Government is a Public Trust which requires all of our participation. 

ACLU Protestor Rights:  

The First Amendment protects your right to  assemble and express your views through protest. However, police and  other government officials are allowed to place certain narrow  restrictions on the exercise of speech rights. Make sure you’re prepared  by brushing up on your rights before heading out into the streets.

 12/2/2025

Dear Friends,

Amidst the flood of emails for giving Tuesday, we ask that you consider giving to more of our amazing partners. We have so many and don’t know where to start, but please consider giving to as many of them as you can. 

Working Together the People Can Prevail! 

Photo by Nayef Hashlamoun

For starters, our Palestinian Justice partners are just incredible:

• Dignity for Palestinians: delivers humanitarian aid into Gaza led by the heroic doctor Musallam Abukhalil.
• Center for Jewish Nonviolence: has been on the front lines accompanying Palestinian and modelling what a Jewish society should be: Compassionate, Courageous, and Respectful.
• Holy Land Trust: (HLT) based in Bethlehem and founded by NVI Co-Director Sami Awad, continues its mission of nonviolent resistance and focus on trauma resilience.
• Unarmed Civilian Protection in Palestine: With NVI and HLT support, Amira Musallam and Mel Duncan have organized some of the elite peacemakers in the world to come to the West Bank and help ameliorate Israeli violence against Palestinians. This is growing fast and needs much support.
• We Are Not Numbers: led by Walaa Sabah, continues to give voice to heroic Gazans. They also have an eponymous new book which is a must read and holiday gift.
• US Boat to Gaza and the Freedom Flotilla: For 17 years we have fiscally sponsored this effort and raised a few million dollars. Unfortunately, David Heap, Canada’s Gaza Boat leader was disgracefully arrested 4 days ago. We are never giving up. Please dig deep because we will return until the siege of Gaza is lifted.
• Villages Group: Led by Tamar Almog and Ehud Krinis. Israeli activists have been supporting and protecting Palestinians in Masafer Yatta every week for 24 years! This amounts to thousands of visits. Incredible.
• Hebron International Resource Network: Provides crucial humanitarian support and programs for Palestinians facing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
• Mennonite Action: A new powerful solidarity movement that is lighting up Christians in the US and Canada to support Palestinians. Listening to them sing is a must.

Wait, there is more! Please support our global partners!

• Western Sahara Solidarity Committee, 
• Ploughshares (direct action against nuclear weapons) program called Isaiah Project, 
• the Syrian nonviolence movement Sullam, and 
• Andre Kamenshikov’s anti-war work for Russians.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, feel free to email or call us and we can talk with you and advise. Feeling overwhelmed is a good thing. It shows that people-power is on the march and together we can move boulders and mountains.

The bottom line is that one of the powerful nonviolent people-power resources is your money. Please invest a percentage of your income or wealth and hit that benchmark every year. Together with a discipline of boycotting malign actors, you can have a powerful impact with your money.

Peace,, 

Mubarak Awad, NVI Founder

9/3/2025

Dear friends, 

Amidst the Nakba of 1948, my grandfather was shot dead on his doorstep in Jerusalem. Since that year, Israel has continued its quest to assert total control over all land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, aiming to fragment, weaken, and ultimately erase Palestinian presence. In 1988, my uncle Mubarak Awad, a popular nonviolent leader, was expelled for life from Jerusalem, where he was born and grew up. My uncle Emil and aunt Mai and their family fled Gaza in 2024 to escape the current genocide. Israel must be stopped.

Since 1967 but more visible for nearly two decades, Gaza has faced a land, sea, and air blockade that blatantly contravenes international law. Presently, it endures relentless bombardment, mass displacement, and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure. This was never about “Hamas.” Israel seeks to render Gaza uninhabitable and force Palestinians to either leave or lose their ability to survive.

This week, in a landmark resolution adopted by 86% of its voting members, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)—the world’s largest academic body dedicated to genocide studies, declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide, citing mass civilian casualties, starvation, blockaded aid, and collective displacement.

In the West Bank, the pattern of dispossession is equally strategic. Israel is moving to annex Area C, which encompasses over 60% of the territory. Meanwhile, settlements proliferate—most significantly in the E1 corridor—destined to sever Palestinian lands physically and create more modern Ghettos for Palestinians to live in. Cities and villages are wholly isolated from each other by roads lined with gates, checkpoint-controlled entry and exit points, and military roadblocks. What was once daily life—access to schools, mosques, hospitals, jobs—has become a controlled maze (and frequent humiliation at check-points), dismantling any hope for a unified Palestinian homeland.

Photo: Megan Hanna

Photo: Middle East Eye/Mosab Shawar

Israel controls and diverts the majority of West Bank water resources, leaving Palestinian communities with only a fraction of the supply available to nearby Israeli settlements. The systematic destruction of wells and pipelines has left entire villages without access to water, while in Gaza, residents are forced to rely on contaminated or insufficient sources. These policies, coupled with ongoing land confiscations and home demolitions, function as deliberate tools of displacement and deepen the humanitarian crisis.

Palestinians who remain within the 1948 borders—today citizens of Israel—also live under a system of discrimination that treats them as second-class citizens.. They face unequal access to housing, education, and services, alongside restrictive planning laws that deny building permits and facilitate land confiscation. Entire villages, particularly in the Naqab (Negev), remain “unrecognized,” denied water, electricity, and basic infrastructure.

Recent years have seen intensified surveillance, policing, and political repression of Palestinian citizens, particularly during protest movements in solidarity with Gaza and Jerusalem. The goal mirrors what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza: to weaken Palestinian identity, fragment communities, encourage emigration, and reduce political resistance while tightening control over all land from the river to the sea.

Within Jerusalem, evictions, restrictive planning laws, and creeping settlement expansion all serve the goal of erasing Palestinian presence and solidifying an exclusive Israeli identity for the city. Palestinians living in Jerusalem are living daily terror from violent settlers roaming the streets, insulting and physically attacking them. 

Palestinian and Jewish Safety

Israel’s project is clear: to dominate from the river to the sea and beyond. Israel is building a permanent occupation of areas in Syria and Lebanon. Besides greed, Israelis are motivated by the myth that only an Israeli state can ensure Jewish safety. In fact, Jewish safety is endangered by the apartheid state that will never be accepted by Palestinians nor much of the world. NVI strongly believes in nonviolent resistance because we know that we must protect everyone in this wonderful homeland and ensure that Never Again means Never Again for ANYONE. 

Amid this onslaught, Palestinians maintain Sumud—steadfastness. In Gaza, families cultivate gardens amid rubble. Our partner, Dignity 4 Palestinians is doing amazing work providing food, water and medical aid to the most needy in Gaza. In the West Bank, NVI projects and programs such as  HIRN, CJNV, Villages Group, and HLT help people resist expulsion while replanting olive trees destroyed by settler attacks. In Jerusalem and 1948 Israel, Lebanon, Syria and in the diaspora, parents preserve identity, language, and history through storytelling, education, and community—even when every system around them seeks to erase those very foundations. 

Building on the 17 year campaign of the Freedom Flotilla, the Global Sumud Flotilla—loading aid and spirits alike—has taken to the seas to do what states refuse: uphold humanitarian corridors, enforce international law, and challenge siege policies. The flotilla is both an act of nonviolent solidarity and a pointed reminder of government failures—a showcase of what should be happening, but isn’t.

This is not a tragedy—it is a political catastrophe born of deliberate policy choices.  Governments and international bodies must act and international law must be upheld:

• Hold Israel accountable—through enforcement of international law, sanctions, and diplomatic pressure.
• Interrupt genocide—by securing safe passage for aid and protecting civilians, not leaving it to civilians on unarmed vessels.
• Impose sanctions on officials, corporations and anyone responsible for war crimes and genocide.

• Support those working on the ground— Here is a list of our partner organizations. These are some of many who are working relentlessly to address the injustices in Palestine and the world.
  
• Join one of the largest protests in world history on Sept 18, the 1-year deadline for Israel to abide by the International Court of Justice order to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza.
• Call on your governments to recognize Palestine and to vote at the UN to intervene with the on-going genocide in Gaza.
• Boycott, Boycott Boycott. Download the app!.

Keep the pressure on your governments, raise your voices in protest, support the movement to end oppression and violence worldwide.

Sami Awad

Co-Director, NVI

International Court of Justice ICJ; https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176