Women in White Project
Imagine 100,000 women dressed in white coming to a war zone. Imagine them forming a nonviolent human shield. They are coming from all over the world, including regions party to the war whenever movement is possible. They are spanning all nationalities, all religions, all shades of skin, hair, and eye color, and all ages. Imagine them standing together to protect everyone, regardless of “side”, political affiliation, or national identity. They are committed and deeply trained, and they are determined to use the power of nonviolence to call everyone back to their humanity. They have trust in their capacity to stop the war and create a foundation for a peaceful approach to addressing the conflict that led to the war. They act as one body, rooted in nonviolence, loving life, vital, and full of faith.
This is no easy task. War zones do not come equipped with public transportation, hotels, and food stores. They know that how the project is run is an integral part of the vision of moving beyond war, making it essential to self-organize, so there is no force needed to keep it going. They collaborate and distribute leadership without any centralized body of people attending to the logistics. They will need the most enormous ingenuity to attend to all the logistical immensities of coalescing the resources necessary to bring them together, move them across the world, bring them to the frontline, and feed and shelter them on the ground where they stand together. They will need extraordinary trust in life to believe that rulers, generals, soldiers, and guerilla fighters will be transformed by their large numbers, as women, and only women, and that their love for all, including those who harm, will be enough to stop the shooting. They will need endless courage to face the horrific risk of being killed, raped, tortured, or kidnapped and continue to trust that 100,000 of them is enough to make it unlikely that this will happen. They will need enough conviction to trust the history of nonviolent struggles to mean that far fewer of them will be harmed than through any armed struggle.
Imagine today, now, a few women and men who are ready to be the first ones to step in, to seed this vision now, before the infrastructure is there, and to nurture it into being a tangible reality by committing hours, days, weeks, months, and years to moving this project forward. They are ready, even now, while horrors are happening, to create a field of love big enough to surround all that is not aligned with life. They are ready to design and bring into life a way to stop a war with the courage to speak truth with love and to act on the passion for life and liberation for all. They are ready to lean on relationship and creativity, on communities and movements on the ground, and on human ingenuity to attend to all that looks, at the moment, like intractable and daunting logistics, global relational mazes to navigate, insurmountable obstacles and legal challenges, and naive risk-taking.
Are you one of them? Are you called to serve life by diving into this first-of-its-kind adventure and collaborating with whoever else says “yes” and has the capacity to do so? Are you ready to actually co-hold this project from now on? If so, we invite you to read the full description.
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A’ida Shibli, Tamera
Miki Kashtan, Nonviolent Global Liberation
