• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

• Thousands of Zimbabwean civil servants conducted a one-day strike Thursday to protest low wages.

• Some 40,000 people were out on the streets on Thursday in various provinces across Turkey to commemorate Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, who was shot dead outside his newspaper’s office in Şişli on Jan. 19, 2007.

• Air traffic controllers in Cyprus walked off the job for four hours on Wednesday to protest a two-year government worker wage freeze and other deficit-reduction measures.

• Inmates in 13 Kyrgyz jails started a mass hunger strike on Wednesday to support inmates in detention center No. 1 in Bishkek, where security troops violently quelled a prisoner riot on January 16.

• On Tuesday, about 6,000 workers began an indefinite strike for higher wages at a $5.25 billion project to widen the Panama Canal to accommodate larger ships.

• Dozens of orphans in Jordan on Tuesday staged a sit-in in front of the Royal Court in downtown Amman demanding better services.

• A new anti-austerity 24-hour strike and protest hit Athens on Tuesday, as auditors of international creditors returned to Greece for talks on the release of a second aid package.

• Women employees at the Palestinian Women’s Affairs Ministry began a “hunger strike till death” on Tuesday to protest against corruption and harassment.

• The teaching fraternity in Ranchi, India carried out a sit-in rally on Tuesday, to protest Maoist atrocities against them.

• Dozens of cars manned by Palestinians from the West Bank tried to leave Jericho on Tuesday morning in a non-violent protest action to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank, but were stopped by Israeli forces, who blocked the four lanes entering and exiting the Palestinian city.

• On Monday, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy staged a protest at a park as part of the international campaign to demand that the Organizing Committee of the London Games set to begin from July 27, cancel the sponsorship by Dow Chemicals.

• Workers at consumer goods giant Unilever staged a noisy protest outside the firm’s London offices in a dispute over pensions which is set to escalate into a series of strikes starting next Tuesday.

• More than 9,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Pakistan’s major cities on Tuesday in protest of a senior attorney’s slaying outside his home in Lahore.

• Workers at a Freeport McMoran mine in Indonesia on Tuesday halted their gradual return to work one day after gunmen shot two contractors dead on the road to the Grasberg mine.

• As many as 231 Air India flight attendants refused to work on Tuesday, which delayed four international flights, to protest non-payment of salaries and sustenance allowance since August.

It is tempting to succumb to despair, what with the onslaught of major media coverage telling us all the bad news, dismissing the promising news, and ignoring the good news. Consider the challenges: the unraveling violence of the Egyptian revolution, the 5,000 killed in Syria, climate change and the instability and disasters brought by extreme weather patterns and an ill-equipped global populace with inadequate leadership, the threat of random violence and terrorist activity–Norway, Belgium, India, the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq–and state and cultural violence against immigrants, women, refugees, the poor, GLBTQ persons, and people of color. So where is the hope? Well, in 2011, the fires of our hope were stoked by the global protest movements–the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street–of millions of people rising up to say: كفاية …Basta…Enough!
Resistance was in the streets and occupations in city squares. A resounding “no” echoed around the world–what Bernard Harcourt has perceptively termed “political disobedience”–signifying contempt, dissatisfaction, and rejection of entrenched governments and status quo economics. Dictators were ousted in Egypt and Tunisia. Revolutionary fervor was sparked by nonviolent action in Libya, Syria and Yemen. South Korean activists are poised to possibly shutter the building of a controversial US naval base with profound geopolitical implications. Afghan youth are getting organized–an incredible feat considering all the challenges they face. Palestinian nonviolent resistance and the Free Gaza movement is growing as are Israeli protests for social justice. In the US, activists and organizers in Wisconsin and Ohio occupied their state capitals to protest budget cuts and GOP anti-unionism. Undocumented students–DREAMers–took it to the streets and Senators’ offices. Environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, students and citizens staged sit-ins at the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline–whose fate is still TBD but the resistance is growing. And then there was Occupy Wall Street. The movement propelled American activism back into public purview and is proving to be the era where a generation of young people–equipped with the tools, knowledge and experience of the civil rights and anti-war generations–are cutting their teeth in nonviolent social change. We are telling ourselves that there is reason to hope because we incarnate it.

The protests of 2011 are the harbinger of what we’ve already known–what we’ve been waiting and working for–that neoliberalism’s carte blanche as signed by the Washington Consensus is on the way out. The days of political regimes that are not truly democratic (and, apparently, equitable) are–at the very least in ideological terms–numbered. In the 00s, there was an explosion of social commentary on globalization: Thomas Freidman, Naomi Klein, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva. Paul Kingsnorth, a British journalist, penned a book whose title has stayed with me: One No, Many Yeses. The catchy, chant-like title offers a simple way to reflect on the the historical moment we are experiencing. As symbolized by Time‘s “Person of the Year,” there is a global “no!” to anti-democratic governments and unfettered capitalism. But at the same time, that singular no of protest is united by the multitude of “yeses” whose global resonance signifies the arrival of a comprehensive vision of nonviolence.

This yes to nonviolence signals the awakening consciousness that summarily connects us to that which is most important in our lives and our communities: the desire to be connected, to live without fear, to be healthy and be in healthy relationships, to be free to have self-determining and mutually-supporting ways of living, working, parenting, learning, teaching, creating, and, yes, even dying. Never before have we witnessed the acute, raw, powerful desire for life in such a way that so many diverse peoples are willingly struggling for that way of being.

Nonviolence–however broadly we choose to define it, whether that be strategically, principally, as a communication technique, as a tactic, as a religious commitment, as a process–has inspired hope, awakened creativity, and substantially changed, once again, the world. Gandhi’s term, “satyagraha,” contains a meaning so varied yet concrete and so distinct yet common that “nonviolence” left lacking. Satyagraha is means and ends. It is an effective tactic of protest, a viable social program and an eternal, utopian hope. The nonviolence in 2012 is shoving the nonviolence of protest into the “constructive program” that rejects the there-is-no-alternative to global capitalism. The nonviolence of 2012 will continue to hold up the alternatives to violence, oppression, and injustice by being the vision it seeks. Democratic participation, consensus-based decision-making, decentralized leadership models, shared responsibility, and economics of common wealth and individual affirmation of uniqueness are being experimented with across the world in thousands of different contexts–and with success! “General assembly” being a household word, the lack of charismatic leadership and establishment confusion over what protesters demand all confirm that nonviolence is more than just protest.

Despairingly, I don’t have much hope in protest alone any more; many of us do not. The record-breaking millions who protested the 2003 Iraq War and the continued political impotence on climate change–like in Copenhagen, 2009, and Durban, 2011–show that the “system” is incapable of responding to genuine democratic sentiments. But the hope of nonviolence, besides having some ability to shake the system into response, is in its birthing new paradigms that are more about praxis and participation than they are about ideology. Through these protests, power is in the process of being fundamentally redefined as something to be shared. Political systems and social relationships–having been more or less stagnant since political liberalism first appeared on the Enlightenment scene and later re-affirmed post-Cold War–are showing early signs of social evolution, an indicator that we are not yet at the end of history. Nonviolence, then, as a common denominator in politics, economics, relationships, and resistance movements can be a guiding–and deciding–force for local and global solutions that are democratically-directed and people-powered. I have hope in 2012!

• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

A Palestinian hangs a photo of the symbolic Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written by Darwish in 1988. (Photo: Al-Ittihad)

“We have triumphed over the plan to expel us from history.”

– Mahmoud Darwish

Twenty-three years ago today, on November 15, 1988, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence was presented by Yasser Arafat in Algiers on behalf of the Palestinian people, and “in the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.” The document was written by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish one year into the nonviolent movement that would become known as the first Intifada, literally, “shaking off.”

Today is an opportunity to reflect on the progress, or at least the developments since then, not only in Israel and Palestine but around the world. For nonviolence is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon that may even—dare we say it—finally shake off the empire of globalization that is threatening to throttle human aspirations everywhere.

We would like to concentrate here not so much on the quantitative spread of nonviolence (Richard Deats and Walter Wink calculated that more than half the planet had seen a nonviolent campaign of major proportions back in 2000, and they are already out of date) as on lessons learned, new habits and institutions formed, networks built and best practices assimilated.

What is qualitatively new in the Palestinian struggle? Well, the obvious: that they have applied to the UN for recognition as a state. This moves toward fulfillment of the 1988 Declaration:

In the context of its struggle for peace in the land of Love and Peace, the State of Palestine calls upon the United Nations to bear special responsibility for the Palestinian Arab people and its homeland. It calls upon all peace-and freedom-loving peoples and states to assist it in the attainment of its objectives, to provide it with security, to alleviate the tragedy of its people, and to help it terminate Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

From the grassroots also, with the two recent waves of flotillas courageously attempting to relieve the siege of Gaza (and successfully drawing international attention to that violation of international law) we saw a kind of nonviolent “pincer movement” with international action mirroring a renewed struggle from the West Bank villages themselves. Among those villages a far greater sense of commonality arose—despite the extreme difficulty of communication imposed by the Occupation—under the auspices of the Palestinian Popular Resistance Committee and similar organizations.

International recognition and internal solidarity are potent factors in a nonviolent campaign; and we are reminded how in the First Intifada itself there arose a combination of “constructive program” projects and active resistance that had rarely if ever been seen since Gandhi’s great campaign. That it came about more or less of necessity is testimony to the creativity that nonviolent struggle tends to bring out in people and to the fact that most innovation in nonviolence has been stumbled on serendipitously—but that is changing.

One of the most significant signs of progress worldwide has been the beginning of systematic learning across movements, of which the input of American scholar Gene Sharp and Serbian youth activists from the successful Otpor movement of 2000 in Egypt was only one relatively well known example.

It is well known now that the important things we learn we learn most efficiently from story-telling. Here is one:

Shortly after the First Intifada a twelve-year-old boy came to our friend Mubarak Awad, one of the movement’s leading figures and a major proponent of its nonviolence, with a complaint. The boy had thrown a stone at an Israeli jeep and a soldier from the jeep had chased him down and beaten him badly. But that was not his complaint. In fact, with increasing difficulty, he had waited for the patrol the next two days and again thrown his defiant stone, only to be beaten once again. But on the third occasion when the soldier caught up with him, he gave him a hug and went back to the jeep. “Why did he hug me?!” he asked Mubarak. Who told him, “because he is human.”

If there is one thing characteristic of nonviolence, and a principle that we cannot forget, it is that the nonviolent vision, this form of struggle, awakens the humanity of oneself and one’s opponent. This renewed sense of connection is not merely a fruit of the tree of nonviolence, it is its very core and our highest victory, because from it will emerge new ideals, stronger communities and healthy children.

Given the spirit of this twelve-year-old that has now resonated throughout the Arab Spring, matched with the spread of learning about nonviolence, we dare hope that the inspiring words of the Declaration will come true in our lifetime:

The State of Palestine is the state of Palestinians wherever they may be. The state is for them to enjoy in it their collective national and cultural identity, theirs to pursue in it a complete equality of rights. . . Governance will be based on principles of social justice, equality and non-discrimination in public rights of men or women, on grounds of race, religion, color or sex, under the aegis of a constitution which ensures the rule of law and an independent judiciary. Thus shall these principles allow no departure from Palestine’s age-old spiritual and civilisational heritage of tolerance and religious coexistence.

Inside my free copy of The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement—Birthright, flush with the cash of Wall Street bajillionaires like Michael Steinhardt, is very big on free—I found tables with statistics: 21% of Ivy League students are Jews, 11% of senators, 40% of NBA team owners, 31% of Forbes’ 400, 24% of Fortune‘s “25 Most Powerful People in Business,” 72% of “25 Real Estate Fortunes Among Forbes 400,” 23% of all Nobel prizes, and on and on. In every arena you could think of, Pease extolled “disproportionate Jewish achievement.”

The last time I’d been in that loft was early 2010, for a pre-trip Birthright orientation. (I wrote about my subsequent trip in The Nation.) But this time, I came with ten young Jews—a minyan—to Occupy Birthright. To liberate Birthright by repurposing its space.

It turns out that the human microphone is a powerful disruptive tool. Last Thursday, for instance, teachers in Chicago rather awesomely Occupied Scott Walker. “Mic check!” they yelled, times two, and proceeded to shut down a fancy breakfast.

“Watch out for the microphone,” Steven Pease told me as I stepped over the cable, en route to the food table. He is a kindly gray-haired man, with a pair of glasses perched atop his head. “Aren’t Jews very accomplished at everything?” I goaded him on. “I thought we were the best at not tripping.” He smiled and answered, “Basketball, the Olympics—very good.” This man apparently cannot be satirized.

I wanted to know who these people sitting around me were, what kind of jobs they work, how they feel about the occupiers laying claim to public spaces and shaping them for their own purposes. But then my friend and co-interrupter Max interrupted my schmooze plans, pointing out the chapter in Pease’s tome devoted to glorifying Lev Leviev, the blood diamond billionaire and settlement construction impresario. Leviev was once a major Birthright donor.

Generally speaking, I’m not much of a chanter. “You come from a long line of cowards and draft dodgers,” my dad has always told me. “Stand at the back.” At demonstrations against the Separation Wall in the Occupied West Bank, I’ve coughed and cried from IDF tear gas—but it was carried on the wind. I am the rear flank by default. And there is a further way to achieve a comfortable distance from experience: scribbling constantly in a notebook.

Israel-loving Jews have a special rage for disrupters. Last November, at the annual Jewish Federations of North American General Assembly in New Orleans, members of Jewish Voice for Peace—which also helped organize this Birthright interruption—stood up one by one interrupting Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech. A rabbi ripped one protester’s banner with his teeth. The final interrupter was put into a chokehold after she unfurled a banner that read, “The settlements betray Jewish values.” The man who choked her turned out to be a 7th grade teacher at his synagogue.

We waited and waited for the opening mic check. Steven Pease told us about how he started using Excel spreadsheets to catalogue Jews, like some kind of pre-assimilation “who’s a Jew” throwback. It was cultural, not genetic, he explained. “There’s no reason why blacks, Germans, Jews, Hispanics—anybody—can’t do this.” If Pease said any of this down at occupied Zuccotti Park, everyone would probably lump him in with that anti-Semitic nutjob yelling, “Jews control Wall Street!”

And then, at long last, the mic check came, and we filled the room with our voices, purging it of all the grodiness we’d just heard. We began:

We are
the Jewish 99%
and we’re calling all Jews
nationwide
to join in solidarity
with Occupy Wall Street
AND with Palestinians
who live under occupation
every day!

Let’s stand up 
to the 1%
Of the Jewish community
Birthright doesn’t represent us
We will not be fooled
by corporate CEOs
telling us 
we are the Chosen People
and reinforcing 
Jewish stereotypes.
We won’t be bribed
with free trips to Israel
that whitewash 
the occupation of Palestine.
We demand 
a redistribution of power 
in the Jewish community.
We are young
Jewish
and Proud!
Throughout history
Jews have been persecuted
as scapegoats for powerful bankers.
These memories
give us responsibility
to speak out
against corporate exploitation
and human rights violations.

We made it through a few more verses and were not exactly greeted with applause. A man behind me asked, “Are you guys anti-Semitic?” Two of the women in our crew had their mic check scripts grabbed by their seatmates, who ripped them up into shreds. A man near me corrected, “Gaza isn’t occupied.” (Tell that to the Gazans, or tell that to the activist-filled flotilla that was boarded and diverted by Israeli forces in international waters on Sunday.) There were, of course, calls for us to “get a job.”

And so, one by one, we were (gently) ejected. Liza Behrendt, a rosy-cheeked interruption co-organizer, was led to the curb by a Birthright employee who remarked somewhat mournfully, “You ate all our food.”

We did our best to continue the occupation from the sidewalk. Our voices were becoming hoarse, and we grew tired. Soon, we acquired a disgruntled passerby, an ultra-Orthodox man getting in our respective faces. He shouted down the human mic’s solo shouter, demanding a “dialogue” none of us wanted, utterly derailing the repetition by turning us into a confused clamor. In this way, the human mic is only human.

Chanting half-heartedly, we asked one another if it was time to go home. What’s the point now? Something hard and angry flashed within me as the shouting grew intolerable. As if I were watching an out-of-body experience, I saw myself jump the ultra-Orthodox man, but didn’t. Never before have I fantasized violence.

A text message arrived from an incognito friend still inside Birthright. “People are listening,” Tamar urged. “Louder.” So, reenergized, we chanted and chanted and chanted. “Occupy Wall Street! Not Palestine!”

A fresh-faced girl of about 17, apparently a neighbor, pranced into our chanting sidewalk cluster while doing a little dance, her long hair flowing behind her while she chanted in a  singsong voice, “You guys are all douchebags who don’t know shit about Israel.” Soon she was shouting and being shouted at, the rage level of the whole group rising, the crowd becoming a mob. The next thing I saw was the girl hitting a Palestinian woman named Nancy in the face, to which Nancy replied with a flurry of fists. They were pulled apart, no one hurt. I wondered if those had been the first blows between an OWS protester and counter-protester in New York to date.

Human mic speeches began, and my friends spoke eloquently about the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948—the occupation of Israel. We were joined by a crew of Palestinians from the Jenin Freedom Theater, a renowned institution in the West Bank. “Where is their Birthright?” shouted my friend Max.

After nearly two months into OWS, I had never been the solo shouter on a human mic. As the others speechified, I felt crippled with the fear of stepping up and finding myself at a loss for words. But something shifted inside me. Maybe it was the mob mentality’s capacity for good that suddenly compelled me to shout “Mic check!” with no pre-planned speech in mind. I will never watch the video, because I know it was glorious, and I don’t want to risk watching anything that might suggest otherwise.

“I am a Birthright alum,” I began.

“There is another way,” I ended. “Join us.”

Eventually the police came. A too-skinny woman with a tan in November, Birthright’s Rebecca Sugar, tried to talk the cops into arresting us. All the Birthrighers had left and the lights had been turned off. Sugar took them inside. When they emerged, her thin lips were all the more pursed in displeasure.

“Next time you do this at an event like this,” the cops told us, “there’s going to be a police barrier.” We laughed. One woman retorted, “What are you going to do—barricade this whole city?”

The cops slammed their cruiser doors. “You guys are behaving like children,” they said with irritation. We cheered: a collective thorn in the side of the powerful.

• Some 5,000 protesters shut down operations at Oakland’s busy port and blocked traffic on Wednesday in demonstrations against economic inequality and police brutality that turned tense as the night wore on.

• Security forces in Bahrain used tear gas and armored vehicles to drive back hundreds of protesters who advanced toward the heavily guarded Pearl Roundabout—once the center of pro-reform demonstrations in the Gulf nation—on Friday morning after a funeral procession for the 78-year-old father of an opposition leader.

• Despite government promises two days ago to pull back from intense confrontations with protesters, Syrian security forces fanned out in force after Friday prayers, surrounding mosques to prevent demonstrations and using gunfire to disperse crowds. At least 15 civilians were reported killed.

• At least 16 people were arrested Thursday while protesting outside the New York City headquarters of Goldman Sachs. Among those arrested were journalist Chris Hedges and the performance artist and activist Reverend Billy.

• About 30 protesters occupied part of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office in Washington DC on Thursday to protest Republican opposition to President Obama’s jobs bill. The protesters were from a new group called “OurDC.”

• Social activist Anna Hazare ended his 19-day vow of silence Friday with a clarion call to campaign against India’s ruling Congress party in the upcoming state assembly elections if his “Jan Lokpal,” or citizen’s ombudsman bill, is not passed during Parliament’s winter session that begins later this month.

• 2,000 church members marched through strategic locations in the Nigerian city of Abakaliki today to protest the slow pace of development and the level of poverty currently plaguing citizens. They also chanted choruses and brandished their brooms which they said symbolized spiritual cleansing of the state.

• Protesters scaled a drilling rig at a hydraulic fracturing site in northern England on Wednesday after a report links the controversial gas drilling process to two minor earthquakes.

• Israeli naval vessels intercepted the two Gaza-bound boats aiming to break Israel’s blockade on Friday afternoon.

The latest wave of international Palestinian solidarity action is underway, as 27 people from five countries sail through international waters in the Mediterranean on their way to Gaza with an estimated $30,000 of humanitarian assistance. Departing from Turkey, the flotilla is comprised of two boats: The MV Saorise, whose passengers include delegates, parliamentary representatives and activists from Ireland, and the Tahrir, an international delegation comprised of solidarity workers and journalists hailing from Canada, USA, Australia and Palestine.

The Freedom Waves flotilla is the international community’s most recent effort aimed at penetrating the punishing and illegal naval blockade of Gaza, which has effectively imposed isolation, imprisonment and impoverishment upon the region and its people. According to Egyptian correspondent Hassan Ghani, tweeting from aboard the Tahrir, “Turkish coastguard was visible as #freedomwaves departed from Turkish shores, but did not approach, kept distance. Darkness now.”

To learn more about Freedom Waves, I contacted the Ramallah-based media office of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). They responded to some of my questions by email earlier today:

Waging Nonviolence: What is your communications strategy?

International Solidarity Movement: Our strategy is to stay connected all the time, to be able to get live updates and post tweets continuously (unless Israel jams the communications signal, as has occurred in previous flotilla aid attempts.) We are currently attempting to stay connected via Skype with the boat.

WNV: What type of actions are taking place on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza in solidarity with the flotilla?

ISM: Demonstrations in solidarity with the flotilla are planned throughout the West Bank tomorrow including a parade on the streets of Ramallah during which Palestinian youth activists will carry a wooden effigy of the aid boats and also distribute arm bands printed with the phrase “Freedom Waves for Gaza”, in Arabic. Meanwhile, another group of students in Ramallah will be staging a demonstration outside of the United Nations building in order to demand that it ensure the safe arrival of the flotilla and to end its compliance with the blockade.

WNV: Why was it decided that the operation be launched covertly?

ISM: We wanted to avoid Israeli sabotage.

WNV: Israel is likely looking for any pretext, such as secrecy, that will legitimize a repressive response to the flotilla. Therefore, it’s important we understand the nonviolent nature of this mission. To what extent were the activists on board these ships trained in nonviolence?

ISM:  This is a nonviolent, human rights based mission. All passengers are required to abide by a code of conduct that will not bring the humanitarian effort into disrepute. Any resistance will be passive and defensive. Our aims are totally peaceful and all members of the flotilla have been instructed to offer no more than passive resistance to provocation and violence from Israeli armed forces. Most of the passengers were initially going this summer (when the boats were stopped by Israel) and then received a minimum of 2 days training in nonviolence that the organizers arranged; the ones who are new to the project received the same training before departures. Also most of them have a long history of nonviolence activism, some are even teaching it as well.

As Michael Coleman, an Australian activist aboard the Tahrir, told Jihan Hafiz of Democracy Now (also on the boat) in a pre-departure interview:

The aims of the flotilla are twofold. While we do have a small amount of aid on board—and that’s one of the goals, is to take aid to the besieged Strip—but the other is public awareness. And we’re well aware that the small amount of aid we have is tokenistic. It’s not going to prevent the suffering of 1.5 million people. Only governments and international institutions can do that. But we, as private citizens, can pressure governments and international institutions to do what is right.

In the meantime, we await the safe arrival of the flotilla which is expected to reach Gaza some time on Thursday (November 3).

I have long argued that nonviolence works best when it deals not with mere symbols but with real things that have symbolic power. Gandhi’s Salt March was an outstanding example; another is the ongoing actions of Palestinian farmers, oftentimes organized and supported by the Palestine Solidarity Project, to plant and replant olive trees that are uprooted, poisoned, and otherwise destroyed by Israeli settlers or the military.

There is something primordial, and even beautiful about a direct confrontation of something real and true — and especially a living thing — with the destructive power of human delusions. The olive tree is both a symbol and an actual source of Palestinian well-being, and hence of Palestinian hopes and dignity. To uproot them, which is contrary to Jewish law, is to enact one’s own violence in a way that even the perpetrator is forced to understand the evil that person is perpetrating.

This “forcing reason to be free,” as Gandhi called it, is an important part of nonviolent dynamics. Not long ago, a courageous woman who ran a shelter for destitute mothers with children in Delhi was told by city authorities that she would have to pay taxes that up until then had been waived. She explained that they were a shoestring operation and if the taxes were imposed at least three of her women would have to be turned out on the street. “We can’t help that,” said the men.  “All right,” she replied, but then took them through the door to the large dorm where her charges were housed, and said, “You choose which ones to turn out.” The men left and the tax waiver remained in place.

In the important film Bringing Down a Dictator that chronicles the 2000 Otpor (‘Resist!’) uprising, which in one dramatic day turned Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic out of office (after eleven weeks of NATO bombings that only consolidated his hold on power), student leader Srdja Popovic explained, “we won because we were on the side of life.”

This symbolic valence might be said to be missing from the present occupation movement. Fun, music, and face paint may say “life” to some people more than business suits and portfolios, but they don’t quite evoke the reality and urgency that enabled the oppressed Serbian population to rise up against harsh police brutality and is enabling the Palestinians and their international supporters to face even fatal resistance in Beit Omar, Surif, and other West Bank villages. Proudly declaring that “their weapons don’t scare us,” the message of the Palestinian Solidarity Project, which is coordinating not only the olive-tree planting but roadblock removal, and apartheid wall demonstrations, is quite accurate:

Peace and security are rights not just for some of us, but for all the people of the world. Controlling another person’s life, possessions, future, and thoughts is a crime and a humiliation. We have dreams and hopes of freedom, so we are inviting all the people of the world to stand with us and share in our struggle for freedom.

For any such struggle to succeed — be it that of the Palestinians or of Occupy Wall Street or even a larger movement for peace — it must be able to counter the power of the Apocalyptic myths that have driven the post-9/11 wars and brought the U.S. to a point of near ruin financially and morally. These prevailing narratives of militarism revolve around the powerful archetype of good and evil, order vs. chaos; but they can be overcome by an even more powerful myth, if you will (I taught mythology for many years at U.C. Berkeley), which is the struggle for life itself against death.

The answer is to take back not just our incomes and some civic spaces, but the “spaces” in our minds and our public discourse. In practice, this would mean making common cause with the Palestinian struggle and looking for other ways to show, patiently but insistently, that in opposing greed and militarism we are on the side of life — which would have the added advantage of being true.

• In Chile, dozens of students and other protesters interrupted a Senate committee meeting Thursday to demand a popular referendum on how to resolve the country’s social problems, especially education.

• Portuguese trade unions on Thursday began a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies, in a prelude to a general strike scheduled for November 24.

• Wearing Greenpeace Quit Coal t-shirts and surgical masks to display the health risks of burning coal, seven student activists marched into the office of the president of Michigan State University on Thursday to ask MSU to transition to 100% clean energy.

• At least seven protesters were killed and dozens wounded on Tuesday as gunmen loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh opened fire on demonstrators in the Yemeni capital.

• On Wednesday, Petroleo Brasileiro SA employees and other oil workers in Brazil implemented a slowdown at refineries, platforms and plants to push for salary increases

• Palestinians prisoners suspended their three-week hunger strike on Monday, as Israeli Prison Authorities agreed to end the use of solitary confinement for prisoners.

• Freeport-McMoRan’s miners in Peru launched a hunger strike on Monday, hoping to pressure the government to resolve a labor dispute 19 days into a walkout at the Cerro Verde copper mine.

Palestinians rally outside the UN building in the West Bank city of Ramallah on September 8, 2011 as they kick off a campaign of support for their bid to become the 194th state to join the United Nations. (Getty Images)

Enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as fundamental human prerogatives are “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition… for a redress of grievances.” The amendment expressly banned Congress from abridging that right. A century and a half after the young nation guaranteed its people those rights, the General Assembly of the United Nations declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that all people were entitled to the same freedoms.

Since then, those rights—“peaceably to assemble… [and] petition for a redress of grievances”—have come to be held as virtually sacred. Often, when they have been publicly abridged in any part of the world, public opinion has been quick to condemn the responsible governmental entity, sometimes with powerful effect.

In the United States alone, two such event chains substantially changed the nation’s political complexion in the 1950s and ’60s. The U.S. left lost strength in 1956, when a large proportion of the Communist Party USA left the party in disillusion after the Soviet Union’s brutal suppression of Hungary’s anti-communist movement. On the other hand, a few years later, the dogs-and-fire hose police responses to civil rights demonstrations in Southern communities—and the international shock as those responses were broadcast on television around the globe—were a major factor in the passage of the Civil Rights law of 1964.

Worldwide, it was the “banning” and imprisonment of South Africans for challenging apartheid as well as the ugliness of apartheid itself that galvanized world opinion against the South African state from the 1980s through the arrival of nonracial-based democracy there in the early ’90s. And the Communist world was never the same after the global revulsion at the deaths of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Now, this year, the Arab Spring and its children are sweeping the globe, from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to New York City’s Wall Street. Around the world, people are exercising their right to assemble, demanding participatory democracy and people-centered economic priorities. As I write this, the protests are arriving in Washington DC.

Two weeks ago, in New York City, Palestine exercised the other half of that right: the right to petition peaceably for redress of grievances—in this case, a grievance going back to 1947 and the U.N. partition of Britain’s former Palestine Mandate into a future Jewish state, a future Palestinian state, and a shared Jerusalem. The State of Israel was formed in 1948, but Palestine to this day has only “observer” status at the United Nations (despite recognition of its sovereignty by 65 percent of U.N. member nations).

On September 24, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, stood before the U.N. General Assembly to petition it to redress that grievance by recognizing the State of Palestine. “The time has come,” he declared, “for my courageous and proud people, after decades of displacement and colonial occupation and ceaseless suffering, to live like other peoples of the earth, free in a sovereign and independent homeland.”

There are several possible outcomes. If the General Assembly recognizes Palestine statehood, the Security Council would then approve or disapprove the decision; the United States will then veto statehood on behalf of its ally, Israel. The General Assembly could then vote to give Palestine an intermediate status, that of “observer state.” That decision would also face U.S. and Israeli opposition but would not be subject to veto.

Most of the General Assembly rose for a long ovation when Abbas finished speaking. A few delegates kept their seats, most noticeably, those of Israel and the United States. That was their right, of course—to express their opinions, or those of their countries. Indeed, it is their right as U.N. members to vote against Palestinian statehood, though whether one approves of such votes is a different matter.

But in fact the United States and Israel are doing more than opposing statehood for Palestine. Israel, while claiming long and deep commitment to democracy, is working actively and furiously to punish the Palestine government and the Palestinian people for asking for statehood. And elected representatives in the U.S. Congress—which also asserts such commitment in its very nature—are working equally actively, equally furiously, to effect that punishment.

No, you didn’t misread this. There are bills before the U.S. Congress that attempt to punish Palestine for seeking recognition.

Leave Israel aside, for the moment. A U.S. citizen, I write this for a U.S. audience, about what our representatives are doing. Members of Congress have suspended payment of unspent monies allocated for Palestine in the just-ended fiscal year 2011; and bills presently before Congress regarding fiscal year 2012 provide draconian penalties for Abbas’ and the Palestinian Authority’s daring.

A clause in a Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill provides that none “of the funds appropriated under this heading may be made available for the Palestinian Authority unless the Secretary of State certifies to the Committees on Appropriations that the Palestinian Authority is not attempting to establish or seek recognition at the United Nations of a Palestinian state outside of an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians.” A bill introduced by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the “Solidarity with Israel Act,” goes radically further, proposing to “prohibit funding for the United Nations in the event the United Nations grants Palestine a change in status from a permanent observer entity before a comprehensive peace agreement has been reached with Israel.”

Punishing individuals or an entire people for seeking freedom, autonomy, or justice was an offense against decency—a crime against humanity, if you prefer—in Hungary. It was an offense against decency in South Africa. It was an offense against decency in the U.S. South and in Tiananmen Square.

It is an offense against decency and a crime against humanity today. That Israel is doing it, that the U.S. Congress is considering it, shames them in the eyes of the world. To let it pass unchallenged would shame all of us.

For one of the many attempts to stop this, see the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation.

• Nurses, transit workers and other union members swelled the growing protest movement in New York’s financial district to around 5,000 on Wednesday. Later in the evening, a breakaway group of around 100 to 200 attempted to link arms and breach the barricade blocking Wall Street. At least 23 were arrested, some facing pepper spray and police batons.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement has expanded to protests in more than a dozen cities, including: Tampa, Florida; Trenton and Jersey City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Norfolk, Virginia in the East; to Chicago and St. Louis in the Midwest; Houston, San Antonio and Austin in Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Los Angeles in the West.

• Hundreds of Afghans have marched through the capital, Kabul, on the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, condemning the US as occupiers and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops.

• Several hundred people gathered Thursday in Washington DC for a scheduled anti-war demonstration that also adopted new overtones in decrying economic disparities.

• Air traffic controllers at Cairo airport protested a cancelled pay increase with a go-slow that grounded four fifths of flights from the major regional hub and left as many as 3,000 travelers stranded on Thursday.

• Thousands of Bedouins demonstrated in the southern city of Beersheva on Thursday to protest a government project they say will displace tens of thousands of people from their land.

“Popular resistance” is the English terminology that the Palestinians have chosen to describe their choice to struggle nonviolently for independence, statehood, and the lifting of the military occupation. Abbas repeated the words “popular” and “peaceful.” It is not at all surprising that the Palestinians who have adopted the technique of nonviolent action have laid claim to their own nomenclature for describing it in English. No appropriate term for “nonviolent” exists in Hebrew or Arabic. It is worth noting that the Arabic word intifada means “shaking off,” an action that does not involve violence. It was used in the 1987 uprising to explain the Palestinians’ approach to ending Israeli military occupation, which was remarkably nonviolent, and had a meaning similar to the catchphrase “take back”—as in to restore, not destroy.

Settling on self-referential terminology like this is important and defining for any social mobilization that intentionally refuses to take up violence in its quest, whatever the specific goal. This choice can be shaped and constrained by language and culture.

A few other examples:

• The word nonviolent does not translate well in the Polish language, so, in 1980, as shipyard workers and their allies joined forces to fight for free trade unions within the communist system they chose social self-defense to portray the work of their union, Solidarność (Solidarity).

• Burma’s democracy movement, symbolically led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has preferred political defiance as most compatible with the Burmese language.

• Tibetan resistors to Chinese rule often use wise action.

As discussions about Palestinian statehood continue in the weeks to come, it is important for international and regional powers to think more deeply and deliberatively about how people and societies build the capacity for independence and self-governance. Such a capacity can be enhanced by the practice and understanding of nonviolent struggle. The same cannot be said for guerrilla or armed struggle with its centralized military command structures that operate at cross purposes with participatory democratic principles.

During the course of nearly the entire past century, the Palestinians were promised an independent state, first by the British, then in U.N. General Assembly resolution 181 (the Partition Plan), and later by U.S. presidents of both political parties. Moreover, starting in the 1920s, the British and Zionists responded to violent upsurges of Palestinian action but not to their more common efforts at nonviolent resistance in trying to protect their way of life, as described in my book A Quiet Revolution. This pattern has been short-sighted. Responding when Palestinian factions adopted armed struggle, while ignoring, downplaying, or denying the Palestinians’ use of nonviolent action—a policy that continues into the present era—has not been in the interest of any of the peoples in the region, least of all the Israelis.

Hard data now confirm that countries that experience bottom-up, grassroots nonviolent struggle are more likely to sustain human rights and democracy once established than when violence has been used, as Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackerman show in “How Freedom Is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy.” Scholars have also documented that nonviolent movements succeed more often than violent insurrections, as explained by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their new book, Why Civil Resistance Works.

When institutionalized politics and constitutional processes—such as elections, political parties, parliamentary action, or even lobbying and interest groups—fail, it is essential for citizens to know how to exercise their inherent political power through nonviolent collective action. The construction of a liberal democracy, with representative governance and accountability in civil institutions, can be helped by civil resistance.

A healthy civil society is increasingly recognized as integral to modern political nation-states. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato maintain that civil disobedience, one method among many in civil resistance, is actually critical to modern civil societies, because it keeps alive the vision of a just and democratic civil society. They contend that civil disobedience may actually constitute civil society.

The Palestinians’ popular peaceful resistance is also important for their appreciation of how they can prevent despotism, tyranny, or oppression in the leadership of a future Palestinian state—without violence. For this reason alone, it is worth encouraging the Palestinians in their increasing turn to the practice of what they call popular resistance. In any future Palestinian state with limited arsenals and armed forces, it will be important for the Palestinian people to know how to take corrective action if violent groups emerge from within what will be at best a fragile civil society. Having strong associations that can offer a way for fight for rights and justice without armed struggle and terror is imperative for the future of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Michael Randle writes, in his post-Cold War survey Civil Resistance, that “to resist the encroachment of basic rights by a duly elected government is not to deny democracy but to uphold it.”

It would have been helpful in recent times to recognize and reinforce the groups that have since the late 1980s adopted nonviolent means of struggling to protect their land, water, and rights. In this sense, the Israelis and Palestinians who have been working together for years in the West Bank village campaigns of civil resistance are already enacting the civility, tolerance, and exertions of cooperative power that are the bedrock of democracy. They are acting out procedures for fighting for rights that are respectful of all people involved. As the work of April Carter shows, nonviolent direct action is fundamental to democracy, can function in its absence, and also acts as a means of democratic empowerment. According to Carter, direct action is an expression of active citizenship, and “the key element … in inspiring participatory democracy is the sense of mass popular empowerment and liberation.”

Popular peaceful resistance represents democracy in the process of becoming.