Look
Again, Gandhi
By Jonthan Cook
11 September, 2004
The Guardian
"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.