Young Palestinian activists represent a potential new political and social force

“They’ve been through all this before, they lost members of their families, and they want to keep what they still have,” she said. “They tell me, ‘Why are you doing this? You’re going to ruin your life, and nothing is going to change.’ . . . I tell them that the cost of getting rid of the occupation is far less than the cost of living under it for a long time to come.”

Building civic participation

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(Samuel Sockol/WASHINGTON POST) - A 22-year-old university student, Hurriya Ziada is active in protests against Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

The protests Ziada and other activists promote take a page from the popular tactics of the 1980s uprising, or intifada, when crowds of unarmed protesters took to the streets to confront Israeli troops, shopkeepers held protracted strikes, and one town staged a tax revolt.

The aim, organizers say, is creative nonviolent action to disrupt the Israeli occupation. Activists regularly join what they call “popular resistance,” such as weekly marches in villages against the seizure of land by Jewish settlers or against Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank, which has cut off many farming communities from their lands.

Ziada and other Palestinian youth organizers have attended meetings in Cairo and Jordan’s capital, Amman, in recent months with young activists from countries swept by the Arab Spring. They came away with practical advice on how to rebut criticism and rumors intended to discredit protesters, how to avoid direct confrontations with security forces, and how to rally support among citizens who have tired of politics or withdrawn from it altogether, she said.

One of the most useful lessons learned, Ziada noted, was that participation can be enlisted by focusing on pressing social and economic problems that affect people’s daily lives.

In the West Bank, Ziada and others have led street-cleaning projects, helped build mud houses for people whose homes were razed by the Israelis and run activities for children in areas plagued by violence. The community work, Ziada said, was meant to encourage a sense of civic involvement and break patterns of passivity and resignation.

“When you clean a street, you feel related to the street because you cleaned it yourself,” she said. “If you build something in the country, you feel that this country is yours. We have to build a strong society from the inside, and that will help us move to the next step.”