No matter where, how or by whom a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is arrived at, it will not only be the result of high-level, closed-door negotiations. While the final signatures and handshakes will be made by leaders on both sides, it will be the "street" and the people that win the peace. I believe that only a peaceful, organized and committed nonviolent movement can change the balance of power in Palestinian favor, from one of military calculation to one based on human rights and the moral high ground. 

Many Palestinians remember and reference al-Nakba, also known as the Catastrophe, on May 15 every year. The event marks the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians, while their villages were destroyed. The destruction of Palestine in 1947-48 ushered in the birth of Israel. Older generations relay the harsh and oppressive memory of their collective experience to younger Palestinians, many of whom live their own Nakbas today. 

Sixty-four years have passed since Palestinian society was decimated by the forcible transfer of some 700,000 people by Israeli forces. Each year, on 15 May, 'Nakba Day' commemorates the anguish of those who were expelled from their homes and those who fled in panic under direct military assault. Today also serves as a day of remembrance for the mass murders of 1948 and the destruction of entire villages, of Deir Yassin and Tantura and Al-Dawayima, when hundreds of Palestinians were killed during a period that is now known simply as 'the catastrophe'. 

Commemorating 10 years since construction of the wall also means commemorating almost 10 years of the struggle against it, as described in the previous chapter. Just as we shall later examine what the wall has accomplished, one should also ask what exactly the struggle against it succeeded to do, especially as so many people paid such a high price for it, and as most of the wall is still off the Green Line.  

I guess it's no coincidence that whenever I think of the beginning of the popular struggle against the wall I think of Gil Na'amati. The story of Na'amati, who was just out of the army after three years of serving as a combatant when he was shot in the knee by soldiers while trying to break open a gate in the fence in December 2003, was what drew my attention to the struggle. I was still in prison at the time, for my own refusal to enlist, and it was this story that led me to start reading about the new struggle I was missing on the outside. 

The slogan "two states for two peoples" has long been used by those who support the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Ironically, however, such a framework risks cementing Israeli apartheid and Jewish privilege, evoking the same sorts of arguments put forward by defenders of South Africa's historical regime of systematic discrimination. 

In faraway, frozen Finland - otherwise known as the infirmary of Ramle Prison - the lives of four detainees who have been on a hunger strike for at least 60 days hang in the balance. Nearly 2,000 inmates in the Nafha, Ashkelon, Gilboa and other prisons around Israel have been on hunger strike for two weeks. The very fact of their decision to refuse food and their willingness to risk being punished by the authorities stands as a reminder of their humanity. 

Earlier this week, Israel ordered Palestinian farmers in Deir Istiya, a major West Bank olive producing village, to uproot 1,400 trees by the end of this month. By comparison, this order is 400 more trees than the total number uprooted in all of 2011. "This is the largest order for uprooting trees that the farmers of Wadi Qana have ever been given," said the International Women's Peace Service (IWPS). And Amal Salem, 63, from Deir Istiya, but now living in St. Louis says unearthing olive trees effects everyone in the village, "When I visited last year, every house I went to has had uprooted trees."