About Ta’ayush and Ezra Nawi
The organization was founded by Israelis and Palestinians in order to end the Israeli occupation and to achieve full civil equality through daily non-violent direct action. Ta’ayush is an Arabic word for ’working together’. A well-known member of the group is human rights activist Ezra Nawi. Nawi is presently awaiting his one-month prison term for stopping a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. The Ta’ayush web site (http://www.taayush.org/) features regularly updated news reports on what is happening on the ground. It also offers background information about the occupation and the peace movement.
Pressenza: What is Ta’ayush?
Joseph Dana: The group was founded roughly in 2000, by two people, an Israeli and a Palestinian who decided that direct action, non-violent protest against the occupation was necessary. One of the main goals was to confront the occupation, to bring Israelis to the West Bank to assist Palestinians in dealing with the daily rituals of occupation.
Mairav Zonszein: Ta’ayush operates on two main levels of activism, which are humanitarian and political. In the wake of the Second Intifada, some of the basic things that Palestinians needed were water, electricity, and convoys carrying basic supplies, so members of Ta’ayush were trying to go through the checkpoints and provide them. The other level is the resistance to the occupation, confrontation with soldiers and the refusal to allow Israelis and Palestinians to live separate lives when in fact we are stuck in it together.
Pressenza: Would you say numbers in the peace movement are on the rise in Israel?
JD: In 2000, many Israelis were participating in weekly demonstrations in the West Bank. A couple of notable Israeli intellectuals joined, and there was lots of media coverage. And then through the fatigue of the Intifada, the numbers in Ta’ayush dwindled dramatically. So presently, we have about 10 to 20 core members and we are conducting weekly activities in the West Bank that sometimes attract up to 40 or 50 people. In a village called Bil’in there has been a non-violent demonstration against the separation wall every Friday for the past five years. This has been met with extreme violence from Israeli authorities. It is a weekly demonstration of tear gas and sound granades and invasions into the village to arrest Palestinian leaders, and yet the non-violent protest is continuing. So we are seeing a very interesting dynamic today in which non-violence is having an affect on the state of Israel and on the international community as well. With the absence of Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians, the accepted norms which Israel would use to attack Palestinians have become meaningless. So non-violent activists, both Israeli and Palestinian have been increasingly targeted by Israeli police, which is a good and a bad thing. It has to get worse before it gets better.
Pressenza: You refer to the activities of your group as „direct action”. Can you give us a few examples of such actions?
JD: Israel is a very small place, so if you harbor leftist (and I use this term very loosely) opinions about Israeli political decisions and the occupation, it is very easy for you to travel 45 minutes and be in the occupation. We live in Jerusalem, so we can be in the West Bank in ten minutes and observe what is happening. In this situation, observing is a form of direct action, because there is a very strong push to keep the facts of the occupation outside of the general mindset.
We are not supposed to see and smell what a checkpoint looks like for Palestinians. Last Saturday, for example, 10-15 activists set out from Jerusalem early in the morning, went to the south West Bank, below Hebron, and assisted Palestinian shepherds with their farmlands. Often times Palestinian farmlands are very close to settlements, and the settlers, with the help of the military, try to harass the shepherds. This is done out of basic hatred and also out of the understanding that if shepherds cannot farm their lands, they will have to move to a bigger city and then their land can be taken by the settlement. It is harassment on a daily basis. So Jewish members of Ta’ayush can go and monitor the situation, hold settlers accountable and if there is violence, they can videotape it and send it to a lawyer who could then file a case in an Israeli court. There are illegal Israeli outposts outside the settlements and last time a couple of activists decided to go to one of them and take pictures, the settlers attacked them with stones. So we were able to document the situation and and send it out to Israeli news media and file a complaint. Sometimes we go to house raids, when the army, for whatever reason, decides to take over the house. By Israeli law, they round up everyone in the house, they put them into one room, they take all of their cell phones, and if anyone knocks on the door, it is the law that they put the person knocking on the door in the house, in the room together with the family.
Ta’ayush activists sometimes get a word of such raids from Palestinians that we know, so we go and knock on the door. This serves a number of different functions: we are showing solidarity with the families and it is also challenging the assumptions that the soldiers are having in these situations. These are soldiers that are told that they are in a terror situation, that it is life and death, that they are protecting the country, and all of a sudden there is a knock on the door and there are ten Israelis there. This is very strange, this is asking a lot of moral questions.
Pressenza: The news published on your website include a lot of entries about an area called Sheikh Jarrah.
JD: Yes, perhaps the most profound situation that we can speak of now is what is happening in East Jerusalem. There is a neighborhood called Sheikh Jarrah. This is an area that was populated with Arabs mostly fleeing from West Jerusalem in 1948, during the Israeli war of independence and they were resettled by the Jordanian government. They have been living there since the 1950s, roughly. About 10 years ago, Jewish settler organizations found evidence that a number of these houses were owned by Jews before 1948 and filed a petition to the Supreme Court to have the residents removed. Of course, this raised serious questions, because the Palestinians living there were also removed from their houses and those houses are now populated by Israelis.
In August, the Supreme Court ruled that these people were in fact living in Jewish property, so the government evicted three families. The Israeli left-wing organizations responded immediately with continuing protests and vigils and solidarity with the families. The families are still living on the street. All this led to very strong police repression, a number of activists were arrested, and for the last two months there has been a weekly demonstration in this neighborhood, and it is growing. Last time we had very high level intellectuals and public figures attending. We had headlines in the international media, showing that Iraelis do not all believe in these measures. So this kind of direct action is taking root in Jerusalem. This is very important for the international community to see: that many Israelis are ready to face police repression for justice and for the refusal of racism.
Pressenza: Critics of non-violence say that non-violent methods may be morally right, but they are inefficient. Also, there always seems to be a justification for the absolute necessity of an immediate violent intervention… What is your explanation for the choice of non-violence?
MZ: In the international media the Palestinian resistance has been known to be quite violent, so we need to make our struggle more credible. Also, we are citizens of a country that claims to be democratic, so for us, unlike for the military, it is most important to uphold basic values. We have been met with a lot of verbal and physical violence, but both for your own soul when you go home at night and for the legitimacy of the opposition, it is important to remain non-violent.
JD: Ta’ayush as an organization is very non-conformist and very free form. We do not have any political stands on whether there should be one states, two states, five states, seven states…The only two things that we can agree on is that we are non-violent and that we are against the occupation. This is the foundation of our initiative, maybe as a reaction to the intensely militarized society that we live in. One of our goals is not to engage in the game of provoking and then responding to violence with violence. Also, if we were tempted to react in a violent way, we would be very quickly discredited and we would all go to jail immediately. So we have to look at the situation as pragmatically as possible.
Pressenza: Do you think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved locally?
JD: On a personal level, yes, I am very hopeful. I have a great respect for Palestinian society for being able to differentiate between the state of Israel and Israeli people. It gives me strength to see people that are harassed and living in an occupation every day being able to welcome me in as an Israeli Jew. This is a kind of moral maturity that many people should aspire to. So in that way, I see hope. Unfortunately, you have very influential countries, like the United States, Germany, England, that have vested interest in this conflict continuing. So it is beyond our hands. We are not going to be able to solve it, because the Americans are making 5 billion dollars off of this and I do not think that they are willing to relinquish that. I am also pretty pessimistic about the trend in Israeli culture towards understanding.
The last elections in Israel showed that we are very afraid and we are voting in nationalist politicians, which is alarming. And yet at the same time we do have these direct action movements that are gaining more strength. YouTube, blogs, Twitter and Facebook have helped us incredibly to get a different side of the story out and hopefully, with people’s support this will penetrate into some mainstream channels as well.
MZ: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is similar to many other conflicts, but it is the responsibility of every Israeli to deal with it, and I wish that from 50 people it would sprout to 5000. If there were more people like us, this conflict would come to an end much quicker. But I do not think that that is going to happen and not soon enough. So it is not a struggle that can be solved internally. External pressure is necessary.
Pressenza: What could or should the international community do in support of the peace movement in Israel?
JD: If there is someone in a European country who feels very strongly about the conflict and about the walls that are being built in Palestine, they should also look at the wall that is being built around Europe and deal with the problems in their own countries. The same goes for the United States. But of course, we always welcome anyone interested in supporting our struggle and thanks to the Internet those interested can easily access information about the various interactions going on between Israeli and Palestinian people on the ground.
Another issue to be considered is that instead of boycotting Israeli products, foreign citizens could go to their government and demand that they stop sending millitary equipment to Israel. That is how you can help: make sure your government divests and thus loses the profits gained from this conflict.
