Overview of nonviolence and course.

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Isn’t it awesome?[podcast format="youtube"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gGW_GTNdcQ[/podcast]

We recorded this on Friday, before the government crackdown began. Michael Nagler and the Metta Center staff would like to express our continued solidarity with the protesters, and urge them to stay the course through this difficult part of the struggle: “Don’t seek suffering, but know that if it comes to you, it is often part of the very success of a nonviolent movement”.

[podcast format="video"]http://www.mettacenter.org/documents/flv/nv_iran.flv[/podcast]

Children in Gaza. Photo courtesy of Nora Barrows-Friedman

Dear friends, the following sections are from an email from Kathy Kelly, Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, January 19, 2009:

Dr. Atallah Tarazi, a General Surgeon at Gaza City’s Shifaa Hospital, invited us to meet him in his home, in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital.

“One of the worst aspects of this war,” says Dr. Tarazi, “is the lack of respect for the UN.  Three United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools were bombed.  In Jabaliyah, more than 45 people were killed at a UN school; F16s bombed UNRWA supplies and stores.”

“In Shifaa Hospital, we saw plumes of smoke for day and night. All Gaza, every day, was covered with smoke and chemicals.  We don’t know how it affects the health.”

“Yes, ‘rockets’ did go out,” says Dr. Tarazi, referring to Hamas rockets fired into Israeli towns, “and we felt sympathy for any Israelis hurt by the rockets.  But, if someone hurts you with a pin, you don’t cut off his head.  You ask WHY the person tried to prick you with a pin. Consider that people here are trapped in a prison and there is a shortage of everything.  No one can repair anything. People wanted borders opened so that goods could come and go.  After six months of closed borders, people are frustrated.  Now, one side declares a cease fire, they say nothing about opening the borders, nothing about withdrawal, and yet they want NATO to help tighten the siege.”

“I hope President Obama will be much better than George Bush concerning these things,” said Dr. Tarazi.  “Human beings that have such a strong army should be civilized and not behave like a terrorist group.  Fanatics can be expected to use terror, but a democratic state shouldn’t use fallacious statements as an excuse for massive killing. A state which does this should be brought before an International Court of Justice.”

“And yet,” he said, “we must experiment with ways of love. We are trying, with Jewish people…by feelings and actions.  We need to succeed.  We need to live together.  We are trying to be in good relations with all the partners, all the views.”

“The strongest weapon all over the world is love,” says Dr. Tarazi, adding that he has always believed this and has said this to his colleagues, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish, throughout his career.  He recalled declaring this same belief at the Eretz border crossing, shortly after the Israelis launched “Operation Cast Lead.” He had been among the 200 Christians who were chosen (800 had applied) to cross the border and celebrate the Orthodox Christmas holiday with family members in the West Bank. When the attacks began, he ended his holiday and hurried to the border, knowing he must return to his work
and his family.  At the border crossing, he greeted soldiers, “Merry Christmas.”  Soldiers answered, “Do you have weapons?”  “Yes,” Dr. Tarazi replied, “I have the strongest weapon of all, the weapon of love.“

“I feel like his campaign swindled the people of the USA into believing his administration would be something it surely will not be. “

On my 72^nd birthday I stood in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza where, many years before, I was passionately involved in the Free Speech Movement, and watched Barack Obama become the 44^th President of the United States.

I had said earlier, “If that man becomes president I will weep tears of joy — but I won’t have any great expectations that that alone will change things.”  Both were true.  However, I don’t entirely hold with the sentiment expressed above that someone recently wrote in to us here at the Metta Center.  Here’s why.

No less a person than the President himself has reminded us that (aside from breaking the racial barrier) his election is not so much the desired change as a chance to work for it.  This is no small thing, that we now can work for it (to put it in perspective, just remember President Bush’s advise to us after 9/11: ‘go shopping, take the kids to Disneyland’).  Even more significant, if somewhat less public, he himself also said that we the people have to make it possible for him to live up to the full interpretation of his own promises.  At a small fundraising event in New Jersey about a year ago, he himself told the story of how A. Philip Randolph, the civil rights activist and union organizer asked FDR to grant the largely African-American railroad porters the right to organize, whereupon the new president said ‘I’m convinced that it’s a good thing: now go out and make me do it.’  (The Railway Labor Act came into law in 1934).

So let’s take the President at his word.  We private citizens of progressive communities like Berkeley (or West Marin, where I now live) have a greater role to play in the direction of our country than we have had for many dismal years — probably greater in proportion to our numbers than many other locations across the land.  How shall we play it?

First, by appreciating what the President has already done.  For eight years we have been living through a national version of those Stanley Milgram experiments on ‘obedience to authority,’ where a national authority figure reassured unsuspecting people from all walks of life that it’s OK to torture.  President Obama pulled us back from that disgraceful abyss with a stroke of his pen.  And he framed it brilliantly: “we’re going to defeat terrorism on our terms.”

Second, by not condemning him for what are undeniably many and harsh disappointments — the silence on Gaza, the refusal to stop drone bombings in Afghanistan (in which 22 innocent people have recently died), his encouraging speech at a Caterpillar plant in IL over the objections of human rights groups and others (Caterpillar supplies the machines that illegally level Palestinian homes, in one case crushing to death an American peace activist), and of course the ringing words of his inaugural address that America is “ready to lead” again.  If you’re like me, you don’t want anyone to be world leader any more; if there’s any leading to be done, it should be toward acceptance that the world a multipolar system; even, dare we say it, toward a real international community.  Am I disappointed?  Yes, but I’m also trying to be realistic.  Public figures, elected by majorities, are not expected to be prophets of a vision that only a tiny minority can understand, much less desire.  In this sense, to be political is to ‘swindle’ at least some of the people much of the time. Instead of calling him a cheat for not giving us everything we want, and doing it right away — which will only deprive him of badly needed support and further terrify his (and our) considerable opposition — let’s appreciate what he’s up against, give him the benefit of the doubt (which is a good idea to give everyone, while we’re at it), and get to work.

Which is my third point.  I understand that in my own town, Tomales, 80% voted for Obama.  I’m ecstatic — but I’m also thinking about the 20% who didn’t; who, let’s face it, are probably 80% of many less blessed locations between here and the Atlantic.  We have to reach out to them; and we can.  Some years ago I was having a rather tense discussion about terrorism and how we had provoked it ourselves with my politically conservative brother-in-law.  At one point he blurted out, “Well, I don’t think we’re so terrible!”  I put in, “Stan, this has nothing to do with being good or bad; it’s about how we are going to live safely in a world with lots of different people.”  His anger deflated immediately, and I’m not even entirely sure he didn’t vote for you-know-whom in November.  So go to coffee shops, or bars, to the next cubicle (if you’re lucky enough to still have a job), and talk to people who disagree with you, always being aware that they have the same moral feelings that we do, if they apply them differently.  Take a workshop in compassionate listening or nonviolent communication, if it doesn’t come naturally to you, and enjoy the conversation. Explain your own values with confidence, but at the same time reassure them that there is a place for them in the new world.  Above all, don’t make them feel guilty (they do already), and don’t gloat.  That’s the surest way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

It’s not the President’s job to convince Joe the Plumber that the new world will be good for him.  It’s our job.  Let’s remember what awaits us if we fail.

Message from a Girl in Gaza. Photo courtesy of Nora Barrows-Friedman.

Revised January 14, 2009.

I have just gotten off the phone with my friend and colleague Oren Yiftachel, a co-founder, with Dr. Eyad El Sarraj of Gaza, of the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.  Prof. Yiftachel lives and works in Beer-Sheva, which is within range of the Qassam rockets coming from Gaza.  Yet when I asked him what the Israeli peace movement was doing to stop the counterattacks he said simply, “not enough.”  The same is true here, even 7,500 miles away in West Marin.

There is another lesson or two for those of us who work for peace and believe in it: we have to do much more, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  That is, we need to understand more things to do and when to do them, for if the last eight years’ wars have shown us anything, it is that protests aren’t enough. There is a time for protests and vigils.  This isn’t one of them.  We need direct action, not excluding, when all else has failed, downright civil disobedience, coupled with vigorous development and promotion of peace alternatives to replace what we — all of us — must now decisively reject: the starving of a whole population, the bombing of civilian neighborhoods in order to ‘target’ individuals within them.  In the final analysis, we need to reject war as an instrument of peace.

Neither Oren nor I were able to reach our mutual friend El Sarraj, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme — the facility had been heavily damaged by bombing the night before.  But on the latter’s recent blog he described the terror of his children as the U.S.-made bombs fell perilously near his home.  Sitting comfortably here in Tomales, it made me very angry.  I am not sorry that it did.  If more of us were angry and had a constructive way to turn our anger into the ingredients of a saner future, namely by nonviolent methods, there might be a silver lining even in this disgraceful episode.

I have been searching desperately for some silver lining in the deepening tragedy in Gaza, and what finally came to me was the chilling words of the poet Aeschylus:  “And slowly, even against our will, wisdom drips against the heart by the awful grace of god.”

If there is a distinguishing feature in this latest round in the sixty years of reciprocal violence — something other than its ferocity — it’s that the futility of the attack was clear as soon as it began.  Already, to no one’s surprise, painfully won progress toward accomodation in the moderate Arab countries is evaporating, while Israel is clearly generating another round of “retaliation,” this time with that much less sympathy from the international community.  Even if Hamas’ fighting ability is effectively abolished by the time the carnage is over, will Israel achieve the security we all desire her to have, and which is the rationale for the attack?  Only in the very shortest term.  Before too long, the seething hatred in the Arab world, and the increased revulsion amongst the onlooking world at large, must boil over into action.  (A similarly “devastating” blow has just been landed on the major rebel faction in Sri Lanka, and a suicide bomber took revenge within the hour).  Before it even revealed the full scope of its cruelty, the massacre was styled Lebanon II or (by Jakob Rieken) the “mideast version of the Bay of Pigs.”  And as Israel’s wisest analyst, Uri Avnery, said of this carnage, “logic has little influence on politics.”

This realization is small comfort, given the terrorization of a million and a half people, the children blown apart on their way to school, the devastation crashing into homes and hospitals; but it could just possibly, if we choose to build on it, become much larger.

We could realize that this is what happens when people are so locked into antagonism that they become blinded to one another’s needs in the confusion of their own hopeless fear.  This is what happens when we arm one side against another (or both against each other), and reinforce  the tenacious myth that security can be acquired through domination.This is what happens when we concoct peace treaties and ceasefires around conference tables while- thousands of miles away- real people on the ground are being humiliated, degraded, and enraged.  This is what happens when small nations let themselves be used by so-called “great powers,” shielded from the human reality of their own actions.  This is what happens when, as Mikhail Gorbachev just pointed out, the international community has nothing in place to absorb the impact of these mad conflicts and interject the logic — and the plain humanity — that the combatants have forgotten.

And we could, just possibly, go further than that. More and more of us are in fact beginning to realize that the problem is not just this war in particular, not just this kind of war, but war itself.  War is a counterproductive atrocity left over from the prehuman past.  “If you want to go East, don’t go West” said a remarkably simple sage some hundred years ago:  If you want peace, prepare it.  Build up all peacemaking institutions, from the cultural level — peace education, peace journalism, sane entertainment choices — to real alternatives like the nonviolent intervention teams that have already saved so many lives at so little cost, in Central America, the Balkans, and now Sri Lanka, Colombia, Northern Uganda, and the Phillipines.  As Martin Luther King said, we are all “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”  We will never become secure, not one of us, by doing things to tear apart that mutuality. But there are many ways to peace through peaceful means that harmonize with and reinforce it.

To survey our globalizing planet geopolitically today is to see a mixture of hopeful developments alongside very disheartening ones: on the one hand the election of an intelligent president in the United States (which is possibly even more important than the election of the first black president) and the publication of ‘Charter 08’ presaging, just possibly, the democratization of China; but on the other hand, ongoing horror in places like Darfur and Burma.  Perhaps, if we can understand its lessons, Gaza will prove to be a bit of both.