On a three-dog January night in southside San Antonio, a brightly painted coffee-and-beer joint burbles to life with a bundled-up crowd, chiefly young and hip, many sporting black-and-white keffiyehs—the scarves that serve as worldwide symbols of solidarity with Palestine. Ringing a spacious side yard, vendors arrange wares on tables. Music equipment for a DJ and band waits on a covered patio. String lights line the property’s perimeter.
The occasion: a show and market billed as “Puro Pinche Palestina,” a coinage that would only suffer from direct translation but that is basically a very San Antonio way of declaring support for the Palestinian cause. A pair of “mutual aid” groups—peer-to-peer alternatives to traditional charities—planned the evening. The event’s earnings will go to an outfit called San Antonio for Justice in Palestine (SAJP), which is pushing for local responses, such as a city council ceasefire resolution, to the horrors unfolding in the Levan