WORDS

The Second Intifada, September 2003. There is a student protest in response to Israel’s raids in Rafah that Rachel skips to go camping with four college friends and her old buddy Long, who is hiking the Appalachian Trail to discover himself or whatever. Rachel parks the car at the campground and waits a few anxious hours before Long—that’s his A.T. name—finally emerges from the trailhead. Rachel and Long bro-hug and her college friends politely say that it’s nice to meet him. One girl, the awkward one in the group, the one Long is going to fuck later, shakes his hand. Long starts shouting jubilantly that it’s so cool to meet Rachel here, he hasn’t had cell service in days, but like fuck cell phones man and fuck cars too because if you’re organized, if you sit with your thoughts and lay them out in front of you, all you need to meet up with old friends is a plan and a pair of good hiking boots.

Once Long has gotten all that exposition out of the way he starts to hit on one of Rachel’s friends, a lesbian who shrugs off Long for like an hour until he gets the message and switches to the other one, the awkward one, Ellen, who is here to have fun and take risks. Rachel is spiraling in secondhand embarrassment listening to Ellen listening to Long explaining how to start a fire. It takes him three tries.

Rachel smokes weed and watches the flames. She’s the only Jew here. Back on campus, people were pressuring her all week to join the protest and everyone else was pressuring her to join the counter-protest. When you’re a nineteen-year-old Jewish definitely-man in 2003 on a college campus, you need to either learn or unlearn the Zionism your parents taught you. Rachel just really wants to not fucking care about faraway Rafah. She thumbs the Star of David hanging on a chain around her neck. On impulse, she walks toward the restrooms, she goes behind the building, she takes off the star and chain, she finds a rock, she places the star and chain under the rock. Fuck it. From now on, she promises herself, she’s a normal guy with normal friends.

She falls asleep listening to Long and Ellen and dreams of being burned alive.

She wakes up coughing and her first thought is that the fire is still smoldering. It isn’t. The firepit is very cold.

Operation Cast Lead, January 2009. Roughly one thousand and three hundred Gazans die. Rachel is at a protest in Boston. The speaker is describing how the Israelis are dropping leaflets telling the residents of a superlatively densely populated open-air prison to go somewhere else because their homes are about to be destroyed by missiles. Rachel is far away from the speaker because she arrived late. She was feeling dysphoric about her injuries and it took her a while to get out of the apartment. She tried to apply makeup for like the fourth time ever to conceal a bruise on her lower jaw before giving up. Maybe no one will notice. She tried on a bunch of outfits before finally opting for a tunic that she is fond of because she doesn’t know yet that it’s not a good fit, leggings to conceal her black-and-blue calves and shins, her well-worn tennis shoes, and her bulky winter coat that fully covers the tunic.

She’s exhausted. She hasn’t slept more than a few hours a night because she keeps having nightmares of Nazis breaking into her house. The circumstances vary. Sometimes she’s doing an Anne Frank. Sometimes it’s early in the Nazis’ rise to power but her father is a political enemy (she’s a child in this version). Sometimes she’s still at home because there was nowhere to go. Sometimes, in a way that’s only possible when you have nightmares, it’s a blend of several houses, several intrusions. But after that, the dreams are always the same. She’s beaten with batons while the Gestapo call her a filthy Jew. They drag her outside by her arms. She tries to wriggle free to kick them, to sweep their legs, or maybe even to run, but a third man, the metal on his uniform sparkling in the moonlight, kicks her in the kidney, and all resistance leaves her. They drag her out of the house and make her stand. Every night, that’s when Rachel wakes up, with fresh bruises. At first Rachel thought that they might be the product of thrashing in bed, but she can’t imagine how. She keeps getting more, always where the dream-Nazis beat her—across her chest, and on her left shin, and on her lower jaw.

Rachel blinks, coming out of a daze. There’s a new speaker, a Palestinian immigrant. He’s condemning Israel’s use of white phosphorous. He starts to describe how the weapon burns its victims’ clothing and skin before he abruptly stops, overcome by emotion. The crowd, maybe a couple hundred people, is shouting “SHAME! SHAME!” at Israel. Loudest of all are the handful of Jews. Not in our name. Never again.

There’s a nearby counter-protest of Zionist Jews. Rachel can’t see them but she can infer their presence. They’re probably holding up the usual signs and chanting that Israel has the right to exist. They’re probably incredulous that these anti-Semites are so naive as to think that Israel has an alternative response to terrorist rocket fire that doesn’t compromise the security of the state. Rachel didn’t tell any Jews—family, friends, anyone—that she was going to be here, doing this. She started caring about atrocities committed in her name around the time she came out and her parents and sisters have only just started to reluctantly acknowledge that Rachel is Rachel, so it feels like that’s enough politics for now.

She hasn’t told anyone at all about the physical pain. Since the air strikes began, she’s been assiduous in never walking around the apartment in a towel if her roommate is around. When the march starts, some people notice that she’s limping, and they glance at her and immediately look away. Rachel feels one pair of eyes lingering, a cis man in his late sixties. He’s staring at her ankle, which is exposed because the leggings are too short. But what is there to say to him? Everything about this moment is collective and public and loud. There’s no way to explain that no, she isn’t being abused and no, this is not a sports injury and no, this is not consensual.

They march in Boston’s bitter cold for an hour and a half before dispersing. The cis man approaches Rachel while she’s sitting on a park bench. He’s wearing a winter coat and tailored pants. He’s balding. He asks if he can sit next to her and she says yes.

She doesn’t process what he says at first but suddenly she’s babbling about how fucking lonely she is and how this bullshit in Gaza is never going to end. The Israelis are going to kill Palestinians until there’s no one left to kill.

The old man listens. His eyes are very serious and very cutting. When Rachel finishes talking, he responds slowly and insistently, hand gestures emphasizing every beat and pause of his diction.

“You’re not alone. I’m a Jew, so you and I are connected, even though we will never see each other again. This is a chance encounter, but two strangers may learn great wisdom from each other. And I want you to know that peace can blossom suddenly. No one expected Israel would ever be at peace with Egypt until the very day that Sadat boarded that airplane. You may despair today, but you don’t know that it won’t end tomorrow.”

Operation Pillar of Defense, November 2012. One hundred and sixty Gazans die. Rachel is at a protest. She’s been having the dreams again. This time, they end at the train. The Nazis beat her, drag her out of the house, and march her to the train. The freight car’s sliding door closes. That’s when she wakes up. Each time, she’s momentarily blind, like there isn’t any light in the world and there never was, until just now, and she has new bruises on her limbs.

The air is crisp and dry today. The protesters are marching to Scott Brown’s office, where they’re going to shout a list of demands over a megaphone.

Rachel is standing next to the most gorgeous transwoman that she’s ever met. She has long straight dirty-blond hair and she’s wearing a denim jacket and one of those collars that coyly could be either a goth thing or a kink thing or both. She has tall leather boots and right now she’s smiling at Rachel and radiating curiosity and confidence. Rachel finds herself not caring what the protest’s demands are. Do they really think that Scott fucking Brown gives a shit about their demands? She hobbles over to the transwoman. Today, she has one good leg and one bad leg.

“I like your collar,” she says.

“I like your eyes,” the transwoman says. “I’m Nora. Nice to meet you.”

They chat a little bit more until it’s clear that they should peel off from the crowd. They get pizza at Sal’s and walk slowly around the Common, Nora doing her best to match her pace with Rachel’s. Nora is predictably really into synthesizers, which Rachel is finally predictably getting into as well, so they talk about noisy machines for a while before they exchange numbers and go their separate ways.

Over the next few days, their flirting is relentless. One night, Rachel wakes up from a dream in which she’s pulled from a Righteous Gentile’s house and beaten and put on a train. The train leaves the station and she suffocates and starves among the dying, standing in communal diarrhea until she wakes up gasping for as much air as she can fill her lungs with, for several minutes, until she’s finally breathing steadily again. Without thinking, she unlocks her phone and sends a flurry of texts, each pointedly asking Nora to do something specific to her. Nora responds in the morning: “OK ;)”

They can’t meet that night because Nora needs to do something for work. The following night, Rachel goes to Nora’s house. Some of Rachel’s requests are too intense for Nora (at least, as a first date) but she’s been looking forward to grabbing this needy dyke’s hair and slapping her pretty body. She sees the marks on Rachel and makes a sly comment about how her slut has been busy this week. Rachel keeps begging for more until her thighs are red and swollen. She safewords, and Nora cradles her while she cries. It was hot up until that moment and then Rachel is overcome with guilt that she didn’t tell Nora what she just reenacted. She falls asleep in Nora’s arms. The ceasefire is declared the following day.

Operation Protective Edge, July through August 2014. Well over two thousand Gazans die. Rachel is at a protest, the first of several she’ll attend. She’s holding hands with her fiancé, Aiden, this being a year or so before “Aiden” became the name that is overused. Rachel is unsteady on her feet and breathing shallowly. It hurts to march. When she read on Twitter about the commencement of Israel’s air strikes, she started to sob, both for the imminent massacre and for her own imminent suffering. Aiden understood the first cause and didn’t know about the second until she confessed her nightmares and their waking truths to him. Aiden, a practicing witch, took it in stride and said he just wished the two of them could communicate better. He offered a tarot reading. He drew three swastika-emblazoned cards from the deck. He yelled in alarm and threw all the cards away from him.

He suggested that Rachel might be haunted by an ancestor, so they got onto one of those Mormon sites and fished out some information from Rachel’s aunts and uncles (she still wasn’t on good speaking terms with her parents). All her grandparents arrived on Ellis Island at the turn of the century, but there was still one-step-removed family to account for. On Rachel’s mother’s side, her grandmother lost all twelve of her aunts and uncles, though no one knew how. One cousin survived. His family lives in Tel Aviv. Rachel’s grandfather’s family all died in Treblinka—there were records. On Rachel’s father’s side, Granddad’s family was mostly annihilated, with one cousin dying as a partisan, two surviving and moving to Israel, and the rest murdered, and Grandma had a small family that was wiped out in Warsaw except for one half-cousin whose family is now in Chicago.

All this left Rachel exhausted. There were so many of them. It could be any of their ghosts. Or it could be none of them.

Aiden suggests they try to summon people in her dream. Rachel shakes her head: “Why the fuck would I want to summon a Nazi?”

Rachel’s dreams now get her as far as the death camp. She’s on the train for several days before the doors open. She stays awake for three days, until she starts hallucinating, and finally gives in, and she wakes up with pain in her stomach and all along her arms and starts shouting at Aiden that he’s the one hurting her. Aiden swears he literally didn’t touch her all night but she doesn’t believe him. He gets out of bed and goes to the couch, where he sleeps until the Israeli bloodlust is satiated a few weeks later. Every night, he hears Rachel thrashing and moaning in the bedroom. Belatedly, he suggests over breakfast that Rachel see a doctor. She looks down at her cereal and mutters something unintelligible about being gaslit.

Rachel is now standing with Aiden and some mutual friends. The speaker just finished talking about a Gazan ice cream truck. It had been requisitioned to store murdered bodies because they couldn’t be buried fast enough. Aiden takes Rachel by the arm to keep her steady as they start to march. In her other hand, Rachel is holding a hand-drawn sign of the borders of Israel/Palestine superimposed on the colors of the Palestinian flag. There’s maybe a thousand people here. There’s protests like this one throughout the country, throughout the world, and none of them will change a fucking thing.

It’s a hot sunny day. She asks Aiden to pass her the water bottle. It takes her a few tries because the chanting is deafening. Never again means never again. What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now.

She tries to reach for the water bottle while still holding onto Aiden and her sign, and she feels a sharp pain in her leg that causes her to stumble and start to fall. Several people behind her catch her. Their gentle, forceful arms and hands, pushing her back onto her feet, is the most soothing sensation she’s felt in weeks.

The Great March of Return, April 2018. Around two hundred and twenty-five Gazans die. Rachel is at a protest watching her friends get arrested. A few brave souls chained themselves to the entrance of the Israeli consulate and chanted the usual chants until the cops arrived. Rachel was at the meeting when they first called for volunteers. A cute butch plainly explained the risks. Rachel had never been arrested before but she started crying and laughing and said, “Sure, I’ll do it, I don’t give a shit,” and something in her tone and the way her trans body shuddered caused the butch to look right at her and say, “No. Please don’t.”

The pogroms of May 2021. Around three hundred Palestinians die.

Rachel dreams of being gassed to death. In the daylight hours, her lungs burn. At the protest, everyone stays away from her because her dry cough sounds like COVID.

The Gazan genocide, October 2023 through present.

Rachel is at one of many protests—she’s lost count. Aiden is home with Ezra. She insisted that she’d be okay on her own. It’s a global warm-ily hot day, but she’s wearing long sleeves to cover the burns and an N95 to protect people from her coughing and to protect her face from photos. There’s a drone flying overhead and she’s trying not to make eye contact with it. She’s sweaty and uncomfortable and her limbs hurt. There’s the usual deep, dull pain, a product of years of getting hate-crimed in her sleep. And there’s new, fresh injuries as well.

A Palestinian is speaking. Rachel has by this point heard countless firsthand accounts from Palestinians who have lost their families, again, who have cousins buried under rubble, again, whose corpses are in ice cream trucks, again, who don’t know which family members are still alive. After the speech, the crowd starts marching to the JFK building to get some people pointlessly arrested, again, and demand a ceasefire, again, as if Elizabeth fucking Warren gives a shit about their demands.

There are thousands of screaming, despairing people. Never again means never again. From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free. Free free free Palestine. What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. Intifada intifada. Some loud men to her right are trying to reappropriate a Vietnam-era chant, replacing L-B-J with Joe-Bi-Den, and it’s not working. She passes by a lone, defiant Zionist on the sidelines holding a sign that says FREE THE HOSTAGES. Another guy of ambiguous allegiance holds a sign that says READ GLENN GREENWALD.

Seemingly everyone wants to assign blame. It’s the settler colonialists’ fault (correct). It’s America’s fault (correct). It’s both sides (wrong). It’s Hamas, who are literally Nazis. It’s all Palestinians, who are all Nazis. It’s the Israeli government, literally Nazi Germany. It’s Netanyahu, literally Hitler. It’s Biden, literally Hitler. It’s somehow Trump, whom everyone knows is literally Hitler. The school administrators who suspend student groups because saying the word “intifada” on campus is equivalent to Nazism are themselves Nazis. The Zionists are acting on their cultural trauma instead of with compassion, which makes them literally Nazis. This is why no one wants to talk about the Holocaust with Rachel. Nearly a century of comparing literally every atrocity to Nazism has saturated public and private discourse. Rachel’s queer kheverim always try to emphasize Palestinian narratives and voices. We are constantly, in every waking moment, grieving the tens of thousands of murdered Palestinians. We are also bracing for the day when this fucking country finally turns on us and the Jews devour their own, but it’s too embarrassing to actually say it. Only the Zionists actually say it.

On the night of October 7, Aiden and Rachel read the news and Aiden unilaterally declares that he will sleep on the couch and tend to Rachel’s injuries in the morning. Rachel’s dream is the same every night, and it’s now strictly linear. The Nazis break down the door of her home—not someone else’s home anymore—and beat her until she stops resisting. They see her in a dress, a degenerate Communist homosexual Jew, and almost shoot her then and there but the man with the gun loses his nerve and angrily drags her out of the house. She doesn’t make a sound. They threaten her until she stands up and march her through the streets to the train station and onto the train. It’s a cool evening. The train is packed with Jews. The door shuts. She stands in shit for a few days. The doors open. She’s marched to the gas chamber. She breathes in the rat poison. And she doesn’t die, because this is a dream, and even in some of the most fucked-up dreams you’re still beyond death. But she doesn’t live either. She gets thrown into a heap with the corpses in a pit dug by Sonderkommandos. The corpses, and her living body, are set ablaze, and that’s when she wakes up. Then Aiden wakes up, and he applies ice to her bruises and realigns the splint on the hairline fracture on her arm and applies antiseptic cream and bandages on the burns while Rachel weeps and checks her phone to learn how many Palestinians have died since the last time she checked her phone, how much of Gaza no longer exists, how many more Zionists are salivating at the chance to build settlements, which hospitals still have electricity, how long the communications blackout has lasted, how many journalists have died, how many children have been executed.

When the ground invasion begins, Rachel’s screams are so loud that someone in the building calls the cops. Aiden and Rachel assure them that it was just a bad dream, but cops continue to circle the building at night. At least, that’s how it is for the first few nights. But then it stops always being the cops. Rachel can tell when she peeks through the blinds to look at their uniforms. Sometimes it’s American cops. Sometimes it’s German Nazis. Sometimes it’s Israeli soldiers monitoring a dissenting self-hating Jew, an enemy of the state and its people. Ezra knows something’s wrong, but he’s too young to articulate the question or to understand the answer. To prove to herself and others that she’s not crazy, Rachel takes some photos. They are terrible nighttime photos, but the regalia is still obvious and clear. She talks to her closest Jewish friends, who first blush and look at the floor before Rachel shoves the phone in their faces and makes them see. It doesn’t make any sense to them but two of them volunteer to take shifts. That night they watch German Nazis watch their friend’s house. This is real, they realize. But no one knows what to do about it because in the real world this is just how things work now.

Rachel’s in bad shape. She’s frail. She’s learning how to walk with a cane. Her hair has gone white. She’s forty years old but looks much older. When she loses her job for being an anti-Semite, she starts going to as many protests as she can because, like, fuck it, I guess.

Rachel finally remembers the Star of David and the chain. She can’t remember the name of the campsite. She tries to contact Long and learns that he died of a drug overdose a few years ago. She had no idea. She tries Ellen, whom she fell out of touch with a long time ago. Ellen is the sort of autistic queer who doesn’t need to ask for more context and immediately gives Rachel the location. Rachel checks the map. There are six campsites in a ring. She has no idea which one she was at, so she checks behind the restroom of each of them. She doesn’t find the necklace because guess what there’s lots of rocks and guess what she doesn’t remember which rock and guess what she was high and she dug at the ground with her foot. Maybe someone in the past twenty years found it and took it. Maybe a crow spotted something shiny and gave it to a human friend.

Her phone has decided to start giving her push notifications of Al Jazeera’s latest casualty count and she can’t figure out how to get it to stop. She drives back from the campsite with the GPS on and has to periodically swipe away the friendly reminders. Every hour, fifteen Palestinians die, and the assault on Rafah hasn’t even started. At home, she tries meditating to find inner calm but then her phone decides to start sending her push notifications to remind her to meditate. She swipes them away while IDF soldiers silently watch her apartment window. She takes long deep breaths with her blistered lungs. She considers doing something that she won’t empower with a name and decides not to. Her friends are beautiful and wonderful and they periodically go to her house to check in with her. They hug her gently while Rachel silently reminisces about Nora’s strength. She later tells Aiden about that night, and the roleplay she never asked for. Aiden has topped her in innumerable fucked-up scenes but this is too much. Rachel gets drunk and cries and thinks, well, maybe the past doesn’t have any answers for us. The next morning, she has a black eye and broken teeth.

A few days after the emergency dentist visit, she picks up Ezra from school and drives to Revere Beach. Ezra is telling her about their new best friend’s neopronouns but their speech is so slurry that she has no idea what they’re saying. She asks them to repeat a few times before accepting that this is just going to be an unanswerable mystery until she meets the parents. Ezra then asks, “Why are you a girl?”

Rachel, driving, glances at the backseat in the mirror and says, “When I was your age, everyone thought they were a boy or a girl, even though some of them weren’t.” This isn’t really true but it feels too complicated to explain how her identity changed as she accessed more nuanced language.

“Are you sometimes not a girl?” Ezra asks.

“Sometimes,” Rachel reluctantly concedes, “but I think you’ll have to teach me how to talk about it.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” Ezra says. “You just ask.”

They get to the beach. Rachel helps Ezra zip their coat back on. They look for seashells and Ezra asks questions about waves until they get tired and it’s time to go home.

That night, as Gazans continue to be murdered, she has the same dream, only this time. Only this time. She escapes out of a window before the Nazis arrive. She runs through back alleys. She gets aboard a ship—it’s not clear in the dream how this happens—and goes from one blood-soaked continent to another. She’s one of the lucky few, in this dream. Absolutely everyone she has ever known dies but she, personally, is a descendant of those who lived. She moves to Boston. She starts HRT. She gets enmeshed in dyke drama. She gets really into synthesizers. She meets Aiden. She raises Ezra to be wiser than those who came before them. And then she wakes up to a dark iron-gray sky. Aiden is making coffee and for the first time in a long time, it feels like morning.

February 2024
Dedicated to the man I met at a protest who I’ll never see again.

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