Peace Fighters

U nderst a nding N onviolent R esist a nce in P a lestine B y R obert H irschfield

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brothers. I will fight with all I have within me to see that Abir’s name, Abir’s blood, becomes the bridge that finally closes the gap between us, the bridge that allows Israelis and Palestinians to finally, inshallah, live in peace.” Combatants for Peace (CFP) was founded on a winter night in Bethlehem in 2005, at the home of Suleiman Al-Hamri, who, like Aramin, belonged to Arafat’s Fatah.The Israelis had traveled the back roads of the West Bank to get there, as it is illegal for Israeli citizens to travel on their own to the West Bank. At first the Israelis and Palestinians regarded each other with fear and suspicion, despite each side’s desire to talk to the other. But when they began swapping war stories, stories of inward and outward scarring, the mistrust melted and a sense of shared suffering slowly knitted them together. Today they demonstrate together against the erection of the wall and the building of settlement roads on Palestinian lands. Today they demonstrate together against the occupation itself as an evil that poisons the lives of both occupier and occupied. For Yonatan Shapira, Israel’s first pilot refuser and a CFP member, the moment of truth came after the sequential killings of innocents. Early in July 2002, after a Palestinian terrorist killed and wounded Jewish children at the West Bank settlement of Itamar, Shapira ferried the wounded by helicopter to a hospital near Tel Aviv. Later that month an Israeli F-16 dropped a 1-ton bomb on a crowded Gaza neighborhood, targeting Hamas commander Salah Shehadeh. Nine children were killed in the attack.

Among Palestinian nonviolent resisters Sami Awad is an anomaly. The activists are mainly Muslims;Awad is an evangelical Christian, of whom few can claim a reputation for nonviolence. Awad’s uncle, Mubarak Awad, was Palestine’s best-known nonviolence leader in the early stages of the first intifada, a 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule. He was also his nephew’s mentor. “I grew up with a Christian understanding of loving your enemy,” says the founder of the Bethlehem-based Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian-run nonprofit that develops nonviolent approaches to end the Israeli occupation. As a child Awad saw his father subjected to insults from Israeli soldiers, and he witnessed firsthand the armed seizure of Palestinian lands so that Jewish settlements could be built. “Living under occupation really forces you to question what loving your enemy means.” By contrast, secular Palestinians, many of whom have come to nonviolence by way of the path of violence, by way of years in prison, might instead say, “Living under occupation really forces you to question how one sees conflict with the enemy, how one sees the enemy himself, once guns and human bombs have been removed from the equation.”

Two approaches, one conclusion

There are two main approaches to nonviolent resistance. Principled nonviolence refers to peaceful tactics undertaken from the conviction that peace is the only way, while strategic nonviolence views nonviolence as an approach that has better odds of succeeding than violence. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are examples of the principled philosophy, and Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institute and Palestinian activist Osama Abu Karsh embody the strategic philosophy. Palestinian nonviolence is on the rise on the West Bank. Most activists have abandoned violence and its deeply rooted mystique in their community for reasons that are pragmatic but also seeded in their own suffering and the suffering of the Palestinian people. But regardless of how they come to the position of nonviolence, every Palestinian who does so recognizes that violence is morally corrosive as well as useless. Bassam Aramin—a former Fatah leader and fighter and now a member of Combatants for Peace, a peace group of Israeli and Palestinian former fighters—exemplifies strategic nonviolence. In January 2007, Aramin’s 9-year-old daughter, Abir, was shot in the head by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli border policeman in Anata at a demonstration of older children. She was taken to a hospital, where she died two days later. In a widely circulated letter written after Abir’s death, Aramin said this:“I will not rest until the soldier responsible for my daughter’s death is put on trial, and made to face what he has done. I will see to it that the world does not forget my daughter, my lovely Abir. But I will not seek vengeance. No, I will continue the work I have undertaken with my Israeli

Above: Palestinian boys at a weekly demonstration against the apartheid wall, Al-Ma’sara village. Photo by: Meged Gozani/Activestills.org Opposite: Members of a direct-action group march to cut the separation fence in the West Bank village of Beit Mirsin. Photo: Activestills.org

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much used during the intifada, was arrested, put on trial, and deported because of his activism in nonviolence. That was a transformational point in my life. Suddenly nonviolence wasn’t just something that made me feel good when I engaged in it. I sensed the power of it, and I wanted to understand: Why doesn’t the other side want us to engage in nonviolence? What does the other side fear when we engage in nonviolence? Why did they arrest and deport my uncle, who promoted peace, dialogue, and nonviolent resistance to the occupation? This is when I made the decision to commit my life to studying and practicing nonviolence as a way of empowering the Palestinian community and myself—and also the Israeli community, because nonviolence empowered them to see that what they are doing is wrong.” Sami Awad’s Holy Land Trust, with its offices on Manger Street in Bethlehem, differs from CFP in that it is a Palestinian grassroots organization without Israelis. Awad has nothing personal against Israelis—especially anti-occupation Israelis. “We want to build a nonviolence organization in Palestine built by Palestinians,” (This view is shared by Middle East Nonviolence and Democracy [MEND], another Palestinian nonviolence organization, but not by the Popular Committee in Bil’in, which has demonstrated every Friday for the past four years against the wall at Bil’in with the high-profile participation of Israelis.) “We want Israelis to build a nonviolence organization in Israel.These two organizations need to intersect at some point on a scale large enough to make a difference.” Founded by Awad in 1998, the Holy Land Trust consists of Christian and Muslim Palestinians. It engages in protest actions against the wall and against Palestinian land seizures. It organizes shielding actions to protect olive harvesters from menacing settlers. It also conducts nonviolence trainings for any group that requests them, including Hamas. In 2006 Holy Land Trust (HLT) trained a group of 20 Hamas leaders from the northern West Bank. This training differed from others only in the fact that there were no women trainees involved; HLT typically insists on mixed groups and gender equality in their trainings. Day one focused on what it means to engage in conflict. Day two was devoted to analyzing and understanding violence. What does it mean to be violent? What does it mean to live under occupation? On day three, trainees were introduced to the different schools of nonviolence, without emphasizing one over another. The fourth and final day was given over to the matter of building nonviolent strategies. The men of Hamas, according to Awad, were not in principal opposed to nonviolence. “They would actually claim that nonviolence is part of the teachings of Islam,” he pointed out, “but for them the only way to deal with Israeli society and Israeli occupation was to inflict the same level of pain on them that

Members of Neturey Karta, an Orthodox anti-Zionist group, march in demonstration against the separation wall in the West Bank village of Nilin.The village is losing most of its agricultural land due to the construction of the wall. Photo by: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org

“The children were just like the children who died a few weeks earlier at Itamar. Only these children were Palestinian. For me, it was as if that bomb was dropped inside my heart.” Shapira authored a letter of refusal, cosigned by 26 pilots who declared that they would no longer fly missions in the occupied territories. Many Israelis were outraged. What if Orthodox Jewish soldiers took it upon themselves to refuse to evacuate Jewish settlers from Gaza? he was asked. “I know the Ten Commandments,” he replied. “I know that one of the commandments is ‘Do not kill.’ I don’t know any commandment that says, ‘Do not evacuate.’” Sami Awad grew up in Palestine, deeply influenced by his uncle, Mubarak Awad, who came to Palestine from the US in the early 1980s and began talking to people about nonviolent strategies. “Although Palestinians had been engaging in nonviolence prior to that,” explains Awad,“what Mubarak did was to put the whole nonviolent movement in context and bring the terminology of nonviolence to the struggles that Palestinians were engaging in. In 1984 he established a center called the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence in Jerusalem. As a young teenager I was very involved in the activities that they did there. It gave me a good feeling to do something and not just sit still and allow the occupation to continue.” But in 1987, when the first Palestinian intifada broke out, Awad’s motivations matured beyond good feelings.“The uprising had some very strong components of nonviolence to it,” says Awad.“Mubarak, who had written a booklet that was very

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have someone who believes in nonviolence working in violent places like prisons. I try to work with prisoners in a humane way, which I think is the best way to work with anyone.” MEND founder Lucy Nusseibeh, who for nine years taught a course on Gandhi at Birzeit University, has written: “The spiritual dimension is at once very general and very particular in relation to Palestinian nonviolence. General in the sense that our approach is humanistic with the emphasis on the value of human life, and the importance of the need, as well as the right of each individual to develop their potential as much as possible. Particular in the sense that ideally the starting point for nonviolence is the individual. To work with nonviolence is to become more self-aware and to accept that each of us has characteristics of both violence and nonviolence.”

they inflict on us.” Awad saw, as a young participant of the first intifada, how nonviolence was able to break through the occupied territory of the heart. “Israeli parents were seeing the children they reared beating up old men, women, and children.They were seeing them responding violently to people who were not being violent to them. This led to a real awakening in Israeli consciousness at the time. Many Israelis did not want such violence to be done in their name.” The absence of violence allows for the presence of compassion even at the Israeli checkpoints deep inside the West Bank, where Palestinians must present IDs and be subjected to harsh questioning by soldiers even as they travel in the opposite direction from the Israeli border. The dynamic of domination locks the soldiers in a downward moral spiral. “The soldiers call us suspects,” says Bassam Aramin, sadly shaking his head.“We call them victims,” he says, referring to the fact that military service is mandatory for all Israeli citizens upon completing high school (up to three years for men and approximately 18 months for women). Nonviolent resisters don’t see these young soldiers as the enemy, but rather the structures that control, train, and funnel them into service.

Voices in the wilderness

The overheated political nature of large segments of the faithbased clergy in the conflict makes it hard for activists like Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, famous for his human shield actions in defense of Palestinian homes slated for demolition by Israel, to find traction among religious Jews. Of his fellow rabbis, he comments,“Most of those who are political support the settler movement. They don’t concern themselves with human rights for Palestinians.” Hejazi Jabari, a MEND organizer from Hebron, bears a scar across his shoulder, courtesy of an Israeli bullet fired at him when he was young and a believer in the path of violence (he, too, belonged to Fatah). He has a similar complaint against Hamas. “They try to tell me what kind of a Muslim I have to be. They say I have to pray five times a day and support armed struggle against Israel. Look where armed struggle has gotten us: continued occupation and Palestinians killing Palestinians. For me, Islam is a religion of peace. I want my daughters to live in peace. I want to live as a man of peace.” Jabari works as a security officer for the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah when he is not conducting nonviolent trainings in Hebron. He has a weapon in his office, but he will not touch it. His weapon-bearing days are behind him. Why does he work as a security officer? “It is important to

In the West Bank village of Bil’in, an Israeli activist and a Palestinian girl work together to plant an olive tree in the agricultural land that had been left on the “Israeli” side of the wall. Photo by: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org The voices of nonviolence in this conflict are all wilderness voices.Voices that have journeyed far and crossed many borders: philosophical, psychological, political, national, and spiritual. Rabbi Ascherman, put on trial in January of 2004 for two human shield actions on the West Bank, used the opportunity to put on trial the state policy of demolishing “illegal” Palestinian homes for which no legal permits can be obtained short of bribery or agreeing to become an informer. “I am very deeply affected when the Torah, which I am sworn as a rabbi to uphold, is trampled on,” Ascherman told the Jerusalem court, noting that his skullcap had been lost in the rubble of one of the homes he had been trying to defend. “I wondered whether this symbolized what was being

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RESOURCES

Sami Awad

Combatants for Peace (CombatantsForPeace.org) is a group of Israeli and Palestinian individuals who were actively involved in the cycle of violence, either as combat soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces or as Palestinian liberation activists who used acts of violence. Today they cooperate with each other and commit themselves to work nonviolently toward a two-state solution.

Bassam Aramin

Holy LandTrust (HolyLandTrust.org) is a Palestinian nonprofit in the holy city of Bethlehem that works to empower the Palestinian community through the development of nonviolent approaches. Their goal is to end the Israeli occupation and to build a future that is founded on the principles of nonviolence, equality, justice, and peaceful coexistence. Rabbi Arik Ascherman

Lucy Nusseibeh

Middle East Nonviolence & Democracy (MENDonline.org) promotes active nonviolence and encourages alternatives to violence among youth and adults throughout Palestine. MEND takes a holistic and creative approach to dealing with violence, working via films, radio, bumper stickers, posters and news advertisements to change the local attitude to nonviolence from one of skepticism or dismissal to one of interest and appreciation.

done to Jewish values and/or whether it would be found someday so that it would be known that somebody had stood against this evil in the name of Torah.” Awad emphasizes that the Palestinian nonviolence struggle must be led by Muslims, as Palestine (apart from its 50,000 or so Christians) is a Muslim land. His uncle Mubarak, a Quaker, made a pilgrimage to India to meet with Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as “Frontier Gandhi,” a Muslim and a nonviolence activist from Pakistan in the days of Gandhi. Mubarak Awad collected Frontier Gandhi’s writings, the stories of him as a peace-loving warrior, as evidence that it is possible to be a devout Muslim while at the same time being a devout adherent of nonviolence.The bookshelves of the Holy Land Trust also hold rows of books by Mahatma Gandhi, brought back from India to Palestine by Mubarak Awad. Sami Awad, in whom Christ and Gandhi intersect as teachers, understands the rage that shapes the policies of Hamas. “You have all this anger in you.Yet at the same time you have to have compassion for the people who are doing this to you, you have to have understanding.You have to work to change their minds, but through nonviolence.” n

Musalaha (Musalaha.org) is a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians as demonstrated in the life and teaching of Jesus. They seek to be an encouragement and facilitator of reconciliation, first among Palestinian Christians and Messianic Israelis, and then beyond to their respective communities. Musalaha facilitates desert encounters, where participants leave their comfort zones and learn to rely on each other. The challenges of the desert journey provide an excellent occasion for spiritual discovery, relationship building, and open communication. Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR.israel.net) gives voice to the Jewish tradition’s concern for the stranger and others vulnerable within society. Comprised of Reform, Orthodox,Conservative,Reconstructionist,and Renewal rabbis and students, RHR champions the cause of the poor and supports the rights of Israel’s minorities and the Palestinians.

Robert Hirschfield is a freelance writer based in New York who has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He is currently working on a book about Palestinian nonviolence activists. His stories have appeared in Sojourners, The Progressive, National Catholic Reporter, Jerusalem Report, and many other publications. PRISM 2009