What is the Center for Jewish Nonviolence?
The Center for Jewish Nonviolence (CJNV) brings Jewish activists from around the world to Israel/Palestine to join in Palestinian-led nonviolent civil resistance to occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.
CJNV’s Work
CJNV’s mission is to strengthen and uplift a robust and connected movement of Palestinians, Israelis and Jews from around the world committed to co-resistance and solidarity against Israeli occupation and apartheid. CJNV works towards its mission by taking part in on-the-ground and international campaigns that bring these communities together in nonviolent action.
CJNV’s activities aim to leverage Jewish privilege to support Palestinian efforts to stay on their land and maintain their way of life, as well as model and amplify the viability and impact of shared resistance.
CJNV chooses nonviolent action because of their belief that it is an important, effective and strategic way for to leverage their particular position and privilege as Jewish activists in this struggle. This includes the use of proactive or disruptive nonviolence and non-cooperation, existence is resistance efforts, and critical education.
CJNV’s main activities include:
-
Delegations of large groups of activists who come for 9-10 days and join in nonviolent action, critical learning, and projects that support sumud/steadfastness.
-
Hineinu, where activists stay in Palestinian communities in the West Bank and engage in daily embodied solidarity for three months, primarily through accompaniment and human rights documentation work.
-
The Olive Harvest, where volunteers join farmers and families, during this economically and culturally vital time of year in Palestinian society, to provide support for the harvest and protective presence against settler-state violence.
-
Activating, training and developing Jewish activists from around the world who are grounded in the realities of life under apartheid and the communities who struggle against the systems of injustice in Israel/Palestine.
-
Using its platform to amplify and highlight the voices and experiences of the individuals and communities it works with.
CJNV’s Values
Invited by Palestinians. All of their activities are led by and planned with their Palestinian partners. They are grounded in solidarity and close relationship with the communities and activists that they work with, and they follow their invitation as they co-vision the shared resistance that guides their work.
Leveraging Their Privilege. Within a system that is built upon a notion of Jewish supremacy, they–as Jews from around the world–carry immense privilege that they can leverage to undo that very system. They recognize that this privilege is not distributed equally amongst us, particularly along racial and gender lines. They support and amplify the efforts of those marginalized while working to dismantle and disrupt the systems that benefit some of us at the expense of others.
Resistive Relationships. They believe that relationships rooted in deep solidarity and co-resistance between Palestinians, Israelis, and Jews from around the world can and will disrupt and destabilize the material and ideological systems that uphold occupation and apartheid and oppress communities across Israel/Palestine.
Radical Imagination. They know that this work requires us to be flexible and adaptive, to learn from and be responsive to changing circumstances and possibilities. They seek to push the edges of what seems possible–strategically, politically, personally and spiritually–in order to vision and actualize different realities.
CJNV’s Founding Story
The entire premise of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence is that there’s power in using one’s privilege as a Jewish person from the diaspora to resist the occupation in solidarity with Palestinian and Israeli nonviolent activists.
On May 19, 2014, the Israeli army uprooted hundreds of fruit trees on Daoud Nassar’s family farm, the Tent of Nations, located just south of Bethlehem in the West Bank. The Tent of Nations is an internationally known educational and environmental meeting center where people from around the world come together. The Nassar family has lived on this land for the last century, despite efforts by the Israeli government to displace them.
When Daoud was asked how Jews around the world could support his family, he replied: come replant the trees with us in a show of solidarity, to demonstrate that the Israeli Army’s bulldozers don’t represent your Jewish values. Nine months later, in February 2015, twenty-five Jews from the US, Canada and Europe spent a week replanting trees on the farm and the Center for Jewish Nonviolence was born.
The Center for Jewish Nonviolence was founded on the idea that solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian communities is both powerful and necessary to build a just future.