the Holy Land Trust organization and Panorama center
organized a two-day conference in Ramallah on the strategies of the
civil based nonviolent resistance against the Israeli occupation in
Palestine.
The conference discussed ways of supporting and reinforcing the civil-based resistance in Palestine.
Many nonviolent activists took part in the conference that started on
Thursday. The conveners discussed several papers on the
definition of Nonviolence in comparison to the Armed Struggle, and the
possibilities to develop and promote nonviolence strategies, and the
role of the Nongovernmental and the Governmental organizations in this
method of struggle.
Sami Awad, director of the Holy Land Trust, one of the organizers of
the conference, said, resistance against the occupation must continue,
at the same time, ‘we believe that the civil-based nonviolent
resistance is essential in the current stage of the Palestinian
struggle.’
Awad added that the conference aims to network among the nonviolent
activists in Palestine to study ways of developing a unified method to
resist the occupation.
Awad is nephew to Mubarak Awad who was arrested in the first Intifada
for promoting nonviolence as a way to resist the occupation.
One of the prominent groups of nonviolence in Palestine is the
International Solidarity Movement (ISM) that has been organizing
nonviolent resistance activities in All over the West Bank since the
year 2000.
The ISM is a Palestinian-led nonviolent group that aims to promote the
Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement. Two Internationals
were killed by the Israeli army in ISM nonviolent activities in Rafah
in the Gaza Strip in march and April 2003.
