Palestinian Nonviolence is Alive and Well

There is a common misconception that Palestinians need to “find their Martin Luther King, Jr. or their Gandhi”, and appeals are often made to Palestinians to use nonviolent techniques in their movement for freedom and equality.  Most recently, Bono, lead singer of the rock band, U2, who is well-known and respected as a philanthropist and human rights advocate, made this appeal in an op-ed in the New York Times in which he wrote that he hoped that “people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a well-known and respected journalist, joined in the chorus on Martin Luther King Day saying, “I wish more Palestinians would absorb the lessons of King and Gandhi.”

These appeals incorrectly assume that Palestinians do not already primarily employ nonviolent tactics in their movement for freedom and equality, which they do.  For nearly a decade, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation has employed various nonviolent methods, most often conducted in partnership with Israelis and citizens from around the world.  While these courageous acts are rarely covered by the media, which, far more often, covers stories that “bleed”, they represent the overwhelming majority of the activities that constitute the Palestinian uprising.

The nonviolent Palestinian (and Israeli) movement for freedom and equality has consisted of civil disobedience, including Palestinians and Israelis standing together in front of Israeli bulldozers seeking to destroy Palestinian homes and olive groves, and Palestinians and Israelis rebuilding destroyed homes and replanting trees.  The movement has included weekly demonstrations against the construction of Israel’s wall on Palestinian land in the Palestinian towns of Ni’lin and Bil’in.  It has included Palestinians removing parts of the wall in both Bil’in and Ni’lin in deeply inspiring and courageous acts that were recorded, posted online and seen by tens of thousands of people around the world.

The nonviolent Palestinian-Israeli movement has also consisted of various legal challenges to Israel’s occupation and manifold discriminatory laws.  Palestinians and Israelis together have brought lawsuits in Israeli courts challenging such policies. For example, with the help of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Palestinian residents of six West Bank villages successfully petitioned an Israeli military court order that forbade Palestinians from using Route 443, a major road that runs through occupied Palestinian land and connects Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv.  Palestinians have also brought lawsuits in international legal fora, including the International Court of Justice, which ruled Israel’s construction of its wall on occupied Palestinian land illegal. 

The nonviolent movement has maintained a substantial international component, with Palestinians consistently advocating for their rights at the United Nations.  The result has been multiple United Nations resolutions calling on Israel to protect Palestinian human rights in its role as occupier of Palestinian land.  Palestinian international advocacy has not been limited to official fora; it has also included robust advocacy within international civil society, where Palestinians have called upon corporations profiting from the practices of Israeli occupation to cease doing so.  This movement was largely responsible for persuading the Norwegian Ministry of Finance to divest from the Israeli company, Elbit, which is directly involved in the construction of Israel’s wall on occupied Palestinian land.

In short, there is an extremely vibrant and active nonviolent Palestinian movement for freedom and equality.  If that movement lacks a single, recognizable leader, it is due, in part, to the Palestinian Authority’s crisis of leadership.  But it is also due to Israel’s systematic response to that movement.  For far too long, Israel’s response to the nonviolent Palestinian movement for freedom and equality has been to arrest and imprison its leaders in order to punish and intimidate them, and to deter them from continuing their work.  These leaders are detained under the pretext that they pose a “security threat” to Israel, and are often held in harsh conditions without charge or trial.

In recent months, prominent Palestinian nonviolent activists Mohammad Othman, Abdullah Abu Rahmah and Jamal Juma have been arrested for their advocacy.  And while, in January, Israel released Othman and Juma as a result of an extraordinary international campaign to pressure Israel to free them, it rounded up more than a dozen other nonviolent activists in the wake of that release.  Those activists, like many Palestinians involved in the nonviolent Palestinian movement, remain stuck in Israeli prisons today, where their important voices cannot be heard and their powerful examples cannot be heeded.

But where are opinion and moral leaders of the international community supporting their cause and demanding their release?  Too often, such leaders have ignored the nonviolent Palestinian movement, and have, by implication, reduced the Palestinian cause to a series of violent acts unexplainable by right or reason.  This ostensible lack of awareness of Palestinian nonviolence allows such “leaders” to escape taking a principled stand on the pressing moral question that is Palestine -- namely, that the Palestinian people have been -- and are being -- denied their fundamental rights to liberty and property by a 42-year Israeli occupation of their land, and to equality by a series of Israeli laws that discriminate against them on the basis of their ethnic and religious identity.   The ends of the Palestinian people are freedom and equality; their means are predominantly nonviolent; and their partners are Israeli and international.  If they have the physical and moral courage to engage in nonviolent resistance in the face of the overwhelming and longstanding injustice that has befallen them, then the least that we can do is have the moral courage to acknowledge, and stand with, them.