I've Been Saying They Should Do This For 10 Years Now

RADICAL NON-VIOLENT RESISTANCE IS SWEEPING THE MUSLIM WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING THE PALESTINIANS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING 10 YEARS AGO, SHUT JERUSALEM DOWN!!! THIS ARAB SPRING IS GIVING ME MY FAITH BACK IN HUMANITY AGAIN, TIME TO GET TO WORK, THE GREAT WORK!!!

Monday, May. 16, 2011
Palestinian Border Protests: The Arab Spring Model for Confronting Israel
By Karl Vick

After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel's border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation.

Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that had caught Israel's vaunted military and intelligence complex flat-footed was announced, nursed and triggered on the social networking site that has figured in every uprising around the Arab World — and is helping young Palestinians change the terms of their fight against Israel. (See pictures of tempers flaring across the Middle East.)

The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day: at least four people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the Syrian fence line, and as many as 10 were killed either by Israeli or Lebanese army gunfire at a similar demonstration on the nearby frontier with southern Lebanon. The death toll, along with the accounts of stone-throwing and tear gas, comport with the familiar narrative of the conflict, one constructed over years of Israel describing efforts to defend itself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged that narrative on Sunday, arguing that the protesters were undermining the very existence of the State of Israel.

But those closer to events found in the day the makings of a new narrative. The Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank approached Israeli gun positions on Sunday without arms of their own. If some teenagers threw rocks, a protest leader said they had apparently failed to attend the workshops on nonviolence the organizers arranged in what they call a new paradigm for the conflict. The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.

Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967. As the dust settled Sunday, senior Israeli officers acknowledged their vulnerability to the approach, which dovetails with the strategy of Palestinian leaders to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestininian state in September. (See "A New Palestinian Movement: Young, Networked, Nonviolent.")

"What we saw today was the promo for what we might see in September on the day the United Nations declares a state: Thousands of Palestinians marching toward Israeli checkpoints, Israeli settlements and the fence along the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians coming with their bare hands to demonstrate," a senior Israeli officer tells TIME. "This is a huge problem. Well have to study what happened today to do better."

Sundays protests marked the anniversary of Israels 1948 declaration of statehood, a day known as Nakba, or the catastrophe, to Palestinians who lost their land to the Jewish state. The day is routinely occasion for protests, and Israel had prepared for unrest. But in the Golan Heights, high ground Israel took from Syria in 1967, only 30 to 40 soldiers were on duty where hundreds of Palestinians began arriving by bus and marching toward the fence. Troops were ordered to shoot to maim. Four protesters were killed, and at least 100 scrambled into Majdal Shams, a Druze village so close to the Syrian frontier it's known for the shouting hill where families separated by the fence gather to exchange news by hollering across no-mans land.

Less clear was how the protesters navigated the Syrian security which usually maintains strict control over the border area. Israeli officials interpreted protesters' apparent ease of access to a military zone as evidence of sponsorship by the battered government of President Bashar al-Assad. With street protests threatening his regime in cities across Syria, the reasoning goes, al-Assad found in the Nakba protests a perfect opportunity to shift the focus to Israel.

But Fadi Quran, a Ramallah organizer in the Palestinian youth movement that promoted the marches, says his contacts in Syria were actually terrified of the Bashar government, which took steps to prevent some from traveling to the protests from refugee camps near Damascus where they have lived since fleeing their homes in what is now northern Israel. (See pictures of young Palestinians in the age of the wall.)

Governments of other neighboring states that host large Palestinian populations, apparently were aware of the protest plans, and responded according to their own interests. Egypt and Jordan, which have treaties with Israel, impeded the demonstrations. Those who are hostile, including Lebanon, eased their way into military zones. But Damascus appeared to be pre-occupied with its own domestic unrest, according to Quran. "I honestly think to a very large extent they took the Syrian government by surprise," he tells TIME.

Demonstrators also gathered in Gaza and on the West Bank. Even there, on a march toward the Qalandia check-point near Ramallah, Quran insists no stones were thrown until Israeli troops fired tear gas, and then only by adolescents. But the overall make-up of the crowd, featuring older women and men as well as students, was a change from previous years, according to Shawan Jabarin of the human rights advocacy group Al Haq.

"They say the Arab Spring gives people encouragement and makes people feel they can make a difference," says Jabarin. "The consciousness of the people, you feel it's something different." (See "Palestinians Mark Nakba with Violent Protests.")

Also encouraging people into the streets: The complete breakdown of peace talks with Israel. If Palestinians needed any additional reminder, the resignation of former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell as President Obamas special envoy for peace was announced two days before Nakba Day.

"We have to come up with an improvement in non-lethal weapons, no doubt," says an aide to an Israeli cabinet minister. "But if we have a new approach to peace talks then we won't have to deal with non-lethal weapons in September."

For their part, Palestinian protesters feel they've found a winning formula. The main political factions, Hamas and Fatah, were forced into their embrace by the same non-violent youth movement that now summons ordinary Palestinians to unite in shaming Israel into concessions.

"They understand the path to freedom is going to be long," Quran says "but were going to continue training in nonviolence, and were going to continue marching in nonviolence until it is very clear in the international media who is violating human rights."

— With reporting by Aaron J. Klein

Another great article I found here, power to the young people!!!

Thursday, Mar. 31, 2011
A New Palestinian Movement: Young, Networked, Nonviolent
By Joe Klein

Fadi Quran is the face of the new Middle East. He is 23, a graduate of Stanford University, with a double major in physics and international relations. He is a Palestinian who has returned home to start an alternative-energy company and see what he can do to help create a Palestinian state. He identifies with neither of the two preeminent Palestinian political factions, Hamas and Fatah. His allegiance is to the Facebook multitudes who orchestrated the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and who are organizing nonviolent protests throughout the region. In the Palestinian territories, the social-networking rebels call themselves the March 15 movement—and I would call Quran one of the leaders of the group except that it doesn't really have leaders yet. It is best described as a loose association of "bubbles," he says, that hasn't congealed. It launched relatively small, semisuccessful protests in the West Bank and Gaza on the aforementioned March 15; it is staging a small, ongoing vigil in the main square of Ramallah. It has plans for future nonviolent actions; it may or may not have the peaceful throngs to bring these off.

I meet with Quran and several other young Palestinians at the local Coca-Cola Bottling Co. headquarters in Ramallah, which tells you something important about this movement: we are not meeting in a mosque. I've known one of them, Fadi El-Salameen, for five years. He was an early volunteer for the Seeds of Peace program, which intermingled Palestinian and Israeli teenagers at a summer camp in Maine. In recent years, El-Salameen has spent much of his time in the U.S. and has achieved a certain prominence—he is quietly charismatic, a world-class networker, the sort of person who is invited to international conferences—but he is now spending more time at home in Hebron, organizing the March 15 movement in the West Bank's largest city. "I met some of the leaders of the Tahrir Square movement at a conference in Doha," he tells me. "They don't fit the usual profile of a 'youth leader.' They are low-key, well educated but not wealthy. They are figuring it out as they go along, trying to figure out what works." (See "Growing Up Palestinian in the Age of the Wall.")

The young Palestinians don't seem as pragmatic as all that; they are somewhere beyond wildly idealistic. "The goal is to liberate the minds of our people," says Najwan Berekdar, an Israeli-born Arab who is a women's-rights activist. "We want to get past all the old identities—Fatah, Hamas, religious, secular, Israeli and Palestinian Arab —and create a mass nonviolent movement." Berekdar has touched on an idea that might prove truly threatening to Israelis: a "one state" movement uniting Palestinians on both sides of the current border. But the young Palestinians have not focused on anything so specific. Their current political plan is to go back to the future—to achieve Palestinian unity by resurrecting and holding elections for a body called the Palestinian National Council, which took a backseat after the Oslo accords created the Palestinian Authority and its parliamentary component. This seems rather abstruse—the basic rule for people-power movements is, Organize first, bureaucratize later — and it would be easy to dismiss these young people as hopelessly naive but for two factors. The first is that they've seized the Palestinian version of a suddenly valuable international brand: the Tahrir Square revolution. "We cannot discount their importance," a prominent Israeli official told me. "Not after what happened in Egypt." (See "In the West Bank, An Economy Without a Nation.")

But equally important are their methods. Ever since Israel won control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Palestinian national movement has been defined by terrorism, intransigence and, until recently in the West Bank, corruption. It has never been known for dramatic acts of nonviolence. "If they'd been led by Gandhi rather than Yasser Arafat, they would have had a state 20 years ago," Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution told me. Israeli officials acknowledge that the recent, peaceful economic and security reforms led by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have been the most effective tactics the Palestinians have ever used in trying to create a state. But they haven't gotten the Palestinians anywhere in their negotiations with the equally intransigent Israeli government. Jewish settlements continue to expand on Palestinian land. A mass nonviolent movement might tip the balance, especially if the world—including the Israeli public —began to see Palestinians as noble practitioners of passive resistance rather than as suicide bombers.

The Israeli leadership is as perplexed as everyone else about what the revolutionary tide in the region will bring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he'd prefer dealing with democracies, but he isn't so sure that the Tahrir Square movement will yield a democracy in Egypt (and there are already indications that Egypt's new government will push harder for a Palestinian peace accord than Mubarak ever did). Netanyahu has wisely called for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, an idea that the Saudis—who seem to agree with the Israelis on practically everything these days—have also quietly endorsed. "If you can't get the young Egyptians involved in big public-works projects, like new housing, which is badly needed," an Israeli intelligence expert told me, "then they're back in the square for sure, only they'll be supporting the Muslim Brotherhood this time."

That seems unduly pessimistic. The Facebook rebels may have more influence on the suddenly antiquated Islamists than vice versa; if there is Shari'a, it will come with alternative-energy start-ups and a Coca-Cola chaser. "You have to wonder what sort of influence this revolution has had on Hamas," a Palestinian Christian said to me. "Are they watching al-Jazeera and seeing nonviolence succeed where terrorism has failed?" (See "In the West Bank: A Visit With a Soon-To-Be Ex-Negotiator.")

The Israelis assume not, which seems a safe assumption: Hamas rule in Gaza is going well, despite the Israeli boycott. "The Hamas military wing is making money off the smuggling from the tunnels [from Egypt into Gaza]," a West Bank businessman tells me. "They sell my product for twice my price. And yet the standard of living is rising in Gaza." In fact, Hamas seems more secure right now than Fatah, despite the economic successes in the West Bank. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been wounded by the leak to al-Jazeera of private memos that showed Palestinian negotiators making what seemed to be major concessions to the Israelis. In order to restore some of his credibility, Abbas has been reaching out to Hamas, raising the prospect of a reconciliation—and destroying any slim hope of an accord with the Israelis. "Abbas has to choose," a Netanyahu aide told me, "between Hamas and us."

So the stalemate continues—with one exception: the March 15 movement and the rush of history in the region. The young activists may be preoccupied by the chimera of Palestinian unity at the moment, but what happens if they turn their full attention to the Israeli occupation? What happens if they begin to organize marches to protest the near daily outrages perpetrated by Jewish settlers? What if they stage sit-down strikes to open roads that are used by settlers but closed to Palestinians? What if they march 10,000 strong against a settlement that is refusing Palestinians access to a traditional water supply? "If it is nonviolent, then that means, by definition, it is civilized," an Israeli official said. "We have no problem with that." But what if the Palestinians are nonviolent and the Jewish settlers are not? "I think about the dogs unleashed on Martin Luther King in Birmingham," Quran says. "I think about the beatings. That's what it took for Americans to see the justice of his cause. We will be risking our lives, but that is what it takes. I only hope that we're not too well educated to be courageous."
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