In the mass of photographs and footage from pro-Palestine protests shared around the world this year, one group seems to have garnered particular attention: older women. They’ve been captured marching, demonstrating outside political institutions, targeting weapons factories, sharing lessons from earlier activism at university encampments, and standing up to the police, with captions and placards often making a point of their age and sex.
To point this out is not, I hope, to be tokenistic. People of all ages are involved in activism and organising, and older women will necessarily be a part of that coalition. But many of those older women themselves seem to recognise the particular power their identity holds, in the way it rebukes the common association of “grannies” with frailty and makes an obvious lie of the establishment’s suggestion that pro-Palestine protesters are all naive youths. And it’s a power on which one new Jewish group, North London Peaceniks, is capitalising. …..more
