Yes YAS

Batya Ungar-Sargon posted this

The Nonviolent Palestinian Activists Working for Peace in the West Bank

on May 3, 2015.

She is described here as a freelance writer who lives in New York.  And here as a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who teaches at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and she seems to be a staff writer at Tablet Magazine and describes herself as a Recovering Academic, Award-winning Journalist, Aspiring Detective Novelist, Flip-flopper.


The leader of the group she is covering, ‘Youth Against Settlements’, coordinator rather, is Issa Amro who she describes so

a man with intense, close-set eyes, a ready smile, and an air of concentrated power

Hadar Sela has written of a fuller 

range of Amro’s activities, his International Solidarity Movement links (apparently including financial arrangements) and his organisation’s connections – all of which are necessary to view his statements in their appropriate political perspective.”

The last article on them at +972 is 14-months old.  Their Facebook page is more up-to-date. They are 'media trained'.

YAS actually complements the regular "popular resistance" struggle which is analyzed here. An excerpt:

The popular resistance is a strategy implemented on the ground in Judea and Samaria and integrated into the political, economic, propaganda and judicial campaigns currently being waged by the PA against Israel. As far as the PA and Fatah are concerned, the popular resistance is used to maintain constant, controlled tension in Palestinian relations with Israel...the popular resistance [is] an acceptable alternative to Hamas' "armed resistance" which the PA and Fatah feel is not, at the present time, useful in the Palestinian struggle against Israel.

...the popular resistance is not the placid, non-violent protest the PA pretends it is. It makes massive use of violence employing cold weapons, mainly involving the frequent throwing of Molotov cocktails and stones, and sporadic stabbing and vehicular attacks...The scope of the popular resistance has increased in recent months, although the popular resistance has not yet turned into a mass uprising. Occasionally the popular resistance claims casualties (killed and wounded) among Israeli civilians and soldiers, as well as Palestinians...

and this

In July 2013 Sarah Ali, a pro-Palestinian Canadian activists of Pakistani extraction was deported from Israel for her involvement in attacking an Israeli policewoman in Hebron. She was a volunteer activist in "Youth Against Settlements" (Ma'an News Agency, July 21, 2013). 

She quotes one member as saying

"It's not our way. We at Youth Against Settlements don't throw stones. Not for them. For us."

But the telling point is

 Youth Against Settlements partners with Breaking the Silence to make videos

^