From the Editor's Desk

Boston, MA. To help prevent the introduction of a statewide anti-gay referendum, visit www.massequality.org©2007 Ellen Shub

Throughout this issue of Peacework, you will meet people like the family in our cover photo, "displaced" from their homes and communities, or left to fend for themselves among the rubble of their former houses. The story of conquerors pushing the conquered out of their homes is as old as the fundamental concept of home itself. But now, more than ever before, people are employing both nonviolence and solidarity to re-enter, and to rebuild. To open this issue and to welcome Black History Month, we offer you Loretta Williams' inspiring call to remember our history, incorporating both what has been lost and what has been learned -- and to keep on learning, too (click here).

In Gaza, as Jennifer Bing-Canar and Adam Horowitz report, US-supported Israeli policy continues to cause great suffering. Israeli journalist Amira Hass uses the term "expulsion" to describe not the theoretical position of some Israeli politicians, but a well-established reality for Palestinians; in practice, it works by making it increasingly difficult to live or work in the Occupied Territories, and then making it increasingly difficult for those who seek work or homes elsewhere ever to return (click here). Rami Khouri warns that with the image of the military checkpoint fast becoming the most evocative icon of the Middle East, the escalating violence in this region may be indicative of a worldwide trend that will be hard to reverse.

What is already being reversed, however, as Khouri observes, is the centuries-old tradition of passive acceptance by the "natives." In Palestine, people have been shielding mosques and each other's homes with their bodies, and have shown a strong investment in their their own democratic process (click here). Afro-Colombians are forming "communities of peaceful resistance," training nonviolent "peace guards" and taking the corporations who have seized their lands to court -- and winning (click here).

Sometimes the soldiers who chase us out of our homes and villages aren't even fighting a war. In Okinawa, women have had sixty years of experience fighting the US military bases that have seized 20% of the island and bring crime, environmental devastation, and sexual violence to local communities. These women's activism and analysis are extraordinary, and their vision is international (click here).

Here in the US, the refugees are called "immigrants," a term used to separate them in the US consciousness from those of us whose forebears arrived in similar waves of workers, seekers, and dissidents. Our government repeatedly chases folks back to countries it has had a large hand in making unlivable, not because anyone really believes that the US economy could function without immigrants but to frighten and harass them into enduring persecution, exploitation, and constant fear as the price for staying. As David Bacon reports, these workers -- and the "legal" Americans whose racist fears are fanned into a populist frenzy -- are being used in a larger campaign to squash unions. The unions are beginning to fight back, but not yet hard enough (click here).

You can also read in these pages about individuals who left their comfortable homes of their own accord, compelled not by an outer but by an inner force: Chico Whitaker, dogged activist for democratization in Brazil and co-founder of the World Social Forum (click here); Eric Weinberger, the Chicago 9th you've probably never heard of (click here); and Enrique Alvarez Córdova, a wealthy Salvadoran and traitor to his class (click here).

For women, of course, home has never automatically meant safety from violence. Pakistan is just one of many countries (including our own) in which feminists are currently fighting the grip on the government of woman-hating religious fundamentalists (click here). Let us hope that the recently passed "Women's Protection Bill," flawed but hard-won, does not serve to quiet international criticism but to inspire Pakistani women -- and all of us -- to press onward for full equality and safe homes for us all.

-- Sara Burke, Co-Editor