Popular Resistance in Palestine

A History of Hope and Empowerment

Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783714261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Armed resistance, suicide bombings, and rocket attacks, populate the Western media's depiction of Palestinian resistance. Synthesising data from hundreds of original sources, Dr Mazin Qumsiyeh provides the most comprehensive study of the always creative, often peaceful, civil resistance in Palestine. Successes, failures, missed opportunities and challenges are chronicled through hundreds of stories from over 100 years of Palestinian resistance. The book critically and comparatively surveys uprisings under Ottoman rule, against the Balfour Declaration and the Oslo Accords, all the way up to the Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions movement. The compelling human stories told in this book will inspire people of all faiths and political backgrounds to chart a better and more informed direction for a future of peace with justice.

1

Introduction

Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.¹

Even those with good intentions misunderstand what happened in Palestine with regard to popular resistance. Jesse Jackson, Sr. once wrote an open letter to Yasser Arafat urging a strategy of nonviolence to achieve ‘statehood’.² Similarly, in an address to the Muslim world in Cairo, President Barak Obama asked Palestinians to ‘struggle for a state’ by nonviolent means.³ As well meaning as these two men are, they fail to understand the true nature of the struggle by reducing the message to a statement about the undesirability of violence on the part of an oppressed people. Both ignore the rich history of precisely such nonviolent struggle while failing to appreciate what Palestinians really want: freedom and the right of return, not a flag over a canton called a state. Though Jackson and Obama are more understanding than others in the West, right-wing individuals like Dick Cheney and Tony Blair, and neoliberals with Zionist leanings like Thomas Friedman, deliver far harsher Orientalist lectures. We also see a minimization or total ignorance among those in the West of the far more deadly violence required and exerted to achieve a Jewish state in a land that, before 1917, had a Jewish population of less than 7 percent. Is it logical that foreigners who have not experienced what we experience should ask us to adopt nonviolence in our struggle against an apartheid colonial system? Is this not more problematic when such Westerners ignore the great work accomplished by Palestinians and internationals to effect real change over the decades and without the use of arms?

As we report in this book, the reality is that popular resistance in Palestine developed indigenously, organically, naturally and beautifully. And it has accelerated in the past two decades. An internet search of ‘Palestinian popular resistance’ now gives over 8.5 million hits. This resistance was and continues to be against the Zionist goal of transforming a central part of the Arab world from a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society into a Jewish state; a goal that required: 1) support from world powers; 2) convincing, organizing and mobilizing Jews for Zionism; and 3) crushing any and all resistance from the native population. Securing international support proved to be an achievable task due to the number of Zionists in key positions in Western countries; but crushing local resistance was more difficult than anticipated. The Palestinians’ refusal to be dispossessed quietly was met with increasingly harsh oppression throughout the decades. The Palestinian people rose from the ashes of each onslaught to engage in novel forms of civil resistance. After nearly 130 years of political Zionism, it is hard now to think of Palestinians without thinking of resistance. It is difficult to think of the conflict in the Holy Land without an opinion on the forms and nature of this resistance. Because of the media’s conditioning in Western societies, many automatically think of armed (violent) resistance whenever the word ‘resistance’ is mentioned.

There has been no shortage of discussion of the conflict’s history at the political level, the violence that accompanied the struggle, the accusations and counter-accusations, and so on. Many books are written in the West supporting the Zionist version of history.⁴ Fewer report the Palestinian version of the same events.⁵ Occasionally, new historians challenge mythologies sometimes decades after key events; we have seen this with the Israeli new historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev, Simha Flapan and Hillel Cohen, who deconstructed the myths around the mass exodus of native Palestinians before, during and after the founding of Israel.

Western books portraying a positive image of Palestinian history have been appreciated, but lack the full understanding that a local Palestinian author has. Critiques of a few Western historical perspectives include: Johan Galtung’s Nonviolence and Israel/Palestine,⁶ which does a fair job showing some aspects of the period 1987–89, but suffers from ignoring the political forces at work and not analyzing the reasons behind the events he describes. The period of the 1987 intifada is included in Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall, A Force More Powerful: A century of nonviolent resistance and its accompanying TV program, but again in an essentially descriptive way.⁷ Another example is Mary Elizabeth King, A Quiet Revolution: The first Palestinian intifada and nonviolent resistance,⁸ and is based on interviews with individuals who identify themselves as leaders of the Palestinian popular struggle. The book emphasizes the period of Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonization after 1987 and sets out an excellent framework for discussion. However, it was not well received in the Journal of Palestine Studies:

She [King] overstates her case by allowing her methodology and convictions to color a complex reality. Steered by her convictions and her sources inside the East Jerusalem bubble, King attempts, ex post facto, to force a popular uprising characterized by a powerful blend of civil disobedience and stone throwing into the ideological straitjacket of nonviolence. It doesn’t fit. This is a lamentable drawback to a book that otherwise is highly readable and admirably rich in detail.⁹

I think this is exaggerated. The work by King is very good compared to treatments like those found in Herbert Adam and Kogila Moodley.¹⁰ More distorted accounts are found in Zionist-centric logic which assumes that actions by Palestinians, armed or unarmed, are not resistance but are illegal and that Israel reacts in order to defend its legitimate goals (albeit with its army sometime not fully ‘prepared’ and even ‘over-reacting’).¹¹ Yet, other Western historians go in the opposite direction and romanticize and oversimplify the Palestinians’ struggle and history.¹² These books further suffer from the flaw that the authors do not read Arabic and thus cannot refer to the original data on a subject that is a struggle of an indigenous, Arabic-speaking people.

While having differing takes on history, most books document actions by governments and powerful leaders in conflicts. Fewer consider peace based on justice, human rights and international law or tell the stories of ordinary people living, adapting and struggling in extraordinary circumstances. We find little acknowledgment of the rich history and phenomenal achievements of popular resistance in Palestine. Some books written by Westerners, unfamiliar with the local language and dependent on published sources or interviews with elite Palestinians, have failed to do justice to this subject.

In addition to the wealth of academic literature, there is a torrent of negative and rather depressing news coming out of Palestine: murders, economic deprivation, torture, walls, imprisonment, home demolitions, land confiscation, corruption, denial of basic rights, lack of freedom of movement and denial of the right of return, etc. It is hard to mobilize people who are bombarded with these issues. In this book, we document and analyze the struggle by ordinary Palestinians forced to live in unusual times since the inception of the political ideology called Zionism. Such a story changes the tone of the conversation. Stories of successes and positive achievements provide incentives for further activism. We Palestinians have no shortage of inspirational, unsung heroes.

A respected Palestinian stated about just one period in our history:

Nonviolent resistance demands strong leaders. In the first days of the occupation in 1967, the Palestinian nonviolence movement had a surplus. A dynamic voluntary work movement sprang up under the guidance of democratically elected municipal councils. This movement created jobs, built schools, established youth clubs, and created public libraries …¹³

Mohammed Omar Hamadeh’s A’lam Falastine: From the first to the 15th century Hijra, from the 7th to twentieth century AD (1985) lists hundreds of inspirational Palestinian leaders, authors, intellectuals and many others. But it is hard for people to read what essentially amounts to a Palestinian Who’s Who.¹⁴ In this book, we summarize and analyze the rich history of popular resistance in Palestine. The book is essentially about the power of individuals working together to transform themselves and their societies, while living in exceptional and extremely difficult circumstances.

VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE

The twentieth century was perhaps the bloodiest in human history, but was also a century replete with examples of popular resistance that shaped the future without resorting to violence.¹⁵ Yet, school history books in most countries seem to give no more than cursory attention to nonviolence. Few are written about common people’s struggles. And any such books are not used as school texts.¹⁶ Violence seems ubiquitous. Laws and institutions in most countries focus on dealing with state-monopolized violence. Even some of our vocabulary evolved from wars and conflicts; many common English expressions have military origins, including ‘the whole nine yards’, ‘clean bill of health’, ‘rummage sale’ and ‘show your true colors’. Thus, to appreciate popular resistance, we need to know something about the culture of violence in our societies.

Violence consists of actions intended to harm others on the assumption that this will help achieve a concrete result or goal. However, perceptions of what constitutes violence are highly varied. Many individuals when confronted with examples of behaviors that hurt others will not associate them with ‘violent behavior’. In societies that condone capital punishment, some individuals would not describe the act of executing a condemned person as an act of violence. Even when a society chooses to use extreme force against an opponent, its history texts do not describe the society as engaging in violence, let alone terrorism.¹⁷ The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, is justified as a ‘necessary action’ to bring World War II to an end.

There are two schools of thought. One proposes that violence is encoded in our genetic make-up, the other that it is a learned behavior and so can be unlearned.¹⁸ As an evolutionary biologist and geneticist, and having examined the issue in some detail, I would contend that the answer lies somewhere between the two: that our evolutionary history gave us a blueprint for violence, altruism and collaboration, while giving us the intellectual ability to educate for or against violence in meaningful ways.

Popular resistance is far more coherent philosophically than violent resistance. Societal violence has traditionally been legitimized and legalized, while violence by non-state actors has been denounced and made illegal, giving the state a monopoly on its use. Avelar explained how strong states, like the US and Israel, have engaged in acts of war (without calling it war) in the name of law enforcement.¹⁹ Those who engage in violent action legitimize what they do according to what they consider are ‘good’ means to a legitimate end. The cause of opponents is not considered legitimate and their use of violence is not justified. No party aims to establish a violent society, and those who justify the use of violence, base their argument on the justice of the ends; the ends justify the means. Whether one accepts the violent means criterion or not, it is a useful means to help achieve the ends sought. That is where the discussion mostly focuses – the issue of utility – and thus opens up violent logic to self-contradictions.

Rulers and occupiers maintain a power structure to dictate their agendas. As such, resistance typically focuses on changing the power structure. Historians can only offer examples of a mix of violent and nonviolent actions to varying degrees. Some may argue that the Algerian revolution against the French occupation resorted more to violent resistance while the Indian revolution against British colonial rule relied more on nonviolent resistance. It is impossible to come up with quantitative measures to say a revolution was 60 percent or 80 percent nonviolent. The closest we can come is, presumably, to compare the number of people killed while resisting violently with those who were killed resisting nonviolently. However, this is a subjective and highly fluid judgment; colonizers often claim they shot protesters because soldiers’ or police officers’ lives were at risk. We also know that, in some cases, Israeli undercover agents have thrown rocks or opened fire in demonstrations to create the pretext for shooting.²⁰

The false dichotomy sometimes argued is that societies can choose to use moral methods that are ineffective, such as nonviolent resistance, or amoral methods that are effective, such as violent insurrection; but this is essentially a misleading and defeatist attitude, which ignores both the history and possibilities of humanity, while overlooking the reality that it is individuals, not societies, who make choices.²¹

In reflecting on apartheid South Africa, people in the West tend to forget that the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, was a guerrilla movement fighting violently for liberation, as well as using various forms of popular resistance. Individuals who believe in violence tend to minimize the role of people like Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., while others tend to consider them key elements of change in society. Ironically, in both situations, some argue that liberation would not have been won without violent resistance, while others argue that it could not have been won without nonviolent resistance. This is a moot point because its foundation is a hypothetical situation that has never existed. All struggles to date have used both violent and nonviolent resistance. Can we really know exactly what the tipping point was in each situation? Can we truly say what would have happened to the civil rights movement without the ‘good cop’ Martin Luther King, Jr. and the ‘bad cop’ Malcolm X? History is usually written by the victors; thus the leaders of the Algerian revolution consider that violence was the key to ending the French colonial occupation. In the transformation of the US in the 1960s, historians typically emphasize popular resistance over the influence of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and so we find no national holidays commemorating the life and sacrifices of Malcolm X, Crazy Horse or Geronimo.

What would have happened in South Africa without Tutu’s popular resistance or Mandela’s more violent struggle? For that matter, can we imagine what would have happened without diversity within the oppressor population? Was President Johnson or King, or Malcolm X for that matter, critical in securing popular rights in the US? Do Israeli groups, like the Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions or B’Tselem, make a vital difference? I think the answers given by advocates in favor of the dichotomy are not that simple. But as an individual, I can make a judgment as to what I can and should do, without cursing or condemning alternative judgments. The Stanford Prison experiment shows that humans are highly influenced by circumstances. In this experiment, students were randomly assigned to play the role of prison...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What We Want: Plurality, Justice, Human Rights
• 3 The Logic of Popular Resistance
• 4 The Local Context of Popular Resistance
• 5 Popular Resistance during Ottoman Rule
• 6 Balfour, Al-Buraq and the Zionist Build-up, 1917–35
• 7 The Great Revolt of 1936–39
• 8 Devastation to Nakba, 1939–48
• 9 From Nakba to Naksa, 1948–67
• 10 One State of Oppression, 1967–86
• 11 Intifadet Al-Hijara, 1987–91
• 12 Madrid, Oslo and the Al-Aqsa Intifada
• 13 Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions
• 14 Conclusions and Outlook for the Future
• Appendix: Local Civil Resistance Nonviolent
• Notes
• Index