When people think of Palestine and Israel, they often picture Palestinians as suicide bombers and terrorists while the Israeli military are seen as bombing whole neighborhoods in Palestine.  The violence and counter-violence and endless war has created a hopelessness about any peaceful future for the Holy Land.

However, during a month-long stay in Palestine and Israel recently, I found something else.  I found something very positive and hopeful and perhaps the key to a peaceful resolution of this tragic conflict — and a possible path toward a peaceful future for both peoples.

I found that violence is not the whole story. Endless checkpoints, 26-foot high walls, and the great fear and mistrust between many Israelis and Palestinians are grimly persistent features of life there.  But there is also an alternative to this cycle of destruction being forged on both sides. There is a larger story beyond the script of retaliatory violence – a story of a growing nonviolent movement that both Palestinians and Israelis are building.  It is this larger story that I would like to share.

Active Nonviolence is alive and well in Palestine and Israel! The interfaith delegation I co-led to this region witnessed, first hand, many Palestinians who are engaged in active nonviolent resistance to the occupation of their lands in the West Bank.  Weekly nonviolent demonstrations have been held in many villages, including Bil’in, Nil’in, Al Ma’sara, Walaja, as well as in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, some for more than five years.  Israelis (including Combatants for Peace and Anarchists Against the Wall), and Internationals, (including Christian Peacemaker Teams, Ecumenical Accompaniment Program and Michigan Peace Teams) actively participate in these weekly actions.  There is a deeply inspiring commitment by Palestinians throughout the region to keep struggling nonviolently even when Israeli soldiers shoot powerful tear-gas canisters and grenades, rubber-coated steel bullets, concussion bombs and even live ammunition at the unarmed villagers.

Bil’in

On December 17, 2009 our interfaith delegation visited one of these sites, Bil’in, an agricultural village of approximately 1,800 residents west of Ramallah about 2 miles from the “Green Line” marking Israel’s boundary before 1967 and near the settlement, Modi’in that straddles the former border.  We joined other internationals, Israelis and about 200 people from the area, and marched from the center of Bil’in to the electric separation fence.  Palestinian activists say that some 56% of the villagers’ farmland is unreachable because of that barrier, about one kilometer down a dirt road.

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Thousands of health care reform advocates rallied at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC, last week outside a conference of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a group that lobbies for the insurance industry. See the video above.

Health care-related protests continued into the weekend, but this time, they were organized by opponents of health care reform. In Minneapolis, for example, thousands of Tea Partiers and Republicans rallied and chanted, “Kill the bill!”

Why might supporters of citizen action sympathize with one side over another?  Facts.  Yes, facts do seem to come cheap these days.  But even if the public thinks the health care bill would create death panels, it still proposes no such thing.

Facts do exist and they matter.

Take the uninsured: 45,000 uninsured people die in the U.S each year – 123 per day – who could have escaped death with health insurance, according to a 2009 Harvard study. The current health care bill, through insurance reforms and subsidies, would at least reduce that number by extending coverage to millions.

Protesters against health care reform may be reading from the same playbook as people in favor of reform. But rallying for a cause does not a just cause make.

• Four Czech activists climbed the Krusnohorske theatre in Teplice on Saturday to protest the planned cancellation of coal mining limits by the Social Democrats, who were hosting a conference inside.

• Hundreds of demonstrators gathered near the Erez (Beit Hanoun) border crossing on Sunday to mark the 1,000-day Israeli blockade imposed on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

• Around 1,000 men and women gathered outside the Jerusalem home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday to protest gender discrimination on some bus routes in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, where women are made to sit at the back.

• About 1,000 people took part in an anti-nuclear protest in Edinburgh calling for the scrapping of Trident, saying money would be better spent public sector jobs and services.

• More than 300 Bahraini fishermen and their relatives demonstrated outside the Fishermen’s Protection Society in Muharraq on Saturday to protest the rapid decline in marine stocks due to a lack of regulation for fishing licenses and sand dredging of the seabed.

• A few hundred people gathered in the streets of Valletta, Malta on Saturday to protest the lack of enforcement of environment protection laws, such as encroachment on outside development zones, illegal hunting, air pollution, unauthorized groundwater extraction and other local issues.

• On Thursday, thousands of Nigerian women took to the streets in protest of religious violence that left at least 200 dead last weekend, singing and waving branches full of green leaves — a traditional sign of protest. They also carried Bibles and crosses made out of scrap lumber.

• The mass protest intended to paralyze Bangkok and topple the Thai Government began at exactly 12:12 pm today with a huge round of applause followed by the sound of gongs and Buddhist chanting.

• Workers belonging to CGIL, Italy’s biggest labor union, will walk off their jobs today for four hours to protest cuts at companies such as Fiat SpA, Alcoa Inc. and Antonio Merloni SpA. The strike called by CGIL, with a membership of 5.5 million people, and a demonstration in city centers will cripple traffic and cause delays in public transport and air travel.

• The third general strike was underway in Greece yesterday. Public services were shut down and air traffic controllers sealed off national airspace.

• Zimbabwe’s striking civil servants say they are now resorting to a hunger strike after the cash strapped government ignored their month long job boycott.

• The National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) workers – led by Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Marvi Memon – ended their seven-day long protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club after the Sindh government assured the protesters that it will regularise 1,547 temporary NPIW employees.

• Affected villagers of Barapukuria coal mining areas in Bangladesh started an indefinite hunger strike on Wednesday to realize their compensation.

• At least 70 detainees at the West Japan Immigration Control Center, which has long been criticized by human rights groups and Diet members, have been on a hunger strike since Monday.

Over at Killing the Buddha (which I also co-edit), we’ve got a really valuable conversation today between the radical of many causes Abe Osheroff and the activist/journalist Bob Jensen. It’s a reflection on intransigence, futility, and the failures of hope, which should be familiar themes to anyone who has put any time into struggling against the principalities and powers of injustice:

Robert Jensen: I’ve heard you use the term “long-distance runner” before. Is that the key—the notion that we have to be in it for the long haul and not expect things to change dramatically all at once?

Abe Osheroff: Not the long haul—the endless haul.

RJ: What’s the difference between long and endless?

AO: Oh yeah, there’s a difference. We will never win the fight. We will influence the players. We may be able to make life better in many ways. We will blunt the shit that the government and the corporations throw at us. But we’ll always be coping with things. My view is that there’s no destination for the train I’m on. No destination, just a direction. No final station on that train. There’s no final destination, no socialist society where we will all be able to sit back and have a wonderful life. Bullshit!

RJ: No utopias.

Read the rest at Killing the Buddha.

The jury trial of three Ploughshares peace activists, Adrian (Adi) Leason, Peter Murnane and Sam Land is being held in Wellington, New Zealand this week. People are coming from around New Zealand and Australia to support them and to give voice to the issue behind their trial—the need to close the Waihopai Spy Base and end New Zealand’s links with the US war machine. Waihopai is New Zealand’s most important contribution to that war machine, far more so than any Special Air Service presence in Afghanistan, and has been operating as an outpost of US intelligence 24/7.

Lets rewind, to 6 a.m. the morning of the April 30, 2008. Adrian, Peter and Sam have entered the Waihopai Spy Base in Blenheim, New Zealand, and used a sickle to deflate one of the two 30 meter domes covering satellite interception dishes. The group then build a shrine and pray for the victims of the war with no end—the so-called “War on Terror” led by the United States, a war that has resulted in illegal military invasions, illegal detention and torture and an unprecedented attack on civil liberties in all Western democracies.

The use of the sickle in deflating the dome was significant. It is taken from the vision of the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew scriptures:

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles; nation shall not lift sword against nation; and there shall be no more training for war” (Isaiah 2:4).

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Twenty-three-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie died seven years ago when she was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza as she stood before a Palestinian home facing demolition. Democracy Now! devoted yesterday’s show to an interview with her sister Sarah and two parents, Cindy and Craig, who are currently in Haifa for the start of a civil trial against the state of Israel over the unlawful death of their daughter. I was struck by Craig Corrie’s words when Amy Goodman asked if the family would get a chance to meet the man who drove the bulldozer.

We would like to meet that person. There are lots of victims, Amy, when you look at a war and what happens. And we lost Rachel, and that hurts every day, but that bulldozer driver lost a lot of his humanity when he crushed Rachel. We’re told by B’Tselem, for instance, that in 2004, I believe, the highest—the cause, proportionately, of deaths in the Israeli soldiers, the highest one is suicide. There’s a big toll to soldiers. And I guess I have to hold out my hand, in some way, that if that man could understand what he’s done, in terms of our loss, if he could mourn our loss of Rachel, I could mourn his loss of humanity.

There’s a lot of steps, as Sarah says, that would have to happen that way. But yeah, I’d like to meet him. And it’s not about trying to put him in jail. It doesn’t do me any good if his children don’t have a father, if he has children. But some way, like Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society, and I think it’s more like a wound in your arm, and to expect that one half of a wound would heal and the other half stay unhealed is impossible. Both halves have to heal.

Forgiveness is obviously at the very core of nonviolence, but it is often a difficult task to carry out. The fact that someone like Craig Corrie is ready and willing to do this should motivate anyone who harbors anger toward another human to repair the divide. His gesture also shows that good has come from Rachel’s untimely death and perhaps even more is on the way, should he ever meet the driver.

The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict has a couple of interesting events coming up. The first is part of an online lecture series on topics related to nonviolent conflict and civil resistance. There have been two presentations since the series began last month, but the latest one is scheduled for this afternoon, starting at 12pm EST. University of San Francisco politics professor Stephen Zunes will be speaking about “the long history of nonviolent action throughout the Islamic world” and highlighting “case studies including Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Mali, Western Sahara, Indonesia, Pakistan, and others.” You must register to attend the Webinar.

The second event is the ICNC’s fifth annual Fletcher Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict at Tufts University. This week-long Institute “brings together international professionals and journalists from around the world to learn from top practitioners and scholars about strategic concepts and present applications of civil resistance.” It will take place June 20-26. Go to the ICNC website to learn more about the application, which is due March 15th.

If you want to be notified of more events put on by the ICNC sign up for their bi-weekly emails, which also include links to many great stories about nonviolence.

On Tehran Bureau, an interesting new blog on PBS’s website about Iran, an Iranian friend of ours -  writing under a pen name – published an important article last week with some sound strategic advice on nonviolence for the Green Movement.

The goal is to erode the pillars of support for the regime until loyalties shift, practical power begins to drain away, and the regime starts crumbling from within. Civil disobedience is thus not primarily aimed at demonstrating the moral superiority of the opposition movement — though that is admittedly one objective — but rather to disrupt the “normal” flow of commerce, politics, and everyday life. Clearly, a violent struggle against a much stronger foe has little chance of disrupting “normal” conditions except for fleeting moments, since violence gives the state license to stamp out its opponents with the full range of instruments at its disposal.

Moreover, violence he argues would only cede the religious “center,” which includes most clergy and millions of everyday citizens, to the hardliners. He then enumerates several critical strategic principles, including:

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• A parade of Indian people from many nations gathered in Seattle on Monday to commemorate the invasion of Fort Lawton 40 years ago, when more than 100 Indian people and their allies stormed the property and took a portion of the land “by right of discovery.” After a month of protests the government decided to donate a portion of the land for a cultural center.

• About 5,000 left-wing activists and Palestinians gathered Saturday to protest the eviction of four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

• About 30 people gathered outside the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Denver, Colorado on Sunday to protest a decision by the archdiocese not to re-enroll a child in a Catholic school in Boulder next year because the child’s parents are lesbians.

• Thousands of health care reform advocates gathered outside the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington yesterday, where the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans was holding its annual policy conference. They chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Insurance companies have got to go!” and staged a mass “citizens’ arrest” of the insurance executives.

• Days after staging protests on campus as part of the national March 4 Day of Action, a small group of students at Stony Brook University sat down in the hallway outside of President Stanley’s office for hours and begged passersby for spare change to cover the rising costs of tuition.

• People who care for injured inmates at California’s Alameda County’s jails are went on a one-day strike yesterday to protest what medical workers call “bad faith” contract negotiations.

• Hundreds of people rallied outside a Manhattan hotel Tuesday to protest a fundraiser held by the group Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.