CSM column on our great gathering in Amman

My column in Thursday’s CSM is about our incredible conference on nonviolence, last week in Amman. You can read it here or here.
In the column, I just gave a tiny flavor of the conference, which was truly an amazing gathering:

    This assembly – a UN-sponsored leadership conference on nonviolence – brought together Israelis, Palestinians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and others from the Middle East. One-third of the participants came from farther afield – from Nepal, Uganda, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Russia, South Africa, and elsewhere – and added a valuable global and comparative perspective to the mix.
    We saw very secular Israeli activists engaging passionately with socially conservative (and very articulate) veiled women from Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Pro-peace Israeli rabbis in yarmulkes worked with Muslim teachers in flowing robes. There were Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular peace activists, and veterans of nonviolent struggles in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere.
    On the final night, an Israeli rabbi and a young Arab woman sang a poem composed two hours earlier by a South African. It told of the dream of coexistence along the Jordan River.
    How did this happen – at a time of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and deadly civil strife in Iraq?

Toward the end of the column I speculated a little on why this gathering turned out to be so successful, so harmonious and productive and inspirational– and this, at a time when the situation in the areas to the east of Jordan and to the west of it are wracked by such terrible, protracted violence.
I concluded:

    Our gathering thrived because of the great human qualities and rich experience of the participants. It helped, too, that so many Middle Easterners can now see that violence – whether direct physical violence or the violence of oppressive systems – simply does not “work.” So in key places, people have become more eager to seek alternatives.
    The achievements of Gandhi’s movement in India and of the (largely nonviolent) African National Congress in South Africa last century are solid examples of the effectiveness of nonviolent mass action that today’s peacemakers embrace as instructive models. The teachings of Gandhi, Dr. King, and others do not try to avoid the big political problems that conflict- ridden or oppressed societies face. Instead, they seek to mobilize new, nonviolent human energies in order to resolve them…

One factor I didn’t mention, that perhaps I should have, was precisely the ‘UN’ (or more directly, the U.N. University) sponsorship of it. I think just about all the participants in the workshop were people who deeply respect the work of the UN, and the principles of human equality, globalism, fair-mindedness, and non-violence that animate the world body. In retrospect, I think that was crucial… So I wish I’d written that.
Very different from, for example, having the seminar convened by a body with an explicitly “western” flavor…
Anyway, as I noted at the end of the column there:

    Now, we all need to work hard to nurture and strengthen this hopeful movement.

Indeed. That’s one of the main things I’m trying to figure out right now, along with my friends and colleagues who were at the seminar…

4 thoughts on “CSM column on our great gathering in Amman”

  1. Thanks, Helena. I’ve passed this along to my nonviolence class. But they will want to know — what’s actually being done? What’s the goal? And how can they help? A nonviolent movement, they’ve learned, is more than hopeful rhetoric from a (carefully chosen) multicultural crew. They’re disheartened by the endless conferences, resolutions, declarations, and amendments from international bodies that never translate into meaningful action. What was the intellectual and activist content of this conference? They will want to go beyond the fluff…

  2. I understand that Somerville, Mass. had two initiatives on their ballott:
    1. One was to affirm the right of return for all refugees, including Palestinians, and about 44% of voters said yes.
    2. The other concerned the question of divesting from Israel, and about 31% voted yes.
    The fact that these two questions made it onto the ballott is a miracle, and that they received any positive votes at all is another, considering that there was tremendous opposition from the Jewish lobby, and all the local radio stations, newspapers and politicians were strongly opposed, not to mention the utter brainwashing that has been visited upon the US population.
    I would really like to know more, just how did those brave individuals in Somerville accomplish this?

  3. How did this happen – at a time of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and deadly civil strife in Iraq?
    This big question been asked.
    Military forces are a key means of social control in today’s world. Military force is the ultimate method any government has for controlling others.
    If US and Israel stoping their wars against other nations and come to understand that no a single human will accept to live under thread or orders of the occupier in any shape or form then this will never happen and the violence we see in Iraq its certainly man made violence and chaos initiated by occupier.
    As same what happen from the time of Britt’s impair with Gandhi and other resistance against the occupiers.
    Also we can say science and technology can be used and developed to support nonviolent struggle, as military forces crating violence around the world.

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