Now that Our Way to Fight is out in the world (or at least the international and Canadian editions are; the US edition comes out in May), I’ve started to give talks and readings.  Responses are positive and encouraging.  However, in discussions at these events, I hear one comment/question so frequently that it deserves to be addressed:

The situation over there seems so hopeless. Isn’t it hopeless? It really is     hopeless, isn’t it?

Behind these words, I hear this plea: It’s so sad, really, but there isn’t anything I can do.

I understand. Media-soaked cultures foster passivity.  We are swamped with a continuous wash of information that flows by too fast for critical thought, so that only sensation is possible – fury, sadness, confusion.  The cumulative effect is to convince us that the only real power we have, the only way we can express ourselves, is to choose between products, candidates, empty slogans – the Audacity of Hope vs whatever the other ad agency hatches.  Hmm.  Okay, I’ll take the cool grey one.  But wait, do you have it in taupe?

Even people who ferret out information from alternative sources can easily feel overwhelmed by the dense weight of it.  The absorption of information is a passive undertaking.  Unless it leads to action, it piles up into corrosive sediment, eating away at any lingering sense of agency we might still have had.

Despite all the wide-eyed techno-babble about Twitter revolutions in the Middle East, the real Tunisian and Egyptian intifadas are being fought on the streets and on the picket line.   The giddy sense of elation that I felt watching Al Jazeera was tempered by the knowledge that I was, after all, only watching.

Now, as the generals and bankers plot behind closed doors to regain their stranglehold, I can only hope that the picket lines won’t crumble, that people will keep returning again and again to Midan Tahrir, Liberation Square.  Easy for me to say, I’m not there with them.  I’m over here, safe and comfy in rural Canada.  As people say, what can I do, really?

Because this question of hope/despair is so familiar, in my travels through Palestine and Israel to gather people’s stories for Our Way to Fight, at some point in our encounters usually I asked:  How do you handle despair?

These are people on the front lines in Palestine-Israel, a bitter liberation struggle now more than half a century long; they have far more reason than I do to despair.  Yet here are some of their responses:

Lamyya Yassin, whose home has been invaded repeatedly, her husband beaten and arrested in the besieged village of Bil’in, occupied West Bank:  “This is a struggle for our land and our lives, so we continue.”

Haggai Matar, Jewish Israeli writer-activist, who has been arrested and beaten by Israeli police at non-violent protests:  “Palestinians don’t have a choice, struggle is forced on them.  So as long as they’re resisting, and despite everything they are still willing to do it with Israelis, we can’t afford to say, ‘Sorry, I’m depressed, I can’t make it today.’  We can just be part of the struggle, tell people about it, and keep going so there will be people on both sides who know and trust each other.  If we can keep these bridges alive, then maybe one day at least we will have something to build on.”

Jafar Farah, director of the Mossawa Advocacy Centre for Arab Citizens in Israel, arrested repeatedly by Israeli police at non-violent protests:  “Of course I experience despair.  Some days I want to forget it, leave this place – there are other things I want to do.  But then you think of your responsibilities to your children, and to Mossawa. You can’t just wake up in the morning and say I’m going to do something else.  In our reality, despair and doing what you want, these are luxuries.”

Ruth Hiller, Israeli Jewish member of New Profile, under continuous attack for its campaign to convert Israel from a military state to a civil society:  “I keep thinking things can’t get worse here, but they do.  Even though I know what to do by now, I still feel helpless.  So I have to gather my energies, and persevere.  When we get overwhelmed, we come together and support one another.  That’s what teamwork does, you are never alone.”

Dr Aed Yaghi, Palestinian Medical Relief Society, director of programs in Gaza — no further comment needed on the challenges he faces:  “I don’t have time for despair, there is too much to be done.  I think the main strength of Palestinians here in Gaza is our belief that to resist Israeli aggression, we must continue to live.  We are living in our land, and we must struggle again and again, and finally we will win.”

Emily Schaeffer, American-Israeli lawyer-activist:  “In this movement it’s very easy to despair.  But the Palestinians can’t afford to lose hope – without hope you don’t have life.  One thing we remind each other is that even when we feel defeated we are still preserving humanity and the connection between the two peoples for the future.  If this is all we accomplish, still it’s something.”

It’s not the cool grey one, not the taupe, but still, it’s something.

More on the popular uprising in Egypt:

Not unusually, the western mainstream media have treated it as a total surprise, a shocking bolt from the blue.  Their surprise is not surprising.  They’ve been listening to the wrong people.

When I met Michal Shwartz in Haifa in 2008, she knew this was coming.  She isn’t psychic, she simply has a long view of history.  Though I’ve learned to be shy of the loaded and much abused word ‘revolutionary,’ that is how I see Michal, an Israeli activist with the Workers Advice Centre, or WAC as it’s known.  It builds unions of marginalized workers, across all the formidable barriers of race, nationality, gender and religion.  (Michal and several WAC comrades are featured in Our Way to Fight.)

The Workers’ Advice Centre is little known in Israel, even to most peace and human rights activists I met.  But if ever a just peace is to grow in Palestine-Israel, WAC will have played a unique role in creating the grounds for it, by fighting steadily for the universal right to a life that’s worth living.  In any context these days, I’d say that qualifies as revolutionary.

By my reading of history, this is a long, steep uphill battle.  Since Michal Shwartz has been at it for more than half a century, I asked her how she reads history.

She paused a moment, then replied: “We are not people who lack patience, who think we can change history with our own hands.  We look around, we see how things have gone in the past and how they are going now, and we work at the tempo that history forces on us.  Sometimes you have to run very fast to remain in the same place.  But experience shows that when you’re active you build something, and if you don’t stop in the middle and leave in despair, it will bring results.  Even if you won’t live to see them, at least you know you’re doing something that’s needed.”

Which brings us to Egypt.  During our first conversation, autumn 2008 in the Israeli agricultural village of Kufr Qara, Michal cited Egypt as an inspiring example of how change is built.  She said:

“In Egypt we see a very encouraging development over the last two years,  a strong wave of workers’ protests.  This is something quite different from the Islamic movement, and separate from the political parties – in Egypt even the communist party is pro-Mubarak.  It is also unusual in that women and men are organizing together, as workers.  Wages in Egypt have gone down greatly while the price of bread went up.  In a place called al-Mahala-el-Kubra, where there are big factories with 30,000 workers or more, they’ve been striking to get rid of the government-controlled union.  They are demanding the right to a decent living wage, the right to organize independent unions, and new political parties.  Of course the official reaction is extremely violent, but even so, the Egyptian workers didn’t just go on strike once and then stop, on the contrary their resistance has been growing.  Now they are calling for a change of regime, an end to the dictatorship.  You won’t see this in most of the press, not even on Al-Jazeera.  Our website is blocked in Egypt, many friends there cannot get to it.  So we send messages back and forth by email, and recently two of our activists went there to meet in person with workers who are protesting.   This is a new development, one which we find very inspiring.  It goes in exactly the direction where we believe things will develop.”

In such a long view of history, Egypt’s intifada is thrilling, but no surprise.

Movement!  The people of Tunisia have expelled the tyrant, and now fight to expand the freedom they’ve gained.  The people of Egypt are moving against heavy odds to do the same, others too.

Palestinians have been struggling against tyranny for more than 60 years.  Longer than that – in 1936 they rose up against the British colonial regime, and before that….. Different faces, different uniforms, but to those who suffer under it, tyranny feels the same.

To us in ‘the west,’ these upheavals are only astonishing because the mainstream media keep us so badly informed.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that their habitual filters keep them so badly informed, they can’t offer much help for us in making sense of the world.

Fortunately other voices are being heard – none so loud as the tyrants’, but still, thanks to small presses and alternative media they are being heard.

Our Way to Fight is a gathering of such voices, voices of people struggling fiercely for peace, justice and human rights in Palestine and Israel.  As repression increases there, it’s essential that these voices be heard.

But:  Several vigilant readers informed me last week that local bookstores in Canada were saying the book wouldn’t be available until May.  What?? It is actually available right now.

I alerted the Canadian publisher, Between the Lines, and they moved quickly, tracking down a glitch in the computer software that provides most bookstores with their information.  Somehow it had listed the UK/international edition (now available) and the US edition (due in May), but omitted the Canadian edition.

That glitch has now been corrected, and Our Way to Fight can be purchased and/or ordered from bookstores across Canada, the UK and Ireland.

Essential voices, hot off the press.

As of January 20, Our Way to Fight will be available for purchase in Canada from select bookstores and online from the publisher, Between the Lines.

In the UK and Ireland you can now order the book online from Pluto Press.  By  January 20 it will be available at select bookstores in the UK and Ireland.

If you don’t find it at your favourite bookshop, please request that they order a copy (or two…)  This will bring the book to their attention and may lead them to stock more copies!

(The US edition will be published in May by Chicago Review Press/Lawrence Hill Books.)

Soon I’ll start posting updates on this blog about some of the brave people featured in the book.   Doing this will give me an opportunity I haven’t had with any previous book – to continue documenting lives/stories that would otherwise appear to go silent when the book is closed.  The Israel-Palestine situation evolves so swiftly, and with such enormous repercussions, it begs for an open book.

Meantime, this excerpt from the book’s introduction will give you a sense of what to expect from Our Way to Fight:

This book emerges from a journey and a search, to see what grounds for a just peace I could find in the tormented land that many call holy.  In a world of spin where ‘peace’ can mean anything, including war, it’s essential to specify: a just peace.  Peace without justice is hollow, a sham, the deathly stillness of tyranny triumphant.  By contrast, a just peace is alive, clamourous, and vibrant with risks and possibilities.  Of course in a world of spin, ‘justice’ can mean anything too.  This book explores what a truly just peace might look like, and how people imagine building it in Israel-Palestine.

Our Way to Fight offers no solutions, only stories of extra/ordinary people fighting fiercely for such a peace, on whichever side of the wall they happen to have landed by accidents of birth.

Early comment on the book:

“A book like a pocket lamp that contests darkness:  the darkness fabricated by those who have promoted a global blindness concerning what has happened in Palestine and Israel during the last sixty years.  The battery of this remarkable lamp is true observation, and with it you discover exemplary courage in the most unexpected places.  Pocket it!”    John Berger, author of “From A to X:  a fiction inspired by the people of     Palestine.”

“Our Way to Fight explores the stories of men and women who create glimmers of light and hope in the dark despair surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A close look at activists who dedicate their lives to the struggle for social justice, Michael Riordon’s portraits reveal what it means to be a courageous person, a seeker of truth.  This is a vital intervention for all who care about peace and justice.”     Neve Gordon, author of Israel’s Occupation.

Please pass this on to others:

Two days ago, the last day of 2010, Jawaher Abu Rahmah was killed by Israeli soldiers in Bil’in, her besieged village.  At age 36, she was fatally poisoned by toxic tear gas during the regular Friday protest against the wall and the military occupation.

In 2009 her brother Bassem was killed by soldiers in another protest, his chest crushed by a high-velocity tear-gas projectile fired directly at him.

In 2008 their brother Ashraf was shot in the foot by an Israeli soldier while he sat bound and blindfolded at another village protest.

In 2010 an Israeli military court sentenced their cousin Abdallah Abu Rahmah to a year in prison for his role in organizing the weekly non-violent protests.

In villages across the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, in Gaza and within Israel, Palestinians, Israelis and international solidarity activists continue to resist the suffocating impact of the wall, the occupation and the military state.  In Bil’in the wall cuts off more than half the villagers’ food-growing land.  Whether or not they resist, their lives are at stake.

During the protests, sometimes the discipline of non-violence holds, sometimes enraged young men throw stones over the fence at their tormentors.  Either way the soldiers fire tear-gas projectiles, rubber bullets and live ammunition.

Village leader Mohammed Khatib has been beaten by soldiers and imprisoned by the military court for organizing protests, and now he faces additional charges.  On my travels for Our Way to Fight, I asked him: Given the violence and brutality Bil’iners endure week after week, year after year, how do you sustain such a high level of non-violent resistance?

He replied, “It’s our right as Palestinians to resist the occupation, but we must choose the method that we think will have the most benefit.  Why engage your opponent in a fight that you know you will lose?  Instead you compete in a way that you think you can win, and show what we have as Palestinians.  We don’t have an army, or tanks, or nuclear weapons like Israel.  What we have is our rights and our own power.  How can we show this power, show who is victim and who is victimizer?  By using non-violence.”

Like other occupiers, from its inception Israel has met non-violent resistance with escalating violence.  It infuriates the military state when the occupied, the colonized, refuse to submit.  “What we are doing is more dangerous than to shoot a gun and then run away,” says Mohammed. “You tie yourself to an olive tree and then you wait for the army to come, maybe to shoot you, to kill you.  You also have to learn how to control yourself, because when you react to violence with violence, you are out of control, and in that field your opponent will win.”

In Palestine, so many martyrs are buried.  At thirty-five Mohammed Khatib is still young.  He has four children.  A year ago I asked him: Doesn’t he fear for his own life?  “Yes,” he replied. “After all these crimes of the Israeli occupiers, and so many people killed, I don’t want it to become a regular thing for us Palestinians to die like this, as if we were born only to die.  I don’t want this to be the basis of struggle.  But after Bassem I know how close we are to death. I am not afraid, personally.  When we go to these demonstrations I expect the worst, I know that maybe this time it can be me.  I don’t know why I’m not afraid of death, maybe because I believe in what I’m doing, and if you die for good things it’s an honour.  So I would say that first we care about our lives, we care about our friends, but we are also not afraid to die.”

The urgent question for the rest of us: What will it take, and how many good people lost, before we can shut down the occupation and build a just peace?