Palestinian Nonviolence—Alive and Sometimes Victorious

Some landscapes are more political than others, like the village of Budrus, in Palestine (that is, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory called the West Bank).

Like many other such villages, Budrus is dependent on its centuries-old olive trees for its economic survival and for the villagers’ connection with their past and their land. But in 2004, the village’s survival was threatened when the State of Israel announced that its 26-foot high barrier wall would pass through Budrus, requiring the uprooting and destruction of 3,000 of the village’s olive trees. (In flagrant violation of international law, the wall would pass well within the “Green Line,” the border between Israel and the Palestinian Territory.) At that moment, Budrus was like many other villages in the path of the wall in one other respect: It was threatened with slow death as a viable community.

Budrus, however, was not without resources. It had Ayed Morrar, a five-times imprisoned Fatah activist for Palestinian self-determination. It had his 15-year-old daughter Iltezam. It had Hamas activist Ahmed Awwad. And, in the end, it had friends—friends from the international community and from within Israel itself.

Morrar called a meeting. He and Awwad agreed to work together to unite the village. They called on the whole community to resist—and Morrar persuaded the village that nonviolence was “in the best interests of the Palestinian people.”

The morning that the bulldozers were scheduled to arrive, the men of Budrus marched en masse to the site of the proposed uprooting and put their bodies in the path of the earth-moving equipment. The bulldozers—and their military escort—backed off, but, of course, returned the next day.

That was when Morrar’s daughter Iltezam observed that the resistance had to that point been all male and told her father that the women of Budrus had to join the protests (pictured above). When he conceded the point and asked the women to join in, Iltezam led the way by leaping into the hole a bulldozer had dug. Soon after that, international supporters came to Budrus to join the villagers; so did Jewish Israeli peace activists. After ten months of blustering insistence by Israel that no protests could make it back down, it did exactly that, moving the route of the wall away from Budrus and its olive trees and closer to the Green Line.

(Depending on your definitions, the defense of Budrus was almost entirely but perhaps not 100 percent nonviolent. There were moments when the youth of Budrus were provoked to the point of throwing stones at the armed intruders, who responded by firing guns. But Morrar and Awwad begged for absolute nonviolence, and in the end, the villagers complied.)

After their victory in Budrus, Morrar and his comrades organized nonviolent resistance to the wall in other Palestinian communities. Now the map of the West Bank is dotted with such pockets of resistance—and the struggle for Budrus itself is available in Budrus, a documentary by filmmaker Julia Bacha and the Just Vision production company. Using footage of the events filmed at the time, plus interviews with Ayed and Iltezam Morrar, Ahmed Awwad, one of the Jewish defenders of the village, and two members of the Israeli military who attacked it, they answer the often-asked question, “Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?” They make it abundantly clear that Palestine does have its Gandhis—and that, as happened in India, Gandhian resistance can sometimes defeat armed aggression. Budrus will inspire all nonviolent activists, although it may also make you wonder why you’re here and not in Palestine, putting your own body on the line for justice.

Budrus, a Just Vision production directed by Julia Bacha, is in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, with English subtitles and at this writing is playing at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village. For more information, see www.justvision.org.

©2010 Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Blight: A Meditation on Indigenous People’s Day

October 12, 2010—For 80-plus miles, from just north of New York City to the upstate city of Poughkeepsie, the Metro North railroad tracks run along the eastern shore of the Hudson River, only yards away from the water. In my childhood and youth, that ride along the Hudson was merely “home” to me—I was raised in Croton, which sits more or less halfway between the two cities. It was only later, after I had seen the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio, the Nile and the Rio de la Plata, the Rhine from beginning to end, and the Danube, the Thames, the Avon, and most of the rivers of France–only then did I grasp how extraordinary that stretch of the Hudson shore is. Across the river, which widens at the Tappan Zee and then narrows again, are the cliffs of the Palisades; in every direction, hills rise out of the water, somehow rising out of mist even on the sunniest day. Its beauty never fails to thrill me, nor have I ever seen anything to match it.

Only a few score miles away is its opposite number in every sense, the ravaged country along the Amtrak railroad between New York City and Washington, DC. The first time I rode that train was on August 28, 1963, from New York to Washington. (That was the day Martin Luther King told the world he had a dream.) Between family visits—my oldest son and his family have lived in Maryland for decades—and protest marches, I’ve taken it scores of times since. For mile upon mile, the tracks pass a nightmare spectrum of blight: dying trees and poisoned waters give way to long-abandoned factories, windows broken, walls graffiti’d, which yield in turn to piles of garbage and old tires dotting tract after tract of decaying homes and broken neighborhoods.

Yesterday I traveled from New York to Washington and back on Amtrak (headed, as it happens, for a family wedding). As I looked out the window, I was struck by a curious thought. Inspired, no doubt, by the fact that it was Indigenous People’s Day, I wondered, what if a Lenni Lenape Indian of 500 years ago—one of the First People of New Jersey—were to time travel along this very route today, as Amtrak skirts the toxic land along the water we call the Hackensack River? What would she think?

What would she think of the deadly marshes? What would she think of the now-useless buildings? What questions would she ask in the face of this endless blight, the bitter fruit of “development” and greed?

Only two, I should imagine, one of which we know the answer to, the second of which is as agonizing for us as it would be for the time traveler: “Who has done this to our Earth, and how can we heal Her?”

For My Mother, on Gandhi’s Birthday

There are dozens of lovely, tree-filled squares in London, but only one—Tavistock Square, in northern Bloomsbury—is dedicated as a peace park. Surrounding a statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s Mahatma (“Great Soul”), are benches with plaques asserting the commitment of one Londoner after another to Gandhi’s vision of peace and the “soul force” of nonviolence.

One of the plaques, however, carries the name of someone who would have loved to be an honorary Englishwoman, but was in fact a New Yorker, born and bred. It says, “From Beatrice Kelvin of New York City, who works for world peace and loves London.”

Bea Kelvin was my mother, and thanks to her determination and that of her daughters, the plaque was placed there in her lifetime, as she wanted it, on a bench facing the back of Gandhi’s statue (why the back of his statue is a different story, equally typical of my mom). Today being Gandhi’s birthday and the World Day of Nonviolence, I put this out in my mother’s memory and his.

The Hotel Tavistock, across the street from Tavistock Square, is a little the worse for wear since its construction in the Art Deco-mad Thirties. But it’s still a handsome example of that then-modern school of architecture, and the slight wear-and-tear has brought the price down to my family’s preferred range. So it was that my peripatetic mother discovered the Tavistock in her world-traveling heyday, learned that the square across the street was a peace park, and began to conceive a desire to have her own plaque there, talking about it from time to time as another might talk about where she wanted to be buried. So it was, too, that she and her two daughters continued to stay there even after Bea could no longer travel alone and I had to accompany her when she left the country. And so it was that in 2005 my sister Joan and I found ourselves at the Tavistock without Bea, who had had a stroke the year before and couldn’t go anywhere at all anymore.

We had stepped across the street to look at the square for her, so to speak, and were talking wistfully about her desire to have her name represented there. Then it occurred to us that there probably was a sign somewhere in the park that could tell us how one went about acquiring a plaque on a bench, and faster than you could say “Mohandas K. Gandhi,” Joan was speaking to the very parks department representative on her international mobile phone …

Back in the States, I told Bea about our research, thinking it was another installment in our increasingly frequent conversation about her post-mortem arrangements. “So you see,” I said, “we can get you a bench there after you, um—after—well, you know—”

“I don’t want it when I’m dead!” she said. “I want it now, when I can see it.”

She got it. She never did see the real thing, but she saw pictures. She was very proud of it. For the last years of her life, she kept a photo of the bench—taken by one of her sons—in a prominent spot on her piano, along with her pictures of her grandchildren. (She was convinced that the park had put her plaque on the wrong bench and that she had requested it facing the front of Gandhi’s statue, but in fact she had misread the diagram they sent and insisted that the spot she chose—the one where the plaque is—was eye-to-eye with him.) When she died, four years after the plaque was installed, we displayed a large photo of it at her memorial service and noted in her death notice in The New York Times that a “bench in London's Tavistock Square is dedicated to peace in her name.”

On this International Day of Nonviolence, “The Political Landscape” salutes Mohandas Gandhi and everyone else—including my mother—who has ever dreamed of a world without slaughter or cruelty and put their lives to the service of bringing that world to birth. May we finally make it so.