Nonviolence as a Path to Understanding Palestine and Syria

On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, Dr. Afra Jalabi draws a parallel between the ongoing conflict in Syria, where more than half a million people have been killed, and the ongoing crisis in Israel-Palestine. She warns against media propaganda around the conflicts, encouraging listeners to do better research about the powers at play in the Middle East and warning us to be wary of the willingness of any side to spill blood for their goals. Drawing from the spiritual and political legacy of her late uncle, Syrian nonviolence scholar Jawdat Saïd, she doubles down on the necessity of nonviolence as the way forward. 

Transcript

Stephanie: Greetings and welcome everybody to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here with my co-host and news anchor of The Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we're from the Metta Center for Nonviolence.

On today's show, we speak with Doctor Afra Jalabi. She is currently an affiliate assistant professor at the Department of Cultures and Religions at Concordia University in Montreal. And her interests revolve around dialog, comparative religion, and nonviolence. She was a weekly columnist in the Arab press for about 20 years, produced hundreds of articles and columns, and is one of the first Arab women to lead a public Muslim prayer.

In the last ten years, she helped to develop a curriculum on strategic peacebuilding, the ethics of nonviolence and conflict resolution at George Mason University for Syrian activists in Turkey, Syria, and Jordan, and has worked with a variety of Syrian nonprofit organizations. And she lives in Montreal with her husband and their two sons and their cat, Leo, which, I think, is important to know. So, welcome to Nonviolence Radio. Afra.

Afra: Thank you for hosting me. It's a great pleasure.

Stephanie: You're a great friend of us here at the Metta Center and on Nonviolence Radio. So, we're happy to have you back. And I know that you and Michael met first, I think, on a radio program out of KWMR, if I remember that correctly.

Afra: Yeah, love from first radio.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. Welcome back to the radio. And here we are. So, I'd love to just sort of begin with how are you feeling today? What's on your mind? 

Afra: I’m well. And this weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving. And we had a family get together last night at my sister's. And we gave thanks for all the good things. And we tried not to be too mindful of also these surrreal and horrible things unfolding. And we all admitted to each other how we have come to reduce our consumption of news in the last several months. Because especially, our background, my sister's husband is Bosnian, and he finds himself fairly triggered when he watches the level of violence and also the level of propaganda.

The rest of us also are kind of disheartened. But it's also surreal because with the elimination of the leader of Hezbollah, Syrians are feeling a sense of relief because he caused so much havoc in Syria, and he killed so many Syrians. And people don't understand because – the Syrian side – because they feel that Hezbollah is a symbol of resistance against the Israeli occupation.

But however, the legacy of Nasrallah is more with Syrians, but some people don't want to see the complexity of the violent situation in the Middle East. And they just want to focus on the suffering of Palestinians. 

But the problem in the Middle East, that a lot of the issues are intertwined and interlinked and codependent, which is perpetuating a cycle of violence that is so insane, that is so surreal. And it leaves people thinking that there are no ways out and that the situation is impossible. I don't believe that that's the case. That the planet is spacious enough, it fits us all. This is not a struggle over land. It's a struggle over power. And it's a struggle over worldviews.

Stephanie: Well, thank you, Afra. That's interesting that you're – first of all, happy Canadian Thanksgiving. And also, it's Indigenous Peoples Day here in the US. Those go well together. 

And this perspective that you're sharing from feeling triggered by the news, but also triggered by the propaganda and the misrepresentation of what the struggles in the Middle East seem to be about at this moment, seems to be frustrating.

And so, as somebody who's done extensive journalism, especially in the Arab world, I'd love to continue to hear how you help to pull apart the problems of propaganda and the problems of misrepresenting the conflict. Especially when we're reading it from a Western media.

Afra: I find that both sides, the right perspective and the left perspective, are deeply problematic. Because they take partisan political views and they kind of become blind to certain issues.

So, I recently, for example, heard some people who are rightly defending the rights of Palestinians who were really depressed and saddened by the assassination of Nasrallah. I mean, yes, we could say that, you know, that kind of insane and chaotic use of violence to solve problems is wrong. But they were actually mourning him as a hero of resistance. And I've heard this from people I used to consider friends on the left. And I find that so disturbing. 

And I remember asking one of those well-known public figures why he was silent about Syria. And he said that because he didn't have sufficient information about Syria, and he doesn't like to talk about issues he's not informed. So, I was respectful, and I told this to other young Syrian activists who were really wondering why is the silence – or even the pro-Assad regime side from the global left, they were very perplexed. Because they felt that they were also engaged, whether through nonviolent means or violent means, against a tyranny, and a single-family rule that ruled Syria in a brutal manner for over 50 years. And why wouldn't left intellectuals understand the legitimacy of the struggle of Syrians?

So fair enough. I thought, okay, if he's not well-informed – this particular individual. However, to hear him praise Nasrallah and how his world feels empty without this amazing leader, really, I find disturbing. And I feel okay, if you chose silence over Syria, then you should choose silence over Nasrallah's death and assassination.

Because you're not informed about what he did in Syria, where he aided the killing of hundreds of thousands. I mean, the UN stopped counting the casualties, if you remember, about ten years ago, after the death toll in Syria reached half a million. And some human rights organizations put the number at a million. I hope it is lower than that. But Syrians themselves, Syrian NGOs put it close to 2 million, including the disappearances and concentration-like camps actually, where there has been systematic torture and starvation of a lot of prisoners.

I don't know if some of you have heard of the Caesar photos that were smuggled out of Syrian prisons. Horrific images that came out, which were verified by multiple internationally recognized human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. And to really, completely, be blindsided by some ideological stances, I find quite disturbing.

So, there's one individual in the state, an American guy, saying that both the right and left are corrupt. He said the corruption of the right is easier when you see the level of fascism and racism. But he said, if you want to understand the corruption of the left, look at their stance with the Syrian people and the horrible silence, or how they sided with the Assad regime.

But for me, where I find moral clarity in all of this, and what I've told some relatives and friends, that we as people who believe in nonviolence, and also as normal citizens having either regular jobs and holding no political power, I always say we have the moral luxury and the moral privilege of actually saying all sides are wrong and terrible and criminal.

And I say it comes to one thing, simply. That any side who believes in the spilling of civilian blood – or any blood, and the use of weapons to achieve any political ends, we should really be very, very, very careful taking that side. No matter how, their slogans or causes seem to be legitimate.

And it's the same like for the other side, for Hamas, for example. They have a legitimate cause, but the way they did the suicide mission and what that caused, the kind of havoc, and genocidal war that it unleashed from a side that is also very filled with hate and propaganda, it has been very, very disheartening.

So, I think people who are watching these events and disheartened, they should really feel that – like we need to really awaken from the tools because it's no longer about the legitimacy of causes. Because we could have legitimate causes, but the way we want to solve them is not working for any side, including superpowers. It's just not yielding results.

Stephanie: Because of the goal not being necessarily the cause, but the goals are hiding agendas for political power. 

Afra: That's part of the problem. But for example, let's take the Syrian cause. Because I know people get triggered by the Palestinian cause because it has so many layers.

But the Syrian cause in some ways, although it seems to people that it is quite complex, it's a much simpler cause. It's a society that wanted to rebel, like taking the advantage or the kind of advantageous moment of the Arab Spring, to rebel and overthrow a tyrant regime.

Initially, like the first six months were peaceful, nonviolent resistance. But the population also didn't have enough immunization and enough nonviolent education to strategically withdraw and advance and negotiate and use other means other than, for example, demonstrations on the streets.

And what happened is that during that time, naively, when soldiers started defecting from the army, they started using very like oxymoron statements like, “We will defend the nonviolence of the revolution by violent means.” And so, they started forming militias because the regime was brutal. And it would sometimes surround some demonstrations with tanks or use snipers to start killing demonstrators, or even sometimes bombing them.

So, naively, many Syrians thought that they could form small militias to defend these demonstrations. But very quickly they learned, and they realized that you can't do that. Once you introduce violence – and the regime wanted that – it will come back so much. Because it was perplexed with the nonviolent demonstrations, it didn't know what to do.

And once the defected soldiers and those civilians who joined them formed the Free Syrian Army, the regime was very happy to retaliate in more brutality. And yet, despite of that, the Syrians to a large extent won the war for the first several years because it was widespread. From the numbers that I once saw, it was, I think, ten times the size of the Iranian revolution.

But it wouldn't yield results because the international community and regional powers were not interested in seeing Assad go because Assad had formed a very interesting codependent – both like convenient enemies and frenemies. Because it's a survival regime, it sells any cause. It uses any level of propaganda.

So, the regional powers – it became a proxy war inside Syria, where 47 countries bombed Syria at different points in different situations and contexts. That's why you have a high casualty level in Syria. And people think they understand it. But it's basically a people who failed to overthrow the regime due to these regional and international complexities.

And so, the question then becomes like, what are a people to do when they are faced with such dire political circumstances? And what are the Palestinians to do when they have a colonizing power that is willing to use any means to actually keep ethnically cleansing the land and pushing the Palestinian population from their lands. These are very difficult situations.

These populations, I find, especially like those living under very brutal regimes, like the Syrians or those who are living under direct occupation, as in Gaza or other places, they did not have enough political stability and situations where they were able to really foster and grow alternative means of resistance. They go to the default mode of armed resistance. It's widespread.

There’s still people – after everything that happened, they still think that ultimately you cannot – like some of the empty slogans, that you cannot defeat – like in Arabic, they say, because it rhymes, that you cannot defeat iron except with iron. Basically, like an iron fist has to be met with an iron fist.

And I think like in the situation of Syria, people are perplexed because they used both nonviolence and violence, and both of them failed. I find that the Syrians at the moment, among all the populations in the region, I think because they've seen such levels of brutality for 13 years – like, northern Syria was just bombed by the regime a few days ago. And it's still going on. Like, I mean, it's on a lesser scale and smaller context, but they’re still – because the area that's under Turkish protection is still being bombarded by the Syrian regime.

So, I find that because they've seen the surreal use of violence, that to some extent they're much more open to other political options. Because they saw how – like they almost reached a dead end. They saw how like nothing worked in their context. And that one has to understand the complexity of the situations in a much wider way. And one has to use alternative means of transforming society.

And so, I find that of all the people – like it's ironic, but there has been intense and great suffering in fairly, relatively speaking, a short time – 13 years, maybe like long in a human's life, but in the life of nations, is fairly short.

So, that intense suffering that the Syrians underwent, I find – I'm being optimistic. Hope, like, that it's made them feel open to other options. Especially because their cause is completely misunderstood. And now they're being seen by those who are supporting supposedly the resistance of Iran and Hezbollah and the Syrian regime as being the last fronts against Western imperialism. I mean, that side, and its propaganda, is seeing Syrians as traitors for being happy that Hezbollah is being eliminated. Which has, I mean, over-leashed – like horrible suffering upon them.

And so, when you see all these kinds of weird sides and very strong feelings, one sees that the only solution for these nations is to really, really deal with the worldviews that are driving these wars and these conflicts.

Michael: Afra, I remember years ago talking to you about, Assad. And I was then wondering about the media – well, disinformation, shall we say, that it was a tribal issue that he wanted to support the Alawites. And I remember distinctly you telling me that he would kill every last Alawite to stay in power.

Afra: And he did that because he really pushed – like he scared the Alawites, his own community, in a very systematic way. The father, Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, and Bashar al-Assad himself, kept a very systematic way of marginalizing the Alawite community and keeping them somewhat poor and isolated in agrarian areas to make them a base for recruitment for the secret services and for the army.

But I think the Alawite community in Syria, after the 13 years, realized that they paid a hefty price defending the regime with other groups, of course, in Syria. And they have not gotten much in return. And it was an ugly war in which Assad used everybody.

And now, like, it's kind of like interesting how Hezbollah, for example, defended Syria. But the moment, Nassalah was assassinated, the Syrian regime removed all his photos. And they started to really disassociate themselves from Hezbollah. And they felt that the international tide has turned against – like, clearly in a different direction.

It's a kind of a regime that's bent on survival, and it's Machiavellian. And it uses, as some people joke, that the Assad family would sell their children and parents if they had to survive. And it uses the Palestinian cause as a slogan. When, in fact, the Assad regime killed far more Palestinians than actually Israel killed in its campaigns. Which many people don't want. And the Assad regime and the Saddam regime killed far more Arabs than Israel in all its wars combined. But that doesn't mean Israel is not a brutal entity in the region as well.

But there's a rule of brutality. And it seems like when one side raises the bar on the brutality, then Israel becomes emboldened, and it raises the bar. And so, one cannot disconnect what's happening in Gaza from what happened in Syria.

Many people feel appalled about the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 by some Lebanese militias and the Israeli government during the Lebanese civil war and the invasion of Israel into Lebanon at that time – which now is kind of a déjà vu at the moment. But at the time, there was this massacre of over 2000 Palestinians in refugee camps. Completely civilians, mostly women and children.

But at the same time, that was about eight months after the Hama massacre by the Assad regime. And one cannot disconnect these events and look at them separately. So, when there's brutality in the region, then other sides also feel that if that side got away with it, then I can get away with it. Which I find really, really grim and sad.

And so, instead of the bar being raised on human rights, in the Middle East the bar is raised on how much you can get away with.

Stephanie: Afra, thank you for this background and drawing these lessons from Syria into the struggle happening in Palestine and Israel-Palestine. I think this is really interesting. And at the same time, you said your family is also thinking at times of how it's difficult to engage with the mass media because of the triggering effect that knowing what's happening can have on people – people feeling more powerless.

And I think that you have a very interesting background in nonviolence. And so, I'd like to shift over to that a little bit and start drawing some lessons there as well. I'm interested in, first of all, what inspired you, or who inspired you to engage in nonviolence? And at the same time, what keeps you committed to exploring this path?

Afra: Well, I grew up in a family that was committed to nonviolence. And it was my Uncle Jawdat Said, from a young age, in his early 20s, while studying at Al-Azhar started really questioning the whole paradigm of violence. Like he had his own personal journey. Again, it was the Palestinian cause that triggered some of these questions because some of his young friends – like whether Syrians or from his own ethnic community, like the Circassian community or Egyptians around him.

These youth were saying, “Why are we studying and wasting so many years of our lives with books, instead of just going and fighting with the Palestinians and going to Paradise right away instantly?” And Jawdat, in his late teens, he started asking himself, “Is this what being Muslim is about, to die as a martyr? Or are we asked to do something else?”

He used to tell us that he started rereading the Koran and the Muslim tradition in the light of these personal questions he had. And then he not only was shocked that it's not the case, but it's actually that it proposes a different paradigm. And he was deeply inspired by several passages that are generally part of the culture, but more in the background.

One of them is the story of creation in the Koran when God announces to the rest of creation and says, “I shall place a deputy or somebody – or a divine representative upon earth. And the angels panic and immediately say, “Are you going to place upon the earth someone who will spread corruption and spill blood?” And God's answer is very fascinating, and it used to fascinate my uncle as a young man.

He said, like, “God didn't say, ‘Yes, they will do this, or they won't do that.’ God said, ‘I know that which you know not’ in the Koranic passage.” And then from that, since then, like a few verses later, we are presented in the Koran with the story of Adam's two sons. And the Koran says, “Tell them,” like that in the voice that's in the Koran addressing the Prophet Muhammad, “Tell them about the story of Adam's two sons who gave an offering to God. One whose offer was accepted, and the other offer was rejected.

And so, the one’s whose offer was rejected was very upset and decided to kill his brother. And he said, “I shall kill you.” And so, the Koranic passage says – and because the Koranic passage, similar to the Old Testament, tells the story, but instead of just telling the story from a distance, zooms into the scene, and we hear the dialog of the two brothers.

So, the other brother says, “If you're going to raise your hand to kill me, I shall not raise my hand to kill you, for I fear the Lord of all worlds.” That really struck a chord with my uncle because he felt in a moment of survival, and where these two individuals met, there were two options. One decided to solve his problem, the brother, who decided to solve his problems by eliminating the competition physically. And the other brother, who under the threat of death, chose not to defend himself. And this became like really a central point in making him reread the entirety of the Koran in the light of this, these two kind of – what he used sometimes to call them, that they capture the genetic code of the moral structure of the Koran.

And then Jawdat noticed that all the prophetic tales are the encounter of two paradigms. One that chooses – like the nations who want to kill a new prophet and eliminate the new ideas, and the prophets who say, “We shall endure impatience. We shall not raise our hands to resist you.” And so, then he felt that not only the Koran is not promoting violence, but rather it's promising an age in which we will overcome this modality.

And Jawdat felt that the story of the two brothers encapsulates God's answer. Where, yes, humans can spread corruption and spill blood, but they also have the potential and possibility of stepping out of that modality and responding with something completely different.

Michael: Afra, thank you so much for all of that.

[Music] 

I was remembering conversations with Jawdat, actually. And that, in my view, he actually went a little bit of a step further and said, “Not only will I,” so to speak, “not raise my hand against you, but what will you do instead?” So, it's not just a case of I won’t defend myself, but in a sense, I'll defend myself through another paradigm, through nonviolence. And he was very eloquent on that point.

Afra: And he used to say that by the brother lost his body, like the battle, physically. However, he converted his brother because at the end of the passage we are told in the Koran that he's overcome with grief. And he doesn't know what to do with the body of his brother.

And then the story says that two birds came in front of him and fought, and one killed the other. And then the bird that did the killing, buried the other bird. And then he said, “I am so overcome with shame that I didn't even know what to do, like with the shame of the body of my brother.” Like basically how to get rid of the evidence of his crime.

And so, Jawdat says that when one side declines from the use of violence, there is something that is touched in the other side. He felt that encapsulates the dynamic and the psychological power of the moral message of nonviolence.

It's not just about winning, but it's also about how it becomes a means of transforming the other side. And that's why Jawdat also saw – like there are verses in the Koran that, again, they tend to be just recited, but not in the forefront of the culture. But the Koran, it has these references about the end of war. And Jawdat was also fascinated about that. Because there are verses that say when war, like with capital W in the Arabic version. It says like or welcome like [Arabic] in Arabic, like enter all of you into the zone of peace or into the land of peace.

And so, Jawdat felt that the Koran not only proposes nonviolence as the paradigm of prophetic transformation of society, of self and society, but it also presents a possibility in which institutional and organized crime and warfare will have an end, just as a kind of beginning. Like slavery. Like slavery was part of our history. But it doesn't mean it was intrinsic to humanity just because our ancestors had slaves and slavery was practiced.

So, Jawdat felt that human institutions that have a beginning could have an end. Whereas if you notice, a lot of war pundits and supposedly, you know, all these experts say that war is a human phenomenon, it will accompany us to the end of times. And Jawdat always felt that the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Koran presented not an end to conflict, but an end to organized crime. Because the Koran says that people will always push each other, or they will have conflict. But when it comes to actual war, it makes these references that humans have the possibility.

And as we said, like in that creation scene when God says, “I shall create humanity,” and when the angels wonder, then there is that potential and possibility of this new being to be able to go beyond that modality of corruption and spilling blood. And Jawdat used to say that that our humanity is not truly fulfilled until we overcome these two things – corruption and spilling blood. That these seem to be the two conditions. And he saw them as being connected.

For him, corruption represented injustices and oppression. And that violence is always kind of like – it’s kind of like a syndrome. They go together, like violence and injustices. And so, for him, he felt that the blood always follows oppression. This is that kind of a global challenge at the horizon of our humanity that is awaiting us and beckoning us to come out of this baited mode.

And for Jawdat, he felt that the very idea of nuclear warfare has made war obsolete. He said, “Even before, morally, we were able to go and step up to this way of – like kind of leaving this world behind. That nuclear weapons made us – forced us, to actually leave the world of war. Because it's only now small powers that are engaging in these proxy wars. But big powers can’t directly engage because it means annihilation for everybody.

So, in a kind of ironic way, like human progress put a real halt on the very concept of war if we're willing to look deep into it. Because it's really war at its highest technological level, at this point is really an impossibility.

Stephanie: Afra, I wonder about your experiences as well, and what you might offer as advice to younger activists or younger generations of activists who are just beginning to engage with nonviolence and peace work, given your background and research into war, conflict, violence, but also healing and peacebuilding and in nonviolence.

Afra: I like sometimes to make references to the wonderful Canadian, Doctor Gabor Maté, because he's really interested in the ideas of trauma. I find a lot of activists have anger and angst in them. And I find that when you bring that kind of angst into any cause, you bring that energy into it and that psychology into it. And I think there has to be a lot of healing on other levels, individually and psychologically and collectively, like in our communities, to be able to see – instead of feelings of vengeance and righting wrongs by any means necessary, to bring something different.

And I find that like art and humor and like all these, we have so many other means of engaging with the world that are still missing in a lot of good causes. And that's why these good causes end up falling into their own propaganda and their own blind spots. And end up taking sides in ways that really overlook the suffering of so many other people. Like those, like the global left that is so standing with the axis of resistance, is not willing to look at what happened in Syria by the axis of resistance and how the axis of resistance actually turned toward a large civilian population and crushed it.

And so to me, and this lack of humor, of self-deprecating kind of humor, which is actually required in any context, the idea of willing to see our mistakes and our faults and our blind spots, are the things that I think activists have to be cognizant about when they want to advocate for any cause. Because without knowing, you might actually end up on one of the sides of evil.

Stephanie: Afra Jalabi, thank you so much for joining us today on Nonviolence Radio. I wish we had more time to continue this conversation, as I feel like we're just getting started. But thank you again so much for joining us. And we hope to have you back again soon.

Afra: Thank you for having me. I always enjoy my conversations with you two and the other friends who believe in the power of compassion and the rejection of this horrible means to solve our problems.

Michael: Inshallah.

Afra: Inshallah. Inshallah.

Stephanie: Take care.

Afra: Shukran. Thank you.

Stephanie: Thank you. 

So, we were just speaking with Doctor Afra Jalabi. She's currently an affiliate assistant professor at the Department of Cultures and Religions at Concordia University in Montreal. And we were talking about, really, I'd say nonviolence, as well as some of the deeper lessons that activists today can draw from the Syrian context.

Let's turn now to other nonviolence in the news with our Nonviolence Report and Michael Nagler.

Nonviolence Report

Michael: Thank you, Stephanie, and greetings everyone. I'm left with one thought from our enlightening, though difficult to bear sometimes, conversation with Afra. And that is the close connection between violence and untruth. We throw around the term disinformation today. But I don't think people are sufficiently aware that when they back away from truth, they back into violence. A lot of that came out forcefully for me when she was speaking. So, conversely, when we get less violent, we'll be able to be more truthful and vice versa.

So, you know, I often like to start off these reports with some kind of a celebration. And I want to celebrate with the world today an elderly gentleman from Japan. His name is Nihon Hidanko. And he is head of the Japan Confederation of A- and H- Bomb Sufferers. He actually is what they call a hibakusha, someone who was in Hiroshima on the outskirts of the city when it was bombed.

And the point here is that this organization, the Japan Confederation of A- and H- Bomb Sufferers, is the winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize. So, that's a heartening thing. And the committee wrote, “No nuclear weapon has been used in war for nearly 80 years. The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidanko and other representatives of the hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo.”

And our guest, Afra Jalabi, was referring to this fact that nuclear weaponry has not been used because of the enormity of the desolation that it would produce. I, personally, don't feel that that's a terribly secure way to avoid using a weapon. Because what happens in war is conflicts take on their own logic. And when the escalation of one side automatically, so to speak, propels the escalation of another – for example, in Israel today, we have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who says very clearly, “Anyone who hurts us, we will hurt them.” Not realizing that what he is saying is, “We are trapped. We are stuck in a tit-for-tat logic in which our behavior will actually be controlled by the other side.” 

So, it's a strange kind of a paradox there that you're giving up your agency when you put yourself in that posture. Needless to say, there are historical reasons by which you could understand why Israelis today might be paranoid.

But, you know, understanding is not necessarily forgiving in this case. And I do believe that when you have a lot to overcome, you gain a lot when you overcome it. And I do know that there are people, some of whom I know personally, so of them are organizations, like Combatants For Peace in Israel, who are undergoing exactly that psychological process of saying, “Yes, we suffered terrifically. Therefore, we will not inflict suffering on others because we've seen and felt what it is.” So, that's a very much elevated human response.

And, you know, the question before the whole world now really is how will that grow? How will that become as instinctive? I don't mean that word very scientifically, but how will that become a reflexive response to suffering that's imposed on us by others? This, to me, seems to be the biggest psychological problem of the world today.

Well, speaking of that region of the world, Israel-Palestine – today, Pace e Bene, as you know, has a nonviolent actor and a quote from that person every day. And the one they quoted from today is someone that we know well, Ali Abu Awad, whom we interviewed in our film The Third Harmony.

He is the founder of an organization called Taghyeer, which means ‘change’, which is a Palestinian national movement promoting nonviolence to achieve and guarantee a nonviolent solution to the conflict. And I might just add that nonviolent methods and a nonviolent solution are the only way to reach a nonviolent regime. And if the last 75 years have shown us anything, they have shown us that.

Now, his story, and the efforts of the organization, Taghyeer, have been featured in over 12 documentaries, including two award-winning ones. One of which was ours, “The Third Harmony.” And so, today the quote from Ali is, “Now more than ever, we all must refuse to use violence to justify more violence. We should not allow our pain to blind us to what is most needed: mutually guaranteed sovereignty, security, and dignity.” Very well put.

Back here in the States, our very good friends and sister organization, Nonviolence International, is really effective at giving us resources. You might recall in our interview with Afra just now, talking about how the uprising – originally nonviolent uprising against Assad in Syria kind of leveled off. It went flat because people did not have enough knowledge of what nonviolence is and how to use it.

And this is what the Metta Center is dedicated to promoting and providing around the world. And so, Nonviolence International does a very good job of this. And their website is Nonviolence.Rutgers.edu. Not their website, but the website for a huge collection of nonviolence training manuals. Which for a while went offline, but I'm happy to say it's up and running again.

Speaking of Nonviolence International, earlier this month, they did a three-day program called “End the Suffering: Global Days of Remembrance and Action”. This was partly a symbolic effort, which, you know, it's kind of the in-between sort of thing for me. But it was an excellent theme. The transforming of pain, as Ali Abu Awad was just saying, into action. And this first phase of symbolism is a necessary first phase. That's when we identify who we are as a community. The next phase is what do we do about it?

And they had a very good hashtag. And that is #EveryLifeAUniverse. I really, really like that. I want to dwell on that for a second. There is a very well-known short story by George Orwell called A Hanging. Orwell was at this time a British police officer in what was then Burma, and he had to officiate at a couple of very distasteful things. One was the shooting of an elephant, and the other was the hanging of a human being.

And with his insight as a writer, he brings this up very vividly how – for example, he notices that while this man is being taken to the gallows, he carefully steps around a puddle not to get his feet wet. You know, just that little human response that makes him not just, you know, a criminal or whatever he was, but a human being.

And in response to that assassination, Orwell says something that had always stayed with me. He says, “One life less, one world less.” Well, I think he said, “One mind less, one world less.” If we could acknowledge the fact that each of us is a microcosm of the whole of reality, which is what the sages have told us, ad infinitum, down the ages, I think it would enable us to hold our hand from violence and to treat one another with truth and love and justice. So that was his insight into that fact and how we violate it every time there is an assassination or an execution.

Now, Pax Christi, has a project now called The Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, which we've talked about before. And their mission is to make nonviolence research, resources and experience more accessible to Catholic Church leaders, communities and institutions, in order to deepen Catholic understanding of and commitment to the practice of gospel nonviolence.

I'm reminded of one of Mahatma Gandhi’s rather sardonic statements, where he said, “The only people who do not realize that Jesus was nonviolent are the Christians.” Of course, it would be extremely inconvenient for them.

And now, Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, has a number of different concentrations in their study, in their research. And one of them is, of course, as I’ve just mentioned, gospel nonviolence. And they're looking into the question, how is nonviolence central to Catholic faith?

And so, this has brought together theologians, scriptural scholars, ethicists, pastoral specialists working on specific topics regarding nonviolence as a spirituality, a way of life, a method of change, and a universal ethic. That is a very good overview. A spirituality, a way of life, a method of change, and a universal ethic as related to Scripture, the Christian tradition, the teachings of the church, and so forth. Not that that will really be substantially different from the teachings of any religion.

Our friend and board member, Safoora Arbab, has informed us this morning of a remarkable event taking place in the Khyber Pass region. It's taking place right now. And that is one of the largest jirgas that she has ever heard of. A jirga is a big meeting. It's a meeting to discuss difficult topics, and to reach conclusions, and to act on them, among the Pashtun or Pakhtun people.

And we read about jirgas at first, speaking personally, in connection with the life of Abdul Ghaffar Khan. But this is an ongoing Pashtun institution. And we’re very happy to say A, that there's a very large one going on, in which many women are participating. And it's been organized by Manzoor Pashteen. And this is a remarkable feat, Safoora tells us. Because he has unified different strata of the Pashtuns and brought them together to discuss ways in which they can achieve peace in their land. That is a remarkable thing because it means that if they can do it there, they can do it anywhere.

And one of the demands he presented to the jirga, the assembly, was that both the army and the Taliban should leave their lands within 60 days. And he openly states that these are the elements that are antithetical to peace and real democracy. And I hope that we can appreciate, Safoora adds, that he has put his life on the line by saying that.

Because of that comment and the unified stance that can be maintained in the face of all manner of state opposition that will now come their way, we can watch for very significant developments in that part of the world, which is not unusual for that part of the world.

Well, I want to come back now to another sister organization – we have a large family here at Metta, and that is the Nonviolent Peaceforce. From the earliest days, Nonviolent Peaceforce has been very strong, balancing their actions of sending trained, unarmed, civilian actors into very violent situations. So, it's not like they're armchair theorists, but they are also theorists.

Christina Switzer, a friend of ours, who was a member of their earliest research reports that they produced in German, and then it was translated because they recognize the importance of unarmed civilian peacekeeping groups learning from their experiences.

And I used to say, you know, my way of provoking people into doing this back in the day, probably made myself very obnoxious, but it seems like it took. I used to say, “Bank robbers do more in the way of looking back over their strengths and weaknesses, their mistakes and best practices, than we've been doing in the peace movement.”

And it was kind of understandable because we had so much to do with so few people and so few resources. You know, there was so much violence, and we just didn't know where to turn. I don't know how much I had to do with it, but they picked up that gauntlet, if you will, and they have now created a 40-page document called, “The Feasibility of Implementing an Unarmed Civilian Protection Project in Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.”

And this has been prepared in particular for the UCP in Palestine project. We all like to have our acronyms. So, it’s UCPiP. And for more information, you can contact MelDuncan1314@gmail.com.

But I want to share with you their list of methods that unarmed actors can practice in violent situations. One is proactive presence – that is to be there on the ground before violence breaks out, when a third party makes a huge psychological difference. And also, a practical difference because you can do rumor abatement. You get out of this, he said-she said thing by saying, “No, no, he didn't say that. We were just over there.” You can do accompaniment. This has been probably the most common activity of UCP organizations.

Nonviolence International accompanied many people in Central America back in the 80s. And when people are accompanied, they have never actually been assassinated. And they can do interpositioning, which is the risky one. And that means going in between two conflicting parties. Which again says, psychologically, the world is not polarized into a duality. We're a third party here, but also again, pragmatically says, look, if you shoot at them, you’ll hit us, and you’ll be getting the wrong kind of international news that you want to get.

They also do early warning and sometimes early response activities when tensions are rising. They do ceasefire monitoring after tensions have been de-escalated. And they do violence de-escalation. So, that's their bag of tricks, if you will. And now they are arguing that they want to deploy at least 100 experienced, highly trained UCP personnel who can commit to at least one year of service. And they want to do this as soon as possible. The idea is to do that in the West Bank and use that as a staging area for Gaza.

Stephanie: Everybody, thank you so much for listening to Nonviolence Radio. We want to thank our guest, Afra Jalabi. To you, Michael, thank you for that great Nonviolence Report. To Matt and Robin Watrous, who help transcribe and edit the show. Sophia Pechaty, Annie Hewitt, who work on distributing the show and summarizing it. To Bryan Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence, who helps syndicate the show. To the Pacifica Network, who syndicates the show, as well as our mother stations, KWMR and KPCA. Thank you very much.

And to you, all of our listeners, if you want to find out more, visit us at MettaCenter.org, NonviolenceRadio.org. And until the next time, please take care of one another. We'll be back in two weeks.