A New Year, a New 'Liberation' Strategy
A couple of posts below, Bernie Avishai bears brave witness to an increasingly irresistible logic of non-violent protest in Israel-Palestine. This time it's by Jewish Israelis on behalf of Palestinians driven out of homes in East Jerusalem, but Palestinians are warming to this strategy, too, as he reports.
Some on the "people's liberation," "violent struggle" left still don't get this, any more than right-wing Zionists get it, even decades after Gandhi, King, Mandela, and dissidents in Eastern Europe showed how and when it can work. It certainly could in Israel-Palestine: In April I linked a colorful, counter-intuitive essay by the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg that bears reading in support and explanation of what Bernie is witnessing.
Before you scoff at this approach, you really owe it to yourself to read also "Coercive Non-violence isn't What You May Think," which notes that often power grows from voluntary consent but is doomed by violent imposition, even by violent "people's liberation" movements. Romantics of armed-struggle nationalism, Israeli or Palestinian, aren't quite wise or brave enough to recognize this and deliver on it. Avishai is both. Do read Bernie's post and its accompanying report by another participant, and forward it to anyone you know in Israel and Palestine.
Jim, I find it very hard to take you and Avishai seriously, despite your obvious good intentions, and I will explain why.
While suicide bombs certainly get press, the greater part of Palestinian resistance to Zionism has been of the non-violent type. This resistance has been rooted in Palestinian tradition and history, and include sumud, "clinging to the land," the checkered keffyiah, the general strike, boycotts, protest, music and art and what not. Just because you are not aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that Palestinians need you to get a lesson about Ghandi.
Mubarak Awad created the Palestinian Center for the study of non-violence in 1985. Israel expelled him three years later. The First Intifada started with boycott and a tax strike. Israel responded by destroying chicken coops used to replace eggs bought from Israel. The second Intifada started with a mass demonstration, that did not turn violent until Israel, on its own admission, shot 1 million bullets in one month. In 2001, Ghassan Andoni co-founded the International Solidarity Movement, to bring cooperation in non-violent resistance between Palestinians and solidarity activists. I took part in that at kind of work in the summer of 2003.
More recently, between 2002 and 2005, a new campaign for non-violent resistance coalesced in Palestine based on demanding supporters of Palestinian rights to boycott Israeli institutions complicit in the denial of Palestinian rights. It is called BDS. I assume you heard about it. In the same period, non-violent resistance became regular in demonstrations against the apartheid wall. large protests, joined by Jewish Israeli activists, take place each Friday in Bi'lin and Na'alin and other places. This has been going for over two years.Today, 1400 activists are stuck in Cairo, prevented by Mubarak's Quisling regime from entering Gaza to participate in a non-violent mass protest march against the siege of Gaza.
Ask yourself, how many times have writers here written about any of that? When did you express support for BDS? When did you or Avishai or anybody else cover the weekly demonstrations against the wall? Did you notice when Bassem Abu Rahma was murdered in Bi'lin in a non-violent protest and his death was captured on camera? Unlike the Iranian Neda, how many people in the West know who Bassem is? As an opinion writer, this is your fault.
Recently, Israel launched an aggressive assault on non-violent resistance. The villages of Bilin and Jayyous are raided every night. Abdullah abu Rahme from Bil'in is in jail on ridiculous trumped up charges, as are over a dozen other activists from the village. Mohammad Othman and Jamal Juma', both leaders and proponents of non-violent resistance from Stop The Wall are in administrative detention. When did anybody from the writers here ever noticed them and their work?
Did you notice the Gaza Freedom March? Activists have been beaten up yesterday by the Mubarak goons, who are as you know on US payroll. A french activist died yesterday from wounds from the beating. Did you know about it? Did you write about it? Did Avishai? Did MJ Rosenberg?
The way to help non-violent resistance in Palestine is not through lecturing us about what we should do. You can help by publicizing the work that is done, supporting the activists that do it, writing about their work, their demands, how people can help, and how the state of Israel is responding to them.
I'm glad the Avishai finally noticed non-violent resistance. But I'm less thrilled by the fact that he only noticed it when almost everybody involved is Jewish, as if Palestinian liberation can happen as a gift from left leaning Jews to Palestinians. I'm full of respect for the activists Avishai wrote about, but less for his failure to note the non-violent resistance is not a new development contributed by Jewish activists but something hundreds of Palestinian have been committing their life to, while being almost completely ignored by American liberals.
PS. I support the right of the Palestinian people to fight for liberty by any means it deems appropriate, including non-violent as well as violent resistance.
January 1, 2010 5:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The way to help non-violent resistance in Palestine is not through lecturing us about what we should do. You can help by publicizing the work that is done, supporting the activists that do it, writing about their work, their demands, how people can help, and how the state of Israel is responding to them."
So writes the self-styled "Evildoer." As far as I can see, Avishai is helping by publicizing the work that is done, and, by participating in the demonstrations, he is supporting the activists that do it. Having done that, he is writing about their work, their demands, how people can help, and how the State of Israel is responding to them.
I, who am much less involved in the Israel-Palestine conflict, am writing, for the third time here at TPM, about the under-appreciated strengths in disciplined, coercive non-violence. Each time, I have linked readers to the work and witness of writers who have gone much further into the matter than I. What I am doing is "helping by publicizing the work that is done."
I did some of it myself, at some risk some years ago, but I haven't written about it. It is a very hard and sometimes lethal undertaking, and it takes a long time to catch on; but it is far less lethal and counterproductive than the alternative. It's hard to know what Evildoer wants Bernard Avishai, Gershom Gorenberg, and I to do from our different vantage points and in our different ways, besides what we are doing. This post by Evidoer doesn't add anything to it, it. It tries to detract from it.
January 1, 2010 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nonviolence is not a magic wand. It works only in the special circumstance when the oppressor is weak or when, because of pressures other than the pressure exerted by the protestors, the oppressor has lost its will or its ability to maintain its oppressive regime. After WWII, Britain's empire was collapsing everywhere, and holding India was increasingly untenable for the British. Ghandi's effective protests made things more difficult for the British--but his nonviolent means where not necessarily any more effective than Irgun's more violent approach in Palestine. Jim Crow was doomed in the American South because the rest of the country no longer supported it and because it no longer made economic sense even in the South. MLK's action helped create sympathy for the civil rights movement and likely accelerated the process of ending segregation, but Jim Crow was doomed regardless, I think. And in South Africa, international sanctions had turned the apartheid state into a pariah state. The ANC using a mix of violent and non-violent means put pressure on the White Nationalist government--and Mandela became a potent symbol around which international sympathizers could rally--but ultimately it was international economic pressure and diplomatic isolation that led the Whites in South Africa to see the writing on the wall.
You can mock Evildoer all you want, but I think his call for "BDS" is what's needed far more than calls for nonviolence. If nothing else, BDS would create that additional pressure that is necessary to weaken the will of the oppressor and produce an environment in which nonviolence can succeed. (It also would be useful to unambiguously label Israel as an oppressor--I'm afraid there's too much reluctance among Israel's soft Zionist critics to do that.)
All that said, one thing that would help the Palestinians is having a leader like MLK or Ghandi or Mandela around whom both the Palestinians themselves and the rest of the world could rally. Leaders who embrace non-violence are more attractive to Westerners than those who embrace violence . . . and this really may be why non-violent resistance has been effective since the mid-20th century . To change anything in a world dominated by the West you need to gain the sympathy of Western populations, and having a charismatic non-violent leader is very helpful in doing that. In addition, a leader who could focus the Palestinian resistance on more effective action directed primarily at increasing Western sympathy for the Palestinian cause would be extremely helpful. Turning the hearts and minds of Westerners toward your cause and against the oppressor's is what is required for success in today's world. So far, the Palestinians have been very unsuccessful playing that PR game--and the Israeli's with their many supporters in the US--have been very effective.
January 2, 2010 8:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
My name/moniker is as relevant to this discussion as your hairline. Other than as an expression of your misplaced defensiveness, it serves no purpose. So it with some bewildered amusement that I note your accusation to another comment writer that I look "backwards and acting out, instead of learning from the past in order to move forward." I'm not acting out. I am trying to help you improve yourself, which you obviously don't seem to appreciate.
It's hard only in the sense that one needs to get past your defensiveness so let me repeat exactly the things you can do better.
1. Be informed and inform others, instead of writing as if you know something when you don't. Don't write about what Palestinians should do without doing the minimal homework needed to know what they have done and are doing. When you don't do your homework, you misrepresent the Palestinian struggle in ways that help undermining it. I hope this isn't your intention.
2. Don't represent non-violence, as Avishai does, as something colonized people need to "catch up on" by learning from the colonizers.
First, that kind of rhetoric, to the extent that it is heard by Palestinians, would only help discredit the work of non-violent Palestinian activists. Again, I hope this wasn't your intention.
Second, representing no-violence in this way is extending the "white man's burden" to resistance itself. This rhetoric pretends to support liberation while in fact helping propagate the idea that Palestinians are oppressed, not because Israel wants them to disappear, but because they haven't yet absorbred the wisdom of the White Man. It legitimizes the occupation.
Third, it is simply not true.
Fourth, it discredit the work of leftist Jewish activists like the people of Ta'ayush and Anarchists Against the Wall by associating it with colonial attitudes and practices. If you respect their work, you should talk with them before you misrepresent what they are doing as "teaching" non-violence to Palestinians. I don't think they would take yours and Avishai's embrace kindly.
3. Don't create straw adversaries, based on falsities, in order to bolster your political self-identification. Who are these people you imagine as "romantics of armed struggle nationalism" who supposedly fail to see the value of non-violence? Can you name them?
Every year, some of the most radical groups in the US, all of them committed to "people's liberation," help send dozens of activists to Palestine, to spend months on end supporting Palestinians engaged with non-violent resistance. I have yet to meet among those who do this work people who identify as centrist or liberals. Why? It is possible that people who identify that way are cowards. But I am more incline to think that the problem is that the thinkers and intellectuals of US liberalism have generally failed to support Palestinians rights in general and Palestinian non-violent resistance in particular.
So if you want to pick a useful fight, pick one with your fellow liberals who do not pay attention to non-violent Palestinian resistance, do not publicize it, do not defend it, and do not advocate public American support for it. The truth of this is sorry fact is in plain evidence here on TPM. That would be a useful fight, instead of taking swipes at an imaginary adversary who, in your imagination, does not support non-violence out of some romantic commitments.
I could go one, but I thinks that enough for now. If you make these three adjustments in the way you write on this issue, you could actually make a positive contribution.
January 2, 2010 12:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Evildoer needs to do less lecturing and more homework. I've posted three columns on this subject; they have lots of links. I'll leave it at that and consign the rest of the thread Evildoer and Purple State, who can save the world and each other here, as the rest of us move on.
January 2, 2010 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
what petulance!
January 2, 2010 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm afraid, as I said earlier, that Sleeper is motivated more by his petty and strangely personal disdain for what he calls "people's liberation" leftists or "liberal racists" than by any desire to understand what makes liberation movements effective or not. It's unfortunate, because Sleeper is an interesting writer, capable of complex and original thought--but at the same time his articles are marred and too often derailed by his apparently reflexive bouts of vituperation and, as you say, petulance. When you read a Sleeper article you may learn something interesting--but you will infallibly learn who Sleeper dislikes (or, maybe more accurately, whom Sleeper holds in contempt because his dislike always has a surprising and even embarrassingly and uncomfortably personal side to it). That list includes a certain type of sixties liberal, WASPs from Western Massachusetts, the British, and David Brooks.
But enough of Sleeper. He's taken his ball and gone home, anyway. And he did do us the favor, I guess, of getting an interesting game started. So we may as well continue to play--as we have more balls, I'm sure.
What, then, is truly required to liberate the Palestinians from the Israeli boot? I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as Sleeper about Avishai's demonstration of 200 drum-beaters in clown suits. If they succeed even at the far more modest goal of restoring the evicted Palestinian family to its home, I will be shocked (delighted, but still shocked). That these pathetic little demonstrations will lead to a sea change in Israeli-Palestinian dynamics seems far fetched to me. There are millions of other Israelis who have opposite views, and I see little evidence that these demonstrators will change the hearts and minds of their compatriots. More to the point, I'm not sure that even the demonstrators have the courage to change their own hearts and minds to the degree they will need to truly achieve justice for the Palestinians.
And here we arrive at the truth which those of us who really are looking forward and not backward must recognize: a necessary consequence of Jewish nationalism in Palestine is the destruction of Palestinian rights. You cannot have a Jewish state with a large Arab population. So the Arabs must either be removed or denied basic political rights. A choice must be made between Jewish nationalism and justice for the Palestinians. Our "forward thinkers"--Avishai, Sleeper, MJ--do not have the stomachs (or to continue our earlier theme, the balls) to stare this choice squarely in the face and grapple honestly with its consequences. Instead, they would rather place their hopes in 200 drum-beating clowns.
So where does this lead us? Palestinian resistance--whether violent or nonviolent--will lead nowhere without a corresponding re-evaluation of the basic premise of Zionism: that a Jewish state is essential to the survival of the Jewish people and that without such a state the Jews will suffer or, worse, be destroyed. The history of the Jews proves that this basic principle of Zionism cannot be dismissed out of hand. But to accept this principle is (mirroring Sleeper's words) to look backward, to believe the past is the future. If one truly wants to look forward one has to begin to search for a new paradigm. A paradigm that goes beyond Herzl's resigned acceptance of a world in which Jews and non-Jews essentially must be separated to protect the safety of the Jews. The exciting possibility about Israel and Palestine is that it will not prove Herzl right, but instead prove him profoundly wrong--the hafrada wall will be torn down and the relationship between Jews and goyim will be transformed permanently from one of division and distrust to one of unity and mutual acceptance.
But this will require more than a march of clowns, I'm afraid.
January 3, 2010 8:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
see at the end. I didn't want to respond in the narrow column.
January 3, 2010 8:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, that was a truly pathetic response. I agree with your advocacy of nonviolence but evildoer wrote a long, detailed piece explaining exactly what was wrong with what you said and how you said it and apparently you had nothing to say in response.
I think purple state identified one of your underlying motives, but I will put it more charitably. I think you are genuine in your advocacy of nonviolent approaches, but you also want to score points against some elements on the far left. Yes, it's true--there have been and maybe always will be some people on the far left who have romantic notions about guerilla violence and liberation movements --this also exists in the center and on the right--only the identify of the "freedom fighters" change. In fact, the way we valorize the military in this country is the same attitude in a different form. This attitude needs to be criticized. Unfortunately, the way you did it partook, no doubt unwittingly, of the standard condescending attitude American liberals often take towards the Palestinians.
January 3, 2010 7:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Bernie Avishai bears brave witness to an increasingly irresistible logic of non-violent protest in Israel-Palestine. This time it's by Jewish Israelis on behalf of Palestinians driven out of homes in East Jerusalem, but Palestinians are warming to this strategy, too, as he reports."
That, btw, is exactly what evildoer is talking about. Jewish Israelis stepping up to the plate, with Palestinians "warming" to the strategy. That's your description. In the meantime, here in the great ole USA (where preaching the ideals of nonviolence is limited to people oppressed by us or our allies), we hear barely one word about any of the nonviolent Palestinian actions that evildoer talks about, and nothing about the nonviolent Palestinian activists jailed by the Israelis.
This isn't a question of evildoer being mean to you--it's a question of who is more accurately describing the truth of the situation. Is there a long history of nonviolent Palestinian activism that's been largely ignored by liberal journalists in America (oh, except when Israelis lead the way), or did evildoer just make all that up?
January 3, 2010 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim - Just one question. If the Palestinians adopted full blown, Ghandi like, non violence do you really think Israel would allow them to have a viable sovereign state?
I've been going back and forth to Israel a couple of times a year for 50 years and I'm convinced that the Allon plan is what Israel has always had in mind as an eventual solution. If you look at the map of Barak's Camp David offer (aside from the vague offer to give the Jordan Valley back to the Palestinians sometime in the future)it sure looks like the Allon Plan.
My 35 relatives are all settlers and the maps they pass around show 5 distinct "reservations" for the Palestinians totally surrounded by Israeli territory and subject to complete Israeli control.
I've seen to much in these last 50 years to believe Israel will ever allow a true Palestinian state. The power differential between the two parties is simply too great for Israel not to succomb to the temptation of fullfilling their dreams in Judea and Samaria.
January 2, 2010 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
The way to help non-violent resistance in Palestine is not through lecturing us about what we should do.
Evil, I'm afraid you make a mistake in assuming Sleeper's primary goal is to "help non-violent resistance in Palestine." Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Sleeper really does favor non-violent resistance and that he at least modestly sympathizes with the Palestinian cause. But anyone who reads Sleeper frequently understands that his primary interest is in critiquing the methods, attitudes, and beliefs of a certain type of leftist who was maybe fairly common on college campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, but who is nearly extinct and certainly completely irrelevant today.
January 2, 2010 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Easy does it, Purple State. You're sounding more like Evildoer than you seem to realize, looking backwards and acting out, instead of learning from the past in order to move forward.
January 2, 2010 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I might conclude that you are right, but not before I give Sleeper an opportunity to prove you wrong.
January 2, 2010 1:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: "...an increasingly irresistible logic of non-violent protest in Israel-Palestine. This time it's by Jewish Israelis on behalf of Palestinians driven out of homes in East Jerusalem..."
ALSO SEE: "Everyone can drum", By Daphna Golan, HAARETZ, 12/22/09
(EXCERPTS)...We were on our way to Sheikh Jarrah, to the homes where Palestinian families were evicted onto the street.
The court authorized Jewish families to come live in those homes instead, since before 1948, the homes belonged to a Jewish organization. How will the education minister explain that Arabs are forbidden to claim the homes they abandoned in 1948 – in Musrara, Talbieh, Katamon and all the beautiful neighborhoods where only Jews live today – but Jews are allowed to claim their former homes?
We sang to a samba beat; the drums set the beat and made us merry. And then, dozens of police arrived in huge vehicles, along with others riding horses, and forcibly dragged away my son and his drummer friends. The police did not explain; they refused to identify themselves; they gave us no reason for the arrest. Two hours later, at Sheikh Jarrah, police attacked the clowns and the drummers and arrested 20 of the Israelis who sat down and said “no more” to racism in Jerusalem.
Altogether, 50 were arrested over the course of a day and a half. In custody, they sang Hanukkah songs and peace songs, and after being released, they continued to drum and sing in the square outside the court. Their drums are still being held...
...Everyone has a pot that can be used as a drum. Sometimes, it is deep in the cupboard. Sometimes, it seems impossible to reach it.
But everyone can drum – drum in order to wake us all up and suggest that we can do things differently. Drum for Jews and Arabs to have a shared life in Jerusalem.
ENTIRE COMMENTARY - http://jfjfp.com/?p=8758
January 1, 2010 9:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
If all Palestinians were non-violent, there would be peace. Period. That is the irresistible logic.
January 1, 2010 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
But there might not be justice.
January 2, 2010 7:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is your remark implying that Palestinian terror attacks are "justified"? It sounds quite similar to the violent mob rallying cry, "No Justice, No Peace". If there were total non-violence and peace, what would justice look like for you?
January 2, 2010 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
My remark implies only that I believe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is unjust. Justice will be achieved when the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza vote in Israeli elections alongside the Jews.
January 3, 2010 11:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
ok. I guess you know him better.
it seems that most of the people who admonish Palestinians to adopt non-violence (without noticing that many of them had) have no real stake in Palestinian loss or victory. They just think it would be nicer, especially for themselves. Avishai seems to be purposefully misrepresenting the events. He describes the people there as if they are all mini-Avishai, sharing his own political views and prejudices, and he represents the Arabs as by-standers. This is not true (see http://mondoweiss.net/2010/01/a-slice-of-life-in-sheikh-jarrah.html for example) . It is Avishai's fantasy in which only the "secular Israeli intelligencia" has agency and everybody else accepts their guidance and benign leadership.
Part of the problem as I said above is this kind of misrepresentation would discredit the protesters, and I read your reference to them as "clowns" in that vein. Especially if you pose the question of whether they will liberate Palestinians. Of course they won't. Nor will they bring Israel to its knees. Don't fall for Avishai's ploy to control the message of the protesters. Many of them are hard core organizers who go from protest to protest every moment they are out of their day job. These are hard, brave and experienced people that few match in terms of dedication. Their numbers is not great but they have an impact that is far greater than their number. Their role, on which a growing number of them is getting clearer and clearer, is not to liberate anything, but to provide an internal reference point that helps Palestinians both practically and rhetorically and helps us makes the case for increasing the pressure on Israel. I think they do an impressive job under conditions that are close to unbearable.
I don't think that asking the question "what is required to liberate Palestinians" is a good starting point for us. It is not my job or yours to figure that out. To answer that question well, intelligence is not enough. you have also to be grounded in the situation. That is the job of Palestinian movement intellectuals, like Barghouti, Juma, Samara and others. Our job is to ask them what help they need and figure out what is the best way to provide it in our own societies.
Even more specifically, I think that answering the question as you do is getting stuck at the rhetorical level. Basically you're saying, to defeat Zionism we need to defeat Zionism. Of course. But how?
If your answer is that we need to delegitimize Zionism, to make people understand than Zionism is non compatible with anything other that eternal war and genocide, I'd say that part of the job. One thing to be doing is to have these ideological trench warfare everywhere we can. But that is hardly enough. It's just one element, not "the key". And it doesn't follow that the best way to argue against Zionism is to discuss what is wrong with Zionism ideologically. That depends on where you are. We have a tendency to think that what makes us tick is the best strategy. But that isn't true. Sometimes discussing Zionism is best, other times organizing an event with testimonies of people who have been in Gaza is better than talking about Herzel and Jabotinsky. Don't get stuck in one gear.
Nor is there any contradiction between these different tracks. The non-violent resistance gives you something to work with in any community you are, to advocate for pressure, to call for the release of the leadership, to explain what is going on, to personalize it. It is also a way to get people from abroad more committed by giving them something they can participate in at different levels. Use it, don't deride it.
Hope it make sense.
January 3, 2010 7:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not much time to write this morning, but two quick comments:
Well I need to go to work, but maybe I'll expand later.
January 4, 2010 5:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree its time to try a new strategy, non-violent protests would certainly get the Palestinian cause further than any armed struggle could.
January 4, 2010 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I assume you speak from your own experience with both strategies.
January 5, 2010 1:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just look at what David Ben-Gurion had to say when the numbers of Jews in Palestine doubled between 1931-35 and the Palestinian national movement began to organise itself and become vocal in fear of future dispossesion.
". . . they [referring to Palestinians] showed new power and remarkable discipline. Many of them were killed . . . this time not murderers and rioters, but political demonstrators. Despite the tremendous unrest, the order not to harm Jews was obeyed. This shows exceptional political discipline. There is no doubt that these events will leave a profound imprint on the [Palestinian] Arab movement. This time we have seen a political movement which must evoke the respect of the world. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 126)
January 5, 2010 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
But there might not be justice.görüntülü sohbet
February 21, 2011 10:25 AM | Reply | Permalink