NonViolent Resistance In Palestine

 - Marianne Torres

            Resisting an oppressive power by acts of protest and persuasion, non-cooperation and nonviolent intervention: We have much to learn about Palestine’s non-violent struggle and if your source of information is the American media, you won’t learn that the majority of the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self-determination has been, and is, nonviolent.

            The earliest days of Palestinian dispossession, from 1946 to the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, was marked by silence. Nearly a million Palestinians lived miserably in refugee camps in West Bank and Gaza, and with much difficulty, though free, in cities and towns of those areas until the 1967 war displaced another 10,000 Palestinians, and 50,000 were internally displaced due to land expropriation and house demolitions after 1967. The West Bank and Gaza were no longer free, but under an illegal military occupation.

            “In the first days of the occupation in 1967…” says Historian Abdul Jawad Saleh: “...the Palestinian nonviolence movement had a surplus. A dynamic voluntary work movement sprang up under the guidance of democratically elected municipal councils. This movement created jobs, built schools, established youth clubs and created public libraries. In 1973, establishment of the Palestinian National Front provided much-needed, central leadership with representation from all occupied territories. Its goal was to collectively confront the Israeli occupation by nonviolent means”.   (Live from Palestine: International & Palestinian Direct Action against Israeli Occupation, ‘04).p

            Today, the “Separation Wall” and blockage of Palestinian roads are met with graffiti, protests, nonviolent action, from simply going around to physical removal. Resistance to demolition ranges from protest by Palestinians and/or supporters to physical attempts to block bulldozers. Demolition of Palestinian homes, uprooting of their trees and crops, closing off of towns and villages from farmers’ fields and one another, happen at frightening speed, and these, too, are met with nonviolent resistance which often ends in the injury or death of one or more protesters (e.g. the death of Olympia’s Rachel Corrie). Just as Martin Luther King’s Vietnam speech signed his death warrant in this country, effective non-violent resistance ensures the imprisonment or death of effective Palestinian leaders, as well as severe punishment of their family members.

            Economic boycotts and non-cooperation, while present, have been more difficult because the Israeli hold is so tight and the (illegal) collective punishment so swift, massive and cruel.

            Why doesn’t the public understand the depth of nonviolent Palestinian resistance? An example of how violence is reported in our media is illuminating: Researcher Nancy Kanwisher and associates investigated the sequence of ceasefire violations and did a detailed analysis of which party—Israelis or Palestinians—broke truces, ceasefires and periodw of calm. Their findings, found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-kanwisher/reigniting-violence-how-d_b_155611.html, are clear: “Virtually all periods of nonviolence lasting more than a week were ended when the Israelis killed Palestinians first…. A systematic pattern does exist. It is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first following a lull, lasting more than a week.” Most people remember vividly the attacks on the Munich athletes and air passenger Klinghoffer. Few remember that Israel killed more than 20,000 unarmed civilians (primarily Palestinians) in Lebanon in two months of 1982, or that the Israeli army supported the ‘82 Lebanese Phalangist massacre in Sabra & Shatila refugee camps by blocking gates and shooting flares so the killing continued through the night.

                Discover the bias for yourself: Google “period of relative calm”+Palestine. An example from Alison Weir (www.ifamericansknew.org) in 11/2004: “The truce and this ‘calm’ were shattered long before this. The last suicide bombing against Israeli civilians was Nov. 1, 2004. It took three Israeli lives. Since that time, while Israelis have basked in ‘relative calm,’ 170 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed. During this LA Times ‘relative calm’ another 379 Palestinians were injured & maimed.”

                Certainly there has also been violent resistance. Palestinians are not monolithic. They don’t have one reaction to their plight. But, overall, the geo-political position of Palestinians doesn’t exude options. Fully enclosed on all sides, with the active animosity of the world’s richest power which has vetoed all but one Security Council resolution aimed at a just resolution, and corporate media in the West that demonize them at every turn, they have little outside support from the large institutions and states that could bring about resolution.

                If they fire a rocket, they are demonized. If they do a nonviolent protest, they are ignored. When every rocket is answered by hundreds of tons of bombs, bulldozers and bullets, experimental gases and weapons, there is little room for anything but non-violent resistance.

            Are we ready to support Palestinians’ non-violent struggle for self-determination? Keep your eye on PJALS to join our Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign. Palestinian non-violence: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/