Athens on a Sunday night. Street after street, Palestine flags spray-painted on the walls. Half a block from my hotel, I stumble into Palestina Meze Bar.

A corrugated shopfront reads: Zionist Not Welcome Here.

Zionist, singular? Just one? Guess they heard me coming.

Inside, a few patrons sit at wooden stools. Halloumi and hummus on the menu. I try to imagine eating with these slogans staring back at me in English, Arabic, Greek:

Freedom by Force By Any Means Necessary Reject Normalisation. Support the Resistance

Twenty-year-old me would have smirked in delight. Hell yeah! Power to the people!

I recognise the appeal, I do. These are saucy ideas. What clarity. What moral certainty.

All Israeli Soldiers are War Criminals

What? Everyone? Even my friend’s kid sister with the bad hair extensions? Raphi, who took so much acid he can’t string a sentence together, or Amy who wore huge sunglasses so the commanders couldn’t see her stoned red eyes.

You can take out the word ‘Soldiers’.

Like a drunk reaching for an open bottle, I step inside.

All over the bar are posters of faceless men with AK-47s. Youths with slingshots. A disabled man in a wheelchair, shirtless, hurling a rock. Burning American flags. Bleeding American flags. Hand grenades entwined with olive leaves. Yahya Sinwar as a boy, as an adult, bullet holes overlaid on his face. Glory to the Martyrs. They made a saint out of a demon.

“Want some food?” Asks the waitress, with a nervous smile. “Just taking some photographs. I like the images.” “I hope that’s what you really think,” says a curly-haired lady at the bar, eyeballing me.

Spotted: a red triangle over my head.

I was once a leftie like her. Self-righteous, all-knowing. Proudly holding a ‘Stop the War’ placard. I read those books, nodded along that indigenous people have a right to throw out their colonisers. That it has to be violent.

What a neat idea. Make the bad guys go away with a blink of a pen. And here we are again, twenty years later. Now the pen is pointed at me.

‘At Any Cost’ hisses the wall.

I walk out as fast as I can. When I turn over my shoulder, they look back. I imagine myself in a Hammer horror movie: in every direction FREE PALESTINE, FREE GAZA, FUCK ZIONISTS ring out through the urban sprawl.

The living mannequins in this scene wrap their heads in white-and-black keffiyehs, pull out granddad’s old communist rifle, chase me down uneven streets, call me an Imperialist, an Occupier, hoist me up, redden their hands in my guts, globalise their intifada.

Back at the hotel, I’m shaking.

I used to love this neighbourhood, the overflowing bars, grungy antique stores, piles of second-hand books around the organic market, bearded intellectuals, a pet shop on every block. Just a short walk away, a breathtaking view of the Acropolis, the happy shadow of Socrates, Aristophanes, the birthplace of Reason.

Athens, I thought we were cool.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)