Will Nonviolent Resistance Work for the Palestinians?

Before departing to Belgium to seek justice for the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in West Beirut in 1982, Suad Srour told reporters, "I am going to Brussels on behalf of a whole people. I hope that (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon is hanged for what he did." Saud’s words were by no means an indication of a violent personality. They were indeed a natural response to an experience that cost the Palestinian girl everything she held dear.
Saud’s experience is one of those that many of us find unbearable to hear. She was only 14 when Phalange troops, under Israeli army command, broke into her impoverished home in the Shatilla refugee camp in West Beirut. They butchered her entire family and raped her in front of her father. The man died, and that scene was his last glimpse of life. Once finished with their mission to "mop up" alleged terrorists that Sharon claimed to be harbored in the camps, they shot Suad. But she didn’t die; she rose from the ashes with others to narrate a massacre that shall daunt the world’s conscience forever.

The camps’ massacre in West Beirut is one of dozens of massacres carried out by Israel against defenseless and unarmed civilians, starting with Deir Yassin, Tantura, Beit Daras, passing through Qbyia, the murder of Egyptian war prisoners, Bureij, Qana and many others.

These atrocities came and went like a summer storm, their victims buried or "disappeared" and details forgotten. Some were entirely dropped from history books. I was dismayed when I realized that after months of research (that I and a colleague have conducted while writing a book, which we hope to publish soon) dealing with Sharon’s war crimes, I found that dozens of massacres were hardly mentioned or even referred to as "massacres" despite their gruesome nature and horrific details, where innocents were collectively butchered.

Throughout most of these massacres, not one hand was lifted to defend the innocents who were killed, as if their lives were of no value. The typical argument presented by Israel, once the carnage was made public, was that Israel is not the one to blame for the loss of civilian lives, for it was the fault of the "terrorists" who sought shelter in civilians homes, forcing Israeli to "retaliate" and mistakenly kill civilians.

Some eyewitness to the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla indicated that yes, indeed there were armed Palestinian individuals in the camps during the massacre: small groups of children, aged 9 and 10 who attempted to provide a safe exit for their mothers, sisters and elder family members who sought safety outside the camp or near a hospital. The children took that role after the departure of all Palestinian fighters who left the city after American envoy Philip Habib promised that the US would provide needed protection for the camps.

This history is of great importance, not because it reminds us of the vile face of Israel and its war generals, but because it comes in a time when there is growing enthusiasm regarding "other forms of resistance" that use nonviolent means.

Some, including intellectuals known for their strong support for Palestinian rights, say that violence is a costly method of resistance in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict scenario. For one, it provides Israel with the needed pretext to escalate its organized campaign of violence in the West Bank and Gaza. To prove their point, they bring up past experiences of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King of the United States. One renowned scholar called on Palestinians to take to the streets and form a human chain to surround Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements, forcing the settlers to leave, once cut off from life outside.

Apparently there is a lack of understanding regarding the nature of the Israeli occupation, and a failure to grasp the causes of violence. There is also a lack of notion to differentiate between senseless violence and sensible violence.

Demanding Palestinians to resort to nonviolent means of resistance is a miscalculated move, to say the least, for it indicates that violence for Palestinians is a strategic choice. The Palestinian individual (regardless of what a poet once said) is not born holding a rock or a machine gun. It is the persistent injustice and the people’s rejection of such injustice that compels Palestinians to resist. The nature of the resistance, its magnitude and duration, is often controlled by the behavior and response of the enemy, its brutality and inhumanity.

For example, the Palestinian uprising began with symbolic acts of rejection to the Israeli military occupation: chants, graffiti, waving fists and strikes, large rallies and rock throwing, (which are of course not enough to repel the fourth strongest army in the world.) The Israeli army which dealt with Palestinian youth and children as if they were well-trained and all geared-up first class soldiers, forced Palestinians to upgrade the level of their resistance, this time not to send symbolic messages anymore (to appeal to an apathetic world), but to in fact defend their families, homes, towns and villages.

And how can we propose a human chain to circle Israeli settlements if Israeli settlers have deliberately and repeatedly run over Palestinians with their cars, killing and severely wounding scores of them?

The factor which forced Palestinian children (who should have been running on a playground or coloring in their coloring books) to carry tank propellers in Lebanon was the inherited desire to defend one’s family and community, not mere violence for the sake of violence. Indeed, the massacre of Sabra and Shatilla came in a time when Palestinians agreed to leave the camps, hoping to spare the lives of the refugees who were targeted and killed by Israel throughout its invasion of Lebanon. Palestinians were therefore killed whether they resisted or yielded.

Nonviolence as an alternative method of resistance is doomed for failure, although theoretically noble and ideal. The savagery of the enemy is what in fact determines the level of resistance. Nonviolence has great chances of success in parts of the world where human rights are treasured and an individual is valued and revered. But in the land occupied by Israel, where children are killed while seeking shelter by their fathers, and where homes are bombarded and bulldozed with inhabitants still inside, and where soldiers often shoot at anything and everything for sport, the rules are different. It would then be unfair and irrational to stop a child who is throwing rocks at a bulldozer while it tears down his house. It would be preposterous to stop a man with a rifle attempting to halt a row of tanks progressing toward his village, demanding that he seek a nonviolent option to halt the bulldozer or the advancing tanks.

Malcolm X once said, "we declare our right on this earth, to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being, in this society, on this earth, on this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary." Palestinians too declared such rights and vowed to achieve them by any means necessary. Malcolm X was too gunned down, but his words have shaped history.

Ramzy Baroud