[News] Nonviolence is only one part of a strategy for liberation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/nonviolence-only-one-part-strategy-liberation/36561>
Nonviolence is only one part of a strategy for liberation

Omar Zahzah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/omar-zahzah> - 27
October 2022
[image: A masked man aims a slingshot]

Nonviolence alone will not liberate Palestine.
APA images

Violent military raids are a constant reality for Palestinians living under
colonial Israeli military occupation.

To that end, as Mariam Barghouti and Yumna Patel argue in *Mondoweiss*, the
vicious collective punishment comprising Israel’s Operation “Break the Wave
<https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/9/13/why-is-israel-targeting-jenin-and-nablus>,”
launched in March of this year, should be understood as a “continuation”
<https://mondoweiss.net/2022/10/what-is-happening-in-the-west-bank-right-now-a-full-breakdown/>
of Operation “Law and Order” that was launched against the 2021 unity
intifada and Operation “Breaking Dawn” in the August 2022 assault on Gaza.

But something important distinguishes the latest series of brutal assaults:
They are being met by an increasingly efficient Palestinian armed
resistance, which includes fighters from most Palestinian armed groups
including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/6/gaza-attack-what-is-the-palestinian-islamic-jihad>
al-Quds Brigades and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Smaller, newly
established armed resistance collectives such as the Lions Den
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUlQBOWH3nY> have formed that may be
supported by these larger, extant formations but also operate somewhat
independently. They share members across Fatah, Hamas, PIJ and PFLP.

Writing for *Al Jazeera*, Zena Al Tahhan reports that the emergence of a
new, coordinated generation of Palestinian resistance fighters has
significantly impacted the calculations of Israeli officials, who cannot
simply attack with impunity.

Sari Orabi, a Palestinian political analyst quoted in Al Tahhan’s piece,
says that Israel’s August assault
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-world-so-indifferent-gaza/36146>
on Gaza “had to be short,” with quick, consecutive “fast hits on the PIJ.
If it had gone on for longer, then we may have seen armed operations emerge
in the West Bank.”

That Palestinian armed resistance has once more reached the point where it
can influence the dictates of colonial military calculations is an
important development, one that arguably bodes well for the prospect of
Palestinian liberation. After all, liberation movements throughout history
have deployed a diversity of tactics.

As Palestinian militancy grows, it’s important to revisit problematic and
dehumanizing notions of Palestinian “nonviolence” as the exclusively
acceptable form of resistance. My issue is not with nonviolent resistance
as such (again, liberation struggles require a diversity of tactics) but
the limiting ways in which it can be taken up in advocacy for Palestine.

More specifically, I believe there is a problematic, obsessive iteration of
“nonviolence” within the broader Palestine solidarity movement that
dehumanizes Palestinians, normalizes Zionism, and ultimately utilizes
racist and colonial frameworks to advance the notion that the means of
Palestinian resistance are more troubling than the reality of Zionist
settler-colonialism.

As such, I believe this logic needs to be exposed and challenged so as to
ensure a comprehensive respect for Palestinian humanity and agency in the
ongoing struggle for liberation from the river to the sea.
Reductive Logic

Though published 13 years ago, American-born Israeli journalist Gershom
Gorenberg’s piece
<https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-missing-mahatma>
“The Missing Mahatma” remains a great example of the reductive logic
informing the dehumanizing liberal/Leftist fetishization of Palestinian
“nonviolence.”

Gorenberg opens the article with a fictional episode involving a
Palestinian of his own invention, Sheikh Nassar a-Din al-Masri, formerly a
militant Hamas member who switched to nonviolent resistance after reading a
treatise on the tactic by Syrian writer Jawdat Said, a relatively
well-known Islamic scholar who preached nonviolence as the true message of
Islam, in prison.

Gorenberg admits that al-Masri “exists only as the stand-in for a question:
Why is there no Palestinian Gandhi, no Palestinian Martin Luther King?”

The seemingly untroubled entitlement with which this Israeli writer sees
fit to use a fictionalized and parodic caricature of a living and breathing
people bravely engaged in anti-colonial struggle to establish the moral
tenor of his appeal seems an apt reflection of the dehumanizing arrogance
of conditioning support for Palestinian liberation to the means of
resistance alone.

Also referenced is Mubarak Awad
<https://books.google.com/books?id=NOcDAAAAMBAJ&dq=jerusalem&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q=jerusalem&f=false>,
a Palestinian American professor, Nonviolence International founder
<https://www.nonviolenceinternational.net/about>, and lifelong advocate of
nonviolence’s centrality to the Palestinian struggle.

The text’s title is partially inspired by Awad’s quoted desire to have a
prominent Muslim figure become the steward of a movement committed to
nonviolence, someone who “would be able to be the Gandhi of the
Palestinians.”

Gorenberg subtly attempts to undermine criticisms of an exclusively
nonviolent approach to Palestinian freedom by reflecting that even the 1919
Amritsar Massacre “did not convince Gandhi to steal weapons and take to the
hills. Rather, it deepened his commitment to satyagraha, nonviolent action.”

The reader gets the sense that even Palestinian nonviolence is not
nonviolent enough for Gorenberg. This is suggested in his criticisms of the
first intifada for not hewing closer to Gandhi’s example.

The intifada, Gorenberg writes, “was unarmed, if arms refers to guns and
not to gasoline-filled bottles.” The stone also seems to seal the deal for
the authentically nonviolent character of Palestinian resistance, given
that the image of a boy standing down a tank with a stone in hand “is close
to Gandhian logic, but only close, unless one imagines Gandhi urging
followers both to go on strike and to master the slingshot. Unarmed did not
mean nonviolent.”
A lingering staple

Ten years of organizing for Palestinian liberation and two years training
others on Palestinian political history and racial justice has shown me
that, even as the Palestine solidarity movement has flourished in many key
ways, the problematic views outlined by Gorenberg remain a lingering,
problematic tendency of Palestine solidarity activist beliefs around
Palestinian resistance.

For some individuals, the emergence of the boycott, divestment and
sanctions (BDS) movement provided them with the latest counter-example to
Palestinian armed resistance to be used in political debates. To be clear,
this is not a critique of BDS, but how some in the solidarity movement prop
up BDS as the *only* acceptable form of Palestinian resistance.

BDS is one out of a series of tactics in the broader Palestinian liberation
struggle – tactics that include armed resistance, as has any other
liberation movement throughout history (and something that Gorenberg’s
middle-schooler historicization omits, given the glaring lack of reference
to Bhagat Singh
<https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/h.htm#bhagat-singh>, a
proponent of armed resistance within the Indian revolution.)

Secondly, as reflected by Gorenberg’s queasiness around Palestinian esteem
for the stone, liberal worship of a caricatured notion of “nonviolence” is
arguably destructive for liberation struggles because its tolerance of
tactics is ever-shrinking.

“Violence” deceptively shifts from the brutality inflicted by Israel to
anything Palestinians do that makes liberals uncomfortable. It is tempting
to imagine how stubbornly these “solidarity” activists would cling to their
“nonviolence” were they forced to suffer through the countless indignities
Palestinians face every day.

If taken too far, problematic fixations on nonviolence run the risk of
forgetting that “violence” is the tank – and the state on whose behalf it
operates – rather than a child wielding a stone. By this logic, the only
thing that the colonized are permitted to do is die for the camera. Nothing
less than the perfect performance of death, it seems, will keep such
“solidarity” activists happy.

And this is where the truly dehumanizing character of liberal worship of
“nonviolence” comes into focus. To view militant anti-colonial resistance
as in any way comparable (much less equal) to the genocidal oppression of
the Zionist state is the height of ethical bankruptcy.

Yet it is a view normalized by liberal human rights organizations such as
Human Rights Watch, whose framing of Hamas, Maureen Clare Murphy argues
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-human-rights-watch-favors-israel/33721>,
“draws a false parity between a colonial power with one of the world’s
strongest military arsenals on the one hand, and stateless guerrilla
fighters in a besieged and repeatedly battered territory, on the other.”

While the work of these organizations provides useful categories that can
help make Israeli settler-colonial violence legible and (at least
theoretically) actionable in certain contexts, their inability to
distinguish between the resistance of the colonized and the violence of the
colonizer reveals the misguidedness of using their frameworks as the
ultimate barometer of political ethics.
A strategy

The liberal mythology of “nonviolence” outlined by Gorenberg and
like-minded activists in the Palestine solidarity movement overlooks the
fact that nonviolent political action is a strategy.

There is, so the vision goes, a utility to responding to state-sanctioned
brutality with nothing less than sheer, stoic passivity, because the
resultant images will stir latent sympathizers into action. In that sense,
nonviolent political action isn’t the outright rejection of violence so
much as a calculated (and highly risky) reliance upon state violence.

Images from the US civil rights movement and Palestinian uprisings from
1987 to the present are replete with such examples; global media pressure
that seized on depictions of Israeli military brutality during the first
intifada even helped secure the release
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/10/stories-from-the-first-intifada-they-broke-my-bones>
of Palestinian demonstrators.

Again, however, we are talking about one form of resistance out of many.
Liberation movements need a plurality of tactics and approaches. Idealizing
one form and using cherry-picked, highly reductive misunderstandings of one
liberation movement as a means to discipline another is dehumanizing.

It also makes for terrible politics.

The ultimate “violence” in the Palestinian struggle is the very existence
of the Zionist state, a state founded on and sustained by ethnic cleansing
and genocide.

Exclusive focus on “nonviolence” can overlook this fact, shifting all
attention to the behavior of colonized Palestinians and over-centering the
comfort of liberal foreign policy “experts” and “solidarity” activists.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room – Zionist settler-colonialism and the
need to dismantle it entirely – continues to be ignored. Small wonder that
Israelis like Gorenberg can harp so critically on “nonviolence.” Doing so
leaves the existence of the Zionist state unchallenged, something that just
has to be “accepted” out of a spirit of “practicality” and “compromise.”

As though Palestinians should have to “compromise” over their stolen land
and lives.

The examples
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-kills-palestinian-fighters-children-west-bank>
of Palestinian heroes such as Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, Islam Sabbouh, Udai Tamimi
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/udai-tamimi>, and Tamer al-Kilani
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/23/israel-kills-palestinian-top-member-of-armed-group-in-west-bank>
suggest that Palestinian armed resistance is not going away soon. Indeed,
it seems to have become a vital component of a broader pattern of collective
resistance
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/20/palestinians-strike-in-west-bank-jerusalem-over-israel-killings>
to Zionist settler-colonialism.

Again, history vindicates this development: as Azzam Tamimi argues in an
article
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-apartheid-armed-resistance>
defending the centrality of armed resistance to ending Zionist apartheid,
“it was not just boycotts and sanctions that brought down South Africa’s
apartheid regime. While they played a role, they were subsidiary to
military resistance, which is credited with rendering apartheid too costly
for the white supremacist minority and its sponsors in the West.”

When the presence of a militarized, genocidal settler-colonial entity
bothers individuals less than the means by which the colonized resist, it’s
probably time to rethink one’s “solidarity.”

*Omar Zahzah is the education and advocacy coordinator for Eyewitness
Palestine, as well as a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement and the US
Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. This article
reflects his views only.*
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