(Follow-on comment [3] by Ray Zwarich, Boston, April 23, 2009):
Thanks to all for your comments.
This is a broad and deep subject that could bear a lot of ongoing discussion. I had a lot more that I wanted to say about it, but I thought that my comments were getting over-long for an email. But perhaps I could prevail on people's patience here by extending my remarks just a bit, in order to try to clarify certain points.
I think that many people misunderstand the theory of non-violence as a political strategy and tactic, as it was created and practiced by Gandhi. Many people in the recent anti-war 'movement' in the US, for example, (I put the word 'movement' in hash quotes because it never really did rise to the status of a genuine movement), seemed to think that non-violence meant avoiding doing anything that might lead to violence. This misguided 'movement' was so keenly focused on 'being good boys and girls,' to avoid any possibility of confrontations in which violence might occur, that it relegated itself to complete ineffectuality.
Non-violence, as a strategy and tactic of resistance, does NOT entail avoiding violence. It is an aggressive strategy that involves planned disruptions of the oppressor's administration of society. It recognizes that these disruptions will almost surely evoke a violent response from the oppressor. It involves the willingness to make the sacrifice of submitting oneself to the oppressor's violence. Its ethos is that when the violence of the oppressor is 'absorbed' without responding in kind, the oppressor will be forced to come face to face with his own barbarity, and his innate sense of moral decency will then cause him to desist from his oppression.
A genuine anti-war movement that was determined to practice non-violence would have sought out ways to disrupt society in order to deliberately provoke a violent response. Deliberate disruption of status quo policies is the whole point of non-violent resistance. The practitioners of non-violence must be willing to submit to being arrested and imprisoned, to be sure, but they must also be willing to submit to being clubbed, gassed, or even shot, without desisting from their determination to resist the oppressor, and without responding in kind.
This kind and degree of sacrifice was at the root of Gandhi's theory. When this idea of Satyagraha, (which translates roughly as 'soul-force'), is perverted into the careful avoidance of violence by going to great lengths to avoid making the oppressor angry, so that he won't become violent, (as it was in the recent US anti-war 'movement'), it is no longer the theory of Satyagraha, it is no longer genuine non-violent resistance, that is being practiced.
If the Palestinians were to take up the practice of Satyagraha, of genuine non-violent resistance, it would involve perpetrating deliberate disruptions of the Israeli occupation that would be sure to provoke violence against them. To consider a hypothetical example, say tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered and announced their determination to pass through an Israeli checkpoint without submitting to examination. (This may not be a realistic physical possibility, but it is just intended as an illustrative example.) There surely can be little doubt that if they did this the Israelis would respond with violence. They would gas them, club them, and likely even shoot them.
But if these people were committed to this action as a 'soul-force,' they would continue to advance on the check point to try to complete their objective. They would continue to submit themselves to Israeli violence. They would make the sacrifice of absorbing this violence, without fighting back, with the objective of forcing the Israelis to become so barbaric that they could no longer avoid 'seeing' their own barbarity (which is the 'hidden' force behind their occupation). When the Israelis exhibit this degree of barbarity, (so the theory goes), their own deep-seeded moral decency will be so egregiously offended that they will desist from the barbarity.
When Gandhi claimed that Satyagraha could be effective against any evil force (even Hitler), he warned that great sacrifice would be involved. (Indeed). Against an oppressor whose moral decency has been buried under thick layers of moral depravity, the degree of sacrifice would obviously, by necessity, be commensurately greater. Hitler was obviously capable of murdering millions of people without provoking a sense of moral decency in either himself, or from the German people. How many Palestinians would be required to sacrifice their lives, in a campaign of non-violent resistance, before the moral sensibility of the Israelis would overwhelm their crazed sense of themselves as the 'chosen people,' and their determination to possess the 'promised land'? And further, does Palestinian culture even allow the remotest possibility that the masses of Palestinian citizens would be at all inclined to behave this way?
When various parties, (such as Barack Obama, for example), demand that the Palestinians must "renounce violence" as a condition for 'peace negotiations', (which the Palestinians, of course, know by now, from their long and tragic experience, are not genuine negotiations at all, but are rather ruses that are only meant to buy more time for more Jewish settlements to be built on Palestinian land), I don't think that what these parties have in mind is that the Palestinians should take up the practice of non-violent resistance instead. I think that Ramzy Baroud is correct. I think that what these parties mean is that the Palestinians must submit. They must give up all resistance. They must surrender to Israeli violence, and 'negotiate' from a prostrate position with the Israeli jackboot on their neck.
If the Palestinian people were culturally inclined to practice Satyagraha, if they were willing to make the required degrees of sacrifice, this strategy of aggressive non-violent resistance could very well be effective. But recognizing the degree of moral depravity of which the Israelis are capable, as exampled by the many shockingly horrific atrocities they have perpetrated, the sacrifice that genuine non-violent resistance would require would be huge.
To restate what I said in my earlier comments, I simply don't believe that it is my place or prerogative to dictate to a people in struggle, from my position of safety outside that struggle, what strategy and tactics they should choose to employ. And to glibly suggest, from a position of relative safety and comfort, that they should make the huge sacrifices that would be required to practice Satyagraha, is, in my opinion, the height of arrogance.
In a sane world it would go without saying that to expect that the Palestinians should give up ALL resistance, that they should submit, as a condition of negotiations, while the Israelis are free to continue their daily violence against these long-suffering people, is completely ludicrous.
But do any of us think we are living in a sane world?
Ray Zwarich
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