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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2008, page 59 Waging Peace Yonatan Shapira and Sami Awad Discuss Nonviolence
INTRODUCING AN April 29 meeting on nonviolent perspectives in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Quaker Meeting Hall in New York, Amjad Attallah, founder and president of Strategic Assessments Initiative, noted that he is always being approached by Americans who ask, “Why can’t the Palestinians be nonviolent?” “They never ask, ‘Why can’t the Israelis be nonviolent?” he pointed out. Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli who went from being a pilot to being a nonviolence activist, spoke of flying missions against Palestinian civilians. “We killed women, children, the old,” he recalled. “In 2003, we signed a document refusing to kill anymore. Some pilots I know can’t fall asleep at night. Some will never wake up.” Sami Awad, director of the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem, and a Gandhian, acknowledged that nonviolence has met with resistance in the West Bank. “When the second intifada broke out, we pushed hard for nonviolence,” he said. “Palestinians rejected it. They linked nonviolence with the first intifada, which failed. We were called traitors.” But after Israel’s re-invasion of the West Bank in 2002, and the Jenin massacre, Awad said there was a tilt toward nonviolence. Militants from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade came to the Holy Land Trust for nonviolence training. Palestinians continue to come, Awad said. HLT has 40 nonviolence trainers, and they are all kept busy. Shapira related that being an Israeli nonviolence activist sensitized him to the ignorance of Westerners about Palestinians. Addressing the European Parliament four years ago, he was asked by a German delegate: “Where are the pilot refusers from the Palestinian side?” —Robert Hirschfield |
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