Nafez Assaily (Arabic: نافذ العسيلي), born in 1956 in the West Bank, in the Old City of Jerusalem[1] grew up in Hebron, and is a sociologist[2] and Palestinian peace activist.
[7] A significant moment in his awareness came when he, a teacher of English in Jerusalem at the time, heard a talk in 1983 given by Mubarak Awad, a Christian Palestinian, and began to work under him.
According to her husband, the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh At the time, to put forward the image of yourself as a non-violent person was not kosher in the Palestinian community.
Israel allowed such reunions for Ethiopian and Russian Jews, and in 1990 Assaily forwarded a specific request to have 140 women and children who had been deported returned to their families.
[13] In 1986 he developed, in collaboration with the PCSN, his own project of a mobile book-loan service called "Library on Wheels for Nonviolence and Peace" (LOWNP) in Hebron in order to encourage reading among the youth of the town, and in particular the study of non-violence.
[5] According to a professor of Middle Eastern history, Sheila Katz The library touched thousands of families over the next three decades, teaching traditions of nonviolence and peace in Islam to empower participation in social change.
[16] In time Assaily's work received funding from organisations like the World Health Organization,[17] Pax Christi, Caritas Internationalis and Misereor, which enabled him in 2007 to branch out by developing a subsidiary Books Along the Divide service in order to furnish with reading materials young Palestinians, in taxis and buses, who found themselves obliged to wait for long periods to pass many of the 540 Israeli checkpoints.
[16] Assaily's research on pamphleteering in the several months following the outbreak of the First Intifada, according to which, of the 17 leaflets circulating, 163 actions were called for, and of the 17 methods advocated for resisting the occupation, 26 were non-violent, has been cited by historians such as Mark Tessler, Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor, Philip Mattar and others in comprehensive studies of Palestinians and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
[22] Assaily recounts episodes of how he advises people struck by settler violence to respond: Once Israeli soldiers razed all the trees in a community's olive grove.
[a]Another method is to ask children to bring to school Fanta or Coca-Cola bottles, or cans,[b] and then to fill them with pebbles, customarily used in throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers.
In response to the first Intifada, Harsina settlers built a security fence, and then, in 2000 gradually expanded, felling the olive trees and levelling the ground until the encroachment ran close up to his home.
[16] Speaking of Palestinians generally, Assaily argues that their principle virtue is patience, but that their great defect is the slowness with which they take on fresh ideas.
[29] Jerry Levin, CNN's former Middle East Bureau Chief before he was taken hostage by Lebanese terrorists, and now member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in the West Bank, has singled him out as a "creative Muslim exponent of non-violent activism".
Israel in trying to achieve peace and security through the exercise of force, the Palestinians by recourse to armed struggle, therefore, he argues, the time has come for non-violent pursuit of their respective goals.