The new plan to end the Israeli occupation – and thank you!
Dear Friend,
My name is Shimri, I refused military service I spent 21 months in Israeli prisons. Today I am the international coordinator here at Resistance Solidarity Network. Tears come to my eyes as I think of you, those who supported our network, during the destruction of Gaza. Your dedication and support in the past few years gave us hope in some of the darkest hours. These were some of the hardest years of my life, as we were organizing day and night for a ceasefire. Knowing that you are here with us, this gave and gives us hope.
Nonviolent struggle is often associated with leaders: Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Greta Thunberg. But leaders do not create movements. Movements create leaders. Thousands of people who marched, resisted, went to prison, supported organizers, and helped to pay the bills. People like me and you.
After these three dark years, we at RSN, together with the movements and groups we support, are now in a phase of re-organizing for campaigns and action. A key question in our work nowadays is this: What is needed for a mass nonviolent struggle to emerge in the Middle East, and specifically inside the Jewish and Jewish-Palestinian groups? How can we replicate what movements such as the civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, or the climate movement have achieved? How can we create a movement infrastructure that grows organisers and leaders like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Greta Thunberg?
For the coming years, one of our main priorities is working to develop the infrastructure needed for waging a nonviolent struggle against the occupation of the Palestinian territories. A key part of this is building a mass training program for organizers in the nonviolent struggles in Israel-Palestine, in Hebrew – where disruption and nonviolent direct action can be most powerful and impactful.
As a writer and educator of nonviolent struggle, I know that a key part of many successful nonviolent movements had a mass-training program. People learned how to become organizers and leaders in nonviolent struggles through training.
The civil rights movement, for example, had the Highlander Folk School. Rosa Parks, a famous leader of the civil rights movement, arrived there as an organizer, and spent two weeks in one of their training programs, an experience she later described as transformative.Not just Parks, but many leaders and rank-and-file organizers in the civil rights movement took part, as trainers and participants, in training at Highlander. There, they learned how nonviolent struggle works, the history of past movements, methods to prevent mental burnout and trauma during disruptive nonviolent direct actions, and tools to develop and execute a strategy of civil resistance campaigns locally and internationally.
While some trainings already happen on an ad-hoc basis, a training program like Highlander does not yet exist in Israel-Palestine. For many organizers, and for myself, it has always been a dream to have one created.
Now we are making this dream come true. Those of us who had the privilege of participating in training sessions by one of the modern-day reincarnations of the Highlander School know how meaningful these training sessions were for us as activists. My personal participation in trainings offered by centers like Ulex, Momentum, Ayni, Einstein Institution, and International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, was life-changing. The toolbox I took from that on avoiding burnout, as well as on campaign planning and movement building, helped me become a better organizer.
Today, together with a network of local organizers in Israel-Palestine, we’re helping to build a training program that will teach nonviolent struggle to those who want to campaign for a just peace. You will no doubt hear more about the project in the months to come, from the people who are directly involved in planning the training, and hopefully also from some of the participants.
Building a nonviolent struggle to end the Israeli occupation is not a short-term task, for the civil rights movement it took decades to end the segregation regime in the South of the United States. The climate movement is already decades old, and is still fighting. We know that, and we are here to stay. Here to struggle until we win. In the words of Miles Horton, co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, words that gave the title to his autobiography, we are here for the long haul. Help us today to build a training program and the anti-occupation movement.
Again, thank you so much to the supporters and donors of Resistance Solidarity Network.
Without you, we honestly could not do any of this.
In solidarity,
Shimri Zameret
Resistance Soldiarity Netowrk