But is that what a tree hugger really is? Just some dazed hippie who goes around giving hugs to trees as way to connect with nature. You might be shocked to learn the real origin of the term.

The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. And now those villages are virtual wooded oases amidst an otherwise desert landscape. Not only that, the Bishnois inspired the Chipko movement (which means “to cling”) that started in the 1970s, when a group of peasant women in Northeast India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down. Within a few years, this tactic, also known as tree satyagraha, had spread across India, ultimately forcing reforms in forestry and a moratorium on tree felling in Himalayan regions.

Despite this powerful history of nonviolent resistance, we still consider tree hugger a derogatory term. Meanwhile, a current example of forest protection in Brazil, where the country’s environmental agency has a special ops team that hunts down illegal loggers, gets all kinds of glory. Not that it shouldn’t, considering Brazil has cut deforestation by nearly 80 percent since 2004. But do environmental heroes need to, as the BBC recently described Brazil’s forest agents, “wear military fatigues, with heavy black pistols slung casually on their thighs” in order to get any respect?

In Africa, there are several conservation organizations that have a shoot-to-kill policy when they see a suspected poacher. Private security firms in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi provide military-style protection for the iconic animals that Western tourists flock to see. While some have argued in support of these desperate measures–pointing to the dramatic rise in poaching in recent years–the “shoot first and ask questions later” approach has led to the deaths of locals, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. These incidents of course lead to resentment toward conservation, which has been shown to be most effective when local communities are involved in the process.

Not surprisingly, people want to protect the land they live on. And like the Bisnhois and people of the Chipko movement, they are often willing to lay down their lives for it–armed only with their own two arms.

“Building a Rainbow” is the title of an old poster I picked up somewhere along the way. The rainbow’s swath of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet layers is dazzling—and only half finished. In the picture, this symbol of peace is not an idealistic dream but something real. It is under construction, with a troupe of cranes carefully maneuvering sections into place, countless trucks and overworked paint wagons, scaffolding everywhere, and a flotilla of helicopters lumbering across the sky, each with its own precarious splotch of color dangling below.

We live in a violent world. But we also live in a world where a growing number of people everywhere are determined to confound the assumption that there is nothing we can do about this. They gamble that violence need not have the final word. They wager that there are options. They assert that we needn’t be victims of a cycle of violent history; rather, we can dare to be active subjects of a more nonviolent history that engages and transforms the violence around us. For them, violent history isn’t a given, it is made. So, too, is a nonviolent one.

The poster reminds us that this is not an easy task. We are building a rainbow, not simply hoping for one. It requires the kind of gumption and creativity only barely hinted at in the poster’s fanciful construction site. It means a profusion of projects, organizations, and movements offering plausible and effective options for the well-being of all. And it means slowly discovering that these innumerable initiatives do not exist in isolation but are part of a mysterious and self-organizing design: a rainbow in the making.

We only have to look around us to see this growing profusion. Countless campaigns and movements (for equality, democracy, peace, social justice and sustainability). New techniques (in nonviolent communication, restorative justice, trauma healing and anti-racism training). Research and education (on empathy, forgiveness, cooperation and conflict transformation). And all reinforced by an emerging worldview stressing the interconnectedness of the planet and its inhabitants.

Nonviolent Peaceforce is part of this creative profusion.

Ten years ago this week Nonviolent Peaceforce came into being. David Hartsough, a peacemaker who first got active with the Civil Rights movement as a teenager in the 1950s and has been at it ever since, had been thinking of something like this for many years: an unarmed civilian peacekeeping force able to respond in a timely and effective manner to crises that might lead to devastating armed conflicts and brutal violence.

Gandhi envisioned a Shanti Sena or “peace army,” which has inspired a number of “third party nonviolent intervention” projects and organizations, including Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, and Christian Peacemaker Teams. Moved by the work of these groups, Hartsough envisioned the emergence of an even larger and more comprehensive initiative.

While David Hartsough began ruminating on this idea in the early 1990s (we have know each other for years, and we would often talk about it together) it was only when he met long-time organizer Mel Duncan at The Hague Appeal for Peace conference in the Netherlands in 1999 that this idea got the traction it deserved. Almost immediately, the two began to build their piece of the rainbow. They crisscrossed the planet spreading this vision, finding collaborators and laying the groundwork.

In December 2001, they opened shop with the early task being to organize a strategic planning conference in Surajkund, India the following November, where Nonviolent Peaceforce would officially be launched. One hundred and fifty peacemakers from 49 countries showed up. I attended this powerful gathering with my Pace e Bene colleague Veronica Pelicaric, and led the opening ritual with Ouyporn Khuankaew, a long-time Buddhist feminist peace trainer and activist from Thailand. It was a dazzling experience spending this time with nonviolent practitioners from five continents hammering out this new project. One year later, in fall 2003, Nonviolent Peaceforce had its first team in Sri Lanka.

Nonviolent Peaceforce’s mission is:

To transform the world’s response to conflict by promoting, developing and implementing unarmed civilian peacekeeping as a tool for reducing violence and protecting civilians in situations of armed conflict.

We envision a world in which large-scale unarmed civilian peacekeeping using proven nonviolent strategies is recognized as a viable alternative in preventing, addressing, and mitigating violent conflicts worldwide. Our primary strategy for achieving this vision is the creation of space to foster dialogue.

Non-faith-based and nonpolitical, Nonviolent Peaceforce adheres to the humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence as it has worked in Sri Lanka, Guatamala, South Sudan, and the Philippines. Concretely, Nonviolent Peaceforce:

protects vulnerable civilians from harm and reduces violence in conflict-affected areas through the innovative methodology of unarmed civilian peacekeeping. We work with local groups committed to peace and partner with them to strengthen community security. We provide safe spaces for parties in conflict to meet each other and address their grievances. We hold the conflict parties accountable to the laws and agreements they have signed and help them live up to these.

Simply by being present and being visible, unarmed civilians can reduce the likelihood of violence or other serious human rights abuses. They do this by ensuring such actions do not happen in secret and with impunity. A more proactive presence involves analyzing the sources and causes of the violence and using international pressure to influence the behavior of armed actors. This can prevent violence even more effectively. By living and working alongside conflict-affected communities, building relationships of trust with all the key stakeholders, and engaging with those stakeholders directly and in confidence, experienced and well-trained unarmed civilian peacekeepers are able to help them see that it is often in their own best interests to take the moral high ground, to avoid abuses of and attacks on civilians, and to abide by the agreements they have signed and the accepted norms of international humanitarian law. This provides the maximum protection to civilians in conflict-affected areas and helps to prevent and reduce escalation of violent conflict.

Our activities have ranged from entering active conflict zones to remove civilians in the crossfire to providing opposing factions a safe space to negotiate. Other activities include serving as a communication link between warring factions, securing safe temporary housing for civilians displaced by war, providing violence prevention measures during elections and negotiating the return of kidnapped family members.

Two concrete examples illuminate Nonviolent Peaceforce’s work. In 2010, NP’s longest-serving peacekeeper Oloo Otieno, from Kenya, reported concretely on the power of unarmed peacekeeping in Sri Lanka, which had experienced decades of war. Twenty-six children had been abducted to serve as child soldiers by rebel forces. Otieno accompanied their unarmed mothers, who were intent on getting their children released, to the rebel encampment. As he wrote later:

With no threat of violence leveled against his forces, the senior-most rebel commander arrived to meet with the mothers and their nonviolent entourage. Our lack of arms earned the commander’s trust, respect and cooperation. He yielded with grace, apologized to the families, and ordered the immediate release of all 26 children.

This outcome was echoed some time later in his next posting in Mindanao in the Philippines, where he and his NP partners accompanied a woman to a military detachment where her husband had been detained after being arrested from a paddy field while at work. She had been afraid to take action, but emboldened by the presence of the NP peacekeepers, she made her case to the local battalion commander:

Within three hours, an impromptu community dialogue was convened by the barangay (village) captain and the battalion commander, who were on opposing sides of the hostilities. The commander explained the husband was suspected of belonging to a criminal gang recently spotted in the area. He apologized for the arrest and implored the community to report any suspicious people to the nearest military detachment. The terrified husband, just 22 years old, was released after six hours in custody.

In its first ten years, Nonviolent Peaceforce has been slowly developing a professional “peace service” in various parts of the world. We look forward to the next ten as it increases its infrastructure, reach and impact—and contributes yet one more important piece to the ongoing rainbow construction project.

I was among those who were shocked, not to say disgusted, when biologist Garret Hardin argued, in 1974, that the relatively well-off nations were like passengers in a lifeboat surrounded by more stranded people than they could take on board. So, his logic ran, we needed to triage the world and write off some people and lands as too far gone to rescue from immanent starvation. I went on record, along with others, saying that we wanted to be included in that abandoned third; we did not wish to live in a world that turned its back on fellow human beings with such callous disregard.

Words are cheap, perhaps, but our revulsion at “lifeboat ethics” was real. And it’s back. A provocative essay by Bronwyn Bruton, a democracy and governance expert writing for the Council on Foreign Relations has urged the West to withdraw from Somalia [see Ms. Bruton's response to this], and her scheme (which she calls “constructive disengagement”) is finding a resonance with policy elites around the world who now seem poised to wash their hands of Somalia and watch three quarters of a million people starve.

Call it the “Somalia syndrome.” In the 1990s, as a recent New York Times editorial states, “the United Nations urged American forces to disarm the warlords ravaging the nation of nine million, but the Pentagon … did not want to risk more American lives after 18 servicemen were killed in an epic street battle immortalized in the Black Hawk Down book and movie (and video game).” This “epic” battle has been blown up into a specter of media-hyped proportions, leading to the unfortunate image of Somalia as a kind of chaotic black hole in which those who intervene disappear.

According to leaked reports, the reason President Clinton did not intervene even to jam the radio broadcasts that were instigating the appalling slaughter in Rwanda in 1994 was because of the shadow of the Blackhawk. But as far as it goes, Bruton’s sober assessment concludes realistically that, “I don’t think that there’s a case to be made that the famine can be mitigated through military intervention.”

This rings true, or it should, not just because Somalia is in the grip of wanton militias (the Shabab), but because military intervention is designed to kill, not to save life. We are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan the futility of training, arming, and ordering men and women to kill and expecting them to stay within agreed upon rules—not to mention go on to build stable regimes. At some point we need to recognize that there is a terrible simplicity about life: destructive energy is destructive, positive energy is positive.

What does this mean right now, for Somalia? Policymakers, having recognized that military intervention will not work (one wishes they would recognize this when it comes to war, not just when it comes to humanitarian rescue missions), throw up their hands and say there is nothing we can do.

I say they are wrong. First and foremost, we can not, as they seem to be suggesting, harden our hearts against the suffering of the Somalis: for us, apathy is not an option. Remember the words of Martin Luther King: “I will not let anyone bring me so low as to make me hate him.” Or forget him. In other words, what happens in our own minds and hearts matters; it is the first line of defense or cure for any situation.

Second, if you believe in nonviolence—which implies a belief in the resilience of humanity and the meaningful order of the world—you cannot, any more than I can, accept that if violence doesn’t work (which it does not), there is no alternative.

Of course, we do not have cargo planes and troops of volunteers at our disposal. As a military official said to me at a meeting of the U.S. Institute of Peace when I complained, in the early 90’s, that we had chosen the Marines to deliver food to Somalia, “What other organization can put 30,000 men on the ground in one week?” Certainly not the peace movement. But remember, this has happened before and it will happen again.

When the tsunami struck South East Asia, the U.S. and other states hastened to improve the global tsunami warning system. This did not address the underlying problem—climate disruption due to runaway industrialism—but at least it put in place a system to mitigate the damage of the next event of its kind. But when it comes to famine we seem to learn nothing.

What if every one of us would sign a pledge that we will not turn our eyes away from the Somalis in their suffering, but do everything we can think of to help them?

What if we pledge that from now on we will make every effort to understand what causes not only this famine, not only famine in general, but the culture of cruelty and disregard that makes such disasters possible?

What if we raise funds, call on a group like the Nonviolent Peaceforce to offer an entirely different kind of protection, and pick one area of Somalia where we can arrive, get into contact with the local militia, and at least save one group in such a way that we show the world that care is not dead, that what affects one affects all, and what we have done here could be done on a larger scale?

Even if it is too late to save the 750,000, it is not too late to save the human image.

While Discover Chicago is a class that meets weekly during the fall term, it kicks off with an intensive Immersion Week, where students traverse the city by public transportation and begin to get engaged.

Joyana Jacoby Dvorak, Lorena Shkurti and I are team-teaching “Nonviolent Chicago” this quarter. When I mention the name of this class to most people, they often react with startled laughter: “Chicago… nonviolent?” Violence is pervasive in this city—I recently wrote about a dimension of this reality on this site—but there is a growing web of programs and organizations that is slowly forming a culture of nonviolent options. By some counts, as many as 300 peace and nonviolence organizations are at work in this city.

In their first week in college, twenty-two students got to know seven of these organizations on Chicago’s South, West and North Sides: Voices for Creative Nonviolence; the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation; the White Rose and Su Casa Catholic Workers; the South Austin Coalition; The Peace Corner; and the Vincent and Louise House on DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus.

During this jammed week together we developed a deep appreciation for the commitment and passion that these often quite different entities share for making things whole.

We were riveted, for example, by Precious Blood’s restorative justice program that uses the peace circle process to bring victims of violence and perpetrators together in the South Side’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. A person convicted of killing a man while driving drunk 10 years before spent nearly two days in a peace circle here with the surviving family members. This experience of safe truth-telling, while painful, opened the door to healing and transformation for the participants. Similarly, the center uses this process with youth in the area. Precious Blood is part of a pilot project with the Inglewood neighborhood courts that refer cases to it for victim-offender reconciliation rather than the traditional criminal justice process of conviction and incarceration. The power of Precious Blood’s work was especially driven home to us by the stories two young people shared with us whose own lives have been changed by immersing themselves in this challenging and powerful work.

The Peace Corner, in the South Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, is also dedicated to offering youth an alternative to violence. Stung by dramatic job losses over the past several decades—unemployment stands at 70 percent—South Austin is wracked by severe poverty and inequality. The Peace Corner is open to all, including those with criminal records who have no other place to turn, and members of different gangs that, outside this space, are often at war. Here they can hang out, use the computers, work on homework, and play sports.

In the same neighborhood, the South Austin Coalition organized peace brigades (patterned on organizer Elce Redmond’s experience with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq and other parts of the world) for preventing youth violence before it starts. The coalition is also heavily involved in building campaigns to get energy assistance during Chicago’s fierce summers and winters to Austin’s low-income residence and to demand job creation. Redmond also described a campaign to deal with the massive potholes in the area. When the city over and over again failed to address the problem, members of the coalition decided to fill the potholes themselves. The action garnered widespread media attention—and the city was out the next day to finish the job.

We were also deeply moved by the White Rose Catholic Worker, eight young people living together who are actively involved in nonviolent resistance (including Witness Against Torture and work along the US-Mexico border), hospitality, and sustainable living, including organic farming, a compost toilet, and a brood of chickens in the backyard.

Another highlight was our afternoon with Kathy Kelly and company at Voices for Creative Nonviolence, which has focused on peace and justice in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were mesmerized both by her many stories of compassionate nonviolent action and the commitment of the group to simple living. Toward the end of our session, we were invited to move into circles and participate in a “pieces of the truth” exercise, where every person played six conflicting roles on the US war in Afghanistan and then debriefed the experience of understanding more clearly a range perspectives, even if they are not one’s own.

Over the course of a week we got a taste of a few projects, organizations and movements trying to build a more nonviolent Chicago and a more nonviolent world. Not only did it sharpen our own awareness of nonviolent options, it also nudged us to suspect that a culture of nonviolent change is being built right in front of us—all we need to do is actually open our eyes.

Inspired by this glimpse of Nonviolent Chicago, I wonder this: what if we developed a project called “Nonviolent Earth” which, through websites, blogs, crowdsourcing and all our old-fashioned means of communicating (including speaking face to face!) we began to identify the emerging (if often still unnoticed) infrastructure of a nonviolent world? For example, within a Nonviolent Earth site each continent, nation, region, state, province, city could be identified as “nonviolent.” (So, for example, Nonviolent Chicago would be nested in Nonviolent Illinois, Nonviolent US, and Nonviolent North America.)

People and organizations everywhere could fill in the information (and real-time videos, reports, and tweets). Slowly, or not so slowly, we would be treated to a much more comprehensive understanding of what exists and what the gaps are. Even more importantly, we would find our allies and (strengthening existing networks and sites working in this direction, like Waging Nonviolence) connect the dots even more clearly to build movements for change the planet sorely needs.

Just a thought, as I savor the powerful, invisible network of agents of change we experienced this week—and that exists all around this wounded and sacred world.

Fortunately this Hobson’s choice, and the comment it delivers on the creativity of our concern, is not, in fact, all humanity can come up with.

In the 1922, when Hindu-Muslim tensions were threatening to tear down everything Gandhi was building in India, he proposed that volunteers could go to villages in insecure districts and live there as a kind of resident third party to proffer good offices, abate rumors (a frequent escalator of conflict there and everywhere), and in extreme cases interpose themselves between parties in open conflict. He called an important meeting to put this institution, which he called the Shanti Sena (Peace Army), into practice for February, 1948 but, as we know, was assassinated days before it could take place.

Shanti Sena did nonetheless come into being. Despite various problems, it served creditably well in a variety of districts and the 1962 Chinese border incursion. More to the point, the idea spread throughout the world, where it was picked up by organizations as diverse as the World Peace Brigade, Peace Brigades International, India’s Swaraj Peeth, the colorfully named Rainbow Family of Living Light and even the Guardian Angels, known for riding the subways of New York to prevent crime. It also deepened into a force that could intervene across borders: not just in local communities but around the world.

The unheralded growth of this idea and its on-the-ground institutions is probably typical of how the best ideas in the modern world have to grow: from the bottom up. The movement for “protective accompaniment,” for example, which became the main focus of groups like Witness for Peace and Peace Brigades International (the former being explicitly a religiously based organization, the latter explicitly not) was carried out by remarkably few individuals, negligible financing and even less coverage by the press. Nonetheless, it saved lives from death squads in Central America and equivalent forms or terror in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. In one case, that of Guatemala, it seems to have created space for a real peace process to unfold when it saved individuals in a key human rights group from systematic assassination simply by being with them day in and out, so that anyone who did them harm would have to do so before the eyes of the world.

The improbable hope represented by protective accompaniment and other functions of Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (as it’s now called, or UCP) did eventually percolate upwards to the attention of more official bodies: an international norm (not yet a law) called the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) has come into play after the shame of passivity in Rwanda, stating that “If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.” While not nonviolence, this does open the door for more UCP activities even as it breaks down the wall of absolute state sovereignty. More to the point, the UNICEF has made a grant of one million dollars to the most ambitious of the UCP organizations, Nonviolent Peaceforce, to do training for child protection in South Sudan and the Philippines.

In the penetrating light of Gandhi’s vision, passivity and violence are really two sides of the same coin. On the spiritual plane, they emerge respectively from fear and anger—both drives of the private, separate self. The only really different coin is that of nonviolence, or selfless love in action (to paraphrase Martin Luther King). The only meaningful choice, then, is not between intervening (with blind force) or not intervening, but between violence and nonviolence as a guiding principle.

As I write these lines, black Africans are being harshly persecuted in “free” Libya, usually for no reason. We should not be surprised. This is what violence does: it cannot but grope blindly after victims, as history so often shows. And it also shows, if we know where to look, that nonviolence does the opposite: it spreads hope and toleration, preventing enemies from oppressing if not actually converting them into friends. And now, as institutions emerging from this principle slowly find themselves and reach across borders into realms that formerly were reachable only by force—or by neglect—we get to choose.

Our friends at the Metta Center posted a great video discussion between Metta president Michael Nagler and Alex Hildebrand of Peace Brigades International. The focus is mainly on unarmed civilian peacekeeping, but there are also some other great side conversations. For instance, at the very beginning Dr. Nagler describes what first drew him to nonviolence and the teachings of Gandhi—which is a type of story I always enjoy hearing from any peacemaker.

In a recent piece for Common Ground News Service, University of San Francisco professor S. Francesca Po and UC Berkeley professor/founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Michael Nagler wrote about another option that draws on Gandhi’s dream of a Shanti Sena or “peace army.”

The idea behind the Shanti Sena was that trained non-violent volunteers would live in a place with conflict long enough to gain the confidence of the locals as a truly neutral third party. They would then provide services to promote peace in times of tension: abating dangerous rumours and misconceptions, accompanying vulnerable persons under threat, mediating when asked and – if need be – interposing themselves between conflicting parties if it was too late to defuse tensions.

This practice is more commonly known as “unarmed civilian peacekeeping” and it has had tremendous success, despite the fact that it’s largely ignored by mainstream media.

For instance, Peace Brigades International has been active in conflict regions since 1981, Christian Peacemaker Teams since 1990, and Nonviolent Peaceforce—co-founded by WNV contributor David Hartsough—since 2002.

Kyrgyzstan could benefit from this kind of a neutral, non-violent third party presence to teach and demonstrate to the local population that ethnic violence does not solve anything – but non-violence just might.

In Kyrgyzstan in particular, peace armies could act as a protective force, escorting and defending targeted minorities like the Uzbeks. Nonviolent Peaceforce has already sent an exploratory team to the southern Caucasus, where there have been multiple interstate and ethnic conflicts in the recent past. With an invitation from the new Kyrgyz government, and international support and funding, Nonviolent Peaceforce could get to work in southern Kyrgyzstan and help the country transition – peacefully – into a parliamentary democracy.

Every time non-violence has been used correctly it has been a brilliant success – and almost every time, barely anyone notices. Until the media catch on, it’s up to the public to get informed about unarmed civilian peacekeeping. For if we know of no alternative, we may continue to flounder in the old dilemma of violence or inaction.

• On Friday, a million workers belonging to Italy’s largest union went on strike across the nation to protest proposed austerity cuts by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government.

• Despite some acts of violence, 25,000 peacefully protested the policies of the G20 in Toronto over the weekend amidst a heavy police presence.

• Tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in Taiwan’s capital Saturday to protest the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, a trade agreement with China opponents said will undermine the island’s self-rule and harm its economy.

• On Saturday, people gathered and held hands to form a symbolic line in the sand for 15 minutes as part of the “Hands Across the Sand” demonstrations organized in the US and abroad to pressure elected officials against any expansion of offshore drilling and to promote “clean” energy. In the U.S. nearly 700 rallies took place in all 50 states.

• Egyptian dissident Mohamed El Baradei led over 4,000 in a protest in Alexandria on Friday demanding an end to police brutality.

• In Michigan, thousands rallied on the state Capitol in Lansing on Thursday to urge lawmakers not to cut funding for public education.

• On Friday, 40 demonstrators greeted Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean at a Melbourne hotel when he arrived at a meeting to approve a deal to export up to 20 million tons of polluting La Trobe Valley brown coal to Vietnam.

BP (and the Deepwater Horizon’s Unified Command, which BP runs with the Coast Guard and other agencies) has so far insisted on complete control of the cleanup operations. A BP spokesman told TIME that the only appropriate way for interested boat captains to become involved would be to register with the Unified Command’s Vessels of Opportunity program. Never mind that according to BP’s numbers, only a third of the 7,200 boats “under contract” through the program are in active service.

To make matters worse BP and the Coast Guard haven’t let any of the local volunteers begin to organize a preemtive response. Not until oil is within 72 miles, they say. But that is hardly enough time to protect the 180 miles of coastline along the Keys. So, rather than wait for their homes and land to be destroyed, people are starting to take matters into their own hands.

A group called Adopt a Mangrove is assigning kayakers their own mangroves to clean if oil comes. Volunteers are monitoring shores throughout the islands for signs of oil. The Florida Keys Environmental Coalition formed to connect boat captains, scientists, environmental activists and various agencies. [Laura Fox, owner of Danger Charters in Key West] coordinated a cleanup of Man Key, a mangrove island west of Key West (oil is easier to clean off a beach that is in good condition). “It was all women, actually,” she says. “Thirteen women in kayaks, clenching knives in their teeth, cutting monofilament fishing line off the mangroves and clearing trash. We brought 35 bags of trash off the island.”

In addition, others set up a series of town halls, crashed closed-door meetings between city officials and BP representatives, as well as organized discount haz-mat and animal rescue training. This collective effort forced BP to promise it would fund $10,000 for more haz-mat training and hire a local towboat operator to keep an eye out for approaching oil.

Obviously these are small victories, but judging by the attitude inherent among Keys residents, they are ready to keep the pressure on BP.

“I just talked with BP yesterday,” says [Patrick Rice, dean of marine science and technology at Florida Keys Community College]. “I told them flat out, ‘If you come down here and start doing what you’ve done in Louisiana, you’re going to have a revolt. They’ll shut down U.S. 1. You won’t be able to bring any of your contractors in or out.’ “

The Free Gaza Movement’s Freedom Flotilla was attacked by the Israeli Navy in international waters late last night. There are varying reports on the tragic aftermath. The New York Times is reporting (by way of the Israeli Trade Minister) between 14 and 16 killed, as well as 30 more injured. Free Gaza, however, just released a statement saying two were killed and 31 injured. Here is how they described the horrifying action:

Under darkness of night, Israeli commandoes dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep… Streaming video shows the Israeli soldiers shooting at civilians, and our last SPOT beacon said, “HELP, we are being contacted by the Israelis.”

We know nothing about the other five boats. Israel says they are taking over the boats.

It’s clearly too soon to predict anything, but a moment has most certainly been created. Israel has exposed its willingness to break international law and fire upon unarmed civilians in a much more dramatic and potentially costly fashion than perhaps ever before. It’s not just Palestinians this time, but a group far more difficult to sweep under the carpet:  international activists, the likes of which include a Nobel Laureate and an 85 year old Holocaust survivor. Already, the story is the lead on most mainstream media websites.

Meanwhile, Israel is trying to justify its use of deadly force, saying its soldiers saw weapons on board the ship. But according to Free Gaza, there is video evidence that shows otherwise. Israel knows that if the truth sticks, the Palestinian rights movement will receive a strong shot in the arm. Already, protests have begun in Turkey, where, according to Al Jazeera:

Thousands of Turkish protesters tried to storm the Israeli consulate in Istanbul soon after the news of the operation broke. The protesters shouted “Damn Israel” as police blocked them.

Turkey is also reported to have summoned the Israeli ambassador to lodge a protest.

“(The interception on the convoy) is unacceptable … Israel will have to endure the consequences of this behaviour,” the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement.

As this moment unfolds, it is important that the memory of the nonviolent activists killed yesterday be honored with a commitment to nonviolence by all Palestinian rights activists. It is the only way any good will come from this tragedy.

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

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

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

Residents of At-Tuwani Village block the path of an Israeli military jeep.

Every time I return home after a vigil, I am asked, “How was it?” How does one answer? We were present? Ignored? Warmly greeted? Does it matter? The war goes on. Guantánamo remains open. Lies continue. We show up. We pray. We walk. So to attempt to describe my voyage with a Christian Peacemaking Team (CPT) delegation to Palestine/Israel in late November is more difficult to answer than the journey itself.

I am blessed to have been led to this step by Catholic Workers and very dear friends. My desire to join a delegation elsewhere was rerouted by the suggestion that I should go to Palestine. As I have related many times, when Anne Montgomery—an 80-year-old nun who travels the world taking part in nonviolent direct actions—says go to Palestine, you go. I went.

For 11 days, our delegation of seven—three women and four men, including a Briton, two Germans, a Canadian, and three Americans—jumped in and out of cabs, buses, hiked hills, climbed mountains, slept in hostels, caves, tents, met with lawyers, activists, shepherds, soldiers, teachers, settlers, and NGO human rights groups. We talked, vigiled, prayed. We learned. We tried to learn. For me, the more I heard, the more confused I became. I felt in the middle of a sudden death battle in which neither side would give in. But I also felt completely at home, welcomed.

In Hebron, I went through a checkpoint. I showed my passport, as instructed and walked on. Then I heard the Israeli soldier manning the post call. I was sure he was yelling at me, but I continued. He called again, in Hebrew. I turned and he asked, “What state?” I answered and he waved me on. But it made me aware that if one does not speak the language of the occupier, one can most certainly be put in harm’s way.

We moved from Jerusalem to At-Tuwani, Tuba, Hebron, Bethlehem and then back to Jerusalem. We toured part of East Jerusalem with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition. We saw the huge discrepancy between Israeli settlements and Palestinian villages. We saw remnants of destroyed homes that were razed because people didn’t have a building permit—a virtually impossible item to obtain. It was always heart wrenching to see the rubble sitting on the ground, almost like a mass tombstone, a reminder that a family could be housed on that lot. Once given a notice of demolition the bulldozers can come at anytime, day or night, the same day or 20 years later—certainly a mechanism to squelch resistance.

In At-Tuwani, we met the first of two CPT teams. At-Tuwani is a small village in the south Hebron hills. Built on a hillside (a small mountain to my aging knees) it consists of about 300 villagers. Electricity comes from a generator and runs only between five and nine at night. Its groan can be heard throughout the village, along with the various noises from roosters, mules and sheep. The grammar school sits atop the village and has been presented with a notice of demolition, punishment for building an addition to house more children. The village mosque was demolished but rebuilt.

Overlooking the village is an Israeli settlement. Hidden deep within a foreboding forest, you cannot see the homes, only the massive electric security lights. Again, noting the disparity in living conditions, these lights burn all night. Each school day, approximately 16 children walk the road right in front of the settlement. Due to numerous occasions of settler attacks on these children, the Israeli military actually escorts the children past the settlement. An armored vehicle plus three soldiers on foot walked behind the children each morning we were in At-Tuwani. If the soldiers do not show up, the children must walk a more difficult, longer route to school. I reflected on the lost innocence of youth, having to come to terms with the stark nightmarish reality these children live under and wonder what path their future will take because of this way of life.

CPT monitors these escorts the entire time the military and the children are together and armed with video cameras, they film any situations that occur. They also go out into the fields with the local shepherds and keep a lookout for potential attacks from settlers. The day before we arrived in At-Tuwani, one of the CPT staff, Laura, was attacked in the fields and hit on the head with a rock, requiring stitches. The police were called in and seemed to be stonewalling the investigation—a seemingly regular habit. But Laura did put herself between the shepherd and the attack of the settlers, securing the safety of the Palestinian. This sobering story was told to us after worship the evening before we arrived in At-Tuwani.

We came to learn, to question and to witness. I came away with a deep fear that peace will never come to the area. Over and over we heard there is no hope for the two state system. Israel wants all the land—a statement somewhat apparent when one looks at the green line, then the actual wall and the ongoing placement of settlements, which seem to cut through Palestinian land at will. It seems to be a strong belief that the second intifada is not over, but dormant. “We are looking for better ways of resistance,” we were told by one leading Palestinian journalist in Dura. “Rocket bombs do not work anymore.”

I left deeply saddened. I missed my home, my community, my friends and the soup line. But I have never been so warmly greeted, accepted and tended to as by the strangers I encountered on this trip. I hope I can strive to be the same with those I encounter from here on out.

At the Catholic Worker, we endeavor to live simply. We do this in our own way, each one differently. I give away a book and a tee shirt, I acquire a banjo. The struggle goes on. So visiting the village of Tuba—an hour hike up and over a mountain—and spending the night with Ibrahami and his family in their tent, taught me another lesson in what we really need to live. Or the night in the Dehiseheh refugee camp. Altallah Salem has lost two of his three brothers, one killed by a rocket, one banished six years ago to Gaza, yet he warmly greeted us, brought us to his other brother’s home in the camp where we dined and spent the night on their floor. “Tell the truth. Tell what you have seen. Invite others to come and see for themselves. We are not terrorists. We only want to live.”

In writing I can do no justice to this journey. I am awed to have been a small part of a delegation of voyagers. We each met looking for something different. We all came from different walks. But as one we saw the lives, heard the stories, and walked the neighborhoods. A part of me stayed behind. And I will return to reclaim it. I cannot say why. As I cannot say why I live at the Worker. I only know that God as led me. And I am thankful.

NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today?

MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world. There’s quite a bit of anxiety among many people, who are asking, if the community consciously opens itself more broadly to humanists and avowed atheists, what confidence do we have that we will share basic values in common? But you can argue, I think, that atheism or agnosticism or humanism are as much religions as any denomination or sect in terms of having an identifiable set of values and, eventually, sets of rituals that shape how people think about and act in the world. A lot of what we struggle with is simply a matter of words. I love Charles Taylor’s arguments about the emergence of the secular age. We’re also reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s very nice new book, In Praise of Doubt. Doubt lies at the heart of the practice of pacifism. You can never know, ultimately, how you’re going to respond when confronted by violence. Absent a total conviction or confidence that you’ll act nonviolently, can you characterize yourself as a pacifist? Part of the conversation that we’re having, also, is about how doubt can create the space for being more accepting of more people.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce has just put out this great video introduction to their work of nonviolent civilian peacekeeping. It is in two parts, so make sure to watch the whole thing.

As Jean Lound Schaller explains in a recent op-ed for the Midland Daily News:

The Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), convened in India in 2002, is a global effort that offers us something to say yes to when we say no to war. The first unarmed, paid, professionally trained, civilian, international “army” offers a concrete, on-the-ground, two-year experience to help build a more peaceful world through peaceful means.

NP, with its international office in Brussels, and its executive office formerly in Minneapolis, has teams in Sri Lanka and the Philippines and is currently developing a project in South Sudan. It serves at the invitation of local civil society organizations. Due to its strict non-partisan stance, it is gaining the trust of governments, armed groups and individuals living in conflict zones. Civilian peacekeepers live among the people, thus building cultural sensitivity and gaining the trust of all stakeholders in a conflict. NP also supports families seeking the return of their children who have been abducted or forcibly recruited into an armed group. International protective presence and accompaniment offer hope and build people’s confidence to claim their human rights and to build peace in their communities.

To learn more about the organization, visit their website: www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org.