May 16

May 16 Flag Raising

Chicago, Demonstrations, Donald J. Trump, Parades, Performance, Public Declarations, Things to Do in Chicago

Chicago’s Palestinian community was scheduled to raise the Palestinian flag today during a 2:00 PM ceremony in Daley Plaza. This is one of many ceremonial flag raisings that take place in Daley Plaza throughout the year. The Armenians, Bulgarians, Ghanaians, Greeks, Indians, Jews, Moldovans, Poles, Ukrainians, and other heritage groups all hold similar flag raising ceremonies.

The city does not charge the groups when the ceremony is held during weekdays at noon. But there is a charge for weekend raisings. Typically, several people speak and culturally-appropriate musicians and dancers perform. Tweens and teenagers often take part in the performances, wearing traditional attire.

Today, nobody danced. One man sang the Palestinian National Anthem. Four men provided some music. Three beat large drums, while one played the bagpipes, which is not an instrument that I associate with Palestinians.

For the most part, the flag raising ceremonies are innocuous, largely devoid of political content. For the last several years, however, Chicago’s Palestinian community has used the ceremony to highlight the plight of the Palestinian people, so the speeches have taken on a far more political tone than typically is the case. That being said, today’s ceremony was less strident than previous ones. Yes, many of the speakers condemned Israel and recalled the hated Nakba, which the Wikipedia defines as:

[T]he ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs by Israel through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.[15] The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war in Mandatory Palestine as well as Israel's ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians.

But I sensed more ethnic pride today than anger.

I was downtown photographing architecture, so I headed to Daley Plaza for what I assumed would be a ceremony lasting no more than 45 minutes. Wrong! At 4:00 PM, the Palestinian flag finally made its ascent up the flagpole, which meant that rather than flying for six hours above Daley Plaza, the flag flew for only two hours.

Given Chicago’s cold and lousy spring, I should not complain about the heat, but standing on concrete for two hours with the hot afternoon sun beating down on me as speaker after speaker droned on was a little too much heat for me (and I suspect everybody else). By delaying the actual raising for two hours, the Palestinians stepped on their pomp and circumstance. By 3:30 PM, I suspect most in attendance were thinking, “Can you just raise the flag already?”

Over the two-hour period, the skies turned cloudy and the light breeze tapered off. When the flag finally reached its apex at the top of the flagpole, it languidly touched the metal pole.

Some 100 people attended, including many now familiar faces. Yet, this was not the weekly Saturday afternoon demonstrations of two years ago, when one thousand to two thousand demonstrators would turn out for a rally in Grant Park, then followed by a march. None of the local television stations sent camera crews..

Today’s relatively low attendance level was most likely due to the cessation of open hostilities in Gaza and the West Bank, although living amongst the rubble left by the Israeli bombardment certainly is no picnic. No doubt many of those who did not attend today are ready to take to the streets again should an errant Israeli missile kill a large number of people.

[Click on an Image to Enlarge It. The Images Are Not Necessarily in Exact Chronological Order]