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This episode of Nonviolence Radio welcomes David Hartsough, long time nonviolent activist, former executive director of PeaceWorkers and co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce. Stephanie and Michael talk with David about his early exposure to the power of nonviolence through his parents and early upbringing, his later activism in the civil rights movement in the U.S. and abroad in Sarajevo and Gaza – to name just a few places he’s worked bravely and lovingly for peace.
Throughout their conversation, one sees David’s fundamental commitment to the principles and practice of nonviolence, from resistance to oppression through boycotts and sit-ins to the creative work of constructive program in which people actively build an alternative to the existing power structure. By the end of the interview, David makes it clear how natural and accessible nonviolence is to everyone:
Well, I think every person has the potential to respond to nonviolence. The problem is most of us never try. And that’s certainly not what people get taught in the schools. It’s not what our newspapers tell us. It’s not what our president and vice president or congress people tell us. But I think the people that were in the civil rights and the freedom movement in the 60s realized that.
Nonviolence doesn’t ask us to be anything but our most human and humane selves – and while not difficult, it does call on us to find models and examples of behavior outside of what much of our current media reports.
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Stephanie: Greetings, everybody. And welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we’re joined today in studio by a special guest, board member of the Metta Center for Nonviolence, and works for Nonviolent Peaceforce and their outreach, Gilda Bettencourt. Gilda’s here in the studio with us.
And our guest today is David Hartsough. And he’s joining us by phone. Welcome to Nonviolence Radio, David.
David: Thank you, Stephanie. Good to be with you.
Stephanie: Yeah. And we have Gilda here, and Michael. So, I want to let them say hello.
Michael: Hello, David. How are you?
David: Good. Great, great to hear your voice.
Michael: Nice to hear yours.
David: And be on the program with you.
Michael: Yeah.
Gilda: Hello, David. And hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today.
Stephanie: So, David Hartsough, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the former executive directors of a San Francisco-based organization called Peaceworkers, and he’s co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. Hence, Gilda’s presence here as well makes that extra special.
He’s a Quaker and member of the San Francisco Friends Meeting, and he’s been working actively and internationally for nonviolent social change and peaceful resolution of conflicts since he met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1956.
This is all really just an understatement about you, David, for those who really know you. I’m sitting here with your book in front of me, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist.
And the book is just so incredible. Story after story, from your earliest childhood onward, of your commitment to nonviolence. And it’s just deep in your heart. So, we just want to talk to you today about what nonviolence means to you and stories and all of that. Because what’s especially important to us is to help people understand what nonviolence is, how it works, and how it’s related to the world around them, how people can get involved.
So, David, why don’t you start us off when you were a child, how did you get into nonviolence? What were some of your first introductions to nonviolence?
David: Well, I don’t know if it’s a very first. I mean, I had the example of my father, who was a congregational pastor that went to Gaza in 1949, just after the Nakba, and worked with [AFAC] and the UN to help get food and tents to refugees.
And I was this eight-year-old kid, and he wrote letters to my brother and me every day talking about going through the battle lines with the soldiers pointing guns at them, etc. And so, I had his example of actually putting his life where his values and his beliefs were, which were that we’re all children of God. We’re all brothers and sisters. And, you know, if there are people in need or hungry or living in a war zone, you know, the job is to go and be with them. And give whatever support he could.
And I had the good fortune of, also, going to Montgomery, Alabama, during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956. And I had heard of Martin Luther King, and I had read some of Gandhi. But that was so inspiring, that here are the whole African American population, instead of giving in to the segregation system, which had been going on for a century, I said, we’re going to stand up, and we’re not going to ride the segregated buses and, even if our churches our burned and bombed, we’re not going to go after, you know, bomb the white churches. That’s not what we’re about.
And walking to work every day, getting up an hour early instead of riding the buses – for a year. And so, that nonviolence in action and seeing Martin Luther King in action, you know, his spirit, was so crucial. His nonviolent, loving spirit was so crucial in helping guide that movement.
That, actually put me on the road to try and live nonviolence, nonviolently. And also, nonviolently challenge the injustice and the violence of the wars, which so inflict our society and our world.
Stephanie: And you were so moved, I read in your book of your meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., that you wanted to name your son, Martin Luther King Hartsough. But your wife, Jan, didn’t let you. Do you want to say anything?
David: Well, he was born the day after King’s birthday. You know, just a few months after King had died. And so, yes, that was my choice, but not my wife’s choice.
Stephanie: Well, but the spirit is there. And so, did you meet him in person and talk to him?
David: Yes.
Stephanie: And can you talk to us about that?
David: Well, Ralph Abernathy, who had visited our home in Pennsylvania, and my dad had organized a speaking tour for him, in the Mid-Atlantic states. And Ralph had said, my dad, “Well, Ray, why don’t you bring the voice down to Montgomery and experience what we’re doing?” But anyway, so he actually guided us around, which was very meaningful. But he invited us to a Montgomery Improvement Association meeting, which was all the African American pastors, and one white pastor was there to join them in organizing the movement.
And King introduced us to the group and said, “These boys have come down from Pennsylvania to find out about our campaign, and we’re so glad to have them with us.” And, you know, he shook our hands and his spirit was so beautiful. Anyway, that has stayed with me the rest of my life.
Stephanie: That’s beautiful. Michael seems to be nodding and wants to ask you something.
Michael: Hello, David. I wonder if you would agree with me. I think of you as a birthright Nonviolence person and a Quaker by convincement.
David: Okay, I’ll take that.
Michael: Okay, good. David, one of the episodes in your life that I was privileged and happy to share with you somewhat took place in the 90s, and that was about the Kosovo episode.
David: Kosovo, I went with the Fellowship of Reconciliation to Sarajevo right after they had been being bombed daily for a year and a half or so. And there were literally fresh graves that had been dug in every spare inch of that city.
And it was just so, so, so sad. And while I was there, I heard about in Kosovo, there was also Serbian repression, another apartheid kind of regime. And instead of responding violently, they were responding nonviolently. And I decided, well, I want to go there. So anyway, I got on the bus, and I went to Kosovo. That was in ‘96.
And it was very – it was both very sad to see the kind of repression that people were living in. The students could no longer go to their university. Their books had been burned, in Albanian. They were not served in the medical centers, etc. They’d lost their jobs if they worked in any government program. And instead of responding violently, they built alternative medical clinics where doctors offered their services.
They had alternative schools meeting in people’s homes where the teachers, without pay, were teaching their children and the young people. And even in the universities, the students could not go to the university, so they had an alternative university. Anyway, the women’s movement, the former political parties, political prisoners, labor unions, all of them were nonviolently challenging that oppression.
But what they said to me over and over again is we need international people to come and be present while we are doing this organizing and this movement building to make it safer so we can be even more challenging of this oppressive power structure here.
And so, I got that message. I came, I traveled around Europe, and around the United States, had spoken on radio and interviews and so forth, talking with government people and said, what the Albanian Kosovars had said to me: “This is an explosion waiting to happen. David, can you get international nonviolent people to come accompany us? Not with their guns, but just with their presence, to make it safer for us to escalate our nonviolent resistance?”
And so, as I said, I traveled around Europe and the US appealing to people. And most people said, “Well, where’s Kosovo?” You know, there hadn’t been a war, so why should they know about it? And, “Oh, well, I think it sounds very important, but, you know, I have work to do,” and “I’m in college” and so forth. So, we just had a few people that actually did end up going in, I think it was spring of ‘88. But I went back several times. And once there were 10,000 Kosovar students walking peacefully with flowers in their hands toward their original university and said, “We want to learn.”
And they were confronted by the Serbian police, very similar to what happened in Selma, Alabama. You know, when they got to a certain point, they’re ordered to stop. And here was this line of police with tear gas and their guns. And then the police were ordered to open fire, and just started chasing these 10,000 people.
People got run over by the horses. It was very sad. I came back from that even more convinced that we had to get people there. And Peaceworkers – that you, Michael, were a board member of – was supporting us to do that work. And we were trying to support nonviolent movements all over the world.
And that was the beginning. I had just been there and whatever it was, ‘88, when – well, I guess ‘89 when Ken Butigan and I had planned a nonviolent training, our friend, [Arvin Kurti], who is a student leader in the movement I had organized.
But leaders from all segments of the society participated in a nonviolent training that we were going to do in Macedonia. I think it was the spring of ‘89, maybe, that he contacted me. We already had our plane tickets and said, “David, it’s too late. People’s anger and upset has just gotten too far.”
And that was when the Kosovo Liberation Army had started. And of course, the US government and the CIA supported them financially, and with guns, and everything else. While, you know, we had essentially, as a government, as the country had ignored, their movement. So anyway, that was way before The Hague Appeal for Peace. I’d led workshops on Kosovo every day for, I think that I forget how many – maybe it was 9-10,000 – people that were there from all over the world, committed to trying to end all war.
And that’s where I met Mel Duncan. I was just – fire in my heart – nonviolent fire, that we needed to build a global Nonviolent Peaceforce where we could have hundreds, and eventually thousands of trained Nonviolent Peacekeepers. They could go into areas like Kosovo, not after the war had started, but before to try to help support a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
And I’m happy to say that, that vision, which I had been trying to push for, well, 3 or 4 years – actually, Mel is a phenomenal organizer, and I had the contacts all over the world. And together we were able to help build the Nonviolent Peaceforce, which Mel has – Gilda can tell us, but hundreds of people in war zones and conflicts all over the world.
Gilda: That’s true. We do, yeah.
David: – to try to protect civilian populations and help make peaceful change possible.
Gilda: Yep. We have hundreds of staff at Nonviolent Peaceforce. And if you consider all the people that we’ve trained in unarmed civilian protection, we have thousands. They’re not officially on our payroll, but they’re trained by us using their methods. And we’re learning from them as well, because everywhere where we work, we learn what people have already been doing to keep their communities safe, and then we share that with other communities around the world. So, it really becomes this beautiful global exchange. Because who doesn’t want safety, and who doesn’t want peace? So, we’re empowering peace and safety for all, which is what this world needs to do.
David: Yeah, President Eisenhower once said, “I think the people of the world want peace so much that governments ought to get out of the away and let them have it.”
I think that’s the situation in the world. Our governments are in the way, and we’ve got to demand –
Michael: Yeah. We’re going to be talking, in a little bit, about a government in a Middle Eastern country that’s definitely in the way of peace. But, David, I’m going to come on as a scholar here for a second and flag something that you were saying. You talked about Kosovars doing their own schools and their own medical stuff.
That is technically known as building alternative institutions, which is a part of constructive program. And which is the part of nonviolence that people usually forget. They think, as you know as well as I, they think nonviolence is you go out there on the march and wave a protest sign. But really, as Gandhi showed – and, I mean, he was building constructive program in South Africa in 1893, even long before he got to India. And the more you do construct a program, the less you have to do confrontational stuff. So that and training, there’s two big elements.
And I wanted to talk about one episode that happened in that period, David. And you can bear me out if I get a mistake.
There was a big march of nonviolent actors down what was called Sniper Alley where people had been picked off. And the UN agency that was on the ground, UNPROFOR, they said, “Look, this is dangerous so we’re going to give you an armored car in front of the line and an armored car behind the line, you know, with cannons and machine guns and all that to protect you.” And they said, “That would contradict the whole principle of what we’re trying to do.” And they went in, and I believe there actually were no casualties right at that moment.
David: And that was, that was, where? Kosovo?
Michael: Yes, that was well –
David: – or was it Bosnia?
Michael: No. Oh, I believe it was Bosnia. I’m sorry, that’s right.
David: I think so.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah, it was later.
David: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah. But I’m always wrong about the details, but I think I get some of the principles right. And I wanted to mention also, David, that there was a big meeting in Santa Cruz leading up to the formation of Nonviolent Peaceforce.
And Mubarak Awad of Nonviolence International was there. And we asked him, in fact, I asked him, “Mubarak, do you want us to be there in Palestine?” This was in the lead up to the First Intifada. And he said something I’ve never forgotten that you just kind of reflected. He said, “Yes, we want you to be there, but not to tell us what to do.”
And then he said, “We are willing to die, but we do not want to die alone.” And that always struck me as the first thing that nonviolent interventionists can do is just be there. You know, so that what happens to you is not just dissipated, it’s not just lost.
So, David, what are you doing these days? What interests are you working on?
David: Well, interestingly enough, Mel Duncan and I are both retired from Nonviolent Peaceforce but, you know, it’s hard in a world that is suffering so much and seems to be addicted to war and violence, to retire. I would think you probably have experienced that as well.
But anyway, Mel and I and others are – not in the name of Nonviolent Peaceforce – but are attempting to organize a group of 100 nonviolent unarmed civilian protectors who can go to Gaza and the West Bank to help protect civilians and help make the space for, you know, a just and peaceful resolution of that conflict. And an exploratory group has already gone and spent, I think, two weeks there. And we’re starting to raise money through Nonviolence International.
And it’s a very, very challenging situation because I was just reading a report yesterday that, even when there’s international people present in the West Bank, the settlers, under support from the Israeli Army, are just coming in with bulldozers and bulldozing their homes and chasing the people out with, you know, live ammunition and tear gas, etc. And are treating the internationals – and in many cases there, it’s the Israeli citizens, who have come to be nonviolent protectors, and they treat them in the same way.
So, it is a real problem when – you know, the problem is, it’s not just the settlers or a small minority of people. When the government itself gives them protection and has, I guess, handed out, I think it’s 8000 weapons to the settlers – but anyway, we just feel morally and kind of spiritually and from our hearts, this is a crucial time that we can’t just stand idly by and say, “Well, good luck to these people. I hope you don’t all die of starvation or hunger or because you’re homeless.”
So, that’s one of the projects that I’m very much involved with right now. A second is, I think as all of you already know, we are closer to nuclear war than we have been, maybe ever. Certainly, since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Both the US and Russia are preparing full scale ahead, getting ready for that nuclear war, threatening use of nuclear weapons, doing troops, you know, thousands of troops in the NATO case, on the Russian borders, you know, in Finland and Eastern Europe.
And it’s just so dangerous. Sadly, most people seem to be totally asleep. You know, like nothing is happening. So anyway, I’m trying to contribute what I can. Tomorrow is Hiroshima Day, and out at Livermore Nuclear Weapons Labs where the US is spending over $1 billion a year just at that one laboratory developing, modernizing our nuclear weapons, our whole stockpile, so we can kill even more people.
There’s going to be a demonstration tomorrow morning at 8:30 at the west gate of Livermore Nuclear Weapons Labs. And then many of us will be risking arrest, saying, “In the name of God and of love for humanity, we have to stop this.” And so, I don’t know how long we might need to spend in jail. Our friend, Susan Crane, is presently spending over seven months in jail in Germany for protesting US nuclear weapons in Germany.
Governments seem to be in the way instead of helping pave the way. And somehow the people have to raise their voices. So that’s what we’re trying to do.
Stephanie: And, David, if I remember correctly, there’s a story of your mother having an effect on somebody who was working at a nuclear weapons lab. Is that right, that she would go and protest every day?
David: Well, this is back in 1959. And it was actually a chemical or biological warfare plant where we were developing biological weapons, including something called Q fever. And I think one ounce of that, if divided evenly around the world, could kill everyone in the world. Well, Quakers, and including my mom – she was a teacher in her summer vacation, spent every day down there. I think it was ten hours a day in the scorching sun. This is in Maryland, in the summer, in the freezing cold in the winter. Just with signs staying vigilant at Fort Detrick, you know, urging you to convert this into a world health center. Well, the workers had orders not to take any leaflets from these people, and not to look at their faces, but just walk straight forward, you know, and drive into the facility.
Well, my folks about ten years later moved to Oregon and lived in Salem. And my mom was in a bookstore one day and a fellow came up to her and looked at her and said, “Were you in that vigil at Fort Detrick ten years ago?” And my mom said, “Yes.” And he said, “I just wanted you to know that I was a worker at that plant and it was because of you that I resigned from my job.”
So, you never know what a small action you do may be like a stone thrown in the lake. And just the waves keep reverberating out. And our hope and our prayer is that, somehow, our voices and our actions will somehow help reverberate across the country and around the world.
I mean, these nuclear weapons, I think, as you probably know, it’s not just the weapons that are dropped or going to kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. But as a result of all that debris going into the atmosphere, we’ll have nuclear winter. And any people that have not been killed by the nuclear weapons will die of starvation because we can’t grow crops.
Well, for any reason in the world why we would be willing to risk essentially all life on our planet because we don’t like the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians, or them not liking the Americans. I mean, it is so stupid, immoral, criminal.
I think that’s an addiction, the same way as alcoholics have an addiction, that violence is the only way to solve problems. And of course, that’s the problem in Israel-Palestine. And, whether it’s Mubarak Awad or Jonathan Kuttab, one of the folks said, “The only solution is nonviolence. You know, where every person, every nationality, every religion, is respected. And to treat each other nonviolently, not as a second-class citizen or as a ‘they’.” So that’s the whole new way of looking at the world, rather than the good guys versus the bad guys.
Of course, we always say the bad guy is a new Hitler, and mobilize the people to say, “Oh, of course we have to spend half of our military budget on wars and preparations for wars because the new Hitler is out there.” And the same thing happens in Russia in terms of looking at what the West has done.
What President Kennedy said about the importance of being willing to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. And instead of just looking at – you know, we have all the answers, looking at what is a solution, whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s Taiwan and China, whether it’s Israel-Palestine, what is going to be in the interest of both sides for a just and peaceful solution?
And if we just committed ourselves to that, we could save $1 trillion a year on the military budget and have enough money to end hunger in the world and build a just and decent life for every person. Not only the United States, but the world. And how safe we would be. I think that’s what Gandhi, or Jesus or King or many of our other spiritual leaders would be urging us and that’s what we somehow have to help in that conversion to seeing the whole world as our family.
Stephanie: That’s a really beautiful vision, David. And as you’re describing as well, our kind of addiction, our national addictions to violence, it makes me think about how dropping bombs and nuclear bombs as well, it’s holding hostage entire populations. Like, as we see very clearly in the news right now, for the people in Israel-Palestine are being asked to, you know, take shelter, make sure their shelter rooms are ready because they recently killed a leader of Hamas.
And so, they’re waiting for violence to be inflicted back on Israelis. And they know this. They know that when they do an act of violence in the name of people that their people will then somehow, somewhere, you know, be attacked in some way. That it’s not stopping it. It’s populations being used as shields for the governments.
David: Yeah, I mean, violence begets violence. And, you know, the people of Palestine have been treated as second-class citizens. And in Gaza, you know, living in like in a prison for decades, 75 years of apartheid system, which is violence. And then the October 7th attack, we’re responding to that.
And of course, in response to that, Israel has been bombing Gaza and starving the people of Gaza, you know, for, you know, 9 or 10 months now. And then Israel kills the Hamas leader as well as the leader of – what, the other leader was killed in –
Michael: Hezbollah.
David: Hezbollah, yes. And Iran may respond to that. And we will get ourselves into a World War. When I met with President Kennedy, he said, “I’ve been reading “The Guns of August” and before the First World War, everybody was arming to the teeth to try to avoid that war.
And of course, the exact opposite happened. I mean, all you had to have is, you know, a local spark. You know, the archduke of wherever it was got killed in Sarajevo? You know, the whole of Europe blew up.
Michael: David, I want to step in here for a second. I was being interviewed once on the radio. I was taking it, not dishing it out at that time. I was talking about nonviolence and the interviewer got very angry with me, and he pounded the table, which you don’t do at a radio studio. Metaphorically, did something like that. And then he said, “Violence begets violence.”
And I said back to him, “What does nonviolence beget?” He was stunned. I think he’s probably still thinking about that.
As I remember your mother’s story and, you know, this is outrageous. I’m taking away your own story from your own family. But as I remember that man in Oregon said to your mom, “We were ordered not to look at you. When I went in, you looked at me, I looked at you, and you smiled. And I quit my job.” And that has always just been a little window onto the immense power that is hiding in nonviolence.
And we recently interviewed a friend of ours who worked with the UN, Amadine Roche, and she was in a polling station in Kabul.
And a man came in disguised as a woman with a very bulky vest, and she fled in terror. And then her inner voice said, “No, no, no, you go back and smile at him.” She went back. She looked the guy in the eye and smiled at him. And what he did was he took off his jacket, he took off his vest and he walked out – the vest being the bombs.
So yeah, I mean, we’re talking about a small scale, but the scale doesn’t matter really. We’re talking about a universal dynamic.
David: I mean, I think most of you have heard my story, but back in the sit-ins in Virginia, when the American Nazi Party was threatening to kill anybody who’d challenge their vision etc. A guy came up to me with a switchblade and kind of yelled in my ear, “I’m going to stab this through your heart if you don’t get out of the store in two seconds.” And I had two seconds to decide. Well, I know we have a nonviolent discipline, etc. [unintelligible] but [unintelligible] to react, to respond to this guy. I just turned around, looked at him in the eye and said, “Friend, do what you believe is right, but I’ll still try to love you.”
And miraculously, and, you know, perhaps not miraculously, if you’d realize the power of nonviolence, which Gandhi said is the most powerful force in the world, instead of stabbing me in the heart, his jaw dropped, and his hand began to fall, and he left the store.
Well, I think every person has the potential to respond to nonviolence. The problem is most of us never try. And, and that’s certainly not what people get taught in the schools. It’s not what our newspapers tell us. It’s not what our president and vice president or congress people tell us. But I think the people that were in the civil rights and the freedom movement in the 60s realized that. And they have been a tremendous force for change ever since.
And, you know, people who were conscientious objectors or refused to register during the Second World War, realized that they didn’t have to hate the person the government says is the enemy. They could follow their conscience and their heart and say, “I’m not going to [unintelligible]. I’m willing to risk my life to try to help people, but not to kill people.” And those people, that was transforming for their whole lives.
I mean, I don’t think there’s one of them that said, “Oh, well, I’m going to become a millionaire now. That’s really what I really want to do in life.” So, I mean, that’s the choice that each of us have. And I think the fear is instilled in so many people about the other. You know, we have a low-cost housing community. “Well, what’s that going to do to our, to our property values.”
Well, which is more important, your property values or your sense that every person has a right to have a place to live, a shelter.
Stephanie: Well, David Hartsough, thank you so much for your wisdom and mentorship for all of our listeners today. You’ve been practicing nonviolence, it seems, your whole life. In your book, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, I highly recommend people check that out. And they can find that at bookstores and online.
You describe from your earliest childhood, your experiments with truth, as Gandhi would say, and to have you here to continue to talk about it, we just kind of pickup in the middle wherever your experiments are leading you right now. And it’s interesting because you just continue with these hypotheses.
What if? What is more important, what do I believe in, and how do I live that way? So, thank you so much, David, for being who you are and sharing your wisdom with us today.
David: Well, thank you. It’s really good to be with you. And thank you for all that you do to try to help build the kind of loving, just, nonviolent, peaceful world that we all want to live in.
And if any people feel inspired by conscience to come out and join us at Livermore, tomorrow morning at 8:30, at the west gate. You’re very welcome. There’ll be an excellent program as well as our nonviolent direct action.
Stephanie: Beautiful. And we’ll follow up on that on the news in our next show to find out what happened.
David: All right.
Stephanie: Okay, David. Take care.
David: Thanks so much. Bye bye.
Stephanie: Okay, great. Well, that was David Hartsough, lifelong nonviolent activist, co-founder of the Nonviolent Peaceforce and former director of an organization called Peaceworkers, working all over the world for nonviolence. And that’s pretty hopeful to know about what David’s up to.
So, let’s turn now to some other hopeful news with our nonviolence report and Michael Nagler.
Michael: Thank you, Stephanie. And I’m going to start off with something pretty darn close to home.We here at the Metta Center have recently, as, doing business as Person Power Press.
Stephanie: We’re launching a book.
Michael: We are launching a book. Stephanie, tell us about it.
Stephanie: Oh, it’s a children’s book called, Courage. And it’s by Ela Gandhi. Ela is the granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, as you might guess from her last name. She’s a South African political activist, served in the ANC with Nelson Mandela and is an incredible person. And she has a story about courage that she learned from her grandfather through her mother, that she always remembers when she needs to get courage.
But part of what’s important about this book is that we feel that nonviolence and courage are inseparable. That in order to do the nonviolent thing, you have to summon your courage in one way or another. So, you can’t get there without courage. And so, we hope to inspire people to think more deeply about where they need courage in their life, or what kind of courageous action they can take every single day. That kind of inner voice of courage.
And that event is on August 21st at 9 a.m. Pacific. You can find out more about it at MettaCenter.org/whatsnew. And, after the conversation with Ela and the event, we will have a screening of The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature.
Back to you, Michael.
Michael: Thank you, Stephanie. I just want to add one thing. It is a beautiful book. I have great-grandchildren, and I’ve seen a lot of children’s books in the last few years, but I think in all objectivity, this thing is just absolutely beautiful and perfect for children. And Gandhi said, if we want peace, we shall have to begin with the children. So, there’s a beginning right there.
Well, there are a lot of other resources that we should all know about. This month – it’s started already and going on until the 16th – there’s a Palestinian Christian by the name of Munther Isaac, Reverend Munther Isaac. And he’s going around the US right now on a speaking tour sponsored by Friends of Sabeel, Friends of Sabeel North America. And that is an organization that of Palestinian Christians like Mubarak Awad whom I mentioned earlier. So, if you look that up, with his name, M-u-n-t-h-e-r Isaac, but more likely go to friends of Sabeel, S-a-b-e-e-l, North America, you might be able to catch a talk from Reverend Isaac.
Also, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which is, I believe, the oldest peace organization continuously functioning in the US, they now have a monthly e-newsletter, an electronic newsletter, with lots and lots of information and other resources on it.
The DNC, now here’s an unusual one. The DNC is taking signups right now for something they want to do on August 19th, which is to pray and meditate. Pray and meditate to protect our democracy. And I wanted to make a comment about that tactic. Because I am one who does believe that prayer and meditation are effective.
And now, as opposed to when I started believing had a long time ago, now there’s a lot of scientific evidence that backs it up. However, Gandhiji, Mahatma Gandhi said, if you really want to realize the power of meditation or petitionary prayer in meditation, you have to have certain characteristics. You have to have, you know, eradicated other desires in your mind and so convert them and so, so on and so forth.
So, I guess my final comment is, this is a worthwhile thing to do. Potentially it will have an impact. It may not have an impact that we will notice right away, but that just means we should, you know, dig in there and do it further and better.
Now, MECA, Mid-East Children’s Alliance, is having a benefit for Palestine with poetry and music.
That’ll be next month, Sunday, 15th of September, in Berkeley at the Freight & Salvage place that does a lot of things like this. And in the course of reading about this, I came across an interesting quote I’d like to share with you. There is a program called Rumi’s Caravan, and it’s based on a quote of his where he said this is Jalaluddin Rumi, who I believe is still the most popular poet in the country. I’m not sure.
But he said, “Ours is not a caravan of despair.” And I take that to heart. And I hope some of you may get some inspiration from it also.
Now, it is not easy to find, conspicuous, large-scale episodes of nonviolence arising in one form or another – and nonviolence can take many different forms, arising around the human disaster now being perpetrated on Gaza.
But if you look hard enough, you do see that some 200 plus Israeli citizens have become refuseniks. And that’s significant because every citizen within a certain age range, male or female in Israel, is draftable. They have to join the draft. So, along with many other voices, many very inspired, passionate statements have been put forward. Like where many of them start with, “As Jews,” we refuse to participate in this.
And one of the most active organizations in the world and with an American branch is Jewish Voice for Peace. And in a big consortium, they are, organizing large demonstrations in San Francisco and elsewhere, called, “300 days of Genocide.”
Once again, I want to comment on demonstrations. They are the absolutely minimal first step in realizing the power of nonviolence.
They often are helpful and effective because people often think that they’re alone. There was a famous study done by two authors, a couple of down here in San Rafael, which showed that the vast majority of people want a peaceful world, but they don’t speak up because they think they’re the only ones, and that their neighbors would deprecate them.
Now, David Hartsough, when we were talking to him, and I think you may have referenced this also, Gilda, talked about the assessment team that has been working in Palestine, evincing the excruciating need right now for unarmed civilian protectors. And one person on that team – let me just read their statement. “The excruciating need for UCP in Palestine has just become very personal.
Our friend and colleague, Amira Musallam, is a member of the assessment team that is just completing their context analysis and recommendations on how to deploy a large scale UCP action in Palestine.” And she has been evicted from her home.
Now when we started UCP – and I say we because I was in on the conversations at least – we already back then, this is like some 25 years at this point, we recognized that, Palestine was really an issue that we wanted to operate in because if we could succeed in stopping violence on a large scale in Palestine, the world would know about it. Whereas it happens in other countries in the world, sub-Saharan Africa, and it, stays underneath the radar. But if we could make it happen in Palestine, it would be evident to the world that nonviolence has this great power.
But, the early days of Nonviolent Peaceforce, we did not feel that we were strong enough, well-prepared enough, to go into Palestine. But that day has come. And perhaps, that vision that we had way back then will be realized.
Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian lawyer living in Washington, DC, and he and his brother, Daoud Kuttab, have just given a very helpful and powerful, passionate interview for Nonviolence International. And you can find the interview there.
Jonathan says, and I want to quote this exactly. “We are living through a historic moment, and it’s not all negative.” He says, “it’s become obvious now that we really need some radically new thinking. We need to think out of the box.” His brother Daoud points out that while many “people have become numb,” you know there’s a phenomenon known as compassion fatigue, and he said some people seemingly have lost their humanity. My comment now, nonviolence is the only way to get it back. Nonviolence is such an essential human capacity that that is really the only way to reach people who have gone into that terrible state. For another thing, at least some of the hypocrisy is out in the open now.
Now, when the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima, people ran to Gandhi to get his reaction. Some people thought he would, give up on nonviolence. Which, of course, he did not. He said this proves that nonviolence is the only way forward. He said if the bomb so sickens people that they turned from violence, it will have at least done a little bit of good. There will be that silver lining.
That did not happen. And so, this is something that we should reflect on at this anniversary. And finally, another quote from Daoud Kuttab, he said, “If they’re not going to give us a state, we have to take it by force. And it could be violent or a nonviolent force or a mixture.”
And, I want to say, as someone, based on my studies of nonviolence, mixtures don’t work. In fact, rather tongue in cheek, I stated a formula which is Nagler’s first law. This is what’s going to get me to Stockholm someday. It’s not very good math. Maybe it’s quantum math or something.
But it’s V + NV = V. In other words, if you have a little bit of violence in your movement, that is what the people will seize on. We saw this some years ago at Columbia University, where there was a 24-hour demonstration. One minute of it, people got out of control and, you know, threw some stuff, and it got kind of nasty and violent.
And guess what? It got one minute coverage on the evening news. Guess which minute out of the 24 hours they picked. So, when we do nonviolence, we have to do it in the spirit that David Hartsough was talking about. Ready to suffer, ready to risk, but not going to use violence at any degree, under any circumstances. Thank you very much for listening.
Hopefully, even better news in our next show.
Stephanie: Thank you so much for the nonviolence report, Michael.
And for you, all of our listeners, you’ve been here at Nonviolence Radio. We want to thank our guest today, David Hartsough. We want to thank Gilda Bettencourt also for joining us here in the studio, albeit somewhat quietly, to Matt and Robin Watrous, Annie Hewitt, Sophia Pechaty, Bryan over at Waging Nonviolence, who helps to archive the show there. You can find it at WagingNonviolence.org.
We recommend learning more about nonviolence at MettaCenter.org, and you can find all of the archives of all of our shows at Nonviolence Radio.org. Special shout out to our mother station, KWMR, KPCA, Pacifica Network. Thank you to everybody who helps share and broadcast this show. You can find it on podcasts.
Definitely check us out wherever you can find us. And then, until the next time, we’ll be back in two weeks, take care of one another.