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As an academic who studies and works with young people, I am horrified by the findings of a report released by several research groups, including Jews for Justice in Palestine and Israel, which names and pictures 232 Palestinian children killed by the youthful Israeli military and 54 Israeli children killed by youth-dominated Palestinian bombers. I have seen no better documentation of the cruelty of this conflict -and of the central role played by youth under 18.
Through all this violence and victimization, we hear almost nothing of a different and vital kind of youth experience: activists organizing to end this bloodshed nonviolently. For many months, young members of an intergenerational, international activist movement spearheaded by a handful of Palestinians and Jews (most in their twenties at the time) -- the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) -- have been crossing the ocean to join Palestinians in coordinated nonviolent actions to end an untenable situation that has endangered both Palestinians and Israelis for 40 years: Israel’s military occupation and settlement of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza strip. Last summer, in an action called “Freedom Summer” in honor of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, activists young and old from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States participated in nonviolent marches, accompanied deliveries of medicines, built roads, acted as human rights witnesses, nonviolently halted illegal settlement bulldozers, and nonviolently challenged humiliating curfews and arbitrary checkpoints. These nonviolent actions involved many Palestinian youth and a core of activist Israelis; many young ISM activists arriving from the United States were Jews. And this winter, several hundred activists from across the globe have again been traveling to the West Bank and Gaza to risk their lives in actions for peace. They have done so by serving as human shields for unarmed Palestinian farmers simply harvesting their olives. The fliers for the movement read, “resisting the occupation by insisting on life.” One day this past October, 13 ISM members accompanied 400 Palestinians from the Yasuf village in the West Bank in a peaceful march to harvest their olives in orchards being illegally annexed and raided by nearby Israeli settlers. These settlers, often fundamentalists from the U.S., are known to be viciously violent in intimidating Palestinian villagers. In an email message home subtitled “Nonviolence Prevails,” the Boston delegates described an incident with armed settlers: “We tried to speak to them, saying, 'We are here in peace.' They said, 'We are here in peace too,' then threw rocks at us and fired shots over our heads. . . .An elderly Israeli peace activist moved in front of the settler's gun. Every time a settler pointed his gun at someone, this seventy year old man would stand in front of it, with the barrel pointed at his chest.” The Palestinians sat down, silently; this was to be a totally nonviolent action-no stone throwing, and completely peaceful and silent. . .The Israeli commander told us that this was a closed military zone and that we had to leave. We argued that it was not. The soldiers seemed stumped. They knew we were right. So they finally asked the settlers to leave. . . The Palestinians were finally able to carry out their harvesting work. They were ecstatic. The olive harvest went on all day long." Through their direct actions, American ISM members make human connections to Palestinian people, a rarity for Americans typically inured to statistics of Palestinian deaths. This summer, two Boston locals, brothers Carl and Chris of Roxbury, spent nights comforting the inhabitants of houses about to be demolished by the Israeli military; Susan, of Cambridge, spent time counseling a young Palestinian woman so bitter about her future opportunities that she saw no point in living. One New York activist, Rebecca (who spent nine weeks riding around in ambulances protecting them from Israeli youth fire, with the internal ambulance light displaying her sheaf of too-blond-to-be-Palestinian hair) talked to Senator John Kerry’s office on her cell phone while staring into the barrel of an Israeli machine gun to let him know that her own tax dollars were threatening her life. One 23-year-old young activist from Ireland positioned herself daily between Israeli tanks and Palestinian civilians. In November, she was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier while trying to protect several Palestinian children from Israeli army fire. She continues to do nonviolent actions in Jenin. As I investigate this network of international activism, I am still amazed to find young Americans doing what no one in their own government seems willing to do: demand the sanctity of life in the Middle East. They’re doing so in league with the nonviolent Palestinian majority and in moral solidarity with many Jews across the world. As Harvard rabbi emeritus Ben-Zion Gold puts it (see his moving “The Israeli-Palestine Conflict and the Role of American Jews,” a talk given at Harvard Hillel on April 14, ‘02), Israeli settlements and military occupation have denied essential human rights and liberties (not to mention water) to Palestinians in the Territories for 40 years. While the Bush government has done almost nothing substantial to condemn or end violence in the region-indeed, while we Americans give the Israeli military millions of dollars a day-these American activists are crossing the ocean to place their lives at risk for nonviolence in the Middle East. Their actions are a lesson for those in power in our own nation, who inexplicably refuse to intervene to end this global conflagration. ISM members, led by nonviolent Palestinians and in league with activist Israelis, are attacking the occupation not with guns or exploding human bombs, but with the nonviolent logic of human rights. They redefine "globalization" as the global connection of people committed to an ideology of social equality. They are nonviolent, as one ISM activist put it, but not passive -- for they are out to provoke an international strategy for peace. And they have done something few Americans have: seen Palestinians, too, as human beings in pain. The upcoming ISM Right to Education campaign focuses on simply accompanying Palestinian children to school. The occupation seems to be killing Israel and the Palestinians alike; it breeds fury and thus threatens, by proxy, every American. The situation keeps millions of people in daily terror and it is literally bleeding people to death. It is time for the Bush administration to follow the lead of these young activists and provide leadership for sending an international protection force to stop the violence on both sides. It is time to bear witness to young Israeli soldiers’ daily brutality; it is time to deny any young Palestinian bomber the right to speak for the nonviolent majority. It is time instead to listen to a broader, nonviolent voice, one calling for the occupation to end and for both peoples to start living in secular harmony. It is time to end the region’s bloodbath before a generation of its young people is destroyed. About the Author
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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