Jerry Slater, the scholar (and also "a lifelong Zionist" who once volunteered to serve in the Israeli navy), had more to say about Jim Sleeper's piece about the efficacy of Palestinian nonviolence at TPM yesterday:
What Sleeper evidently doesn't understand is that the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
its very essence, is that the Israelis have used massive violence
against the Palestinians and their political organizations since 1947,
and not only against Hamas and other extremists.
Moreover, this violence has repeatedly been directed not only against resistance movements,
but also against civilians–for that matter, not only Palestinian
civilians but also Egyptian, Jordanian, and (repeatedly) Lebanese
civilians. To be sure, earlier Israeli violence against the
Palestinians was on behalf of an historically just cause: the creation
of a Jewish state, following centuries of murderous persecution of the
Jews, particularly but not only the Holocaust.
When unjust methods are used on behalf of a just cause, it can reasonably be argued that a moral dilemma
exists. However, when unjust methods are used on behalf of an unjust
cause–the maintenance of the occupation and repression of the
Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza–there is no moral dilemma at all.
In a sense, then, Phil Weiss's comment that lecturing the Palestinians on
how they "ought to behave to compel us to get our boot off their neck"
is an appropriately acerbic comment on the moral blindness of many
Israelis–as illustrated, for example, by Golda Meir's infamous
comment: "We will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill
their children.”
The history of Israeli violence against
the Palestinians is not a matter of opinion, but of plain, repeatedly
demonstrated fact. Anyone who fails to grasp, willfully denies, or
simply forgets those facts is not qualified to lecture the Palestinians
on the virtues of nonviolence–even more so, because these lectures
also ignore the long history of Israeli repression of Palestinian
nonviolence, which in fact many Palestinians have tried, only to see
the occupation consolidated and expanded.
To be
sure, it is clear that Palestinian violence has also failed, and my own
view is that for both moral and practical reasons they should eschew
violence and employ only nonviolent resistance.
Nonetheless, anyone advocating this should also honestly admit that
Palestinian nonviolence in the past and present has repeatedly failed,
and that the likelihood is that it would continue to fail, given
Israeli ruthlessness, brutality, and blindness to their own history.
The great tragedy for the Palestinians, then, is that nothing has worked for them, and given the state of affairs in Israel
today there is little prospect that anything will work in the
foreseeable future. Nonetheless, it is not the Palestinians but the
Israelis that are largely responsible for their catastrophe–and anyone
giving advice to them on how to proceed has little credibility if they
fail to acknowledge that.
