Could Americans force the story of Palestinian nonviolent resistance to land confiscation onto the agenda of mainstream US media?
Last Friday, Palestinian peace activists created the village of Bab al-Karama on the lands of Beit Iksa village to prevent their confiscation by the Netanyahu government.
The previous Friday, Palestinian peace activists created the village of Bab al-Shams near the village of Al Zaim to block the confiscation of Palestinian land by the Netanyahu government.
What do you think is going to happen in Palestine this Friday?
Economists like to say that the only thing that you can’t predict is the future. But I think that the odds are very good that on Friday, a new Palestinian village is going to be established to block the confiscation of Palestinian land by the Netanyahu government.
If that happens, will American media report it?
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?
To be effective, a strategy of nonviolent resistance to injustice requires an audience.
Sometimes Western pundits have asked: Where are the Palestinian Gandhis? But when Palestinians have engaged in nonviolent protest and have been suppressed by Israeli occupation forces, Western pundits have been largely silent. The pundits’ words communicate one thing; the choice by Western media to largely ignore nonviolent Palestinian protest movements communicates the opposite.
Thanks to movies like Budrus and 5 Broken Cameras, the story of nonviolent Palestinian resistance to land confiscation is reaching a new group of Americans. That’s a fantastic development. But when civil rights marchers in Selma were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, Americans didn’t have to wait for a movie to find out about it. It was big news right away.
There is a precedent that may be relevant. When Occupy Wall Street began, it was ignored at first by mainstream media. To find out what was going on, you had to go to social media like Twitter. When the story became well-established in social media, mainstream media had to take notice.
What if we raised an army of thousands of Americans who pledged themselves in advance to one simple task: When the news breaks of a new Palestinian village established to block land confiscation by the Netanyahu government, members of this army agree that they are going to be notified, and then they are going to spread this news on social media.
Thousands of Americans have already signed our pledge. You can join them here.
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