On July 10th, 1943, Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman interned in Westerbork, sent yet another of her deeply thoughtful letters. In this particular letter, sent to a dear friend, she writes:

It is not fear of Poland that keeps me from going along with my parents, but fear of seeing them suffer. And that, too, is cowardice.

This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept. And although it is something I learned a long time ago, I also know that one can only accept for oneself and not for others.

I have never been able to “do” anything; I can only let things take their course and if need be, suffer. This is where my strength lies, and it is a great strength indeed. But for myself, not for others.

Hillesum, who was only 29 years old when she died in Auschwitz in November of that same year, determined that she would be the “thinking heart of the barracks.” In her journals and letters, which are now published for English readers in Etty: The Letters and Diary of Etty Hillesum, 1941 – 1943, we find a daunting yet luminous account of how to respond humanely to a culture of death. Hillesum invites her reader into the daily work and struggle of a life devoted to authentic hope, compassion for others, and a courageous engagement in nonviolence.

In November of 2000, I participated in a Bearing Witness retreat sponsored by the Zen Peacemaker Order in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. In a quiet and solitary moment, I knelt on the grounds of Auschwitz and asked Etty to be my teacher and guide, for I was on her ground now. It seems to me that Father Daniel Berrigan, in his own way, made a similar request of Hillesum. He expresses this beautifully in his poem, “Etty Hillesum,” which reads, in part:

“Here goes then,” wrote the woman I never heard of
And, “I don’t want to be safe, I want to be there.”
Wrote this woman …

The ineffaceable likeness. Death
her child, her semblance.
Wrote, “In such a world I must kneel down. Kneel down.
But before no human. In the furnace
lust and its cleansing, birth and its outcome.
To kneel where the fire burns me, bears me.
Eros, God, Auschwitz …

She wrote: “To live fully
outwardly, inwardly, my desire. But to renounce
reality for reality’s sake, inner or outer life –
quite a mistake …

O singer of songs, O magnificat Mary,
O woman at the well of life!

The woman at the well, according to the Gospel of Saint John, asked that Jesus allow her to drink the water of life just once so that she would not be left thirsty nor have to return to the well again. In August of 1943, Hillesum, writing to another friend from Westerbork, related a conversation that had taken place within the camp: “When I went into the hospital barracks, some of the women called out, ‘Have you got some good news? You look cheerful.’” “Good news” would typically mean that one’s call to be “transported” to Auschwitz had been put off, that the war was soon to end, or that folks would soon be released from the camp. But for Hillesum, the reason for her good cheer had simply been the sighting of a rainbow in the camp earlier that morning. Her ability to see the rainbow and to reflect its radiance was grounded in a diligent practice of self reflection and prayer begun just over a year before she entered Westerbork. Hillesum, once could say, no longer needed to return to the well. She saw clearly that within her—and each of us—flow the living waters of life. As she put it in an early journal entry: “Life itself must be our fountainhead, never something or someone else.”

Jan Gaarlandt, in his introduction to An Interrupted Life, an abridged version of Hillesum’s letters and diaries, opens his remarks by noting that her journals and letters were written in Holland between the years 1941 and 1942. He then comments, “Those were the very years when the scenario of extermination was being played out all over Europe. Etty Hillesum was Jewish and she wrote a counter scenario.” Hillesum’s writing of a counter scenario, one of the greatest gifts she has bestowed upon us, was an act of responsibility and resistance. In our own “worst of time,” might we, too, come to see through the monolithic posturing and claims of empire’s narrative? Might we come to see, like Hillesum, that we must choose to love and not to hate?

While Hillesum learned to love herself through her practice of writing, she learned to love others through the practice of community building. In an early journal entry, we find that Hillesum began the work of community building in Amsterdam, where she lived prior to her entry into Westerbork. In a dwelling that consisted of Jews and Christians, Germans and Dutch, students and widowers, she worked not only to preserve the community but to ensure that its members flourished through one another. The task, even in this small and local community, was difficult at times:

Ours was and is a bustling little world, so threatened by politics from the outside as to be disturbed within. But it seemed a worthy task to keep this small community together as refutation of all of those desperate and false theories of race, nation, and so on. As proof that life cannot be forced into pre-set molds.

Hillesum’s worthy, yet modest task of community building well served those she later came to meet in Westerbork. It seems modest, I suppose, to practice nonviolence within one’s own community when a war of extermination is being waged. However, even amidst the Nazi storm, Hillesum was able to hold her ground, to keep doing what she had always been doing. She did so by simply comforting those in need: “When hungry children [in Westerbork] started crying, I would go over to them, stand beside them protectively, arms folded across my chest [and] force a smile from those huddled, shattered scraps of humanity … And all I did was just stand there, for what else could one do?” In “just standing there,” however, Hillesum stood on the side of humanity, on the side of life. Her modest effort was simply, as Berrigan puts it in his “Zen Poem,” to refuse to belittle, refuse to hate, and refuse to kill. When I contemplate what she did, I once again hear Berrigan’s poetic cry of praise, “O, Woman at the Well!”

Though in Westerbork, in the midst of so much death, Hillesum had every reason to shut down. It was precisely at this moment, however, that she chose to widen the community of those she loved. This is the moment that she vowed to be the “thinking heart of these barracks” and then, “the thinking heart of the whole concentration camp. In the years prior to this vow, she found that she had little time to complete the daily tasks of life and to be present to others. She realized that the feeling of “not having any time” was not so much literally true as it was more an indication of her chaotic and fragmented inner state. Now, near the end of her life, when she had only a few months left, she found that she had “all the time in the world” to talk with others, to be present with them.

In the building of community beyond “her own,” Hilesum put to good use the interior work, prayer and nonviolent practice that she had committed herself to in the prior year. In the circle Hillesum had drawn, no one was excluded. She was able to say, even while interned in Westerbork: “I feel at home. I have learned so much about it here. We are at home!”

Hillesum often jotted down the phrase, “to live fully.” She came to see, paradoxically, that to live fully required the acceptance of suffering and death. It is this acceptance that curbs the human propensity to inflict upon others what we refuse to accept ourselves, such as suffering. Acceptance, in the way that Hillesum understands it, is far removed from a stance of indifference or passivity; Hillesum gave all that she could to be in service to others. What she’s getting at is the interior ability to hold both suffering and joy all at once and to not diminish either. It’s the third way, in other words, that nonviolence asks of us.

By all accounts, Hillesum was a radiant presence inside the camps, an incandescent light amidst the dark night of Nazi terror. In honor of her work and her light, perhaps we might “find the time” today to pick up the practice of interior clarity and community building that Hillesum has left for us; perhaps we, too, may pledge to be the “thinking hearts” within our own communities.

I received an email this morning from Bi’lin’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements telling me about a 3 am attack on their village by approximately 100 Israeli soldiers and border police. Homes were raided and two residents were arrested, including one American activist. The invaders eventually retreated, however, when a group of Palestinian, Israeli, and international nonviolent activists, numbering close to 100, started following them around the village and blocking their attempts to enter more homes.

Unfortunately, such attacks are commonplace in Bi’lin. Over the past two weeks soldiers have broken into homes, where they have harassed small children and made nine arrests, including a 16 year old. This is done to discourage the popular nonviolent protests against the separation wall and expansion of illegal settlements. Internationals have aided in several “de-arrests” by stepping between soldiers and young persons about to be apprehended. But more help is needed. The Popular Committee is asking “Israeli and international activists to keep coming to the village in the following days, in order to resist further army invasions.”

While this desperate plea and news from half a world away reaches the inboxes of other activists and supporters like myself, most media outlets will be busy reporting on the death of a pop star. The New York Daily News is running a forty-page spread on the life and career of Michael Jackson, as if round-the-clock media coverage the past one and a half weeks has not been enough to sate anyone’s curiosity and interest.

Nevertheless, 1.6 million people registered to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral in Los Angeles today. Of those 1.6 million, only 17,500 were able to get the highly coveted ticket. I have a suggestion for those not able to attend the funeral: How about on Tuesday if we all call our Congress persons or the White House and ask that Israel desist from its attack upon the people of Bi’lin? That would amount to 1,582,500 calls on behalf of the people of Bi’lin and the nonviolent protest they have waged each Friday for the past three years. A day on which over a million people called on behalf of people who are waging a nonviolent struggle would be a day that could change the course of history for the better.

In Buddhist practice, it is only a matter of time before a student must come to terms with the “hungry ghosts” of his or her being. These ghosts—manifest in greed, jealousy, addictions and compulsions—are imagined as beings whose “mouth is the size of a needle, though their stomach is the size of a mountain.”  While their hunger is intense, they can never get enough food. In the compulsive media coverage over Michael Jackson—his exceptional talent notwithstanding—I often wonder what “hungry ghost” is devouring us? Further, as we are dragged to and fro in the frenzy of the coverage, what else is going on in the world that warrants our complete attention?

Gilad Atzmon, whose writing has been excerpted in the most recent edition of Adbusters, speaks to what demands our attention in his article, “The Terror Within.” Though he speaks to his Israeli countrymen and women, those of us in the United States—whose close to $3 billion annually in tax dollars and whose weapons were used, most recently, to kill close to 1,400 Gazans in just three weeks—may also wish to pay attention to what he says. Writing of the December 2008 – January 2009 attack upon the Gaza Strip, Atzmon states:

The IDF campaign in Gaza enjoyed the support of 94% of the Israeli people. They watched the carnage on their TV screens as one of the strongest armies in the world quashed women, elderly people and children. They saw blizzards of unconventional weapons burst over schools, hospitals and refugee camps. And yet they didn’t do much to stop their ruthless ”democratically elected” leaders. Instead, some of them grabbed a seat and settled on the hills overlooking the Gaza Strip to watch the army turn Gaza into a modern Hebraic Colosseum of blood. Even now when the campaign seems to be over and the scale of carnage in Gaza has been revealed, the majority of Israelis fail to show any signs of remorse … This level of group barbarism cries for an explanation. How is it that a society has managed to lose its grip of any sense of compassion and mercy?”

In early January of 2009, the US Congress resolved overwhelmingly to support Israel to defend itself from attacks coming from the Gaza Strip (House) and to defend itself from terrorism (Senate). Ira Chernus, in his article, “Israelis Get the Truth about the Gaza Attack,” speaks to why our Congress would do well to add “wisdom” to the “sense of compassion and mercy” Atzmon advocates:

The justification Israel offers is the increased firing of rockets from Gaza. But Israelis can read that Hamas is responding to Israeli provocation. “Six months ago Israel asked and received a cease-fire from Hamas. It unilaterally violated it. On November 4, an Israeli operation sparked a new round of dangerous, if controlled, violence, when it unnecessarily bombed a tunnel.

About the same time, Israel cut off transport of food, medical supplies, and electricity to Gaza. Food insecurity in Gaza currently runs at 56 percent and is deteriorating rapidly, 42 percent of the Strip’s population is unemployed and 76 percent is receiving humanitarian assistance (all UN figures). A million and a half human beings  live in the conditions of a giant jail.

The Congressional vote, in other words, lacks intellectual honesty and integrity. Further, like the Israeli population described by Aztmon, there seems to be no remorse for those who were killed even though we supported the effort with the Congressional vote, with our tax dollars and with our weapons. How is it that the rockets launched by Israel and the United States are any less “terroristic” than those launched by Hamas and other armed groups? Tom Cordaro, in his book, Be Not Afraid: An Alternative to the War on Terror, offers one explanation. When writing about the “terrorism of the strong”, i.e. nation-states, he notes (with specific reference to the United States):

Because those who engage in the terrorism of the strong often have at their disposal many social, economic, cultural, and political levers of institutional power, they can commit their acts of terrorism under the guise of legitimacy and legality. This might explain why the FBI’s definition of terrorism includes the caveat that terrorism is the “unlawful use of force or violence.” Or why the State Department’s definition restricts terrorism to “sub-national groups or clandestine agents,” conveniently eliminating the possibility of nation-states, like the United States, might be guilty of terrorism.

The Popular Committee of Bi’lin, as well as other Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, believe that the attack upon the Gaza Strip is a harbinger of what’s to come for those Palestinians living in the West Bank. This is one reason why, among others, that we must pay attention to what’s happening right now in Bi’lin and to support the nonviolent efforts of its people. On Tuesday, let’s be one of those 1.5 million people to make that call to our Congress people and the White House—or creatively organize—on behalf of the people of Bi’lin. It is certainly a meaningful way to honor all of those who have struggled and who continue to struggle to “count” as a human being and who strive to bring about justice and peace for all.

Capt. Drew Schoenmaker, who heads the Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, described the four thousand strong Marine attack in Afghanistan yesterday morning as an effort to “forge new ground … We are going to a place nobody has been before.” The Marine attack, labeled “Operation Strike of the Sword,” aims to remove (kill, maim or capture, I suppose) fighters from southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province before the August 20th presidential election. Strike of the Sword, fortified by the Air Force and 650 Afghan troops, is the largest Marine offensive strike since the Vietnam War.

I respectfully disagree with Capt. Schoenmaker. In choosing a military strike, we walk a well-worn and bloody path. We, as well as other nations and armed political movements, have been there before and the results have been disastrous. Susan Galleymore, in her book, Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War & Terror, well documents the horrifying effects of war making on Afghani women and children. She opens her chapter on Afghanistan, “You Were Never Hidden from My Eyes,” with a transcribed clip from a 2008 video conference between President Bush and, among others, U.S. military personnel in Kabul:

I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, you know, confronting danger. You’re really making history, and thanks.

Earlier this month, I joined a CODEPINK delegation to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Joining the delegation was Hunter “Patch” Adams, M.D., who taught us the practice of clowning as a method of nonviolent transformation. One evening, as he spoke to the delegates about his work, he showed us a film he had made with a troupe of Italian clowns. He and the Italian clowns had traveled from Rome to Kabul in order to serve the sick, the starving and the wounded in hospitals there. In one of the film’s scenes, a doctor—using the most rudimentary of medical instruments—was picking off the charred remains of a four year-old girl’s burnt skin. She was a beautiful child, though most of her body had been badly burned in a war-related injury. As the doctor gently worked his gruesome task, she whimpered and wailed in distress. The mother, holding her in her arms, remained silent. Only the tears that were streaming down her face revealed her agony.

Patch also spoke of seeing three children in one bed; they fit in one bed because they were emaciated. Toward the end of the film, one of the clowns coaxes a seven year-old girl to walk with him; it was difficult work for her on the artificial leg she used to replace the leg that had been blown off by a land mine. Perhaps it is nonviolent activists who must take up the phrase, “If all can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution” and use it as the measure of right action.

Galleymore, through her interviews with Afghani women now living in the United States, learns that Afghanistan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world; the average GDP per capita is about $800, and that the number of widows is estimated to be about 60% of the total population. In my estimation, to “break new ground” in Afghanistan would mean that we would actually listen to what they want and need and actually deliver that. Robert Daar, author and human rights activist in Afghanistan for the past thirty years, says as much to Galleymore:

The Americans propose to increase troop level and talk about their successes there. I’m of the view that we should give them help, but for what they ask for … The sad fact is that if we hadn’t have been so involved with the military side of this operation, in time the majority of people would reject the emptiness of the Taliban, as there is a lack of support for this kind of Islamism and fundamentalism.

All of the Afghan women interviewed in Galleymore’s book had suffered from war and did not want another war: “No more war. We’d like peace. As a mother I know how war affects everyone, especially the families.” So that we might truly “go to a place we have never been to before,” we might do well to start listening to these women. We might start to take the practice of nonviolence seriously. We might ask that our national leaders visit the sick and dying in Kabul, as did Patch and the Italian clowns, and in Helmand province. We might ask that they take our lives seriously and stop, in Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, the “demonic suction cup of war” from siphoning off monies that are needed for our schools, our health care and our jobs.

The sight of the trash was jarring; it awakened me to how the earth is violated even in just the small act of dropping of litter. The practice of gardening, much like Zen meditation, is all absorbing and encourages a stillness within the mind. While I was raking a pile of dead leaves, questions started to emerge: Where does my body begin and end in relation to the earth’s body? Am I breathing in what the trees are breathing out and vice versa? Are we, in other words, breathing together? In light of such porosity, how can I treat the earth with such indifference?

Barbara Kingsolver, in her book of essays, Small Wonder, beautifully articulates what I had intuited during the work of raking leaves:

People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers … Wilderness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plan of earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.

As if taking a cue from Kingsolver, Ludmilla spotted planks of wood that, like much of the trash, had been flung over the fence. These planks, dank and moss covered, would serve as the borders of our vegetable garden. “Isn’t it wonderful,” she exclaimed while we dragged the planks out, “we don’t have to buy any wood!” Indeed, she had chosen carefully. It’s likely that our vegetable garden will not make the front cover of any garden magazine, but her choice to recycle and renew pointed to a grandness of vision. These planks, however humble, evinced a certain nobility after we set them up in a square formation; they would be the guardians of the new life soon to take root within their borders.

Prior to working in the garden, I was paging through Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. Given the recent military coup in Honduras, I wanted to reacquaint myself with Galeano’s piercing analysis and poetic eloquence. I was not disappointed. Isabelle Allende, in her foreword to the book’s 25th anniversary edition, writes: “Great literary books like this one wake up consciousness, bring people together, interpret, explain, denounce, keep record and provoke change.” She finds within Galeano’s intimate reading of history reason for hope:

The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them.

The land originates and sustains us; why is this obvious fact so often forgotten or neglected? When Galeano writes about Honduras, he reminds the reader of the 19th century exploits of William Walker, a North American pirate who was employed by US bankers. With full support of the U.S. government, this “national hero” as he was later hailed, “robbed, killed, burned, and in successive expeditions proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras.

Not to be outdone by Walker, President William H. Taft upped the ante in the 20th century: “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it is already ours morally.”

The fact that Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, defender of the workers and campesinos, was ousted by the military—with a two-time School of the Americas (now WHINSEC) graduate, General Romeo Vasquez, leading the charge—is not all that surprising, I suppose. As Father Daniel Berrigan, poet and peace activist, often says, we follow the same marching orders time and time again; we think that human community is formed out of the barrel of a gun. Along with humans, the land is also burned and destroyed.

Ten years ago, the “Red” Bishop of Recife, Brazil, Dom Helder Camara died. Dom Helder’s is a voice that we must resurrect in these days of coups and climate disasters. Camara, up by 2:00 am every morning, channeled his astonishing energy into uplifting the poor, particularly those who lived in the favelas, the teeming slums of Rio de Janeiro. Though his early efforts found him creating anti-poverty programs, he soon came to see that such “band-aids” would never heal the structural wounds of poverty. In order to do that, Brazil had to re-think its process of industrialization and its care of the land:

Every day the agriculture industry expels more peasants from the interior. The big companies move in with their modern methods of cultivation which require far fewer hands and produce much higher yields. They buy vast tracks of land, and anyone who has been living there—probably without any official documents, but often for several generations—is forced to leave. They’re simply thrown out.

And they go to the towns. If they can, they go to Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo … The peasants think that they’ll be able to find houses, schools, work, and hospitals in the city. And they end up in the favelas.

Or they may end up rebelling, and more often than not, imprisoned or killed. In Camara’s book, Spirals of Violence, he counsels nonviolent resistance as a means of transforming oneself as well as the unjust structures of society. In writing the book, however, Camara wanted first to defend the poor from the accusation that they were “inherently violent,” as was evident, to the elite at least, by the violence of their rebellions.

Camara pointed out that rebels were rebelling against the violence of politically and economically induced impoverishment backed up by a military intent to keep political and economic power in the hands of a small elite. This he called the first level of violence, which was met by the violence, at times, of a resistance movement, or the second level of violence. In the third level of violence, the elites strike back and most often with wildly disproportionate force. Camara, who often lived in the favelas, knew that his call for nonviolence was challenging: “Choosing the way of moral pressure is not choosing the easy way out. We are replacing the force of arms by moral force, the violence of truth.”

Reading Kingsolver, Galeano, and Camara, I better understood the nonviolence of earth stewardship, and its urgency. Working in the garden later that afternoon, I intensely felt that same urgency. Camara, in a meditation entitled, “The Co-Creator Went Mad,” claims that we have gone mad because our leaders stockpile weapons that can destroy the earth “more than thirty times.” I think now about worms I came close to today, silently writhing about in the dark soil. I think of how the “whole universe” was right there, at that moment. Who will speak for them in the midst of such madness?

As I read through my emails yesterday morning, I came across one that had been sent by the Popular Committee of Bi’lin (West Bank). It’s subject line read: “Bi’lin Invaded by Israeli Soldiers.” The email, sent by Iyad Burnat, the head of the Popular Committee, describes a 2:30 am raid by close to 70 soldiers. Declaring Bi’lin a “closed military zone,” the soldiers broke into a number of homes. In the process, they seized and took away – for no stated reason — two sixteen-year-old boys, Mohsen Kateb and Hamoda Yaseen.

Burnat’s home was also broken into and his nine-year-old-son, Abdal, threatened with seizure. At that point, a number of Popular Committee members as well as those of the International Solidarity Movement stood repeatedly in the path of the soldiers. Though they were brusquely pushed aside, they did manage to prevent Abdal from being arrested. They also managed to prevent the arrest of Haitham al-Katib, an activist, who was video-taping the raid. Burant reports that similar types of raids haven taken place almost every night for the past two weeks and that, all told, seven Bi’lin community members have been arrested.

Throughout the morning, I have read and re-read this email. Perhaps it’s because I was just in Bi’lin two weeks ago and met Burant along with many other Popular Committee Members. Perhaps the memory of being bombarded by tear gas cannisters and rubber bullets during the Committee’s Friday afternoon protest march to the separation fence (the building of which has claimed 60% of the community’s farmland) has yet to dissipate. Or, perhaps it’s simply because human beings are suffering terribly and there seems to be no end to that suffering in the near future.

Burnat’s email closes with a note of gratitude, “Thank you for your continued support.” Perhaps this is the line, most of all, that keeps me returning to my computer. How can I continue to support those whom I have known for two years in this community? What does solidarity with the Popular Committee’s nonviolent movement look like from here in the US, thousands of miles away from Bi’lin? If I am not there to put my body in the way, as did the folks of the Popular Committee and the International Solidarity Movement, what else can I be doing?

Jeff Halper, the director of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolition, an organization with whom I worked last summer in the West Bank, tells a wonderful story of his August 2008 meeting with residents of Gaza. Halper, who had been on the first of the Free Gaza boats, related that his Palestinian hosts wanted to speak with him in Hebrew, a language they missed speaking since they were no longer able to work or travel within Israel. During his conversation, now in Hebrew, one elderly man said to Halper, “Tell me, how can we get out of this mess together?” When Halper, upon his return to Israel, told this to the Israeli media, they would simply not report it. He speculated that there was too much of an investment in the narrative of “the Palestinians are violent people and they hate us [the Israelis]” for the counter-narrative witnessed by Halper to seem credible.

Like Halper, I appreciate the wisdom of the elderly Palestinian gentleman: how can we do this work together? His insight speaks to what’s foundational in the practice of nonviolence: do not get caught in the essentially meaningless duality of “friend” and “enemy.” Or, as Dr. Martin Luther King said in his “Christmas Sermon on Peace”:

It really boils down to this: that all of life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of this interrelated structure of reality … We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all of reality.

It seems to me that one of the most important practices of nonviolence is that of “not getting caught.” The use of violence, for example, tends to blindside its perpetrator. The “enemy” is reduced to a caricature and becomes an object to be pulverized or annihilated. Nonviolence, at its best, tends to be more skillful in its applications. It is, as Dr. King put it in his book, The Strength to Love, “a powerful demand for reason and justice.” One responds, for example, to the immediate facts at hand, not to a narrative that constructs “other” as the devil incarnate. But because nonviolence demands so much of us, it is often easier – and understandable – that there is a constant retreat into the use of violent force. When one’s home has been demolished, one’s employment cut-off and one’s sixteen-year-old son killed for no reason, why respond with nonviolence? When an unaccountable oppressor and its enablers rationalize the “despair” of a people, such as we see in Gaza, how are we to “live together?”

The Popular Committee of Bi’lin, with its 227 consecutive nonviolent Friday marches, demonstrate one nonviolent way of “living together.” Another way, and perhaps more for Americans, is to be accountable. When asked, “What can we do to help those who suffer the violence of the Israeli Occupation?,” so often our Palestinian hosts told us to two things: take care of your own [US] house and answer the question of “what to do” yourselves.

Certainly, in Dr. King, for example, we had someone who spoke to “taking care of one’s own house.” In his “Time to Break the Silence,” sermon, he called for truthful self-reflection during the time of the Vietnam war: how can a nation that kills millions of people, maims horribly their children, drops chemicals on its own soldiers, poisons land and water, bombs hospitals and shelters, etc., be considered a force for liberation? King’s naming of America as “strange liberators” has not been proven any less accurate in the passing of time. The “war question,” is just as paramount today as it was during King’s time, particularly for those who suffer our bombs, our bullets, our white phosphorus gas, etc.

Self-knowledge, in the manner described by King, points to the path we need to take in order to “clean up our own house” as well. Once again, we had someone who also pointed this out: Dorothy Day, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and a pacifist. In Daniel Berrigan’s essay, “The Long Loneliness of Dorothy Day,” he describes how Day said what others would not dare to say, or had not the insight to see:

Why, in a sane world, she asked, should a wounded human lie in a ditch? She began, so to speak, literally to remember that body. The crime, the neglect, were universal, she cried. All over the world, on an “average” day, the unemployed and unemployable, the victimized and the vacuous, the homeless and the feckless, the alcoholics and the druggies, the flaky and the furious – in great numbers these were struck down, and fell into ditches.

And the world went its amnesiac blank-eyed way, the way named “money and routine and ego and academe and religion.” The way named, on the largest signpost of all, lettered in blood – war.

With regard to the question of “what to do?”, I suppose each must make the effort to anwer that question for him or herself. I’ll mention, however, Berrigan’s essay, “We Are Filled With Hope,” as a resource for working through this question. In this essay, Berrigan gives an account of the “Plowshares Eight,” a communal effort of eight nonviolent activists to disarm the nosecone of a Mark 12A nuclear war head. On September 9th, 1980 these eight—including Berrigan—entered General Electric’s Nuclear Re-entry Division Plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and hammered upon the weapons. The activists grounded their action in the words of the prophet Isaiah (2:4), who, envisioning a nonviolent future, said: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

When Berrigan speaks of “what to do?” with the scourge of nuclear weapons, he says: “All great moments are finally simple. Why not, we asked our souls, why not us, our hands, our hammers? And if not us, who?” Further, he reflects:

The weapons are a kind of demonic anti-sacrament, a sign of a mystery, of the sin that gives up on life. Despair of sisters and brothers, of human variety and beauty, of contesting forms of organizing societies. Most grievously of all, despair of the possibility of peacefully settling human differences.

The logic of hope, we thought, runs counter. What has been ill made, immorally made, illegitimately made, secretly made—made without accountability or public debate or plain horse sense—this can be unmade.

The elderly Gazan gentlemen, the folks of the Popular Committee and the International Solidarity Movement, the Israeli “Refusniks,” have all “unmade” the logic of violence and its tools. Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan have shown that we, too, are capable of doing the same in America. Let there be no more “cries in the night;” let us live the “fierce urgency” of nonviolence right now.

We Buddhists must find the courage to leave our temples and enter the temples of the human experience,
the temples that are filled with suffering.
If we listen to the Buddha, Christ, Gandhi, we can do nothing less.
The refugee camps, the prisons. the ghettos, and the battlefields then become our temples.
We have so much work to do.

Maha Ghosananda, “The Human Family”

The recent revelation of top Democratic support for President Richard Nixon’s decision to send U.S. and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia, provide arms to the Cambodian government and continue its “secret bombing” raids had me re-reading Santidhammo Bhikkhu’s “Maha Ghosananda: The Buddha of the Battlefield” last night. I suppose I was looking for someone who found a nonviolent way through the madness of war and of its horrific violence.

The June 24th edition of the Washington Post reports that when Nixon telephoned Senator John Stennis (D-Mississippi), then chair of the Armed Services Committee, on April 24th, 1970 to let him know of his plans for Cambodia, Stennis responded: “I will be with you … I commend you for what you are doing.” Part of what Stennis “commended,” had already been well underway, as is noted in the the March 18th, 2009 edition of The Cambodian Daily: “Between March 18, 1969 and August 15, 1973, U.S. warplanes carpet-bombed, sometimes indiscriminately, ‘neutral’ Cambodia, killing civilians, pulverizing the countryside and pulling the nation deeper into conflict in neighboring Vietnam. Causality estimates range from as few as 5,000 to more than half a million.”

The Daily points out that the March 18th bombings were not the first to have pummeled the land and its people; they had been going on since 1965. The 1969 “Operation Menu,” with its “Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Supper, Dinner and Dessert” campaigns, was simply an escalation of what had already begun in 1965. All told, the Daily reports, “the long-range B-52 bombers flew more than 230,000 sorties over Cambodia and dropped more than 2.75 million tons of ordnance on more than 113,000 Cambodian sites … and more than the total tonnage of bombs dropped by Allied Forces during World War II, counting the two atomic bombs used on Japan.”

Mann Phal, who was a young girl during the time of Operation Menu, puts human flesh on the payload statistics of the Cambodian Daily’s account: “My father said, ‘Child, run into the bunker, the plane is coming. Come to the bunker.’ Before she could reach it, the bunker took a direct hit. The explosion tore her family to pieces and hurled a chunk of her father’s leg on to a treetop. The bodies of her mother and siblings were eviscerated. That bomb also sent searing hot shrapnel into Phal’s head, legs and arms … Phal survived [her brother carried his unconscious sister to safety] but her arm was left dangling by bits of flesh and bone, and was later amputated. [Her] grandmother returned to the blast site … to collect the body parts [Phal's parents and four siblings were killed] strewn about and buried them together in a single grave. ”

The Daily ends its article with a final quote from Phal: “If you bring [the American pilot who dropped the bombs] here today, I would beat him. And I would cut off his arm to put it on my own body.”

In the monastery we learned to meditate this way.
All day long, we moved the hand up and down, up and down,
with mindfulness, following the breath carefully.
Every day, we did only this – nothing more.

Maha Ghosananda

During Operation Breakfast, Maha Ghosananda was studying meditation in a southern Thai forest hermitage. Like Phal, his parents and siblings had also been killed in the bombings and in the ensuing violence that engulfed Cambodia. Upon hearing about the great suffering endured by the Cambodian people, Ghosananda’s first impulse was to rush back to Cambodia, where “the rivers are full of blood,” and assist in any way that he could. His Buddhist teacher, the Venerable Ajahn Dhammadaro, insisted, however, that he remain in the monastery and learn how to meditate. Peace, according to Dhammadaro, begins within one’s own heart. Further, and before rushing into a situation, know when the time is ripe to act. When Ghosananda learned that his entire family had been killed, he could not stop weeping. Even during this time, the teaching of the Master remained the same: “Don’t weep. Be mindful. Having mindfulness is like knowing when to open and when to close your windows and doors … You can’t stop the fighting. Instead, fight your impulses toward sorrow and anger. Be mindful. Stop weeping and be mindful.”

When Buddhist teachers speak of “mindfulness,” they are not speaking of intellectual knowledge. By the time Ghosananda, who was born in 1929, came to study with Dhammadaro, he had already been ordained as a monk, graduated from Buddhist University in Phnom Penh, completed advanced studies at a Buddhist university in Battambang, and attained a Ph.D. from India’s Nalanda University. Ghosananda, who had been born into a Mekong Delta peasant family, was also fluent in numerous languages. When he received his doctorate, Samdech Preah Ghosananda, received the honorific title “Maha,” which means, according to Santidhammo, “‘great’ and refers to a monk who is a Pali expert and a monastic scholar.”

Ghosananda gives a hint as to the nature of mindfulness in a joke that he had about own scholastic achievements: “Ph.D. means Person Has Dukkha.” When the Buddha said, in the First Noble Teaching, “All of life is suffering,” he was pointing to dukkha. One way of re-stating the First Noble Truth might be to say that “all of life appears to be that of suffering.” Even in the best of circumstances, there is no one who can escape the “pervasive unsatisfactoriness of life.” This particular Buddhist teaching does not mean, for example, that we minimize the horrific suffering experienced by Phal and Ghosananda’s families; it simply asks that we take a deeper look into the nature of our being and into the nature of suffering.

The courage to even look at dukkha, or the truth of our lives honestly, much less “understand” what the Buddhists are talking about, is why Ghosananda, with all of his academic achievements, studied in a Thai forest for nine years during the worst of the bombing. Despite the terrible news about his family, his teacher had asked him “not to weep and to be mindful.” Ghosananda took this as a starting point for his practice of mindfulness: “All his family, all his friends were gone [They were in the past]. He thought about the future, and saw that it was totally unknown. He decided to do the one thing he could do, which was to take care of the present just as well as he could.” Like the Buddhist understanding of dukkha, the “present moment” is another term that runs the risk of being reduced to a cliché or completely misunderstood. Hence the Buddhist imperative to practice and not simply talk about the practice. Without such practice, it is almost impossible, as American Zen teacher Blanche Hartman discovered, to understand what Ghosananda was talking about when he said, “When you know suffering, you know Nirvana.”

Upon leaving the Thai forest monastery, Ghosananda walked straight into the battlefield Cambodia had become post-American intervention and during the rise and reign of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. From 1975 until early 1979, Pot’s genocidal practices wiped out nearly two million Cambodians by means of execution, forced labor and starvation. Joining the Cambodian people in their suffering and death were close to 62,000 of its 65,000 Buddhists monks as well as the “official” practice of Buddhism itself. Ghosananda, who entered a Cambodian refugee camp located on the Thai border in 1978, must have seemed, at first, a saffron-robed apparition to the camp’s sickly and starving people. Soon enough, however, they flocked toward him and received from him a verse of the Metta Sutra which read: “Hatred can never overcome hatred; only love can overcome hatred.”

Ghosananda, who had known suffering so deeply, walked through the sewage-filled camp with great serenity. It was often said of him that joyfulness and happiness seemed to radiate from his very being, or, as Benedictine monk James Wiseman recalls: “Looking at the Venerable Ghosananda, one has the impression that not only his smile, but his whole body is radiant. It seems as if his skin has been washed so clean that it shines.” Ghosananda, in other words, was the living incarnation of the sutra he was handing out to the people of the camp. By first handing out the sutra, he was not ignoring the physical needs of the refugees, but was, in actuality, giving them a means of well-being for a lifetime.

From his initial entry into the Sakeo camp, Ghosananda launched into fifteen years of endless effort on behalf of the Cambodian people. His many works, which are are well documented in Santidhammo’s short book, found him doing everything from building temples and resettlement camps to serving on the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. Ghosananda, who was often referred to as the “Cambodian Gandhi” also assembled a peace army whose only ammunition were “bullets of loving kindness.” His army, assembled for the purpose of six “Dhammayietra (a pilgrimage of truth or a peace walk) for Peace and Reconciliation” would make peace one step at a time: “Wars of the heart always take longer to cool than the barrel of a gun … we must heal through love … and we must go slowly, step by step.” The hardest step was that of loving one’s enemy, yet if we desire peace, we must take that step. Relying upon his Buddhist practice, Ghosananda understood that when we see the “enemy,” we see “ourselves.” Seeing deeply into this realization, I would not fight another since that is, in actuality, fighting myself. It is fortunate that Ghosananda had such a good teacher, and that he did indeed learn how to meditate in the Thai forest monastery.

Ghosananda’s devotion to peacemaking was early in the making. While at Narlanda University, he had the opportunity to meet, study and work with the Japanese monk Nichidatsu Fujii, who had studied intensley with Gandhi at his Wardha Ashram and eventually went on to found the Nipponzan Myohojii Buddhist order. In 1954, Fujii built the first peace pagoda and held his first peace walk in Japan. According to Fujii, for whom nonviolence was the center of his peacemaking efforts, “civilization is neither to have electric lights, nor airplanes, nor produce nuclear bombs. Civilization is not to kill people, not destroy living beings, not make war. Civilization is to hold out all respect and affection for one another.” Today, his adherents, including those in the United States, continue to walk for peace and for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

During the many Dhammayietra walks that he led in Cambodia, Ghosananda took literally and seriously Fujji’s dictum of “respect and affection for one another;” somehow, he was even able to bring members of the Khmer Rouge within his tent of reconciliation, forgiveness and nonviolence. But the effort was not without cost. During most of the walks, Ghosananda and his multitudinous Dhammayietra disciples were shelled or caught in the midst of crossfire. On a few of the walks, a few of the monks and nuns who had joined him were killed. Still, Ghosandana and his peace army of thousands did not stop walking. Just as the Buddha had done in his own time, the walkers of the Dhammayietra went directly into the heart of the matter. When relatives of the Buddha began to fight over the use of water between two communities, the Buddha – sensing that an armed struggle was soon to break out – walked directly onto the battlefield and asked: “Which is more precious, water or human blood?” When the people responded that human blood was more precious, the Buddha asked: “So, for the sake of water you will make rivers of blood flow? Is what you are doing correct?”

On April 12th, 1992 when the first Dhammayietra began, the hope was to walk in solidarity with those Cambodian refugees returning home from Thailand for the first time in close to twenty years. Opposition to the walk was voiced by United Nation’s officials, the Khmer Rouge, and Thai government officials, among others. The biggest obstacle, however, was the buried land mines that had been in the ground since the 1970’s. Any obstacle the walkers faced, however, was tempered by the gratitude of the Cambodian people—even members of the Khmer Rouge—that the walkers passed along their route. Americans Elizabeth Bernstein and Bob Maat, who were on the walk and whose reflections were documented by Santidhammo, had this to say:

Even as early as 4 am, in town or countryside, families would wait outside their homes with a bucket of water, candles and incense sticks. As monks and nuns filed past two by two, they would bless the people and water with words of peace. “May peace be in your heart, your family, your village, our country.” In return, many walkers had his or her feet washed by those waiting alongside the road, wishing us well on our journey. “May your feet be as cool as this water.”

As the walkers passed by, Khmer Rouge soldiers and government forces lay down their weapons beside the road and asked for blessings from Maha Ghosananda, expressing their dread of war and earnest desire for peace … “We don’t want anyone to be killed or hurt”, one soldier said. “Even though I am a soldier, I have no ill-will in my heart.”

In one village where a massacre of 30 people had recently occurred, the village folk welcomed the walk and one man said, “This is the first time we have dared to gather together again in a large group. We just couldn’t stay away. Everyone is here. The market is closed, the people have left their jobs to come receive you. We are so grateful that you have come to help us find peace again … The monks and nuns must lead us out of this mess of killing one another. If we just think of killing and revenge, it will never end. Buddhism must guide us.”

In his “Army of Peace” statement, which can be found in Ghosananda’s 1992 publication, “Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion” (Parallex Press), he begins by saying: “History is being made. Four armies are putting down their guns. Four factions are joining to govern. We are all walking together.” Unfortunately, the history made by Ghosananda and Cambodian peacemakers is often not recorded by the likes of the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc. What we are often left to read are those stories crafted from those heavily invested in armed struggle and political domination. The temptation, in light of this reality, is to lapse into despair or to wish that Ghosananda, who died in 2007, was still among us. To which, I am imagine Ghosananda would say something like this, as he often did: “Peace is possible, just take it step by step!”

Elise Aghazarian, a professor of sociology at Bethlehem University and Palestinian activist

It’s a shorthand way of speaking about the relentless, though perhaps unconscious, desire to “be number one.” While those in the social justice, peacemaking and civil rights movements might assume that King was only addressing the wealthy and the powerful, it would be a mistaken assumption. King, relying upon the psychological studies of Alfred Adler, contends that the desire to “lead the parade,” is a pervasive human tendency.

For King, the “great issue in life is to harness the drum major instinct.” Failure to do so lends itself to a range of debilitating practices, particularly for the nonviolent activist. The unharnessed drum major instinct, for example, fosters a snobbish exclusivity not a welcoming inclusiveness; destructive competition not affirming cooperation; gossip and not meaningful conversation, etc. When properly harnessed, however, the drum major instinct fuels true human greatness: “to be first in love, to be first in moral excellence and to be first in generosity.” Further, there is no “Ph.D.” required for this kind of creative genius; it is a field of study and application open to all. Meditating upon his death, though not knowing how soon that would come to pass, King asked that all of his achievements be forgotten; he simply wanted to be remembered as one who led a life “committed to peace, justice and righteousness.”

During a recent visit to Beit Sahour, a Palestinian town just east of Bethlehem, I met Elise Aghazarian, a young woman professor of sociology at Bethlehem University. In short order, it was quite evident that I was in the presence of someone who, though relatively unknown, embodied the greatness described by King in his sermon. Aghazarian, who is of Armenian and Palestinian descent, spoke to our CODEPINK delegates at a forum sponsored by the Alternative Information Center (AIC). The AIC is a Palestinian-Israeli grassroots organization engaged in the dissemination of information, critical analysis and political advocacy. After the forum, she joined us for lunch.

Aghazarian impressed me with her comportment, intelligence, warmth and passionate interest in her studies. Upon learning of the crushing circumstances forced upon her by the Israeli occupation, I was moved by her resilience and obvious love of life.

This resilience and love of life flowed through the brief talk that she gave at the AIC forum. I have, as much as is possible, reconstructed her talk for those not fortunate enough to have been there upon its hearing and in her presence.

(While Aghazarian spoke, the melodious call of the muezzin, beckoning all to pray—to listen—wafted through an open door, as did the brilliant rays of a mid-morning sun.)

“I would like to give a personal testimony of what it feels like to live under occupation.

I used to go to Birzeit University every day and look right through the window at so many trees. Looking at the trees and the horizon, I often would feel empowered. I could feel these trees often consoling me on the way. That feeling, in time, started changing. I always looked at the horizon and thought there must be a nice future, nice horizons. There are so many dreams I can not touch. There is so much for the future.

In time we were obliged to go down from the bus and be searched. So every day we were searched as being potential terrorists, everyday we have to stop on queues, our stuff had to be searched, we had to be searched, everyday we had to hear, ‘You barbaric Arabs, goyim’, or other words. Then there was a sense of solidarity; we were somehow helping each other.

Gradually there was a one-colored gray wall over there. Every day I would see how the wall was growing up, up, up … We were trying to challenge that, to say ‘No’, to go on demonstrations. We did our best but then one day we were protesting—there is no freedom of opinion—and many people were arrested. We have 11,000 political prisoners

It’s not easy to live under occupation. I think occupation is the degradation of a person’s humanity. It’s being deprived of your past, it’s being deprived of your dreams; it’s being deprived of your present; it’s being deprived of being able to move. It’s being constantly represented by others. You look at the sky and there are Israeli planes, you look at the land, you see it changing, landscape transformation. You don’t know if tomorrow you will see your friends, if your ID card will be revoked.

It’s not easy to live under occupation. It’s having to live with many minimal resources and still thanking God that maybe you’re better off than people in other regions and saying maybe tomorrow will be worse than today, so let me just live today because I don’t know what’s going on. It’s not knowing when the Israeli helicopters will come or when the Israeli tanks will come and for whom. It’s not knowing if you are dangerous or not.

Sometimes you say something simple and you’re viewed as a terrorist. One time I was working on research in Jerusalem and suddenly the Israeli soldiers broke in the office saying we have dangerous documents and we were just doing simple statistics about Jerusalemites.

It’s not easy to live under occupation and it’s not easy being a woman living under occupation. As a woman you already have your personal challenges and then you have also to deal with society and its social pressures. You have to deal with different dominations of your body by different parties, by different groups, by the occupation. It’s seeing your home being threatened by demolition. It’s challenging, both the social and the political pressure.

And then trying to find ways to revolt. My friends and I often despair, we feel that we have no hope. But then somehow you find an inner strength, something mysterious, letting you go on. Maybe the social solidarity helps between socially conscious people.

As a teacher, I look at my students. Last semester, I had a class where there was one girl who was pregnant and she was coming to University every day, challenging her mother, her father-in-law, her husband, leaving her kids at home, crossing a checkpoint, coming from Hebron to Jerusalem just to study. And she wanted to study just because it was her dream. There was one guy who was arrested by the Israeli occupation. He was not simply dealing with the difficulties of being arrested but also his memories of being arrested. Why was he arrested? Because he was distributing brochures of a certain leftist, Marxist persuasion.

There are people who just tell me of their simple dreams. For example, one student was telling me, ‘My dream is to see the sea. My dream is to see the sea. I want to see Jaffa.’ And they can’t see Jaffa. Other students who are at Bethlehem University are just twenty minutes away from Jerusalem; they just want to see Jerusalem, they just want to see the Dome of the Rock and that’s a very simple ride, they live not very far away. Their parents have seen the Dome of the Rock but they can’t. Why? Because they are so-called ‘West Bankers.’ They know because people from outside come and see the Dome of the Rock and see the Holy Sepulcher, but they can’t.

So, I think it’s difficult to live under occupation and yet it is special because everyday you feel you have a challenge. I think resistance is the effort to hold onto your humanity because occupation is a degradation of your humanity. So resistance is trying to be human everyday. It’s trying to challenge all the discourses that are around you on different levels. It’s trying to challenge the desperation. Sometimes you fall down but we Palestinians, we associate ourselves with the phoenix. Sometimes we feel we are dead, but then we feel alive again with more power to go on.

So it’s resistance and it’s connecting to the different people who are resisting even though we can’t sometimes see them. The different people who come in solidarity, like your group. It’s trying to dream, trying to hold on to your daily dreams, despite everything. Even your simple dreams. It’s trying to make the best and think of alternatives everyday. For example, my students, they tell me, ‘Why will we study sociology? Why will we study development? There is nothing, there is no future. Come on, let us admit it’. And I say, but how can we live? How can we make our daily lives better under occupation? How can we look at what is remaining of the existing horizons? How can we look at them and we don’t know what happens tomorrow? But we can try to resist, we can try to be strong despite everything.

And I hope we will continue to have this solidarity together and with other groups and our solidarity with the people of Gaza that we can’t even reach. Our solidarity with the land that’s being fragmented and our effort constantly to work on changing our social and political system toward the better.”

Over lunch, Aghazarian spoke more specifically of “life under occupation.” She brought many of us to tears when she spoke – with dignity and grace – of the travails she endured when trying to buy some chocolate for her students.

She had been sent by the University to a conference in Italy. Her students, hearing that she would miss a few classes because of a conference, in Europe, asked her to bring them some chocolate. Wanting to honor their request, Aghazarian decided that she would arrive at the airport a bit earlier than normal for her return flight home. This would afford her the time she needed to buy the chocolate. She passed through an initial security check quite easily only to encounter an Israeli security force at a second checkpoint within the airport. After reading her passport, she was asked to follow them, which she did—down four flights of stairs to an underground garage-type area. She was interrogated and told to strip down to her bra and underwear so that her clothing could be checked thoroughly. While her clothing was being examined, she was forced to sit clad only in her undergarments.

After about forty minutes, Aghazarian asked that she be allowed to dress so that she might have time to buy the chocolate for her students and still make her flight home. She was allowed to dress but she was to be accompanied by Israeli security to the Duty-Free shop. Upon arrival to the shop, her security escorts informed the clerk that they would choose the chocolate that Aghazarian would buy. She quietly but firmly refused such bullying and chose the chocolate herself. She was then escorted to her plane by the security forces, one of whom sat next to her for the duration of the flight. Mid-way through the flight, when dinner was being served, Aghazarian noticed that only she and a woman next to her had not received a meal. At this point, she cried out that the humiliation she had endured be stopped, that she was not a terrorist, that she was a human being, etc. The response of her security attendant was one of ridicule; he attempted to make it appear to the flight staff that Aghazarian was crazy.

Toward the end of his “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, King speaks about what it means to “hold on to one’s humanity.” It means that we are to be on the right side of the war question, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, love other human beings … and, as Aghazarian so beautifully exemplified, buy them chocolate despite everything.

In a poem entitled, “And Now,” Adrienne Rich sets a task for herself: she will pay close attention to our political landscape, to its details and public voice, so that she might better discern just when it was that “the name of compassion was changed to the name of guilt, when to feel with a stranger was declared obsolete.” She points to an “owning up” to the suffering that is inflicted upon the vulnerable,  the poor and the oppressed, and asks: “who was in charge of definitions and who stood by receiving them.”

During my time with a CODEPINK delegation in Israel and the occupied West Bank, I, too, was challenged to learn how to “pay attention.” Though a rather jolting experience, I am grateful for it. Given the enormity of suffering in the world, this is hardly the time to be walking about in some kind of stupor. “Wake up!” is a phrase that often appeared in my notes written at the end of each day, particularly after the day our delegation joined Palestinians, Israelis and other internationals in a nonviolent demonstration in Bil’in.

Bil’in, a village of about 1800 Palestinians, is nestled within the foothills of the Judean mountains. Though it is just seven miles northwest from the city of Ramallah, the village relies primarily upon agricultural production to sustain its inhabitants. Within the first few moments of my sojourn into Bil’in, I marveled at the magnificence of the land. There is at once the play of light upon the silvery leaves of the olive trees, the contrast of its cream-colored rocks against an azure sky and the gentle beauty of its undulating hills. The panoramic view, visible from any street in the village, offered an antidote to the thoughts and feelings of fear that were beginning to crowd my mind and heart. The land was instructive in its capaciousness; it spoke to me of the necessity of a large heart and mind in the work of nonviolence.

Just after the arrival of our CODEPINK delegation, the muezzin’s sonorous call beckoned Bil’in’s Muslim inhabitants to prayer. From Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, the coordinator of activities of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and the Settlements, we learned that the Friday protest walks, which have been held every Friday since February 2005, begin after the noontime prayers are completed. His statement reminded me of something that Daniel Berrigan, S.J. has often shared with members of Kairos, an interfaith New York City-based peace community. According to Berrigan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the churches of the American South as the places from which “we  [the Civil Rights Movement] go forth.” I imagined Dr. King and folks from the Civil Rights Movement with us in Bil’in; what a wonderful sharing of stories, songs and experiences there could have been.

Abu Rahmeh led us to the Popular Committee’s meeting house where he and Iyad Burnat, the head of the Popular Committee, gave an orientation and nonviolence training. From the outside walls of the house hung large and brightly colored banners which read, “President Obama, Have a Look!” Had President Obama “looked” on April 17th, he would have seen the violent death of 31-year-old Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahmeh. Abu Rahmeh, a beloved member of the village and steadfast participant in the Friday marches, was blasted in the chest by “the rocket,” a high velocity tear gas projectile. It was shot by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) directly at him and at close range, no more than forty meters away. Though he was not killed immediately, Abu Rahmeh’s chest was ripped open and his lungs were soon flooded with blood. He died in a private car en route to a hospital in Ramallah. Just prior to being shot, he had come to the assistance of a French female journalist who had been slightly injured in the face by rebounding shrapnel. He pleaded with the IDF to stop shooting but was only able to get a few words out before being felled: “We are in a nonviolent protest, there are kids and internationals …”

I wish that President Obama could have met Abu Rahmeh and his family, as did Benny Ziffer, an Israeli who writes for Ha’aretz. In his article, “Low on the Scale of Humanity,” he gives this personal account:

Basem promised he would learn Hebrew so it would be easier to come and visit my daughter … [He] came from a modest family. He was not an intellectual but he had natural leadership abilities. I returned to the village several times and watched him calming down groups of angry young people near the separation fence, so they would not provoke the soldiers. I saw him maintain order during the historic demonstration about a year ago, that marked the [Israeli] Supreme Court’s recognition of the justice of the village’s case, and its ruling that the lands stolen during the construction of the separation fence must be returned to them … Thus ended the brief story of the life of Basem Abu Rahmeh, who was handsome, tall and charismatic, but in terms of the categories of humanity, ranked very low.

Chris Hedges in the introduction to Collateral Damage, a book he co-authored with Laila Al-Arian, writes: “The politicians still speak [of war] in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in the lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue.” The grave of Basem Abu Rahmeh is located nearby the Popular Committee’s meeting house; you walk by it in order to get to the protest route. Far from “improving the world,” the loss of Abu Rahmeh is the loss of someone whose presence and gifts are those needed at this exact moment: he had no qualms about learning the language of the so-called “enemy;” he risked and gave his life to help someone in need; he managed to reach the hearts of those in his community trapped within feeling of rage and despair, etc. More so, he lived the greatest miracle of all: to be human in a situation that brutally dictates inhumanity. While standing by Abu Rahmeh’s grave, I took the call to President Obama as my own: Look! Look!

The ability to see clearly, however, is only an initial step. Ultimately, action is required. If there was a common theme to the various workshops and talks I attended during my two weeks with CODEPINK’s delegation in Israel, the primacy of deeds not more words, reports, analyses, etc., was that theme. “We know what’s going on in the Occupied Territories, now what are you going to do about it?” was the question put forth by almost every speaker I heard. Yes, we have “known what’s going on” for thousands of years, actually, and it is well expressed in a verse from the prophet Isaiah: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land (5:8)!” Particular to Bil’in, as Mitchell Plitnick writes in his blog entry “Death in Bil’in: End Soldier’s Violence at the West Bank,” is that:

60% of Bil’in’s land, including much farmland crucial to the livelihood of many of its inhabitants, has been cut off by the barrier in order to accommodate the expansion of the Modi’in Illit settlement … the bottom line for all of this is that the root of these problems is the settlement project and the route of the security barrier based on the concerns of settlement expansion.

Recent developments in the expansion of the Modi’in Illit block hit close to home for those of us who live in the United States. In July 2008,  Adalah-NY, The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, charged New York-based developers, Shaya Boymelgreen and Lev Leviev, both of whom are billionaires, of being directly and indirectly involved in the development of Mattityahu East, located within the Modi’in Illit block. This development is in violation of international law. According to Adalah-NY, “The construction of Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention according to a broad international consensus.” At the time of Adalah-NY’s press release, Boymelgreen, the owner of Green Park International and Green Mountain, both of which are Canadian registered, faced a $2 million lawsuit in Quebec Superior Court. Leviev, though not directly named in the lawsuit, is the owner of Africa Israel, whose subsidiary company, Danya Cebus, was responsible for the construction of Mattityahu East. Of Boymelgreen and Leviev, Adalah-NY also points to a connection between the poor of New York City and those of Bil’in: “Boymelgreen and Leviev have also earned reputations in New York City as developers who abuse laborers while building expensive condos that price low-income and middle income families out of their communities.”

In a Ha’aretz article entitled, “Tear Gas Is an Emotional State,” Iris Leal asks Basman Yassin, a Bil’in farmer, whether or not he is able to get to his lands:

“He says that in theory, with the proper permits – which are a pain in the neck to obtain – there is access to the land, but in practice it is often denied for long periods of time. Crops do not tolerate caprices, they demand regularity.”

Yet as Avika Eldar reports in a 2006 Ha’aretz article, “Documents Reveal West Bank Settlement Modi’in Illit Built Illegally,” settlement builders are able to access such permits quickly and illegally. According to Eldar:

“The military government’s Civil Administration chief planner, Shlomo Moskovitch, admitted the building permits for the new neighborhood Matityahu East in Modi’in Illit were issued illegally … The land [Bil'in's] was purchased by land dealers through dubious powers of attorney, then rezoned as state land and leased or sold to settler’s building companies. The construction of the separation fence prompted the purchasers to implement their ‘rights’ by hastily fixing facts on the ground.”

These “facts on the ground” are intended to be permanent. This is a point, claims Eldar, made by B’Tselem, the Israeli Information for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and from Bimkom, Planners for Planning Rights, who obtained a copy of “The Master Plan of Modi’in Illit Area for the Year 2020.” Intended as a guiding document, the Master Plan map designates “some 600 dunams next to the plan for Matityahu East, owned by a few Bil’in families, is slated for construction of 1,200 housing units for settlers.” Hence, the “separation fence” may not be so much for the purpose of security, notes Eldar, but quite literally for the separation of a people from their land.

In January of 2005, the people of Bil’in decided that they would resist being separated from their land and formed the Popular Committee. Since February of 2005, what was once a daily occurrence has evolved into the weekly Friday demonstrations. There have been demonstrations on 225 consecutive Fridays since 2005, many of which display a creative pageantry. As Leal reports, “during the Soccer World Cup three years ago, they wore the uniforms of soccer teams; on Christmas, they dressed up as Santa Claus.” As I witnessed last summer, when I first participated in a Friday march, the  essentially, though not always, nonviolent and creative efforts of the Popular Committee are met with a barrage of IDF- launched tear gas cannisters, rubber coated steel bullets, percussion grenades, rubber ball grenades, live ammunition, etc. The meeting between this firepower and human flesh has produced death and horrible injuries. Chroniques de Palestine notes that Abu Rahmeh was the third person killed in the past three months, bringing the total of those killed in the anti-Wall demonstrations to sixteen. Eleven of the sixteen killed have been teenagers, including a ten-year old boy who was killed last summer in Ni’lin, a neighboring village of Bil’in. Frank Barat of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine puts these deaths in a larger context by noting that since the start of the Second Intfada in 2000, 87% of those killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been Palestinians.

On the Friday that the CODEPINK delegation joined the demonstration, Abdullah Abu Rahmeh gave a brief training in nonviolence. The start of the training began with Abu Rahmeh pulling out a large box containing spent tear gas cannisters, tear gas projectiles, grenades and a various assortment of bullets, all of which had been collected on the route of the protest march. I felt nauseated while looking at these spent shells, which can only be described as vile. What kind of mind designs such a weapon? Clearly the outcome of being hit by one of these would be death or being horribly maimed. In his article, “Israel Wages Chemical Warfare with American Tear Gas,” Louis Wolf reports that American made tear gas cannisters have been “shot or thrown at crowds or individual in streets and alleyways, into elementary school playgrounds, and repeatedly inside houses, hospitals, schools, stores and mosques, as well as dropped from helicopters into teeming refugee camps.” They have also been shot at me, twice, as well as at our CODEPINK delegation and, of course, at the internationals and Palestinian participants in the Friday protest matches. What I can describe personally, Wolf describes technically:

A highly concentrated lachrymatory (tear-producing) agent dispensed in a finely pulverized, dust-like substance, the CS gas3 initially attacks the eyeball and the lachrymal gland which produces tears and is the passages from the eyes to the nose. An intense burning sensation renders it exceedingly difficult to open the eyes, compounding the eyes and blinding the victim to what is happening.

Being “blinded to what’s happening” while the tear gas cannisters are being shot is not a situation one wants to be in given the potentially lethal effect of being hit by the cannister or projectile. While walking toward the fence – and you walk in an open field with little if any protective covering – one first hears the distinctive sound of tear gas being shot. It a is rapid “thunk, thunk, thunk.” Next comes the sighting of a white plume of smoke and then the effects of the gas, which are immediate, sickening, and debilitating. The range of these cannisters and projectiles is  stunning; you could be no where near the separation barrier and still be hit. During our nonviolence training, Abu Rameh taught us how to dodge the cannisters and instructed us to listen to the directional commands issued by the leaders of the march. In reality, however, the terror of these weapons makes it quite difficult to follow any instruction. While I looked at the spent casings and listened to Abu Rahmeh describe the effects of each of the weapons on the body, I wondered if the  American taxpayer knew how much of his/her money Israel receives each year in military assistance. If we did know – say perhaps a box of these casings were put on every doorstep along with photographs of those who have been killed and injured — would we resist the spending of our money in this manner? What if each taxpayer was to join in a Friday march and take in just one whiff of the gas, which is enough to create the rather intense burning that Wolf describes? Would we then resist paying at least that percentage of our taxes that are used to purchase such weapons? If Americans understood how our own military contractors benefit from the sale of weapons to Israel, would we be outraged or indifferent?

It’s likely that most Americans have no idea how much of their money has been allocated to Israel for military spending. Former CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison, in their article, “U.S. Military Aid to Israel” provide a helpful guide. They point out, for instance, the:

United States and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding in August of 2007 committing the U.S. to give Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next decade. This is a grant aid, given in cash at the start of each fiscal year. The only stipulation imposed on Israel’s use of this cash gift is that it spend 74 per cent to purchase U.S. military goods and services.

In FY 2009, the amount of the grant was $2.55 billion. In order to reach the $30 billion amount earmarked through Memorandum of Understanding, however, the yearly allotment would have to increase, as is noted on the Naval Open Source Intelligence website. Its authors state that the FY 2010 cash gift proposed to Congress will be $2.775 billion. Since 1949, Israel has received $101 billion in total aid from the United States. Of that $101 billion, $53 billion has been allocated for military assistance. Wolf, in his article on tear gas, describes the atypical way that Israel and Egypt can make use of U.S. military assistance. Unlike other nations that receive military aid, Israel and Egypt are given “credits” (loans) through the Foreign Military Sales program. This money can be spent in any way that Israel and Egypt see fit. Further, “in the case of Israel’s tear gas purchases, the ‘credits’ are generously being rolled over and ‘forgiven,’ which means free tear gas.”

Ever since my return to the U.S., I have been thinking about my participation in the Bil’in march as a “non-violent” activist. Given that I am a citizen of the world’s leading military power, arms dealer and consumer of the world’s resources, the construction of my being in the world, at least in part, has been formed by astonishingly violent forces. Though often outside of my control, still there was much that I still had to do (e.g., resist paying taxes, consume much less than I do, etc.) to deepen my practice of nonviolence, to become honest. The question of nonviolence emerged during our training, though it was directed more toward the rock-throwing youth of the Bil’in marches. “If rocks were to be thrown at the Israeli soldiers, could the march still be considered a nonviolent protest?” was how the questions was asked to Abu Rahmeh. Abu Rahmeh said that while the organizers of the march would not be throwing stones, it was hard for them to control what the younger men of the community might do. In light of all that they had faced – the seizure of land, living in an “open-air” prison, the death of those whom they loved – it is understandably hard to control feelings of rage and frustration, he continued. Burnat, who was interviewed by the Guardian’s Rory McCarthy, pointed out that he had spent countless hours in discussions about nonviolence with the youth of Bi’lin but that “it gets more difficult when someone is killed.” I thought again of Basem, how much he was needed in this community, and how much I could have learned from him. It’s likely that I would not choose to throw rocks but then again I come from a nation that has (and continues to) rained down tons of bombs on other human beings. The “rock-throwing,” if you will, has already been done for me, and I pay for it every April 15th.

By the day’s end that Friday, two persons were treated for injuries and dozens for the inhalation of tear gas. I walked away from the demonstration feeling shaken and sad; it was hard for me to imagine how the community endures such trauma every Friday, not to mention the daily humiliation and hardships of life under occupation. I thought of the Popular Committee and of their courage and constancy. Abu Rahmeh told us he envisions the work of the Popular Committee to be that of a spark which will ignite a mass nonviolent movement of resistance. As did many speakers I met that week, he warned that Gaza was emblematic. It was his belief, as well as others, that Israel hopes to create traumatized and isolated pockets of Palestinian people. This must be countered by, according to Abu Rameh, a unified nonviolent Palestinian people. I thought also of the Israeli soldiers, who had so perfected the ability to “hit their targets.” How does life appear to them? Rabbi Brant Rosen, in a blog entry entitled, “In Search of Perspective in Bil’in,” shared the perspective of one young soldier whose present tour of duty was in Bil’in:

In Gaza you spot a terrorist, fire a shell and it’s over. Here you face a citizen who may hurl a stone or a Molotov cocktail, but your ability to respond is limited. It may appear that we are the ones using force here, but in reality that’s not the case, as we are subject to very difficult restrictions.

A different point of view is shared by a member of Ta’ayush, an Arab-Israeli NGO, who befriended a Bil’in-based soldier and gives this account:

‘Y’ [a reference to the soldier] recounted one instance when a settler woman told the soldiers that someone had thrown a stone at her. The army’s response was to go to the Palestinian village, and line everyone up. Most of the Palestinians there were children, and Y said he started to feel like the ‘bad guy.’ While off-duty as a soldier, Y began to join the Bil’in protesters and see the conflict from their side. One day he was called up by an officer and told that he would no longer serve with them because of his activities. The rest of his service was spent as a ‘jobnik,’ doing secretarial work.

In Denise Levertov’s poem, “May Our Right Hands Lose Their Cunning,” she begins by writing: “Smart bombs replace dumb bombs. ‘Now we can aim straight through someone’s kitchen’ …” continues by speaking of “a dumb fellow, a mongoloid, 40 years old, who, being cherished, learned recently to read and write, and now has written and poem …” and ends her poem by praying “to retain something round, blunt, soft, slow dull in us, not to sharpen, not to be smart.” I think here of the picture of Basem, whose Arabic name means “smile,” used for the many posters of him now found in Bi’lin. In these pictures, he does have a brilliant smile and he is flying a rainbow-colored kite, right next to the separation barrier. I think also of “Y,” typing away in some back office as opposed to shooting a gun. I am grateful to both of them – as I am to so many others – for daring to see “everything beautiful,” as did the boy in Levertov’s poem, for their refusal to be “smart enough” to inflict harm and suffering on others.

You had to see it to believe it: Hunter “Patch” Adams, MD, fully decked out in his clown outfit, and a retired Israeli military general standing together in an enormous pair of red silk underwear. Patch calls it his “underwear security,” a play upon “undercover security.” It’s an ingenious device which encourages egotistical disarmament. You can’t climb into Patch’s underwear if you are overly-defended.

“Being part of the fun” wasn’t a thought that occurred to me when I signed up for the CodePink humanitarian delegation to the Gaza Strip. Since our particular delegation was to enter Gaza by way of Israel, I suspected our chances of getting in were slim. Indeed we were denied permission and entry on three separate occasions. I had recently seen the pictures of Gaza taken by two previous CodePink delegations who had entered through Egypt. These pictures showed the massive destruction of homes, schools, ambulances, hospitals and factories. They also showed horrific human injury and death, not to mention the rotting carcasses of livestock and animals. So, what came to mind when I thought of Gaza was “death, destruction, starvation, crisis, etc.”

It was Nasser Ibrahim, the Director of the Palestinian-Israeli Alternative Information Center in Beit Sahour (West Bank) who provided a way for me to see the necessity of the work of clowning, with its love of joy and of fun, in the context of a disaster. According to Ibrahim, political resistance is an “effort to hold on to your humanity. It is the work of being human.”

Ibrahim’s insight certainly came to life during our three attempted crossings into Gaza. During our first attempt, we were joined by “Kassamba,” an Israeli anarchist band whose name roughly translates into “sound rockets,” and a troupe of clowns. Kassamba, Patch and the Israeli clowns had all of us dancing, laughing and smiling in an area that was filled with miles of fences, guard towers, military vehicles and M-16’s. When our passports were returned to us and our entry denied, Patch took the passports and started a game of poker with them just underneath the checkpoint booth, a move that had the Israeli guards looking on in amazement and amusement. When Patch reached out his hand to one of the guards, the guard reached back and clasped Patch’s hand with a strong grip. In this case, the hand that clasped the other had to first release his hand from a gun. “Score, humanity!” at least for this moment.

Our second and third efforts to cross were enriched by balloons, kites and flowers as well as by a three-hundred person strong demonstration by Gazans just across the crossing from us. Our kites and balloons embodied our soaring spirits and the desire to connect with the people of Gaza. Our flowers were placed in the fence of the Erez crossing along with handwritten notes. Prior to placing our notes in the fence, we were able to speak with a few of the Gazans who had made it through the crossing and who were on their way to the hospital. Be they elderly women or small children held by their mothers, the pallor of sickness was quite evident, particularly in the sweltering heat of the day. Most were suffering from heart ailments and were in need of serious medical attention. In order to get out of Gaza, where medical supplies are in short shrift and hospitals are barely functioning, they had to wade through an onerous bureaucratic permit process only to wait—if they were among the fortunate few—for hours before being allowed out. The festive atmosphere we had created in this desolate and inhuman space brought forth smiles and hugs from our Gazan friends. “Score, humanity! Once again.”

Though the gates to Gaza were not opened for us, the gates around my heart were opened. Far from being dispirited, I know that the roots of my peacemaking practice are stronger and more deeply rooted than ever before. Once again the words of Nasser Ibrahim came to mind: “Never give up!” I will not give up; I have only just begun.

On the plane ride to Israel, I had just begun reading Judith Butler’s most recent work, Frames of War. In this book, Butler asks why it is that some lives are grievable and others not; why some lives are to be saved while others are shed, if even noticed, particularly during times of war. In one of the book’s many memorable phrases, Butler claims that our efforts to build borders between one another would be better spent appreciating how “bound up we are in one another.” This phrase has become a touchstone for me as I make my way through the early days of the delegation. It doesn’t allow me to slip into the facile duality of “friend and enemy” but challenges me to live  truthfully, as one who, indeed, is deeply bound to other human beings.

As we made our way round the communal introductions, I was deeply inspired by the stories and presence of those who gathered that evening. Among us were two young women of the Shministim (conscientious objectors), one of whom had just been released from a military prison for refusing to serve in the IDF. Others were Israeli and Palestinian women who work together in the Coalition of Women for Peace. On their way were three delegates from CodePink’s Cairo delegation who had just finished building a marevelous “pink playground” for children in the Gaza Strip. Here were folks who well understood “being bound” to one another and who were determined to “pay up” in order to live that insight.

One of the delegates reminded us that 2009 was the last year in the decade that the United Nations declared was to be a decade devoted to the development of a culture of nonviolence for the sake of the world’s children. I thought, once again, of that young father and of the children who were now left behind. Oh, how we adults have failed our children and one another! The consensus of the community gathered that evening was that each of us was responsible for helping to create this culture of nonviolence. I thought of this vow while listening to a conversation between one of our delegates and a young man working the desk at our hostel. For this young man, any effort to help the Palestinian people was seen as a threat to the security of Israel, which meant ultimately, to his family. My sense is that the Palestinian father was also working for the security of his family. I wonder why this common concern for security so often ends in the death of another? If we are bound up in one another, then how would killing another add to anyone’s security? This is a question that I hope to dwell upon in the coming days.

As we make our way to Gaza, there will be plenty of ways to practice “being bound up in one another.” One of the creative ways of doing this will be the practice of clowning, as we will join the Israeli Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (ICIRCA) as well as our own delegation member, Patch Adams, in the effort to bring play and joy into the work of our peacemaking. Another way will be for me to confront the welling sense of fear that I am feeling in anticipation of our work in Bi’lin, a community that sits next to Ni’lin. I had joined a nonviolent demonstration in Bi’lin last summer only to be chased from the scene by the menacing fire of tear gas cannisters shot by the IDF, as it seemed to me, directly at us. I am feeling the desire to explore the energy of this fear, to see what’s there and to find ways of encouraging connection to others and not flight from others. There is an opportunity here that I have vowed not to miss; it’s the opportunity to build the beloved community that Dr. King so often spoke of, and to start that work right within my own heart.