Is violence avoidable?
The Palestinian Intifada is headed down a path of armed resistance that was unthinkable a few years ago. For outsiders, this poses new questions, writes Khaled Al-Azaar*
There is no connection between the Palestinian Intifada's use of weapons, or its resort to martyrdom operations, on the one hand and the retribution exacted by Israeli troops against the Palestinians on the other. The Israeli army and police had been shedding Palestinian blood on the West Bank, as well as in Gaza and Jerusalem, long before the Intifada began.
On the first day of what was to become the current Intifada, for example, the Israelis shot dead seven Palestinians on the premises of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. On the second and third days, 13 Palestinians were killed and almost a thousand wounded, including many who were also Israeli citizens. In some hospitals, Arab-Israeli victims of the violence were registered as "enemy wounded", even though such Arab- Israeli citizens have never been accused of launching suicide operations against Israel.
International observers have consistently pointed out that Israel habitually resorts to the "excessive use of force" against unarmed civilians, and the international community has been vocal in requesting Israel to stop its deadly assaults from the first days of the Intifada on. Indeed, this excessive use of force is an indication that Israel wants to bully the Palestinians, people and leadership, into submission, trying to impose upon the Palestinians the Israeli contention that they are no match for Israeli might. However, Israel's tactics have given rise to a Palestinian reaction of a similar sort. Lacking Israel's sophisticated weaponry, the Palestinians have resorted to martyrdom and to hit-and-run type assaults.
Yet, once the Palestinian reaction to the Israeli violence became similarly violent it was used as justification for Israeli brutality. Israel's opening acts of bloodshed were conveniently overlooked. Victims were turned into culprits, oppressors into blameless prey. And critics of the Intifada's armed militancy ignored the basic fact about the events in Palestine, namely, that Israel's occupation of Palestinian land has now lasted for 35, or, to be more precise, 54 years. Surely occupation, sensible people would agree, is an act of aggression that deserves to be resisted.
However, critics of Palestinian violence against the Israeli occupiers have nevertheless drawn several analogies to make their point, all of them inaccurate. For instance, one should not compare the 1980s Intifada with the current one, a major difference between the two being that while Israel has now taken its troops out of range of the Palestinian protestors, it has maintained its lethal aggression. Palestinian civil resistance became almost impossible post-Oslo, but Israel continued to punish the Palestinians by preventing them from working, and thereby impoverishing them.
The Palestinians have an estimated 40,000 rifles, and it is inconceivable that men who have access to weapons will stand idly by when their people are coming under the sustained and brutal assaults of the occupation forces. Yet, Israel, and its American supporters, would prefer these rifles to be fired at Palestinian protestors; in other words, Palestinian violence would be fine if the victims of it were Palestinian.
Some idealists have called on the Palestinians to engage in peaceful civil disobedience, in the style pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi in India. However, the Indian and Palestinian situations differ in almost every respect -- in geography, in the type of colonisation and in the nature of the conflict. In addition, while non-violent protests may have succeeded in Eastern Europe, there the quarrel was about future political options and democracy, not about colonialism and occupation. Furthermore, the success of such peaceful protest in the Eastern European case owed much to the favourable international climate.
While supporters of peaceful protest may think they are suggesting something new to the Palestinians, in reality they are not. The Palestinians engaged in different kinds of peaceful action, from the 1920s to the 1980s, including during the entire period of the first Intifada, from 1987 to 1993. They tried the legal approach, trusted to the pressure of world public opinion, and waited for action by the international community, all to no avail.
It has been said that the violence of the Palestinian Intifada provides a pretext for Israel's unbridled brutality. However, once again the reality is more complicated. Firstly, it was Israel's brutality that triggered the Intifada in the first place, and secondly, those Palestinian groups engaged in violence have offered to change their methods if Israel changes its methods. Yet, Israel has not stopped in its attacks on the Palestinians, while demanding their unconditional submission. Its policy makers have no use for compromise, and they make no room for common ground. Besides, there is no proof that Palestinian retaliation, including martyrdom operations, has failed. No one knows how far the Israelis would have gone if Palestinian retaliation had not taken place.
Indeed, history provides no instances of colonialism being rolled back by civil disobedience alone. Both the Algerians, in their struggle against French colonialism, and the Libyans, in their struggle against the Italians, succeeded as a result of armed struggle. Similarly, the democratic transformation in South Africa and in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) succeeded only as a result of a mix of peaceful and violent resistance. Nelson Mandela understood the need to combine the two forms of resistance, and consistently refused to tell his followers to renounce violence.
Furthermore, the white colonisers in Africa had not received an influx of immigration for many years when political settlement was finally reached in 1994, unlike the Israeli settlers in Palestine. The Africans were also fighting only for equality in their own land, whereas the Palestinians are having to struggle for a more complex cause in theirs -- the need to end the occupation, as well as racism.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine a situation in which the Palestinians could attain their objectives without keeping the option of armed resistance open. However, the efficacy, timing and criteria for the use of force should be carefully assessed. Violent resistance, including acts of martyrdom, should not be conducted without clear strategic and political guidelines: violence is a functional tool, a part of a larger structure, and it has to be calibrated with purpose and precision. Armed struggle must also be part of a strategy that minimises its damage and maximises its effects. As outsiders, we can provide comment on the struggle, but little more: we should not become back-seat drivers in a struggle that we ourselves are not fighting.
The Palestinian resistance has the right to select what it considers to be the best methods of confronting the Zionist terror. It needs to assess the impact of its methods, including martyrdom operations, on the enemy's military and domestic fronts, though observers of the resistance can also perhaps provide occasional insight on how things appear to the outside world.
This is the type of advice one can offer to the Intifada, without sounding defeatist or discouraging. For the Intifada needs all the support and guidance we can give it in order to achieve its aims.
* The writer is a Cairo-based Palestinian political analyst.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 19 - 25 December 2002 (Issue No. 617)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/617/op13.htm