July/August 2005 Nonviolence Training in Palestine Holy Land Trust (HLT) is a Palestinian not-for-profit organization established in 1998 in Bethlehem with the aim of strengthening, encouraging, and improving the Palestinian community through working with children, families, youth, and the NGO community. In November 2003, HLT’s training coordinator, Husam Jubran, visited the United States and attended a Fellowship of Reconciliation nonviolence facilitator training. He found our model to be worthy of further study and dialogue, and invited a group of FOR-USA trainers to come to Bethlehem to observe their nonviolence training and work with Palestinians. We traveled to Palestine in June 2005. Following observations of four classes in the village of Dar Saleh, where HLT trained over 130 people, FOR shared facilitation techniques, interactive exercises, and other components of our program.
Husam’s training had already emphasized the equality of women. It had stimulated considerable controversy about traditions that hold women subservient, generating honor killings, early marriage, and violence against women. He repeated the theme: “You as women need to stand up for your simple human rights. Violence in the home and the community and violence between Israel and Palestine are all related. We need to learn to live nonviolently in our whole lives. And we need women who are empowered helping to resist the Occupation.” An FOR trainer led an exercise. Our group had fifteen minutes to plan a role play. We quickly agreed on a desperate situation my three Palestinian partners knew well—a family trying to take a seriously ill relative to a hospital across an Israeli checkpoint. Ahmad asserted that he knew how to be the soldier, and found an object to symbolize a gun to point at the family. I volunteered to be the sick relative, bent over with pains in my chest, moaning and groaning. Nivin and Alfred as my sister and brother discussed a variety of ways to gain the soldier’s permission. Alfred began with a polite request, showed his ID, and looked quietly at the soldier. He tried reasoning. Unsuccessful, he expressed the urgency and suggested the soldier would want the same for a sick member of his own family. Ahmad, the solder, was unmoved, dismissive, even angry, and threatened with the gun. Nivin held me tightly and waited. Finally, she stepped forward and implored the soldier softly, “You can see my sister is ill. She needs to get to hospital quickly. Think of your own sister or mother. Please let us through. We are not dangerous. Ask your supervisor, if you need to.” She was not successful, and with exasperation released her hold on me so that I fell forward onto the floor. We ended the role play as she proclaimed, “So, then you die.” It seemed a sacred moment, larger than mere practice of a role play. Stepping into the Palestinian role was a powerful and visceral experience for me; it was emotionally overwhelming. Other Americans gasped and cried. Ahmad said he felt powerful and unmoved by the petitions of the family. Nivin feared not only for her sick sister, but also for the safety of Alfred who was confronting the solder. But most of the Palestinians were quiet and seemed to accept this common situation. We analyzed whether this role play would be effective in nonviolence training. Would it just reinforce experiences of futility? Or could it empower people by reinforcing how to maintain dignity and self-respect, instead of being submissive? And not just a few people, but many? Was this a situation for experimenting and practicing? Would more practice in role-taking skills help break the dehu-manized stereotype of the soldier? And, it was said, sometimes a soldier does let a sick person pass—sometimes.
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Husam began an exercise by asking each of the thirty-five women in the group to drop something valuable into his bag. The assignment was to reach agreement on one project for another village, which could be paid for with their valuables. “If you don’t agree on a single decision in fifteen minutes, I will take your objects home and not return them,” he said. Immediately, one of the women turned to a man who was observing the training and urged him to speak on their behalf. He took charge. Voices in the room grew loud and energetic as women advocated their own ideas: a health care center, a park for children, a preschool, a youth center. They argued, voted more than once, and picked up the pace each time Husam announced how few minutes remained. When time ran out, the women lacked a single decision, and Husam announced that he could take their rings, photos, and other valuables with him. He challenged them to evaluate why they had failed and how they might have organized themselves to reach a decision. Why did they submit so quickly to his direction without asking more questions? Do they comply so quickly with the Israeli soldiers, their IDs at checkpoints even before they are asked? And why should a whole group of women ask a man to represent them?