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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/nonviolence-only-one-part-strategy-liberation/36561">electronicintifada.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Nonviolence is only one part of a strategy for liberation</h1>
<p class="gmail-node__submitted">
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-author"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/omar-zahzah">Omar Zahzah</a></span> -
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publication-date"><span class="gmail-date-display-single">27 October 2022</span></span> </p>
<span><img src="https://electronicintifada.net/sites/default/files/styles/original_800w/public/2022-10/hebron_slingshot.jpeg?itok=3wEGxkr8×tamp=1666797231" alt="A masked man aims a slingshot" title="" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="435" height="290"></span></div><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><p>Nonviolence alone will not liberate Palestine.</p><small>
<span>APA images</span></small><p>Violent military raids are a constant reality for Palestinians living under colonial Israeli military occupation.</p>
<p>To that end, as Mariam Barghouti and Yumna Patel argue in <em>Mondoweiss</em>, the vicious collective punishment comprising Israel’s Operation “<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/9/13/why-is-israel-targeting-jenin-and-nablus">Break the Wave</a>,” launched in March of this year, should be understood as a <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2022/10/what-is-happening-in-the-west-bank-right-now-a-full-breakdown/">“continuation”</a>
of Operation “Law and Order” that was launched against the 2021 unity
intifada and Operation “Breaking Dawn” in the August 2022 assault on
Gaza.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/6/gaza-attack-what-is-the-palestinian-islamic-jihad">Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s</a> al-Quds Brigades and Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Smaller, newly established armed resistance collectives such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUlQBOWH3nY">the Lions Den</a>
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.</p>
<p>Writing for <em>Al Jazeera</em>, 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.</p>
<p>Sari Orabi, a Palestinian political analyst quoted in Al Tahhan’s piece, says that Israel’s August <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-world-so-indifferent-gaza/36146">assault</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Reductive Logic</h2>
<p>Though published 13 years ago, American-born Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg’s <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-missing-mahatma">piece</a>
“The Missing Mahatma” remains a great example of the reductive logic
informing the dehumanizing liberal/Leftist fetishization of Palestinian
“nonviolence.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Also referenced is <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=NOcDAAAAMBAJ&dq=jerusalem&pg=PA21#v=onepage&q=jerusalem&f=false">Mubarak Awad</a>, a Palestinian American professor, Nonviolence International <a href="https://www.nonviolenceinternational.net/about">founder</a>, and lifelong advocate of nonviolence’s centrality to the Palestinian struggle.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<h2>A lingering staple</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>only</em> acceptable form of Palestinian resistance.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/b/h.htm#bhagat-singh">Bhagat Singh</a>, a proponent of armed resistance within the Indian revolution.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yet it is a view normalized by liberal human rights organizations
such as Human Rights Watch, whose framing of Hamas, Maureen Clare Murphy
<a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-human-rights-watch-favors-israel/33721">argues</a>,
“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>A strategy</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/10/stories-from-the-first-intifada-they-broke-my-bones">release</a> of Palestinian demonstrators.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It also makes for terrible politics.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>As though Palestinians should have to “compromise” over their stolen land and lives.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-kills-palestinian-fighters-children-west-bank">examples</a> of Palestinian heroes such as Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, Islam Sabbouh, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/udai-tamimi">Udai Tamimi</a>, and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/23/israel-kills-palestinian-top-member-of-armed-group-in-west-bank">Tamer al-Kilani</a>
suggest that Palestinian armed resistance is not going away soon.
Indeed, it seems to have become a vital component of a broader pattern
of <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/20/palestinians-strike-in-west-bank-jerusalem-over-israel-killings">collective resistance</a> to Zionist settler-colonialism.</p>
<p>Again, history vindicates this development: as Azzam Tamimi argues in an <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-apartheid-armed-resistance">article</a>
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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p> <h3>
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