The Palestinian started to struggle against the Israeli separation wall ever since Israel started building it. At first people started in the North with small protests in the villages near the Palestinian city of Jenin, those protest were, however, soon crushed and finally stopped.
Less than a year later, the Israeli wall reached the village of Bilin. The residents of Bilin decided to take faith in their own hands and started protesting against the wall. These small protests later evolved to become a full blown movement, from which the popular resistance committee saw the light. In a few years, there were protests in Nilin, Bilin, Ma’asra, Eraq bourin and Nabisaleh.
Most of those villages adopted the principle of nonviolence as a method to resist the Israeli occupation and colonization of the west bank; claiming one needed to adopt the same methodologies as were used during the Indian revolution lead by Mahatma Gandhi.
Soon the term nonviolence was started to be used everywhere. People -mainly the elite- started to talk about how a nonviolent revolution would solve what the Palestinian people failed to solve in the past 63 years by using armed resistance -they didn’t do it right anyway-.
The European union picked up the movement and started sending indulgences -EU considering them Human rights activist- to everyone they thought fitted the profile. Off course this didn’t mean that anyone of them would receive any kind of immunity from the Israelis. A nicely dressed white guy in the court room whenever they would be send you to jail for six month for collecting used teargas grenades would probably be all that could be expected from those EU representatives. The main problem I find in people who talk about nonviolence is the fact that the are often detached from reality and the people in streets, they talk about Gandhi and India revolutions -which, by the way used armed resistance, Tamil Nadu, Maharasta, Bengal and Bihar are just few names of many armed resistance groups in India.- to people who know nothing about Gandhi nor India.
Secondly, most of the Palestinian nonviolent resistance advocates fail to recognize the uniqueness of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, and the objectives they are seeking.
The Zionist colonialism unlike the classical colonialism tends to spoil the country they colonize with resources, yet they don’t need the native for cheap labor. At the contrary since the beginning of the Jewish immigration to Palestine they always called for supporting Jewish labor., They complained many times to the company’s business owners and even the state about the lack of Jewish employees.
Third, those preaching for nonviolence seem to know so little about the countries and their struggles they use to advertise nonviolent resistance to the Palestinian population. They talk about Gandhi and Ignore Jatiandranath Mukherjee; they talk about Nelson Mandela, yet they ignore the fact that he was send to jail for using armed resistance; they talk about the civil rights movement in America while ignoring the black power movement and Black panthers for self defense. How can you take someone seriously, when they know nothing about the example he has been using to prove his point of view.
Fourth, and this is a dangerous one, many of those nonviolent preachers criminalize the popular resistance. What I mean here is that, some of those nonviolent activists tend to criminalize the actions that some Palestinians have adopted as part of the popular struggle, such as the throwing of stones at armored jeeps and soldiers. Which in all respect is a major flaw that requires such groups to reconstruct their ideology.
In the end, the Palestinian maintains the right to resist the Zionist colonialism using any mean necessary to achieve their purposes. nevertheless, the Palestinian is also obligated to resist with the approval of the West, even if they would rather chose the violent path. Cause after all they will miss the nicely dressed white person in their trials!
PS: I wrote an earlier post regarding this topic, but I felt obligated to talk about it again.
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