• 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.

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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.

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• 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said on September 23 from the U.N. podium that “our people will continue their popular peaceful resistance.” Yet CNN’s English interpretation on its translation bar below the picture omitted the words popular and peaceful. This omission (later corrected) altered the meaning of the statement—an avowal that ought to be welcomed, no matter where one stands on the issue of Palestinian statehood.

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

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