Editors’ note: America has published several essays on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and on the war in Gaza. Read other views on the conflict between Israel and Palestine here.
I had never visited Palestine. Beyond the endlessly clashing narratives I had heard for most of my life, I arrived with no concrete sense of what I would encounter there. I certainly did not expect to experience what amounted to a weeklong training session in nonviolence.
The ongoing war in Gaza and the military operations in the occupied West Bank are a seething cauldron of escalating violence. At the same time, a movement of courageous nonviolent resistance is at work in the Palestinian territories—a movement that its activists say is the only effective way toward peace.
In August I saw this movement up close when I joined a delegation organized by Christians for Ceasefire, a coalition of pastors and peacemakers from a range of denominations in the United States. Pope Francis has often said that “war is a defeat”; and during the week we traveled across Palestine, he declared, “I call once again for a cease-fire on all fronts…. I encourage everyone to make every effort to ensure that the conflict does not escalate and to pursue paths of negotiation so that this tragedy ends soon!”
In this same spirit, we had accepted an invitation by Palestinians on the ground to see the realities unfolding there and to provide a bit of support for families facing illegal evictions from their homes. The group was led by Omar Haramy, a staff member of Sabeel, a Palestinian Christian organization working for a future where Palestinians, Jews, Christians and others can live together in peace and justice.
Our delegation mourned the terror attack carried out by Hamas almost one year ago on Oct. 7 that left over 1,200 people dead and hundreds taken hostage. We denounced the subsequent air and ground invasion of Gaza and its horrific toll of over 40,000 killed, tens of thousands injured and the entire population facing the prospect of rampant disease, starvation and long-lasting trauma. We prayed that a larger war across the Middle East could be averted. We reproved the U.S. government’s arms shipments that poured fuel on the fire.
All of this—and the spiraling violence across the West Bank—came into focus for us, not through political briefings by Middle East experts in Tel Aviv or learned theological pronouncements in Jerusalem, but by our hitting the road.
We saw with our own eyes a series of calamities being carried out across the West Bank, where Israeli settlers, encouraged by government policies, were confiscating Palestinian land and building settlements prohibited by international law.
This was where nonviolence came in.
As we traveled by van to Nablus, Hebron, Bil’in, the outskirts of Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, passing through one military checkpoint after another, Mr. Haramy shared with us the principles of nonviolence by which his 40-year-old organization operates and that many of the people we would meet embody.
Above the sound of the traffic, we were told that active nonviolence is a practice of love and justice. It is a path of change that includes refusing to be enemies with anyone else; being liberated from hate and animosity; shunning revenge and retaliation; pursuing the truth by confronting falsehood and deception; championing the oppressed, the poor and the marginalized; resisting violence; and pursuing peace and reconciliation. As one of the activists we met that week put it: “Evil does not defeat evil. Only good can do that.”
Day after day, we saw these high-minded precepts translated into concrete reality. We saw this with a member of Rabbis for Human Rights whom we met during an interfaith service near the Gaza border crossing, and who said he opposes his government’s war in Gaza. We saw it with a family in the village of Beit Jala, west of Bethlehem, who were aided by Combatants for Peace, a group of former Israeli and Palestinian soldiers stubbornly but nonviolently occupying their property to keep it from being confiscated.
We also saw nonviolence put into practice by the activists in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter who are nonviolently resisting the confiscation of the land that has been theirs for hundreds of years, And we saw it with the Tent of Nations community near Bethlehem, where Daoud Nassar recounted for us the minutiae of the community’s 30-year legal and political struggle to keep their land from being swallowed up by Israeli settlers. He outlined the settler and government strategy that they are battling, then launched into his own list of nonviolence principles: We refuse to be victims. We refuse to hate. Nonviolence is not weakness. Justice will prevail. We refuse to be enemies.
I let it sink in: Being an enemy is a choice that, even under the harshest conditions, we can reject.
Then there was Issa Amro, known as the Palestinian Gandhi, who has been imprisoned and tortured many times for organizing nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Although we were thwarted twice at military checkpoints as we tried to enter the part of Hebron, where he lives, we were finally able to make our way to his home, where we spent a powerful hour together.
“We use nonviolence,” Mr. Amro told us. “We don’t want to harm them,” he said, speaking of the Israelis. “It is our values and principles to not harm them.” But he also said that loving the enemy includes resisting their violence. “I am not able to give up. It is my identity to help the people. I see myself as a case study to show other Palestinians. We need to be more patient and more unified.”
Then he got more focused: “My nonviolent resistance now is keeping people in their homes.”
These are only a few of the many instances of nonviolence in action we saw firsthand, approaches aimed at escaping the trap of escalatory violence and pursuing what Andrew Young, a key organizer of the U.S. civil rights movement, called “the way out of no way,” including rejecting both antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Though it is not an approach for change that everyone in Palestine chooses, nonviolent resistance has a long history there—and around the world. Nonviolent strategies are being increasingly deployed in societies on every continent for more just and sustainable outcomes. As the groundbreaking research ofErica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan has demonstrated, nonviolent strategies are twice as effective as violent ones at bringing about meaningful change.
This is a finding that we in the United States could heed. Instead of providing more arms shipments to Israel, our nation could learn from change agents in Palestine and around the world how to build a more just and peaceful world—nonviolently.
Inspired by my Catholic faith, I long for peace with justice. For all Palestinians. For all Israelis. For all people throughout the Middle East and every place in the world. This longing, I found on my trip, was shared by so many people we met. Everywhere we went, we heard that the only viable way to bridge deep, historic divides and to construct a more just and sustainable life is through active and liberating nonviolence.
