Coercive Non-Violence Isn't What You May Think
I never post twice a day -- and I apologize for crowding my fellow bloggers -- but e-mail and online responses to "A Quiet Read," below -- about Gershom Gorenberg's "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank" -- show that few know what "coercive non-violence" is. I'd better try to explain.
From the national-security-state right to the "armed struggle" left, people scoff that coercive non-violence is pious pacifism and passivity and that those touting it are either credulous dupes or Machiavellian oppressors. But coercive non-violence requires as much concerted, collective energy as warfare, and more courage than that of the scoffers on both sides, whom history often turns into pious apologists for mass murder.
Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World explains that practitioners of coercive non-violence are committed and disciplined to expel not just the oppressor but the oppressive methods they themselves have internalized. They stop obeying established power and generate new power by doing new things together peacefully that the oppressor disapproves. That needn't mean that they attack or, if attacked, turn violent, although at times, they may: Scoffers seem unaware that Gandhi and King weren't pacifists, and they don't understand what that means. It's urgent that we find out.
Scoffers think that advocates of coercive non-violence are moral purists. But it's militarists and violent liberationists who stink of purity when they pretend that the blood shed in their cause has sanctified it, even as their adversaries' blood sacralizes that side, as well.
Morally as well as physically, violence in people's wars as well as by military machines is usually a dead end. As Albert Camus understood but Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon did not, those who lack the courage to think their way through this become, by default, apostles of murder.
The blogger Phil Weiss, for example, has barricaded himself into an intellectual Masada that leaves no option I can find short of massive dispossession of Israelis for the sake of his own tortured ethno-moral equilibrium. Why does Weiss scoff at Gershom Gorenberg's excruciatingly conscientious "The Missing Mahatma"? Gorenberg's and Schell's insights make Weiss uneasy. In an intellectual Masada one gets a sweeping view and some interesting dispatches but not enough truth of the kind George Orwell got in Spain.
History since 1789 shows that the "people's war" left has often been as much implicated in murderous folly -- even in victory, in post-revolutionary Paris, Moscow, or Phnom Penh -- as has the "blood and soil" nationalism of the right, in Madrid or Santiago. Yet some editors at some leftist publications or websites are pious clerics of other people's violent "purity" who turn smoothly away from its ugly consequences, as if they're trapped in a cold, fine-spun, unquenchable rage at their own bourgeois upbringings.
Weiss accuses advocates of coercive non-violence of drawing facile analogies between what it took to drive the British from India and what it will take to remove Israelis from..... where? I'm not sure if he means all of the Palestine of, say, 1936, but he seems to want all Israelis kicked out of the Middle East, pretty much the way the British were kicked out (by the Israelis, often violently, even terroristically), and not the way the Brits were kicked out of India by Gandhi. Weiss hasn't factored in Kant's portentous if stupid assessment of Europe's Jews as "these Palestinians who are living among us," a people too Levantine for Christendom.
Weiss also seems unaware that Gandhi was no pacifist and that he's the one making facile analogies between Palestine and India. He writes as if he'd gloat if the War in Iraq came home to America. There is something sadly missing here - and something else that is sadly far too present.
Schell's rendering of coercive non-violence draws not just from Gandhi but also from the even less-pacifist Hannah Arendt's understanding of the inverse relationship between violence and power: The more of the former, the less of the latter, and much sooner than many zealous young fighters of the left or the right ever seem to realize, until it's too late.
Real power grows from voluntary consent, or it is doomed by its violent imposition, even by people's liberation movements. This is what people who get swept up in moralism aren't strong enough to understand, or brave enough to deliver on. They're not equal to practitioners of coercive non-violence who have brought down vast-national security states in India, South Africa, American Dixie, and Eastern Europe.
I know that I must repeat here that coercive non-violence can't work in all conditions. Jews couldn't have tried it against Hitler, although, even there, it worked against him at certain moments, if for circumstantial reasons.
Gorenberg reports a range of Palestinian and Islamic assessments of all this. He doesn't push an ideological answer or a pie-in-the-sky solution. Israelis' own religious and national warrants for coercive non-violence are murky, and Gorenberg starts on this by contrasting Israelis' fraught readings of Jewish non-violence in the diaspora as cowardly and shameful - an understandable but ultimately uncomprehending and incapacitating assessment -- with Jews' own best examples across the generations. More needs to be said about this.
Finally, it always amazes me when supposedly progressive people say things about a supposedly rightfully Muslim and Arab Middle East that recapitulate right-wing Israelis' and right-wing Arabs' racialist "blut und boden" (blood and soil) notions that peoples belong to lands and lands to peoples in some nearly sacred way.
Why should anyone on the left carry this notion as far as these people do? The problem with it -- aside from the fact that Americans who embrace it should leave America and give back its blood-soaked lands to the original inhabitants -- is that it's a dead end for both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict and flies in the face of certain realities one may not see from a Masada.
Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq have been home to Christians and Jews as well as Muslims for centuries. The 1917 Ottoman census of Iraq counted 80,000 Jews among Baghdad's 200,000 residents, and 10,000 more Jews in Basra and more in Mosul. They had been there since 586 BCE. My brother-in-law, an Iraqi Jew whose family had been there for nearly 2500 years, grew up in Baghdad and attended a Jesuit-run high school there. He and his family escaped "back" to Israel after Saddam took power.
Purists of people's liberationist violence turn smoothly away from the fact that these Jews were kicked out. By their own logic, shouldn't they be equally accepting of the fact that as the Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, Tunis, and Damascus returned to Palestine along with Kant's European "Palestinians," many Arabs were kicked out, too? Wasn't Hebrew the language of the area for a thousand years before any Arab was spoken and 700 years before Islam grew out of the Hebrew religion? Wasn't Palestine mostly Jewish when the Romans named it... Palestine?
That's what "full Israel" Zionists will tell you, and while they're right on those facts, they're so violently wrong in so many other ways that I wonder if people's liberationists at the London Review of Books can see how their own and the Zionists' sacred nationalist logic converge, and how tragically and wastefully they are fueling that convergence.
Well, after all, this is something one expects and can almost understand among the Brits, into whom a few too many historical embarrassments and necessities have implanted a hypocrisy of such unprecedented purity and depth about these matters that one might think it genetic. But what about the rest of us?
"Finally, it always amazes me when supposedly progressive people say things about a rightfully Muslim and Arab Middle East that recapitulate right-wing Israelis' and right-wing Arabs' racialist "blut und boden" (blood and soil) notions that peoples belong to lands and lands to peoples in some nearly sacred way."
Israel and Israelis as trafe! Do you know how bad that is, how close it is to Jews as subhumans? I've waited for others to comment...in vain. So I'm sorry to say that it is the "progressives" and their ideas who are trafe, and the Jews among them far worse, far, far worse.
April 1, 2009 3:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Today's problems between the Palistinians and Jews are the direct result of the Israelites refusal to follow God's words to Joshua to commit harem (ethnic cleansing) of the inhabitants of Caanan during the exodus from Egypt.
This same situation occured in South Africa with the Boer's and the native Africans (blacks). It was avoided in the USA by decimating the native Americans (ethnic cleansing).
To determine who has the right to occupy any given land, it must be determined when the world began. For the USA, it was within the last 150 years.
For Africa, the blacks drove out the aboriginies approximately 8,000 years ago.
For Israel, the Israelites arrived with Abraham, left voluntarily with Joseph, returned under Joshua, were dispersed by the Romans, and returned in the 1940's to claim their "ancesteral" lands.
Who has a right to the land of Caanan depends entirely on when the world began. 2,500 BC, 1,500 BC, 71AD, or 1948 AD.
And whoever said "Might doesn't make Right."
Whatever people or nation can take a land and hold it against all comers has the right to that land. This has been proven over and over throughout the history of the world.
.
April 1, 2009 4:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Might makes right" is wrong.
If I come and take your house and hold it against your attempts to retake it, does that make me right?
I thought not.
Power-mad monsters believe what you believe.
April 2, 2009 12:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Isn't that what the banks are doing with the forclosures?
Join the real world.
April 2, 2009 10:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Foreclosures are equivalent to God-supported ethnic cleansing?
April 2, 2009 12:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, Forclosures are equivalent to someone taking a home away from someone by force.
My original comment was dealing with peoples and nations. NewsNag took it to the individual level and stated a platitude rather than dealing with the comment as it was written.
Even at the individual level, that platitude: ""Might makes right" is wrong." fails the real world test. In a forclosure, the Might and the Right is accepted as the law enforced by the police.
What is considered to be Right by one person can easily be considered Wrong by another. It all depends on whether you are on the giving or the receiving end of the Might.
Just ask the city fathers of Carthage and Troy, the American Indians, the Incas, or the Aztecs whether "Might makes Right".
I don't hear of anyone seriously postulating the return of anything to them.
April 2, 2009 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was nodding in agreement during the first half of this post, when you were bashing the folks who ridicule nonviolent methods of resistance. Good for you. People on all parts of the spectrum are far too prone to think they are being "realistic" by dismissing nonviolence.
Unfortunately you then decided to start playing games. Where does Phil say he say he favors massive killing and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East, or is that just something you stick on him because it allows you to dress up in your George Orwell costume? Most anti-Zionist lefties in my experience favor a one-state solution with the notion in mind that all ethnicities will live together in peace. It might be unrealistic (I'd worry about it turning into another Lebanon), but it's not "blood and soil" nationalism on behalf of conservative Muslims. You can find a few nutty people who favor expelling all Jews from Israel--I see them once in a while online and they are, putting it kindly, morons. But I think most of us know perfectly well there have always been Jews in the Mideast and furthermore, we don't have anything against immigration either. It's the folks who talk about a "Jewish state" and demographic threats who seem more blood and soilish to me.
Try arguing with what people actually say, and not what you claim they "seem to want". Doing the latter is fun, but you might enjoy it less if they start doing it to you.
April 1, 2009 4:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, fair enough, DonaldJ, although obviously people already have done it to me, as per the Phil Weiss entry I linked! And I've adjusted my phrasing a bit for Phil's sake, but not much, because I don't see him really pointing the way, except through bromides to a constructive or even viable future.
That said, the situation is not only devilishly complex but so bitterly daunting that only a faith (not necessarily religious) as deep as Gandhi's or King's offers any hope, and Gorenberg is right to explore it, and Weiss suspiciously wrong to deride him for making such a conscientious and illuminating effort.
April 1, 2009 4:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've said this before, but I'm afraid there's a tendency among apologists for Israel to make the situation in Israel out to be more complex than it really is--I'm afraid as an excuse to avoid having to confront some simple and rather obvious, but uncomfortable, facts. This is not to claim that the situation in Israel isn't complex--it is--but I see no evidence that the situation in Israel is inherently any more difficult than the situation in South Africa during the apartheid years. The problem in South Africa and the problem in Israel are, in many respects, identical. The state is an ethnocracy, which leaves the indigenous people disenfranchised. And the solution in Israel is, as it was in South Africa, to end the ethnocracy, create a state that is blind to ethnicity, and work through an admitedly difficult but not impossible program of reconcilation and acceptance. We leftists hardly want to rid Israel of the Jews. All we want is to see Israel convert, much like South Africa did, to a truly pluralistic democracy that sees all its people simply as its people, without regard to their race, ethnicity, religion, or ancestry.
April 2, 2009 12:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Except that the distinction between indigenous and non-indigenous is a meaningless one. In the case of South Africa, whites have lived there for 300 years. They are just another African tribe. The case in Israel is even clearer. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in what is now Israel for more than 3,000 years. Who's the indigenous group again?
What does it mean to be "blind to ethnicity"? Israel was founded as a solution to the ancient problem of anti-Semitism. It was meant to be a state for Jews the way Japan is a state for Japanese people and Hungary is a state for Hungarian people. So if you're going to condemn the idea of a Jewish state, you'd better condemn the idea of the Japanese state. Or else you're going to have to come up with an explanation as to why only Jews are not entitled to a state of their own.
This brings up another point. It is a standard leftist shibboleth that nationalism equals racism. Not so. Different countries take different approaches, but many have reconciled the idea that there can be a dominant group with a commitment to equality for all citizens. Israel is no different.
April 2, 2009 1:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
The 50,000 or so Jews that lived in Israel/Palestine pre-Zionism certainly are indigenous as much as any of the Arabs who lived there before Zionist immigration began. The millions of Jews who came from Europe in the early twentieth century and who actually set up the ethnocracy--not so much. I'll qualify that somewhat because I do believe those immigrants from Europe are fully indigenous now and have every right to stay where they are. However, I do not believe that, just because some of their co-religionists lived in Palestine for thousands of years and some of their ancestors may have lived there thousands of years ago, they have a right to just move in, take over the place, set up a country for themselves, and marginalize the millions of Arabs who also live there. Sure, let's recognize Jewish rights to live in Palestine. But then let's also recognize Arab equal rights, not only to live there, but also to fully participate in determining the nature of the government.
Israel has a right to be an Israeli state, just like Japan has a right to be a Japanese state. That means the Israeli people have a right to have an Israeli state. But that's not necessarily the same as the right to have a Jewish state--especially when a significant portion of the population of Israel is non-Jewish.
April 2, 2009 7:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
But you're still applying a double standard. Every nation-state was founded by people moving in and setting up a state for themselves. You think the Arabs that were in Palestine before Zionism had been there forever?
The only difference between Zionism and other nationalisms is that Zionism is the nationalism of a dispersed people. But the story of the Jews is different from that of other peoples. Jews were stateless for 2000 years and yet maintained a distinct sense of peoplehood. I fail to understand why that delegitimizes Zionism.
Israeli Arabs vote, have representation and participate in civic life in Israel. But they are a minority the way, say, Hungarians are a minority in Romania. Yes there is discrimination and Israel should work to reduce that. But the civil protections for minorities in Israel are strong.
I still do not understand what it is you object to. As a state with about 70-80% of its people being Jewish, Israel is, by definition, a Jewish state. As such, the state takes on a character that is shaped by and for Jews. Minority rights are protected, albeit imperfectly, but the Jews by and large call the shots.
I hasten to add that this analysis applies to Israel without the West Bank. If you add in the West Bank, then the story changes, which is why it is important to have the West Bank become a separate state eventually.
April 2, 2009 9:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
It doesn't appear that you actually know what Zionism is, or the backstory to the founding Israel, also known colloquially as "the Jewish State."
The reality is, you can be born in Brooklyn, move to Tokyo, go through a bureaucratic process and become a full citizen of Japan. You can become a full citizen of "the Jewish State" only if you are certified by the State of Israel as a Jew, actually and racially of Jewish ancestry.
The "single state" solution proposed above is a non-starter. The Israeli state is constructed as it is specifically to ensure that only Jews will run it. The Knesset will always be majority Jewish and the executive branch will always be majority Jewish.
That being so, the "two-state" solution, in which Palestinians are accorded their own state, is the only game in town which can provide peace in this region. Of course, right-wing Israelis, with plenty of backing from American Jews who don't actually have a dog in the fight (or an oar in the water), are favoring the "expulsion" solution: round up and load all non-Jews into trucks, drive them to the Jordan, Syrian, Lebanese and/or Egyptian borders and dump them on the other side of the line. Shoot those who try to return.
"Eretz Israel," indeed.
Thanks.
mp
April 2, 2009 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
It appears that while you seem to know very little about Japan, perhaps accidentally your Japanese analogy is apt.
Having lived in Japan before, I can tell you that becoming a Japanese system entails more than just a "bureaucratic process". It is next to impossible for anyone who hasn't married a Japanese citizen. There are people of Korean ancestry in Japan who after four generations are still not citizens. Those foreigners who do become citizens must legally take a Japanese name. Even people who have lived in Japan for decades are still treated as outsiders. The chances of a person holding a high position in government if they are not ethnically Japanese is next to nil. Japan is a country that is run by and for the Japanese people. They, like Israel, try to guarantee minority rights, but at the end of the day there is some level of discrimination unfortunately.
This is what is so infuriating about these conversations. Compared to the vast majority of countries in the world, Israel does a much better job of protecting minorities. Compared to the Christian minority in Egypt, for example, the Muslims in Israel have it easy. Yet no one raises a stink about an Egyptian or Japanese "ethnocracy." It is hypocrisy on a grand scale.
Yes, Israel was founded as a state for Jews. So what?
April 2, 2009 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Er - that should read "becoming a Japanese citizen" not "system".
April 2, 2009 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Yes, Israel was founded as a state for Jews. So what?"
The "so what" is that in founding the Jewish state, around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced out and in both cases not allowed back in. If it really had been a land without a people for a people without a land, then "so what" would be appropriate,but it wasn't.
Now this is no different from the way America was founded, but Israel had the bad taste to do all this in the mid-20th century, when this kind of behavior was starting to go out of style.
The fair solution would be to allow all the Palestinian refugees a right of return, but that's politically impractical, it seems, though these days nothing seems politically practical. I'd worry about the one state solution on the grounds that it might lead to a civil war between what Jim Sleeper calls the "blood and soil" crowd in each camp--I think there are enough of those on both sides to start such a war.
April 2, 2009 1:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
What you fail to acknowledge is that every country has this in their history. It's just a matter of how far back you have to go. That is why condemnations of Israel on this ground are so hollow. Where the f*** do Europeans, Africans, Arabs and others get off accusing Israel? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
And in fact, in the aftermath of WWII, which was when Israel was founded, there was quite a bit of population shifting, especially in Europe. Germans were booted out of Poland. Italians were kicked out of Yugoslavia. Hungarians out of Romania and Romanians out of Hungary. And let's not get started on the horrors of ethnic cleansing in the Soviet Union. Yet none of those injustices are the subject of such relentless international scrutiny as what happened to the Palestinians, which was at least partially their own fault anyway. It really does make you scratch your head.
April 2, 2009 3:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
"What you fail to acknowledge is that every country has this in their history. It's just a matter of how far back you have to go. That is why condemnations of Israel on this ground are so hollow."
If it'll make you happy, okay, I acknowledge that. I don't really know about "every" country, but a great many. It's an irrelevant point though, because of what you say yourself--"it's just a matter of how far back you have to go." By your logic, we can't criticize modern day slavery because slavery used to be in every country--it's just a matter of how far back you have to go. We can't criticize anybody for doing anything, really, because nobody ever shows any originality by committing entirely new crimes.
As for poor Israel, the target of criticism by every country, I will hold back my tears, because it doesn't seem to change their behavior any. South Africa used to make the same complaint, but in that case the empty rhetoric eventually stopped being empty and something good came out of all that UN hypocrisy. Also, the hypocrisy of the condemnations by various countries in the UN is balanced by the hypocrisy of the pro-Israel politicians in the US.
April 2, 2009 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unfortunately for Israel, that other nations at other times have done similiar things is for all intents and purposes beside the point. Had Israel made it's move a hundred years earlier it would not have had the same problem as a result of the displacement of Palestinians as it ended up having after it's birth in 1948 and to this day. The harsh fact is that by 1948 the era of doing such things and having it accepted had all but disappeared. So regardless of how you feel about what Israel should or should not have done or who you are "for" in the conflict, it is an enormous and ongoing and thoroughly unsettled issue. The movement and displacement of people in europe is not really analogous, at least in the minds of most people. Israel's displacement was more a colonial or imperial sort of displacement since many (if not most I'm unsure of the numbers) of the Israelis were not from the region at all, but were europeans moving into a completely different area thousands of miles from the countries of their birth.
April 2, 2009 9:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Forget it. The people you're arguing with are not amenable to reason.
Israeli history is well known. So is its political and social structure and the conduct of its armies. ...and the same is true of the Muslim and third world. Those who want to can easily see that the war criminal President of Sudan is treated quite well by Muslims, that South Africa is not a tolerant, multi-cultural paradise but, increasingly, a failed, racist state much like Zimbabwe, that blacks, browns, and yellows are less tolerant and more racist than whites, usually much, much more.
Yet almost nothing about that appears on TPM Cafe (excluding the occasional token nod of agreement). Why? For two reasons. The first, the lesser, is that Israel is nuclear and central to world affairs. The second, the greater, is that Israel in particular and Jews in general are winners - very rich and powerful in relation to their numbers - and lefties are the party of the poor and the weak - losers.
The Arabs are upfront about the situation. Jewish success in Israel is an intolerable assault on their self-esteem, their sense of worth, their manhood so there will be no peace until that is remedied, they are avenged, Israel is destroyed.
But white Lefties in Europe and America cannot be so honest. What they are in need of is therapy. Direct confrontation with reality is far too painful for them.
April 2, 2009 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Israel is nuclear and central to world affairs"
I can assure you those are the only real reasons we hear about Israel as much and as often as we do and if oil weren't nearby we simply wouldn't care. Despite all the claims of the "power" of "the lobby" and all the rest, if Israel's situation did not have a direct impact on the stability of world politics and on the United States interests in the middle east in particular, you would not hear about what is going on there anymore frequently than you read or hear about Zimbabwe or South Africa or Paraguay for that matter.
America does not intrinsically care at all about what happens in any of the middle eastern nations. It used to be that the middle east had a strategic importance in terms of the east/west conflict in the cold war but with that over and done with, oil alone makes the region important to us. If it weren't for the oil and Israel's proximity to it, Israel could have all the nukes on the planet and it would be of little concern to the US.
April 2, 2009 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Quite right, oleeb. That was George Marshall's position in his argument with Truman - he was very upfront about it - and it remains as a very strong argument in determining American foreign policy.
But Marshall was talking about America, as were you, while I was talking about Lefties and their positions and arguments. Marshall talked about oil, Lefties argue morality and history.
Of course, morality and history are not irrelevant; Truman made his choice based on them...to the detriment of our interest in oil...so politicians play to both; clever Israelis argue that they are a better and more reliable partner than the Arabs ever could be, partly because we share a similar heritage, partly because - as a European culture - they are modern in technology, finance, governance, etc., and, as such, serve to better protect our claims to middle east oil than total reliance on Arabs.
The conflict between Arab and Jew is intractable precisely because it cannot be cast as right vs. wrong. It's a fight for survival, a fight for land between two incompatible cultures which cannot co-exist. One will win, one will lose. It's been seen that way by both sides right from the beginning and continues to be viewed that way by those honest enough and tough enough to acknowledge an often cruel reality.
April 3, 2009 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
"which is why it is important to have the West Bank become a separate state eventually."
Brad - Eventually is the key word, as my relatives remind me weekly - the Jews waited for 2000 years for a state and the Palestinians can wait as long as we did for their state. In this context 42 years of occupation are inconsequential.
April 2, 2009 8:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
"In this context 42 years of occupation are inconsequential."
In the context of everyone under 42 years it is a lifetime and is definitely not inconsequential to them.
April 2, 2009 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I haven't read Gorenberg's piece yet, but will get around to it. I'd be predisposed to both like and dislike it, depending on how it comes across. I do think Palestinians should only engage in nonviolent resistance--otoh, I think Phil and others are reacting to what they perceive as yet another attempt to put all the blame for the violence on the Palestinians, when most of us lefties think the Israelis should get the brunt of the blame for that. Whether that is a fair criticism of Gorenberg's piece I can't say yet, not having read it. It is a fair criticism of a great many people one sees online who do this--talk as though everything would be peace and flowers in Israel/Palestine if only the Palestinians had their Gandhi, as though the Israelis are the innocent victims.
April 2, 2009 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for bringing up this topic - peace is made by tough guys in my view.
If you want peace you have to be tough and strong.
Fearful people start wars. Hate and fear make people weary and weak in the long run. How do people live in a state of perpetual animosity ? Do they have insomnia and generally bad health ?
Trying to wipe people out, opposing them at every turn, thinking of novel ways to make them miserable ... what a dreary existence.
Note : this post does not pick a side - remarks apply to all involved.
April 1, 2009 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sleeper creates a few straw men to slay and his characterization of Weiss's views are unrecognizable, but I will let Phil defend himself. The general characterization of leftish views is also mostly unrecognizable in many of those of the leftist persuasion that post here at the cafe.
Among other mis-characterizations is this:
Purists of people's liberationist violence turn smoothly away from the fact that these Jews were kicked out. referring to the Arab Jews that were forced out of their ancestral homes after 1948. This was a tragedy and it is always sad to see old communities (some these going back multiple millenia) disappearing. But how could the left or any even any state have stopped what happened. In fact, once the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Palestine began in 1948, it was a near certainty that the minority Jewish centers elsewhere in the Arab world would suffer. It was predictable and I suspect that the Zionist were not only fully aware that this might happen but wanted it to happen -- after all Palestine needed more Jewish immigrants.
Don't blame the left for what happened here. Perhaps it is time to maybe look a little at your own responsibility.
April 1, 2009 7:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow. Fascinating post. If I could rec it more than once I would.
Also, from Weekly Standard -- Pretty much nails it.I get irritated about them being misrepresented as "pacifists." My only quibble is that "sainthood" came later for both men, obviously. While alive, they were reviled by many.
Thanks for that link to Gershom Gorenberg's essay -- The Missing Mahatma and Jonathan Schell gets it so right in explaining coercive non-violence.
It is a relearning of the relationship between power and violence. I also don't see where Gandhi or King ever represented themselves as moral purists. I'm kinda certain that's the one thing they did not believe themselves to be.
It's always been the mob that lay claim to moral purity. What I like about Gorenberg's essay is the complicated journey he shows of a region and a people towards using non-violence and placing that journey in the larger history. Abu Sway's preaching of non-violence has been a belief in search of a leader and an activist. And then Gorenberg describes Jawdat Said's Path of Adam's Son. That was fascinating. Through Gorenberg's essay, what I found fascinating was the way that violence gets utilized and represented and also how a mob philosophy persists.
April 1, 2009 9:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
oos... Sorry. Correction -- Not Abu Sway, but Mubarak Awad. I was multitasking and multitalking.
April 2, 2009 12:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are no doubt correct that most people have a very poor understanding of the method of Satyagraha invented by Gandhi and brought to America by Martin Luther King. Only by being misinformed can people make the assumption that the methods so successfully used by these men do not work. From it's first use in America, Satyagraha has been distorted and mischaracterized as "pacifism" or "passive resistance" when nothing could be further from the truth.
Satyagraha is a word invented by Gandhi himself to describe the nonviolent resistance (not passive) he and his followers used to such great effect. It has several meanings: "truth force", "love force", "soul force", but Gandhi's personal preference was "the nonviolence of the strong". Notice he says the strong instead of the weak though those who consituted the troops in the nonviolent armies of Gandhi and King were almost all poor and cloe to powerless. He called it this because of the personal strength and discipline required to become a Satyagrahi or one who practices Satyagraha. The courage and sacrifice of the Satyagrahi requires strength far greater in order to meet violence--no matter how brutal--with nonviolence.
It is true that Gandhi and King were not pacifist but they did reject violence as a method of bringing about change and did so unreservedly. They rejected violence because it does not bring an end to conflict it only extends it. Violence only succeed by crushing it's opponents. Nonviolence wins by converting and transforming, not conquering the enemy.
I have often thought that if the Palestinians were to use Satyagraha instead of violence in their struggle with the Israeli government that they would see far more progress on a much faster track in a short period of time than they will if the persist in their armed resistance for another hundred years. An organized campaign of nonviolent resistance is not something the Israeli establishment is prepared for and would have difficulty suppressing. It could even lead to an accomodation and peace in the region. But that is pure speculation and is unlikely to occur in any event given the totally poisoned atmosphere all around in that situation. More's the pity too.
Gandhi unesitatingly decalred that there is no oppression that cannot be defeated with nonviolence because nonviolence is the most powerful weapon available to humanity. Having studied his methods and their practice I agree with him. But the way of Satyagraha requires sacrifice on a scale that is unimaginable for many notably because it requires the sacrifice, even of one's life, without any violent physical retaliation if necessary. This method literally sacrifices it's own followers rather than that of the enemy. It is a literal acting out of Paul's advice in the Bible for Christians to love those who persecute them and that their love would be like heaping hot coals onto the heads of their oppressors. I cannot imagine anything more difficult or demanding than the dsicipline this kind of sacrifice would require in the face of what might appear to be unyielding brute force.
Because most people are really quite uninformed about Satyagraha and how it is implemented they dismiss the idea as ineffective. But I would remind those very people that in every case where the method is adopted with discipline and rigor, those who use it succeed. Can they explain why this is so if "nonviolence doesn't work"?
April 1, 2009 9:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very true, what you say about the sacrifices required by practitioners of satyagraha. Somewhere, while studying this I encountered the clearest explanation by Erik Erikson. Along with Nojeim and Donatella della Porta. Also, I think there was a study done on prisons, and the violence that prison guards have to inflict and the toll it takes on them. No, that's not pacifism but the toll was on the person dispensing the violence and that is what I understood satyagraha to be. Turning the dispensing of violence against the dispenser by not retaliating in anger or through return violence.
April 1, 2009 10:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is a very good way to explain it. It illustrates the guiding principle very well.
People have a hard time grasping this I think (if they are made aware of how it works) because it seems almost supernatural.
April 2, 2009 2:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
I will say the concluding para is rather rough. I don't understand what, specifically, Mr. Sleeper has against lrb.
April 1, 2009 10:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2855:prof-stephen-zunes&catid=88:in-depth
"While supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station. For example, in the occupied Palestinian city of Gaza in 1981, Israeli soldiers -- who had shown no hesitation in brutally suppressing peaceful pro-PLO demonstrations -- stood by when a group of Islamic extremists attacked and burned a PLO-affiliated health clinic in Gaza for offering family-planning services for women.
Hamas, an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who had been freed from prison when Israel conquered the Gaza Strip 20 years earlier. Israel's priorities in suppressing Palestinian dissent during this period were revealing: In 1988, Israel forcibly exiled Palestinian activist Mubarak Awad, a Christian pacifist who advocated the use of Gandhian-style resistance to the Israeli occupation and Israeli-Palestinian peace, while allowing Yassin to circulate anti-Jewish hate literature and publicly call for the destruction of Israel by force of arms."
I posted this on the previous thread.
my mistake.
April 2, 2009 12:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
You want more on palestinian non-violent activism?
Start here
How many times on these pages have I linked to Helena Cobban, a Quaker and pacifist, with longstanding connections in the occupied territories? How many times has that been ignored or dismissed?
April 2, 2009 12:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yesterday's Sojourner "Verse and Voice," which I just got to this morning, tells me:
Concept.
Thanks.
mp
April 2, 2009 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Link:
On the other hand, the linked story about taking an axe to kill a 13 year old and injure a 7 year old indicates that violence is still all too common.
April 2, 2009 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
I find the situation in Israel and Palestine analogous to China's occupation of Tibet. Both are the longest running occupations in modern times.
I have yet to meet an Israeli who feels that China is right in continuing it's occupation of Tibet. Yet when I ask how do you expect the Tibetan's to throw off the yoke of the militarily superior Chinese, it dawns on them what I'm getting at. At that point the discussion usually centers around "but we're different and we are just reclaiming our original homeland". When I point out that the Chinese have a similar claim dating back 2000 years - the discussion usually ends.
Applicable to this discussion is what realistic hope do the Tibetans have of ending their occupation. Violence would be useless against the Chinese and the Dalai Lama is as close to a Ghandi as we have currently in the world. He has made no progress ending the occupation even after decades of effort.
I have severe doubts that a Palestinian "Ghandi" will make one iota of difference with Israel. The power disparity is too great and Israel feels anything the Palestinians get is a "concession". Justice, economic viability, human decency do not enter the picture - only real politics.
The status quo is just fine with Israel as it is with China. In the late 70's and 80's I watched hundreds of non-violent Palestinian demonstrations and as far as I could see very fews Israeli or government officials were moved by their plight of statelessness. The Palestinians were mocked and laughed at. I see nothing in contemporary Israel which would make them pay any attention to a "Ghandi".
April 2, 2009 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
" In the late 70's and 80's I watched hundreds of non-violent Palestinian demonstrations and as far as I could see very fews Israeli or government officials were moved by their plight of statelessness. The Palestinians were mocked and laughed at. I see nothing in contemporary Israel which would make them pay any attention to a "Ghandi"."
You of course, speak from decades of hard experience. Don't expect that to matter.
The illusionistes who are conjuring up this one-track Peace Train for Arabs Only aren't even that interested in listening to the voices of those they imagine should climb aboard.
April 3, 2009 1:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Isn't that always the problem. People putting together something and then imagining/feeling that 1) everyone should climb abroad, 2) never hearing their voices. Precisely because it is one-track, no?
April 3, 2009 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
It never occurs to those within the circles where this "Palestinian Ghandi" business has become popular to listen to anyone other than themselves.
To your larger point; "Isn't that always the problem...." Agreed, especially re our FP in the ME although there is some "listening" to the voices who say what we want to hear...The sources of THOSE voices are then declared "moderates" and annointed as "leaders".
April 3, 2009 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Concerning Tibet and China's occupation:
Was the USA's acceptance of that occupation a part of the treaty that ended the Korean war?
Geography maps changed at about that time from having a country called Tibet to showing that area previously called Tibet was now a part of China.
April 3, 2009 9:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
The 50,000 or so Jews that lived in Israel/Palestine pre-Zionism certainly are indigenous as much as any of the Arabs who lived there before Zionist immigration began.
That high number actually seems to be from the last years of the 19th century, after the first waves of Zionist immigration. At the beginning of the 19th century, the number of Jews of in Palestine was more like 7000. In the late 17th century the number of Jews had dipped to about 2000, which was less than 1% of the total.
April 2, 2009 11:49 PM | Reply | Permalink