Nonviolence could actually do it, at least in
fully securing the rights of resident Palestinians and creating trust between
the two cultures. This is at least
something new and it opposes and displaces the present political dispensation
which has lived by sustaining the conflict.
For the Palestinians real peace was always there
to be accepted and managed simply because it was always in Israel’s interest
today it is completely clear that the Palestinians are completely on their
own. All possible allies are gone into their own
morass and any resolution will never be good news for Palestine. So with all other bad options fully explored,
perhaps it is time for accommodation.
This starts with nonviolent confrontation and an
open dialogue. The prize is Israeli investment
in infrastructure and job producing industry to produce a modernizing state. Do it while no one is really looking.
My Surprisingly Inspiring Trip to the West Bank:
Echoes of Our Civil Rights Movement
Wednesday, 28
August 2013 12:54
As I prepared for a
grueling fact-finding trip to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank (occupied
for 46 years), Secretary of State Kerry announced that Israel and the
Palestinian Authority had agreed to resume peace talks without
preconditions.
On the day my delegation flew to the region, Israel announced that
it had approved still more housing for Israeli settlers: “Israel has issued
tenders for the construction of nearly 1,200 housing units in occupied East
Jerusalem and the West Bank,” reported London’s Financial
Times, “defying U.S. and Palestinian opposition to expansion of Jewish
settlements three days before the scheduled start of peace talks.”
It’s the same old
depressing story, with Israel showing little interest in making peace.
So before I turn to
what’s surprising and inspiring in the West Bank, let’s acknowledge the bad
news: Palestinians are slowly being squeezed out of their homes, deprived of
their water and centuries-old olive groves, humiliated on a daily basis by
Israeli settlers and the Israeli state in a relentless violation of their human
rights that gets worse as much of the world looks away.
But here’s the good
news: Across the West Bank, Israel’s occupation has given rise in recent years
to a nonviolent “popular resistance” movement that should be an inspiration to
people across the globe. This unarmed resistance has persisted in the
face of Israeli state violence (aided by U.S.-supplied weapons and tear gas),
lengthy jail sentences for nonviolent protesters and widespread detention and abuse of children.
It was fitting to return
to the U.S. on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington because
Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy of militant nonviolence were invoked by
Palestinian activists in virtually every village and town I visited as part of
the fact-finding delegation.
Like King, leaders
of the Palestinian popular resistance – from intellectuals to grassroots
villagers who’d been repeatedly jailed – spoke to us about universal human
rights, about a human family in which all deserve equal rights regardless of
religion or nationality. “We are against the occupation, not against the Jews,”
was the refrain among Palestinian activists. “We have many Jews and Israelis
who support us.”
It was indeed inspiring
to meet several of the brave Israelis who’ve
supported the nonviolent resistance, often putting themselves in the frontline
of marches (their jail sentences are tiny compared to what’s dished out to
Palestinians). They are admittedly a small minority, thoroughly ostracized
within Israel – a society that seems as paranoid and militaristic today as our
country during the McCarthyite Fifties.
NABI SALEH:
In this village near Ramallah that’s being squeezed by settlers, a leader of
the local popular resistance waxed
poetic about Israelis who’ve supported their struggle: “After we started the
popular resistance in 2009, we saw a different kind of Israeli, our partner. We
see them as our cousin – a different view than the Israeli as soldier shooting
at us, or the settler stealing, or the jailer shutting the cell on us.” The
story of Nabi Saleh was compellingly told in an atypical New York Times
Magazine article by Ben Ehrenreich, “Is This Where the Third
Intifada Will Start?”
“It’s not easy to be
nonviolent, but no soldier has been killed by a stone,” said activist leader
Manal Tamimi. “We want to show the world we are not terrorists. On CNN, Fox
News, we’re just terrorists, suicide bombers. I was in the states; you never
hear of settlers attacking Palestinians.”
As we were leaving her
house, Manal added: “You need to be our messengers because your tax money is
killing us. You are our brothers in humanity, but you are part of the
killing.”
Like our 1964 civil
rights martyrs in Mississippi – Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman – Nabi Saleh
reveres its martyrs: Mustafa Tamimi and Rushdi Tamimi.
BIL’IN: If you saw
the Oscar-nominated documentary “5 Broken Cameras,”
then you know of the seven-year-long, partly-successful battle by the villagers
of Bil’in to drive back Israel’s “separation wall” (aka the Apartheid Wall) –
which was positioned to confiscate nearly 60 percent of their land, separating
farmers from their fields and olive trees. It’s an inspiring story of
courageous nonviolence, with international activists (and Israelis) flocking to
Bil’in to support the villagers’
resistance.
“Internationals” who
live in the West Bank and put their bodies on the line in support of nonviolent
Palestinian struggles remind me of the U.S. students and others who “headed
south” in the 1960s to support the civil rights movement.
We stayed overnight in
the homes of Bil’in residents. Iyad Burnat, the brother of “5
Broken Cameras” director Emad Burnat, talked with us
past midnight about the importance of media coverage, international
support, and creative, surprise tactics in a successful nonviolent movement
(like using their bodies to close an Israeli “settlers-only” road). “In Bil’in
we don’t use stones. The Israeli soldiers use that – kids throwing stones – to
attack our people.”
Iyad was one of a dozen
Palestinians we met who bristled at their lack of mobility now that their
communities are ringed by the wall, settlements, checkpoints and Israeli-only
highways. “It’s easier for me to get to the U.S. or the U.K. than to Jerusalem,
25 kilometers away.”
Like our Selma martyrs –
Jimmy Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo – Bil’in has its nonviolent
martyrs: Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahmah and Jawaher Abu Rahmah.
EAST JERUSALEM:
One of the most powerful and educational movies on Israel/Palestine is the
25-minute documentary, “My Neighborhood”
– which exposes the Judaization of East Jerusalem by
focusing on a Palestinian family facing eviction from their home of 47 years in
the middle-class neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. We sat down with the “stars” of
the movie, the al-Kurd family, outside the part of the house they still can
live in. Absurdly, zealous and aggressive Jewish settlers occupy the front part
of the house. As we approached, I caught a glimpse of the settlers behind
their Israeli flag. (Watch the movie here.)
Middle-aged mom Maysa
al-Kurd and her 94-year-old mother told us they’ve lived in their East
Jerusalem house since 1956, having been forced to flee Haifa during the 1948
“War of Independence.” Settlers are now using intimidation in hope of
forcing them to flee again. With half a home, the al-Kurd family is luckier
than dozens of others in Sheikh Jarrah who’ve been driven out of the
neighborhood completely. (Many Palestinians are refugees two or three times
over.)
With the help
of Israeli and international activists, the al-Kurd family has fought for
years to live in peace and dignity in what's left of their house. If you
watch “My Neighborhood,” you’ll see grandson Mohammed, then in the 7th-grade,
announcing that he wants to be a lawyer or journalist battling for human rights
when he grows up. Two years later, he holds to that dream. Maysa
al-Kurd asked us to tell her family's story to President Obama – and, if we
can't reach him, to tell their story in social media. She wants to ask
Obama "if it would be acceptable to him if his own kids were harassed in
their home; if not acceptable for his kids, then he shouldn't be silent"
when Palestinian children are suffering.
HEBRON HILLS:
Near the end of our tour of the West Bank, we visited the beleaguered but
unbowed village of Al Tuwani in the South Hebron hills, where expansion-minded
(“God gave us this land”) Israelis in nearby settlements have terrorized the
village and sabotaged their fields and water. For “lack of a building permit,”
Israeli soldiers demolished their village school and mosque. It struck me that
being Palestinian in some of these remote locations was akin to being black in
rural Mississippi in the 1950s, facing continuous intimidation from lawless
Klansmen (like these armed and sometimes-masked settlers) backed up by state
power.
But Al Tuwani has
resisted – with women taking new roles in the economic sustenance of the
village, with young Italian solidarity activists (Operation Dove) accompanying the men into the field as a “
protective presence” and videotaping any confrontations, and with Israeli human
rights lawyers defending their right to rebuild their community.
A woman leader in the
village, like so many Palestinians, begged us to return home to contest media
portrayals of Palestinians as terrorists: “You’ve seen the true Palestine, not
what you see in news media . . . Tell the world the truth.”
*
*
While it was inspiring
to see nonviolent “popular resistance” groups persisting across the West Bank,
I felt ashamed and angry as a Jew to hear Palestinians document the relentless
drive by the “Jewish State” to Judaize East Jerusalem and intimidate and
humiliate West Bankers into leaving their cities, towns and villages.
Everywhere we went, we heard complaints about day-to-day hardship --
checkpoints, Jewish-only highways, blocked Palestinian roads and how drives to
work or school or neighbors that once took 15 minutes now take several hours.
Seeing these “facts on
the ground,” I kept asking myself NOT “Why have many Palestinians turned to
violence and terrorism?” – but rather, “Why so few?”
I’m not the first or
only one to think that thought. In a moment of candor in 1998, hawkish
Israeli politician Ehud Barak admitted to Haaretz reporter Gideon
Levy: "If I were a young Palestinian of the right age, I’d eventually join
one of the terrorist organizations.” (Barak wasn’t punished for his candor –
Israelis elected him prime minister a year later.)
As hard as we tried, it
was difficult to find a single Palestinian (or Israeli peace and justice
activist) with much hope for the Kerry-led peace process; they fear that talks
will again be a pretext for continued Israeli expansion into Palestinian
land. We were repeatedly reminded that at the beginning of the Oslo
“peace process” in 1993, there were about 260,000 Israeli settlers living in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem – and that number increased to 365,000 by the
time Oslo fell apart seven years later. Today, there are well over 525,000 settlers.
Everywhere you travel in
the West Bank, you can see Palestinian villages on hillsides or in valleys –
and newer, gleaming Israeli settlements on the hilltops above, startlingly
green thanks to abundant, diverted water. During the Oslo talks,
then-Israeli foreign minister Ariel Sharon was quoted as telling a rightwing
party to "run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the
settlements.”
Many in the
nonviolent Palestinian resistance also have little faith in the Palestinian
Authority – seen variously as weak, corrupt, “an Authority with no authority,”
and a junior partner in administering the occupation. “We want a third
Intifada, the Palestinian Authority wants to prevent it,” an activist told us.
Their faith is in
spreading the grassroots resistance within Palestine, and gaining international
support. We were told over and over: Without outside pressure on Israel,
there will be no end to the occupation and no justice. Which is why every
Palestinian nonviolent activist urged us to support the boycott of Israel aimed at ending the occupation –
and they emphasized that boycotting is a supremely nonviolent tactic.
All drew parallels
to the successful, international boycott that forced South Africa’s apartheid
regime to the bargaining table. And some mentioned another success – the
boycott of Montgomery buses led by Martin Luther King.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with
permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission
or license from the source.
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