Semi-Successful Tactics

The death of two Palestinian women and the injuring of ten others in Gaza today at the hands, or rather bullets, of the Israeli Defense Forces has the potential to be truly revolutionary. All that is required, and I know this is a tall order, is a rethinking of Palestinian liberation strategy.

Since 1967 if not before 1948, Palestinians have assumed that arms and violence will win them their state. In fact, with every suicide bombing or rocket attack this goal gets further away. Israel merely has to label Palestinians as terrorists and they are allowed to do pretty much what they will including execution, torture, exile and worst of all the destruction of livelihoods. The international community and the international conscience, the ones that will make Palestine free (despite what Israel might think) are not easily swayed by violence. Even if the violence is committed in a just cause.

What is different about today is that these women were unarmed and were standing valiantly in the path of one of the most advanced and deadly military machines in the world. And it wasn't a small group of women either but a mass of women surrounding a mosque in Gaza. They were not threatening, they were just standing with their heads held high, as they should be. You are Palestinians, you should be proud.

Unfortunately they were not defending their children, their homes or their crops but were protecting armed men taking refuge inside a mosque. This is where their actions lose their power. Israel now has an excuse for the killing of these two women, they were protecting terrorists. Open and shut case. I can already hear the Israeli spokesperson dismissing these deaths as necessary in the "war on terror".

I've always argued that if the Palestinians or any marginalized and dominated group is really interested in gaining their freedom, they must embrace nonviolent tactics. If these heroic women and the millions of other Palestinians rotting in Gaza and the West Bank could be mobilized in a nonviolent struggle, they would have their state in a day. The two largely nonviolent intifadas of the past two decades got the peace process moving much more than hijacked planes and executed athletes.

Also using violence to cast off an oppressor doesn't lead to a constructive and respectful society once that goal is achieved. In fact, I would argue, it entrenches the method of violence deep within a people's psyche. It becomes how they relate to one another; one only has to view the current tension between Fatah and Hamas to see this truth at work.

I recently listened to a radio show about Algeria's independence struggle and this lesson is perhaps best described there. Algeria is free from the French but at what cost? Algeria is a sad and violent place today. How do you remove the stain of violence from your soul? Best not to start down that path.