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Seeking a Palestinian Mahatma Ghandhi
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By Isabel Kershner From The Jerusalem Report, Februray 11, 2002 |
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A small but growing Palestinian non-violent resistance movement lacks leadership and strategy, but not conviction. How 'dangerous' for Israel is the 'power of love,' and how ready is the Palestinian public to switch support from the gun to the olive branch?
Stalking about nervously, black robe flapping around his sinewy frame, Father Raed repeats his exhortations and tries single-handedly to shepherd the thousand-plus crowd of European, American and Palestinian demonstrators, including dozens of nuns and a few lower-level members of the Muslim clergy, away from the line of Israeli soldiers blocking the road ahead, and back toward the town. But nobody seems in a hurry to leave. The idea, after all, had been to "defy" the checkpoint and walk the 10 or so kilometers to Jerusalem, where thousands more Israeli leftists, visitors and Palestinian Jerusalemites were supposed to be waiting to link hands around the Old City before going on to pray at the Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy sites. With the news out in Jerusalem that the soldiers are not letting the demonstrators from Bethlehem cross the military checkpoint, however, no more than a few hundred have turned up. The December 31 Church-led mass rally is the culmination of a two-week solidarity mission during which some 700 foreign nationals, from Europe and the United States, came to campaign with the nascent Palestinian non-violent resistance movement against Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Their protest actions focused on Israel's "inhumane measures" on the ground, such as the army's security closure and "encirclement" of Palestinian towns and villages enforced by what is now a well-established network of earthen mounds, trenches, roadblocks and manned checkpoints. One day during their visit, foreign delegates lay down for a symbolic few minutes in front of armored vehicles in Ramallah before going to pay their respects to Yasser Arafat, grounded in his compound nearby. Some were reportedly beaten, threatened and dragged back onto their buses by Israeli soldiers at the Erez checkpoint after being refused entry into the Gaza Strip and holding a sit-in on the tarmac. And they made the evening news on Israel's two main TV channels for having partially dismantled the controversial Surda checkpoint that prevents free passage from Ramallah to Birzeit University in the West Bank. There, the foreign activists emptied sand bags, rolled a small portable army lookout post down a hill and confronted the troops, who responded with tear gas and shots in the air. THE PALESTINIAN NON-VIOLENT RESISTANCE ACTIVISTS AND THEIR FOREIGN ALLIES HAVE A clear stated goal to get rid of the occupation and make way for a Palestinian state in the territories captured by Israel in 1967. But the tactics are still largely being thought out. There is some consensus that purely passive resistance won't have any effect, that what is needed are attention-grabbing direct actions that risk confrontation with Israeli troops at checkpoints, as above. The question of whether Jewish settlements in the territories should also be targeted for "direct actions" is still under consideration. The foreign activists had come at their own expense, invited by the International Solidarity Movement, an ad-hoc committee affiliated with the non-governmental Palestinian Center for Rapprochement based in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, and Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People, another committee recently established by the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organization network, PNGO. These local groups provided the "internationals" an assortment of seasoned peace activists, concerned individuals and members of "Palestine Solidarity" chapters with a two-day training workshop on their arrival, covering issues such as Israeli law and arrest procedures, and organized their schedules. At this final event on December 31, though, at the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, there's a hint of disappointment, and, in some quarters, anger over the organizers' reluctance to enter into a confrontation with the Israeli troops.
Under pressure from the Israeli authorities, it turns out the church leaders had come to an agreement of their own. Troops had stopped the protest march earlier in the morning inside Bethlehem, at the Caritas Hospital junction, when organizers say it was around 3,000 strong. In order to at least reach the checkpoint and pray there, for the symbolic value, Patriarch Sabah had given the army his word that the crowd would then disperse quietly and not attempt to walk on.
Father Raed, who hails from a village near Jenin in the northern West
Bank, has, over the past year and a half of the bloody Al-Aqsa Intifada,
become one of the most visible individuals promoting non-violent resistance
as a Palestinian weapon. He organizes, lectures and writes a weekly
colurnn in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, and also publishes an electronic
newsletter, the Olive Branch, covering religious news. Though he works in a personal capacity, he has the blessing of Sabah.
"The strategy of non-violence is far more dangerous for Israel
than guns," he explains. "It defies Israel's military might,
without giving Israel a pretext for brutal retaliation." Father Raed works on the principle that the Palestinians cannot win by military means, and are fighting a lost battle in which the "victims," are portrayed as the aggressors. "The Palestinian people are stronger with stones than with guns, and stronger with the olive branch than with stones. The Israelis have the power of force, the army," he goes on, "but we have the power of truth and the strength of love, what Mahatma Gandhi called Satyagraha." His words betray a certain ambiguity vis a vis the motivations of the Palestinian non-violence movement; a tension between a utilitarian, tactical view on one hand that sees the Palestinians as the weaker side and their armed struggle as doomed to failure, and a genuine ideology of pacifism and ab- horrence of violence on the other. While the non-violence advocates don't support Palestinian armed attacks or terrorism, they are loathe to condemn such acts outright under the current circumstances. Some of the internationals have similar reservations. "The suicide attacks are absolutely wrong and aren't doing anyone any good," Rev. Colin Morton, who served from 1988-97 as the minister of St. Andrews Scottish Church in Jerusalem, told The Report during the December solidarity mission. "But the actions Israel has taken to defend itself are also unacceptable. Innocent people are suffering. I can't condemn the Palestinians without condemning the Israeli government at the same time." In Father Raed's dreams, non-violence would be adopted as an official
strategy by the Palestinian civil, political and religious leadership.
In the meantime, he concludes, if the Christians don't start down this
path, drawing on what he calls their tradition of pacifism, it will
have no chance at all. It is true that the Palestinian non-violence movement has a distinctly Christian air, because of the religious affiliation of many of its main proponents, and many of its sympathizers abroad. The next international campaign is planned for Easter. The non-violence movement gives Christians, who often don't identify with Palestinian militancy and certainly not with the suicide-bomb tactics of Hamas, a way of being involved. "Palestinian Christians were almost accused of being out of the game," acknowledges Father Raed, "but we also suffer, like the Muslims, under occupation and have the same aspirations. We'd like to be free." Yet the non-violence initiative has grown beyond the Christian community. Ghassan Andoni, who heads the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement (PCR), is a non-practicing Christian who became active in Palestinian-Israeli dialogue, non-violence and civil disobedience during the first Intifada of the late 1980s. He says his group now works regularly with local Muslim volunteers all over the West Bank, including Dir Istya near Nablus, Salfit, Beit Umar near Hebron and in Hebron itself. Indeed, non-violent resistance activists name one of their best-known supporters as the late Faisal Husseini, the former PLO Jerusalem official who died of a heart attack last June. They note that Faisal, the son of Abd al-Qader al-Husseini, the legendary Palestinian fighter of the 1948 war, always stood at the forefront of peaceful demonstrations at roadblocks or at the site of house demolitions, often being tear-gassed, and sometimes beaten, by Israeli soldiers.
The local Palestinian organizations also coordinate some activities on the ground with Israeli leftist groups such as Uri Avneri's Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) and the Coalition of Women for a Just Peace, which have carried out protest actions and provided humanitarian aid convoys to Palestinian communities in the past few months.
The efforts at mobilizing ordinary Palestinians are bearing a little
fruit. In August, when church figures led a march to the Bethlehem checkpoint
during Israel' s invasion of the town, 20 or so local Palestinians joined.
This time, the number had swelled to over a thousand, though it still
fell short of a massive turnout. Father Raed points to several weak
links in the chain, including an absence of high-ranking Islamic clergy,
and the fear of local Palestinians "who were not sure it wouldn't
end in confrontation." Adds Andoni: "I'm venturous, but people
need to be assured that going to a checkpoint doesn't mean a bullet
in the chest." The Holy Land Trust's Husam Jubran, a Muslim, contends that "promoting non-violence in Palestine is harder than digging a tunnel from the North to the South Pole." Palestinians confuse non-violence with passivity and a sign of weakness, he says. He points to two main problems with the movement, the first being a lack of leadership. "We don't have a Gandhi," he says. "Every movement needs a leader." Nor, he adds, does the movement have a clear strategy, with well-defined tools or objectives. "That's why I was so angry at the Bethlehem event," he explains. "The Palestinians all came knowing we were going to cross the checkpoint. When they were turned back, many said they wouldn't come again. There was confusion, born of the fact that there is no clear leader. The idea was to go through, not to talk or negotiate with the soldiers. That one mistake has destroyed a lot of work. Andoni is clear in his mind about what non-violent resistance should consist of, in the Palestinian environment. "Our definition is direct acts of defiance," he says. "You go to a roadblock and dismantle it. You don't hurt the soldiers but you risk being attacked or arrested. Anything more passive will go unnoticed here." As for the Bethlehem controversy, Andoni says "people are impatient. We're not looking for immediate results. If we'd insisted, we could have passed through, but we respected the bishops' limitations and accepted the compromise because we're interested in having the clergy on board. They were threatened over the December 31 event by military and political officials in Israel."
But if that intifada was in general a popular one, which depended largely on local initiatives and the work of the grassroots "popular committees" within the Palestinian communities, this one is very different. "I don't think it can be called an uprising," says Andoni. "It's more of an intense crisis."
There is an ongoing dispute among the Palestinians, he adds, about the ethical basis and the efficiency of the means employed in the current intifada, though the debate is mainly kept out of the public arena. There is disagreement, for example, about the suicide attacks against civilian targets, not only due to the negative international reaction they inspire, "but also on grounds of morality," Andoni asserts. "Can I, as a Palestinian, identify with that? It's not in the newspapers," he states, "but it is going on inside."
The internationals were also barred access to Hebron, where they had planned to entertain Palestinian children and to "deco- rate" the concrete roadblocks separating Palestinian Hebron from the Jewish settlement enclave. As the internationals' buses approached the checkpoint at Kfar Etzion, on the Jerusalem-Hebron road, the army declared the road ahead and all of Hebron a closed military zone. The army said it was preventing a repeat of the Surda checkpoint confrontation of the day before. Some Palestinian activists have been called in for meetings with Israeli intelligence officials. And Dr. Mustapha Barghouthi, a sophisticated Palestinian spokesman, community health activist and leading light in the Grassroots International organization, was detained by police on January 2 after entering Jerusalem without a permit to hold a GIPP press conference. He was released four hours later and sent back to Ramallah, but was detained again by the military at the checkpoint along the way. When foreign delegates at the scene, including two European Parliament members, tried to prevent his detention, they were reportedly met with tear gas. If the Israeli authorities are not exactly embracing the "non-violent resistance" movement, the Palestinian Authority is somewhat ambivalent too. While Arafat and the PA agencies do not work against the activists, and at times have even lent them their support, they certainly have not adopted the non-violent strategy.
Father Raed is fond of citing Arafat's infamous speech to the United Nations in 1974, when the PLO chief declared that he'd come "carrying an olive branch in one hand and a gun in the other," adding, "Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand." Unfortunately, "the olive branch hand has not yet been used," Father Raed opines. "So far, we have only heard the guns." |
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A DOZEN PALESTINIAN BISHOPS including the venerable Latin
Patriarch Michel Sabah, have just led the crowd in a multilingual, ecumenical
pray-in, olive branches in hand, and the balloons are released, rapidly
floating up from the Bethlehem checkpoint in the general direction of
Gilo.
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FEW DAYS LATER FATHER RAED, SPEAKING AT THE LATIN Patriarchate in
the old city of Jerusalem, tells The Report that he had prepared an
"I have a dream" speech to deliver at the checkpoint, his
dream being to turn into a cat and slink by the soldiers on guard. In
the end he didn't read it out. He says he didn't want to imply any comparison
between himself and Martin Luther King. 
ANDONI
IS IN THE PEACEFUL STRUGGLE FOR THE long haul. The latest PCR non-violence
campaign started a year ago, at the height of the intifada violence.
But Andoni's own activism dates back to the first intifada in the 1980s,
when Beit Sahour launched its famous campaign of civil disobedience,
which peaked with residents throwing away their Israeli-issued ID cards
and refusing to pay taxes to the military administration. The authorities
crushed the revolt, confiscating equipment from the village in lieu
of the outstanding taxes.