• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

• Tens of thousands of Czechs staged one of the biggest protests since the fall of Communism on Saturday, marching in Prague against spending cuts, tax rises and corruption, and calling for the end of a center-right government already close to collapse.

• On Sunday, 150 Palestinian prisoners joined with 1,200 others being held in Israeli jails who started an open-ended hunger strike on Tuesday to protest the conditions in which they are being held.

• In Montreal, 89 people were arrested Saturday after trying to disrupt the second day of a conference on the development of northern Quebec.

• Tens of thousands of Egyptians demanded on Friday that their military rulers stick to a pledge to hand over power by mid-year after a row over who can run in the presidential election raised doubts about the army’s commitment to democracy.

• In Bahrain, tens of thousands people marched along a motorway from Budaiya, an area to the west of the capital, Manama, on Friday to demand an end to the crackdown on dissent, ahead of the Formula 1 Grand Prix on Sunday.

• Thousands demonstrated in the Rome on Friday to protest government plans to introduce legislation that will make it easier for companies to sack employees.

• Less than 24 hours after their release, University of Texas students arrested after staging a sit-in at President Powers’ office gathered with supporters Thursday on the steps of the UT Tower to continue in their campaign against sweatshop labor.

• Tens of thousands of teachers, doctors, police officers and other public workers went on strike on Wednesday in Slovenia over proposed pay cuts under austerity measures to rein in the euro-zone member’s budget deficit.

• In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protesters swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

• In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation began a 48-hour hunger strike on Sunday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — and all tar sands pipelines — they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.

• Jordanian authorities arrested more than two dozen political activists during protests Saturday critical of King Abdullah II that called for a change of government.

• An estimated 800,000 homeowners in Ireland joined a tax boycott by refusing to pay a new flat-rate $133 property tax by Saturday’s deadline.

• On Saturday, nearly 100 people wore hoodies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin.

• Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured.

• Three protesters were arrested Thursday at the UC Board of Regents meeting, when a few dozen activists, some stripped down to swimsuits, called for more transparency in state funding talks and an end to tuition hikes.

• On Thursday, hundreds of Bahrainis staged a sit-in outside the offices of the United Nations in Manama demanding action over the “excessive” use by police of tear gas against protesters.

• Some 50 students at the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes in protest of absent teachers, inconsistent classroom instruction and other issues.

• Russian police arrested nearly 100 people on Sunday for picketing Moscow’s TV tower over footage that accused the opposition of paying anti-government protesters.

• On Sunday, after more than 150 protesters carrying signs calling for nonviolence and the rule of law began to chant the slogan that has echoed throughout the Arab revolts — “The people want the fall of the regime” — uniformed officers and men in plain clothes beat them with sticks and began making arrests.

• Argentina’s truckers called an indefinite strike on Monday to demand higher pay rates, parking their rigs in protest just as exporters were counting on them to haul freshly harvested soybeans to port.

• Thirty Palestinian prisoners have joined the hunger strike of Hana Shalabi, who was hospitalized on Monday evening after consuming only water for 33 days.

• In Cuba, three dozen members of the Ladies in White opposition group were detained on Sunday before their weekly march to press the government to free prisoners jailed for politically motivated  crimes.

• George Clooney was arrested for civil disobedience in Washington on Friday alongside his father Nick and other  protesters after a demonstration outside the Sudanese Embassy aimed at drawing  attention to the country’s president, Omar al-Bashir, and his government for provoking a humanitarian crisis and blocking food and aid from entering the Nuba Mountains from South Sudan.

• Some 200 Moroccan women staged an angry protest Saturday outside parliament a week after the suicide of a 16-year-old girl who was forced to marry the man who raped her.

• The April 6 Youth Movement declared on Saturday the start to an open-ended sit-in in front of Parliament’s offices, in which the group will demand the release of detained member George Ramzy.

In the midst of the excitement that continues to surround the Occupy movement, it can be unfortunately easy to forget that occupations tend to be anything but empowering. Creativity and imagination often fall by the wayside when the struggle of daily life becomes the main focus of thought. Yet it is those very positive traits that lead to liberation.

Last summer, while traveling in Paris, I met a Palestinian playwright named Abdelfattah Abusrour, who has made it his life’s mission to inspire the imaginations of the young people living in refugee camps in the West Bank. He runs a cultural center in Bethlehem’s Aida Camp called Al Rowwad (which is “pioneer” in Arabic), where children are taught, what he calls, “beautiful acts of resistance.”

Shortly after seeing him perform with his adult troupe–several members of which have been with Al Rowwad since they themselves were children–I sat down with Abusrour to get more of his story, which can now be read in the current issue of The Progressive. Here is just a quick excerpt:

Just moments after performing a dramatic final death scene, Palestinian playwright Abdelfattah Abusrour was back on stage delivering an afterword that was no less intense. Speaking softly, Abusrour told the small Parisian audience about his work back home in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp where he grew up and now runs the Al Rowwad Cultural and Theater Training Center.

“We are a beautiful people and we want to show our humanity to others, as well as ourselves,” Abusrour says. “We need to see beautiful acts of resistance. It’s not always linked to blood and martyrs and destruction.”

For Palestinians like Abusrour, who lived the hardships of occupation, resisting isn’t the question. “To exist is to resist,” as Palestinians often say. The question is how to resist.

“I firmly believe that nonviolence as a strategy will win,” he says. “And the way to do it is through building this culture of people who think they can create a world based on nonviolence and the strength of people power.”

To read the rest of the article, visit The Progressive‘s website or, better yet, buy a copy. And if you are interested in hearing more about Abusrour’s work,  you may get the chance to see him in person, as he will be visiting U.S. cities in April and May to raise international support for Al Rowwad—more info on that, to come.

• 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.

• A five-day strike led by transportation workers, farmers and fisherman to protest Prime Minister Mario Monti’s cutbacks and the excessive rise in fuel costs that has paralyzed the Italian island of Sicily since Monday will end tonight.

• 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.

• To mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, nearly 40 people were arrested outside the White House on Thursday and detainees at the prison launched a hunger strike.

• 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.

If 2011 was the year of the protester, 2012 may prove to be the year of nonviolence. What’s the difference? It’s as great as between yes and no. A crucial awakening that envelopes humanity’s collective struggle for justice, peace and democracy is happening; it is an awakening that clarifies the circumstances we embrace with a yes and those by which we respond with a vehement no. Like many I know, I often teeter between despair and hope–stuck in a kind of uncomfortable tension resembling Wendell Berry’s poetic instruction to “be joyful though you have considered all the facts” –grasping for some measure of sanity to make sense of all that is happening.

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.

I did my best to smell and look expensive, like someone who would normally come out on a Monday night to hear “venture capitalist and turn-around CEO Steven Pease,” author of a 622-page book called The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement. The program began with a complimentary light dinner, then the talk: “Why Jews are Disproportionately High Achievers.” This was the first in a series of Wall Street-oriented events hosted at Birthright Israel’s alumni headquarters, a loft on West 13th Street with exposed brick walls and tasteful track lighting.

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).