SABBATICAL 4: "Nonviolence is Anti-Occupation"

Tuesday Afternoon, Hebron

Issa Amro (founder, Youth Against Settlements) and Jeff Halper (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) have been nominated by Norwegian MP Ingrid Fiskaa, for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.  In acknowledging this recognition together, they've written: 

The nomination represents not only recognition of our joint efforts to confront Israeli repression, violence, displacement and denial of Palestinian national rights, but of the collective resistance the entire Palestinian people have sustained over the past century and more – supported, as our nomination signifies, by Israeli Jews of conscience willing to stand up for Palestinian rights in opposition to their own government and society.

We met Issa this morning just outside his home, high above the Old City of Hebron--where he lives, and where he continues to build a nonviolent grassroots Palestinian movement in solidarity with Israel Jews and allies around the world.  Along the steep path up, we passed an ancient olive tree (maybe 2000 years old) torched by Hebron's settlers.  Miraculously, the tree survived, and branches were already sprouting green shoots.  Hope.  In an olive tree.  Nature's resistance to apartheid and cruelty.

The H2 area in Hebron is inhabited by approximately 35,000 Palestinians and 400 radical settlers now living in four downtown settlements. These same 400 settlers are "protected" by as many as 4000 Israeli soldiers at outposts and checkpoints in the Old City.  While Palestinians in H2 live under military law, Israeli settlers move freely under Israel’s civil law.  Due to this kind of  militarization (wholescale closure of shops and commercial buildings; extended curfews, restrictions on pedestrian movement, prohibitions on vehicle movement), the Palestinian population in H2 is declining.  Which seems to be the purpose of it all.  

Issa preached in my California church nine years ago, championing nonviolence as a Palestinian commitment and connecting that commitment to deeply respected American traditions (Rosa Parks and MLK, Delores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, and others).  A year later, in 2017, my daughter and I traveled to Hebron and climbed the steep hill to his home.  It was good, these eight years later, to see him again.  He embodies sumud.

Several things popped out today:

1.  The "Hebron-ization" of the West Bank:  Issa talked about the way in which the drastic tactics used in Hebron for many years are now deployed across the West Bank--and increasingly so since October 7, 2023.  Military aggression without accountability.  Settler violence unfettered.  He noted that he suspects the dividing up of the Ibrahimi Mosque--which followed the massacre of 29 Palestinians praying during Ramadan in 1994--might be repeated in Jerusalem (at the Al Aqsa Mosque) and Bethlehem (at the Church of the Nativity) soon.  He called the situation at present the "Hebron-ization" of the West Bank.

2.  What can be done?  Issa noted that an expanding international coalition must "make this occuaption costly" to the occupiers.  He insisted on boycotts, divestment and sanctions.  He encouraged a wide range of nonviolent organizing and action.  And he urged us to address the extreme imbalance here--between Israeli power and Palestinian powerlessness: lifting up Palestinian voices wherever and whenever possible, supporting Palestinian educational institutions and opportunities, and bolstering the Palestinian economy.

3.  The nature of this struggle.  Issa reminded us, eloquently, that this is not a religious struggle, nor even that of one nation against another.  This is only about one thing, he said.  A system of oppression, dehumanization and control.  At issue: Will you be anti-occupation or will you be pro-occupation?  Will you join the struggle for human rights, and a land in which those rights are equally shared and collaboratively celebrated?  Or will you try to justify a divided land--in which the human rights of many are systematically denied in the name of "security"?  

Issa Amro, Omar Haramy (Sabeel)

If the struggle here is all about and only about human rights, and if that struggle is shared by Palestinians and wise, courageous Israeli allies, it is NOT about Judaism.  And it is NOT about Islam or Christianity.  It's about any and all within these communities coming together around shared values and deeply felt commitments to human rights (voting rights, self-determination, the right to clean water and affordable housing and health care and equal opportunities in school and at work).  So, again, the question we ask is not: "Are you pro-Israel or pro-Palestine?"  And it's not even: "Are you sympathetic to Jews or sympathetic to Palestinians or both?"  The question around which this movement is built--and must to moblized NOW--is only: "Are you anti-occupation or are you pro-occupation?"  And you can't be both.

4.  The Urgency of Nonviolence.  Issa insisted that nonviolence in the West Bank rises faithfully from the culture, from the people, even the land beneath us.  He noted that there are "many Gandhis" right here in Palestine: the farmer working the land against the backdrop of settler intimidation; the woman resolutely remaining in her family's home in H2; the many students continuing in their studies; engineers; and journalists, too.  He said that nonviolence is their best and only tool in "neutralizing" the aggression of Israeli forces in Hebron, and equips them with the courage to stand steadfastly in the midst of it all, without giving in.  And he said that this particularly Palestinian expression of nonviolence is especially devoted to "community resistance"--the promise of vibrant communal life and creative communal cooperation in the here and now.  "Existence is our resistance."

Issa, Recovering, July 2024

Lastly, Issa was asked whether he's ever afraid.  Settlers attack regularly; and did just days ago.  He's been beaten badly many times (picture, right).  His home is a regular target of settler ire and intimidation.  He was quick this time and said: "How am I afraid of them?  I believe in God."

And it is this faith that compels him--to seek friends in each and every faith community; to build alliances for the long haul; to remain in a place where his own life is threatened daily; and to imagine a land where occupation is no more, where war is no more, where peoples of all faiths, of all backgrounds and nationalities, live in peace and kindness and justice.  As one.

It's a vision that comes just soon enough...so that I can too can see it.

Let it be so.