This spring Jewish Voice for Peace (I am a founding member of the Seattle Chapter) is sponsoring a tour of young Palestinian activists to speak in over fifteen cities in the US to discuss the challenges facing Palestinian students who live under Israeli military occupation. I was fortunate to hear Mira Dabit and Hanna Qassis speak in Seattle, and I also got a chance to interview them about right to education issues in Palestine, their lives under occupation, and their hopes for a better future.

Mira Dabit photo by Emma Klein

Mira Dabit, 25, was born in Jerusalem to a refugee family originally from the 1948 city of Al Lod. She has been a youth activist and folkloric storyteller for many years. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology from Birzeit University. After graduating, she moved to Ireland where she volunteered with community initiatives for three years. Back in Palestine, Mira is continuing her activism with youth and education, including the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University.

Hanna Qassis, 27, is from the town of Birzeit, Palestine. He graduated from Birzeit University in 2006 with a BA in Business Administration, and is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in International Studies. In addition to working for the Academy for Educational Development in the West Bank, Hanna is a political and youth activist who volunteers with several Palestinian civil society organizations.

At a talk at Seattle University on April 11, 2010, they both spoke movingly about the role of education in Palestine. Mira posited that education has been important to Palestinians because the loss of their land in 1948 meant that many Palestinians also lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. Education was what they had left, and she sees it as a tool for Palestinians to tell their stories and educate people about their lives.

One of the biggest risks of nonviolent protest is that those whom you are protesting might respond with violence. Ask Mohandas Gandhi and those who struggled for India’s independence. Ask Martin Luther King, Jr., and other African-Americans who joined in the civil rights movement. Such was the case most recently in Bahrain on the morning of February 17th. Yet in 2011 in the United States of America, if you were to engage in a silent and nonviolent protest in front of a major national leader, say merely turning your back on her while she was giving a speech on, say, the importance of free speech, would you expect to be brutally beaten and jailed by her security detail? Until receiving an email message from Ray McGovern, we would have answered that question with a resounding no.

Like every other lover of democracy in the world I have been thrilled and at times moved to tears by the courage and success of the Tunisian and Egyptian democracy movements. And like many others I have wondered: where did this extraordinary commitment to nonviolence and creative organizing come from? One commentator wrote that they thought the most critical moment followed Mubarak’s speech on February 10, when he was expected to resign and didn’t, and the Tahrir Square protesters restrained themselves from reacting with violence. If you look at this map of Tahrir Square, above, on the BBC site where it is interactive, you get an idea of how that degree of self control was possible: these people were organized!

But this piece, “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History”, from yesterday’s New York Times has done more to explain the movement to me than anything else I have read. The article explains the deliberate way leading organizers like Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer, went about schooling themselves in nonviolent organizing. They were particularly taken with the example of Otpor, the Serbian youth movement that helped overthrow Milosevic, and they were greatly assisted by an organization in Qatar (where it’s worth recalling that Al Jazeera was also founded) called the Academy of Change. Both Otpor and the Academy of Change draw deeply on the work of American political theorist Gene Sharp. According to Wikipedia:

Gene Sharp (born 21 January 1928) is known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle: he has been called both the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.”

How are we each implicated -- or refusing to be implicated -- in the horror of racially biased, mass incarceration?

On Saturday I attended the first annual “Love Warriors’ Convocation” – an event that was put together by Seminary of the Street, one of my favorite local organizations in Oakland.

For the last few years I have had the good fortune of having regular walks with Nichola Torbett. I accompanied her, in conversation, through a process of resigning from her last job and founding this organization. Hers is the courage that takes people into confronting their deepest fears and opening up to life.

Over the course of Saturday’s event we were asked to do just that. I was most struck by what happened in the first part of the afternoon, as part of continuing to digest what has happened in Oakland since Oscar Grant was killed. Sujatha Baliga from Communityworks invited us to share in a circle our response to the following question: “How are you implicated in police brutality and the criminal injustice system?”

There were about 22 of us in the room. The object that was held by each speaker kept moving through the room. As each of us spoke, I felt a growing sense of honesty, a bond of truth between us. Everyone present contributed to a growing tapestry of clarity about what keeps it all in place. One by one we shared stories, small and large, of moments in which we had opportunities to stand up, to make a difference, and to show our humanity, and didn’t because of fear.

“There is a war between the ones
who say there is a war
And the ones who say there isn’t.” (Leonard Cohen)

“Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” (Hillary Clinton, 1/21/10)

Wikileaks has raised a range of fascinating and related issues, starting with the extraordinary information that has been revealed. But should that information have been revealed? Is Julian Assange a hero, a rapist, both, or neither? What has the US done in response, and what should it have done? And what has “Anonymous” done in response, and who are they anyway? I’ve been trying to keep up with the unfolding answers to these questions, surfing as fast as I can, and getting further and further behind the wave. But the most fascinating story is the battle between Anonymous and the US government, a battle so one-sided that it makes David and Goliath look like an even money bet. But, as could only have happened in the 21st century, Anonymous has won at least the first few rounds.

In this corner in the red, white, and blue trunks, the US government. With an annual budget of 3.5 trillion dollars it has enough power that all it takes is for Joseph Lieberman, (whom the Guardian calls “the kind of politician who gives loose cannons a bad name”) to call Wikileaks “implacably hostile to our military and the most basic requirements of our national security,” and things happen. Amazon terminates their hosting of Wikileak’s account, spuriously claiming copyright violation. (As Juan Cole points out, “once a document has become public, no matter how, the government cannot sue for copyright infringement or demand its return on those grounds, at least in the United States” And how secure does your cloud computing feel these days?) Wikileaks domain name provider, Everydns, dropped wikileaks.org off the net (the cyber equivalent of having your phone disconnected). Visa and Mastercard stopped allowing their cards to be used to make donations to Wikileaks, (though you can use these same cards to donate to the Ku Klux Klan). Paypal not only dropped Wikileaks, but locked the account of users whose businesses had donated any money to Wikileaks. Then, feeling that a Wikileaks knockout had been achieved, on Dec 8th the US State department announced “World Press Freedom Day,” because they were “concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information.” Oh the irony, it burns. As Al Jazeera accurately summed up the US response,

“what WikiLeaks is exposing is the way the Western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (the US and UK in not regulating their financial sectors); corrupt (Ireland, Italy; all other governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessly militaristic (US and UK in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way…. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.”

But in the other corner, apparently wearing no trunks at all, was Anonymous.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,

Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.

Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.