It was deja vu all over again. Suddenly, I was a teenager once more.



The year is 1968, the place Chicago, my hometown. I am standing amidst huge throngs of people - most of them in their teens or '20's - at the site of the Democratic National Convention, where the Democratic candidate for President will be chosen. A massive protest against the War in Vietnam is in progress for a third straight day, and, although there is a kind of circus atmosphere among the demonstrators, tensions are running extremely high. The huge crowd is chanting en masse, "1-2-3-4, we don't want your bloody war; 5-6-7-8, we don't want to escalate." Signs against politicians, the military-industrial complex and virtually every vestige of the Establishment are everywhere.



Facing off against the crowd are "Chicago's Finest," a wall of mounted police in riot gear. They are under strict orders by the Windy City's legendary, autocratic Mayor Richard J. Daley to hold back the crowd, to be brutal if necessary, but to show the protestors just who is "Boss."

(Mayor Daley's nickname).



Even from behind their plexi-glass masks, I can sense that the police - and the animals beneath them - are champing at the bit, waiting for the right opportunity to punish the "hippy-dippy flower children" for ruining what the Mayor had hoped would be a grand opportunity to show off the Second City to the world. (Daley had "won" the right for Chicago to host the Convention after securing JFK's razor-thin election victory eight years earlier, when he "delivered" a huge Democratic plurality in Chicago, swinging Illinois' electoral votes and the Presidency to Kennedy).



Now, the Mayor watched in abject fury as his golden prize was becoming severely tarnished.



All at once, the cops on horseback charged the crowd. With their metal-tipped batons swinging indiscriminately, they beat the defenseless protestors with Cossack-like ferocity, smashing skulls and breaking limbs.



The TV cameras rolled with the punches, capturing the horrendous scenes in bloody, living color. By the time the smoke had cleared and the hundreds of wounded removed to the hospital, the vivid scene of Chicago at war had been indelibly imprinted upon the American psyche.



The Democratic Convention, along with the JFK assassination and Woodstock, would become the defining image of the tumultuous '60's. It would shake the American political system - bringing down one President and leading to the impeachment of another - and would ultimately help to end the disastrous Vietnam debacle, leaving the heavily armed United States gun-shy for more than two decades. In many ways, the kids came out on top.



All these scenes rushed back to me as I watched the recent confrontations at Amona. Again, idealistic young people stood on one side while armed, mounted policemen stood on the other. To be sure, there were those protestors who over-stepped their bounds and acted disgracefully and violently towards government forces, just as some over-zealous kids in '68 threw bags of human feces at the police and taunted them with shouts of "Here, piggy, piggy." To be sure, there were hot-heads and agitators among the Israeli throng, just as Abie Hoffman and Tom Hayden ("Mr. Jane Fonda") had egged on the Convention crowd.



But for the most part, the cruelty and brutality were heavily weighted on the part of the police, not the protestors. Numerous innocents were clubbed and beaten for no reason other than they were there; the charge of the horses directly into the crowd did not distinguish between the peaceful and the provocateurs.



While there is plenty of blame on both sides, the playing field was not exactly even in Amona. After all, who should we expect to demonstrate more restraint and more control in crisis conditions: A 15 year-old student, already hurt, confused and frustrated by this summer's pullout from Gush Katif; or an adult in uniform, supposedly trained to carry out his job with precision and professionalism?



As the world gleefully watched the Jew vs. Jew violence, all the currency we had accumulated from the Gush Katif withdrawal - when soldiers accomplished their task with hugs and not head-breaking, where the tears far outnumbered the truncheons - vanished into thin air.

Something snapped that day, and this country crossed a red and bloody line.



What is most distressing to me about all this is the sheer cruelty displayed by our police, the "over-the-top" zealousness which they displayed while beating young boys and girls, even after the kids had been rendered helpless and lay on the ground. So extreme was their behavior that many protestors insisted they could not be Jewish. Indeed, the Talmud says that "if you detect a strain of cruelty in a person, you can rightly question his Jewish lineage."



When had we ever seen this kind of gratuitous violence? What, exactly, fueled this near-savage behavior? Why didn't the police use another form of crowd control, such as water hoses, or even tear gas? After all, these were not criminals or convicts on a rampage, nor were they drug addicts or vandals out to do reckless vandalism. These were good kids from good homes, who believe deeply in the sanctity of the land and are prepared to fight - and die, if necessary - in or out of uniform, to preserve the Jewish homeland. Surely they deserved better.



The knee-jerk reaction of acting Prime Minister Olmert to whitewash the police behavior and stonewall any investigation into their conduct was absolutely Daleyesque. He, too, stood by his troops to a fault, refusing to acknowledge any malfeasance of duty on their part and placing all the blame on the younger generation.



But youth must be served. Instinctively, our kids sense that there is something amiss here. A society that first encourages settlement, then retracts it, that demonizes the pioneers and cavalierly abandons them to their fate, that rolls back sacred principles at will and redefines the values always held dear, is a society that must be confronted and challenged. Thank G-d we have a younger generation that gives a damn, that has a cause, that cares deeply about what happens to this country.



Rather than beat back that impulse, we have to address it, nurture it and treat it with the respect it deserves.