Resistance to Israeli policies takes many forms and is practiced by both Palestinians and Israelis. An international resistance presence has also taken root in the Palestinian territories. Religiously based groups like the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) have been active for some time in the region, while strictly secular organizations are becoming more common, most notably the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) co-founded by Palestinian-American Huwaida Arraf and Jewish-American Adam Shapiro. Other solidarity groups practice a kind of resistance to Israeli policy from their various nations around the world through education efforts, financial support, and development projects.
Cush Shalom, the Israeli peace organization co-founded by Avnery, posts many ISM reports. However Avnery has not devoted specific essays to the international resistance movement to change Israeli policy, other than one artide below on the British academic boycott movement. Moreover, most of Avnery's articles that address Palestinian non-violent resistance, concentrate on joint Palestinian-lsraeli demonstrations rather than such topics as the tax resistors and general strikes of the First Intifada, however small or seemingly insignificant. Nonetheless, the following selections present both violent and non-violent resistance in context of the devastating situation in Palestine and Israel.-SRP
November 3, 2001
President Bush has declared a "war on terrorism." Indeed?
Osama bin Laden is undoubtedly a terrorist. Killing 4,800 civilians at the World Trade Center was a terrorist outrage. But the United States would have declared war on bin Laden even if he had been satisfied with killing American soldiers in Saudi Arabia or blowing up oil installations across the Middle East. It is not the methods of bin Laden that