[News] Look again, Gandhi - Jonathan Cook

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Look again, Gandhi
Jonathan Cook
Al-Ahram Weekly
September 2 - 8, 2004

<http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/706/re91.htm>http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/706/re91.htm


"I am coming to speak about peace and non- violence," Arun Gandhi, Mahatma 
Gandhi's grandson, told the Jerusalem Post newspaper shortly before he 
arrived in the Middle East to preach a message of mutual respect, love and 
understanding to two conflict-weary publics, Israeli and Palestinian.

At his first rally in East Jerusalem last week, Gandhi led thousands of 
Palestinians, including Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, and a handful of 
Israeli peace campaigners on a march against the wall being built across 
the West Bank. Under the banner "No to violence, yes to peace", the protest 
was designed to promote the path of Palestinian peaceful resistance to 
Israel's military occupation.

After four years of armed Intifada, the US- based group that organised his 
visit -- Palestinians for Peace and Democracy -- believes that the 
philosophy of non-violent struggle can be exported to the West Bank and 
Gaza where it will mobilise the Palestinian masses to find new ways to 
oppose the occupation.

But what Gandhi and his supporters fail to understand is that a non-violent 
struggle requires specific conditions that are not present in this conflict.

The first and most obvious condition is that non-violence should carry with 
it the moral weight that makes violent retaliation unconscionable. But if 
there is one lesson from the first and second Intifadas, a lesson learned 
at a high price, it is that non-violence by Palestinians both in the 
occupied territories and inside Israel is rarely reciprocated by the 
Israeli security forces.

During this Intifada, for example, 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens were 
shot dead inside Israel, in the Galilee, for organising largely peaceful 
demonstrations. And the first victims across the Green Line in the West 
Bank and Gaza were scores of children hit in the head by sniper bullets. 
Most were throwing stones ineffectually at tanks and military 
installations, or just watching -- maybe not quite Gandhi's vision of 
non-violence, but hardly armed insurrection either.

Today most Palestinian men, women and children have slunk back to their 
homes, to lives under curfew or military siege, leaving the resistance to 
the young men of the Palestinian militias (their seniors more than often 
dead or in jail).

The lesson dealt by Israel's military chiefs has been absorbed in different 
ways on both sides of the Green Line. In Israel, where resistance is far 
less critical to daily survival, Palestinian citizens say if non-violent 
protest gets you killed, better not protest. In the occupied territories, 
Palestinians say if non-violent protest gets you killed, either better not 
protest or better go down all guns blazing.

The second, and most important, condition for non-violent resistance in 
pursuit of national objectives is that actions must be collective and 
popular. Realistically, an unarmed population only has the courage to face 
down soldiers and tanks when it has the numbers on its side. But, with the 
brief interlude of the first Intifada, Palestinians, whether in Nazareth or 
Nablus, have rarely been able to organise effective mass demonstrations. 
Increasingly, factions have been pursuing their own limited or competing 
agendas, often relying on the heroics of small groups of militants or lone 
suicide bombers.

The reason is not, as some Western writers, academics and politicians like 
to imply, related to a rogue Arab gene, a failure of the "Arab mind" or an 
excess -- or lack -- of guns, but to the specific circumstances that have 
followed the Palestinians' dispossession and dispersion. Theirs is a unique 
legacy of colonial misrule, and the lessons of India or any other colonised 
state cannot easily be translated to their case.

Israel, after all, was not created in a vacuum. The Jewish national project 
emerged and grew strong just as other colonial movements were dying, and it 
learned from their mistakes. Most relevantly it allied itself with, but 
(until now) avoided replicating the worst excesses of, South African apartheid.

In both South Africa and Israel, the goal was the theft of land and 
underground resources from the native population -- in Africa's case the 
mineral wealth, especially diamonds, and in Israel's case, the aquifers and 
precious water supplies.

Some common approaches adopted by the two countries are discernible. Both 
South Africa and Israel absorbed the core strategy of colonial Britain: 
that the necessary condition for ruling another people, dispossessing them 
and exploiting their resources, is a policy of divide and rule, of 
fragmenting the native population so that all forms of resistance can be 
suppressed more effectively.

But South Africa and Israel also learned from the colonising nations' 
failures. The main lesson was that to reinforce the colonisation project it 
was better to install a settler population in the place of the dispossessed 
natives. These settlers should be committed to the national project and to 
the occupied territory in a way that, for example, British army officers on 
a tour of duty could never be.

So why, taking up Gandhi's implied criticism, did the black South African 
population eventually find a successful way to resist and end their 
occupation while the Palestinians seem no nearer liberation?

Many factors must be taken into account. The excesses of South African 
apartheid were more visceral; the black populations in Europe and the US 
grew more influential from the 1970s and racism increasingly became 
synonymous with discrimination against black people; white rule in South 
Africa and the boycotts it provoked marginalised the country's significance 
in the global economy; and the white Boer population demonstrated an 
impressive lack of political sophistication.

In contrast, Israel has many advantages. It has endlessly exploited Western 
guilt over the Holocaust; it has successfully used the fear of 
anti-Semitism to silence most high-level criticisms of its policies; its 
strategic Middle Eastern alliance with the US remains strong; it is still 
seen in Washington as an effective bulwark against Arab nationalism and the 
threat that poses to the oil supply; and it has a vigourous lobby working 
for its interests in the corridors of Congress.

But perhaps most importantly, Israel's leaders, unlike South Africa's, have 
never lost sight of the necessary condition of occupation: the 
fragmentation of the enemy, the indigenous population.

Even the apartheid wall -- which will eventually make life so unbearably 
difficult for almost all Palestinians that it may breed some sort of 
collective consciousness -- should be able to contain the threat it 
conjures up. For the wall, combined with Israel's military system of 
curfews and checkpoints, is physically entrenching the cantonisation of the 
West Bank. Mass action will become impossible when neighbours are cut off 
from each other.

The wall is the summit of Israel's ever- evolving policy of divide and 
rule. At each stage of the occupation -- whether the original 1948 form or 
the later 1967 incarnation -- Israeli strategists have devised new and more 
effective ways to prevent the Palestinians from challenging their power. It 
is worth briefly surveying how this has been achieved.

First, the native Palestinian population was largely fragmented by the time 
the institutions of the newly created Israeli state conquered much of the 
territory that had been Palestine. Even before the Jewish state was 
declared in May 1948, Palestinian elites had largely abandoned the cities 
of Jaffa, Jerusalem, Acre, Nazareth and Haifa for the safety of 
neighbouring Arab states. Under the weight of growing Jewish terror and the 
British mandatory authorities' clandestine support for the Zionist 
enterprise, the middle classes had decided to cut their losses and sit out 
the impending war.

With them went the Palestinian entrepreneurs, intellectuals and 
politicians. After 1948, the new Jewish state was confronted with a 
leaderless, largely dispersed Palestinian society, which lacked the tools 
needed to organise resistance to Israel's project of consolidating 
Palestinian dispossession by transferring land and property to Jewish 
immigrants.

After their victory, Israel's military and political planners were far from 
complacent, however. Their main fear was that given the chance the 
Palestinians under their rule would sooner or later pick up the pieces and 
reassert themselves. Israeli officials therefore worked tirelessly to 
subdue and terrorise the rump of the Palestinian population who were now 
citizens.

The instrument they used was the military government imposed on the 
Palestinian minority in Israel's first two decades. It rigidly controlled 
their lives with a system of permits, it developed an extensive network of 
informers and it crushed all political and social dissent. Since 1967 that 
system has been replicated in the occupied territories.

The consequences for ordinary Palestinians are equally evident on either 
side of the Green Line. Collective action has been made all but impossible. 
The wider the circle extends, and the more Palestinians are included in any 
direct action -- whether violent or non-violent -- the more likely an 
informer will be included in the circle and the enterprise will be destined 
to fail through Israeli subversion.

Out of necessity, unelected, unaccountable cliques rule in Palestinian 
society. Powerful, independent and populist leaders have not been able to 
emerge. When they have looked close to doing so, as the Islamic Movement 
leader Sheikh Raed Salah did inside Israel and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin did in 
Gaza, they have been either jailed or assassinated. Marwan Barghouti might 
have achieved much the same in the West Bank had he too not been imprisoned.

The conditions allowing these unaccountable cliques to prosper -- including 
the biggest of them all, the Palestinian Authority -- have been encouraged 
by the social, economic, political and ideological divisions Israel has 
created, sustained and exacerbated in Palestinian society. They are almost 
too numerous to classify.

Inside Israel, for example, the main rival sub- groups within Palestinian 
society are: the Druze and Circassian communities, which uniquely are 
obligated to serve in the army; the Bedouin in the Negev, who to this day 
live under an unofficial but enduring military government, regulated by 
special institutions like the paramilitary police force the Green Patrol 
and the Bedouin Education Authority; the Christians, who have been offered 
limited financial and economic protection by virtue of their association 
with the international churches; the 250,000 internally displaced citizens, 
also known as "present absentees", who along with other refugees lost 
rights to their homes and property in 1948; the Palestinian citizens living 
in the so-called mixed cities, which in fact are marginalised and depressed 
urban ghettoes; Palestinian citizens living in "unrecognised villages", 
communities deprived of all public services such as water, electricity, 
schools and medical clinics.

Many Palestinian citizens belong to multiple groups, shaping their 
identities and loyalties in complicated ways.
All these Palestinians share a common Israeli citizenship but their 
experience of what it means to be a citizen is entirely different, making 
it impossible to organise collectively. Factional manoeuvring for more of 
the limited resources available to each group within the minority is a far 
more common strategy.

Exactly the same pattern is discernible in the occupied territories. The 
West Bank, Gaza and annexed Jerusalem are precisely more of those markers 
of difference Israel encourages. Even during Oslo, this process exacerbated 
with the creation of Areas A, B and C, occupied zones that fell under 
different forms of control. Today, the cantonisation of Palestinian towns 
and villages into an even larger number of separate units, through the 
erection of the wall and numberless checkpoints, isolates and factionalises 
the community still further.

As well as these territorial divisions, ideological splits (particularly 
between the secular and religious) and the marginalisation of women from 
the struggle have served to weaken possible resistance to the occupation.

Instead, the Palestinians have resorted to factionalism. The instances of 
coordination between the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Hamas and Islamic Jihad 
are easily outnumbered by examples of rivalry and competition.

It is worth remembering that in the late 1970s Israel helped to create the 
Islamic Movement, from which Hamas was born, as a counterweight to the 
increasing popularity of Fatah. A strong Islamic faction in the occupied 
territories, it was rightly assumed, would dissipate the energy being 
harnessed by Fatah and accentuate differences within Palestinian society.

Instructively, as Israel stands on the brink of approving a unilateral 
disengagement from Gaza, the question being discussed by Gazans is not how 
the Palestinians will pick up the pieces after the settlers are gone but 
who will pick up the reins of power.

The third and final condition for successful non-violent resistance to 
occupation is the support and solidarity of left-wing groups within the 
oppressor nation. But in Israel's case, the politician-generals have just 
as effectively neutered the Jewish left-wing as they have the Palestinian 
resistance.

The Israeli left has been factionalised and left impotent by a similar 
policy of divide and rule. How is the left to appeal to a "consensus" about 
the country's future when Israeli leaders have encouraged deep fault lines 
in the Jewish population, between different visions of Zionism, between the 
European Ashkenazi elite and the Mizrahi proletariat, between the Zionist 
mainstream and the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox, between the secular 
revellers of Tel Aviv and the fanatical settlers of Itimar, between the 
development towns and the kibbutzim?

The left has instead tried to pander to as many of these mainstream groups 
as it can without entirely abandoning its left-wing credentials. Even so, 
in the case of the most visible groups like Meretz and Peace Now it is 
often hard to identify what is still left-wing about their agendas -- 
beyond a message that discrimination and oppression must be lessened, if 
only as a strategy to maintain the legitimacy of the Zionist mission.

Maybe this is the ultimate success of the colonial project planned, 
organised and executed by Israel's politician-generals. Colonised peoples 
always rely for their liberation, at least in part, on dissident groups 
within the colonising nation, on factions within the colonisers who work 
slowly to change the environment in which the colonial project is judged, 
both within their own societies and in the international arena. They hold 
up the mirror to their society, eventually giving legitimacy to indigenous 
resistance movements and their struggle for liberation.

In this respect, Israel's left must be judged an absolute failure. It still 
speaks in tongues to its chosen disciples, other Jews, too often preferring 
the language of Hebrew for criticism so that outsiders will not learn about 
what is really taking place. Its debates are only meant for internal 
consumption.

This was not the way South Africa was liberated from apartheid. There, in 
the end, a rainbow coalition of blacks, coloureds and whites stood firm 
against the apartheid regime. Different black tribes largely put aside 
their differences and worked for a common agenda against a common enemy. 
They were assisted by South Africa's whites, who both inside the country 
and in the Diaspora were not afraid to speak out loudly and to the rest of 
the world about the injustice of apartheid.

If Gandhi has any message for the peoples of Israel and Palestine, let it 
be this.


Forwarded by:
_________________________________
Ravi Khanna, Director
voices from the global village
1world communication
P. O. Box 2476
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phone: 413-253-1960
cell: 413-687-8150 (new)
e-mail: <mailto:oneworld at igc.org>oneworld at igc.<mailto:oneworld at igc.org>org

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