Sharp warned that when authoritarians were overthrown through violence, those who next rose to power tended to be violent too. In his 1990 book, “Waging Nonviolent Struggle,” he described a technique that is instead “based on the ability to be stubborn, to refuse to cooperate, to disobey and to resist powerful opponents powerfully.” Corporations, Sharp argued, have been brought down when workers refuse to work, or consumers to consume. Military powers dissolve when orders are disobeyed by civilians. “Massive stubbornness can have powerful political consequences,” Sharp wrote. Amro, stubborn by nature, found this vision exhilarating.
He began organizing, starting a student committee to discuss what actions members might take. One of their first protests shut down a main thoroughfare in Hebron — one that was used by Palestinians, not Israelis. “Everyone asked me, ‘Why are you shutting this street down to our cars?’” Amro recalled. His answer: Palestinians had to be shaken out of their complacency first.
By that June, five months after the Israeli takeover of the university, Amro had managed to organize an occupation of campus buildings. Some 3,000 students, according to Amro, crossed the military barrier, and over the following weeks, they held classes, with the older students teaching the younger ones, as soldiers looked on. For the first time, Amro found himself in the cross hairs of both Israeli and Palestinian authorities: When Israeli soldiers threatened to demolish university buildings if the students didn’t leave, its Palestinian administrators urged Amro to stand down. Amro refused, and instead, the military relented. After seven months, Palestine Polytechnic reopened, a rare victory for Palestinians in the West Bank.
As Amro read more about South African history, he concluded that there was no way to talk about his own struggle without addressing the parallels to Mandela’s campaign against apartheid. His entire life in Hebron had been lived under a similar system of segregation, he told me: Israelis were given different license plates from West Bank Palestinians, which allowed them to drive on different roads; they had different colored identification cards, which entitled them to different rights from those, like Amro, who held West Bank Palestinian cards. If Amro was beaten by a settler on the streets of Hebron, the settler would be tried in a court in Israel under civilian law. If Amro carried out the beating, however, he would be tried in a military court, where the punishments were more severe. As a Palestinian, Amro was no longer even allowed to walk the street where he grew up.
Yet in Amro’s mind, Palestinian politics offered few paths out of the status quo. Armed factions like Hamas sought wars over peace deals; the Palestinian Authority had become a stateless bureaucracy known more for its corruption than for taking on Israel. In the rural villages of the West Bank, however, a small but growing movement had begun to challenge Israeli soldiers with marches, usually held on Friday, the Muslim holy day, often highlighting issues like grazing rights for livestock or water access. Amro saw potential for similar actions in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city: a steady series of sit-ins, marches and boycotts, directed at challenging the Israeli occupation and settlements.
