In 1978 Abie Nathan went on a hunger strike for "peace" sic. Nathan was a radical Leftist, and I had no sympathy for his politics, but I loved the music on his pirate radio station.
A good friend called me and asked that I join her to protest Abie Nathan's hunger strike at his tent. We were a few Anglo women manning the counter-demonstration, I being the youngest by a generation. (The older women were younger than I am today.)
Nathan didn't have much of a support crew; I only remember one young girl/woman. She must have felt "threatened" by our superior numbers, and she began to shout out to the passersby:
"Don't listen to those ladies. They're not Israeli!!!"
I don't know what got into me, but I marched into Abie Nathan's tent, where he was resting, and I said to him:
"I don't think you'd like what your young follower is saying. She claims we're not Israeli, because our English is far better than our Hebrew. We're olim, so we're Israeli."
Abie Nathan apologized, agreeing that we are certainly Israelis, and by then the young follower had also entered the tent. She was asked what she had against immigrants and admitted that her parents had made aliyah with her when she was a baby. That meant that she, too, was an olah. I then made the point that our aliyot were superior to hers, since we did it for idealistic reasons. Abie Nathan agreed.
That's my Abie Nathan story.
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