HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023534.jpg

18

Article 5.
The Daily Beast
The Palestinian Right to Dream
Peter Beinart

May 25, 2011 -- I watched Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to
Congress with a guy named Fadi Quran. He recently graduated from
Stanford, where he double-majored in physics and international
relations. He lives in Ramallah, where he’s starting an alternative
energy company. And he just might rock our world.
Quran is helping to coordinate a raft of Palestinian youth
organizations—located in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan,
Lebanon and Syria—all united around one goal: to create a
Palestinian Tahrir Square. They organized the unity march that
helped pressure Fatah and Hamas to reconcile. Ten days ago, they
organized the Nakba Day protests in which refugees marched on
Israel’s borders.
What they’re doing isn’t exactly new. Palestinians in the West Bank
have been conducting regular nonviolent protests for many years
now, often against the separation barrier that stands between them
and their fields. But Egypt and Tunisia made Quran and his
colleagues realize that nonviolence was possible on a much larger
scale. Not everyone in his movement believes in peaceful resistance
as a matter of principle, he admitted sheepishly. But they all believe it
represents the right strategy. They’ve been studying the civil rights
movement and Gandhi’s struggle against the British and the
movement that peacefully brought down Slobodan Milosevic in
Serbia. No one wants a second intifada, he insisted. “It hurt us much
more than the Israelis.”
When I asked Quran what his movement believes, I expected to hear
about borders and refugees and Jerusalem. Instead, he began talking

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023534