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<font size=3><br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>Look again, Gandhi<br>
Jonathan Cook<br>
Al-Ahram Weekly<br>
September 2 - 8, 2004<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3><a href="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/706/re91.htm">http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/706/re91.htm</a><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>"I am coming to speak about peace
and non- violence," Arun Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, told the
<i>Jerusalem Post</i> 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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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).<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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?<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>Many Palestinian citizens belong to
multiple groups, shaping their identities and loyalties in complicated
ways.<br>
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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>Instructively, as Israel stands on the
brink of approving a unilateral disengagement from Gaza, the question
being discussed by Gazans is not <i>how</i> the Palestinians will pick up
the pieces after the settlers are gone but <i>who</i> will pick up the
reins of power.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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?<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>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.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
</font><font face="arial" size=3>If Gandhi has any message for the
peoples of Israel and Palestine, let it be this.<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2> <br>
<br>
Forwarded by:<br>
_________________________________<br>
Ravi Khanna, Director<br>
voices from the global village<br>
1world communication<br>
P. O. Box 2476<br>
Amherst, MA 01004<br>
phone: 413-253-1960<br>
cell: 413-687-8150 (new)<br>
e-mail:
<a href="mailto:oneworld@igc.org">oneworld@igc.</a><a href="mailto:oneworld@igc.org">org<br>
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