The Seattle Times engages the question that the New York Times won't: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi. And Huwaida Arraf answers in this Op-Ed, by giving a list of people who have been killed by the Israelis while pursuing non-violent protest, from Rachel Corrie to Bassem Abu Rahme. The point:
When village residents gather weekly to protest, they use various creative methods of nonviolent resistance, including carrying mirrors up to the soldiers to show them "the face of occupation" or dressing as various politicians and wearing blindfolds to symbolize the world's blind eye to their struggle. The Israeli military meets them and their Israeli and international supporters with tear gas, grenades, and bullets.
Eyewitness accounts and a YouTube video of Bassem's killing attest to the fact that Bassem was not engaged in any kind of violent action when a soldier decided to fire a high-velocity tear gas canister — designed to be shot in the air or from a great distance — directly at his chest, fatally wounding him. In fact, just before he was shot, Bassem is heard calling to soldiers to stop shooting as a woman had been injured. Far too often, Israel tries to silence dissent by using disproportionate and sometimes lethal force against demonstrators.
My own response. When Americans, Where is the Palestinian Gandhi, the best answer is: Wait, why put the onus on someone else; where is your own protest movement? If something is so unjust that it requires a Gandhi, then why are you tolerating your country's support for it.
The Palestinian Gandhi is not the individual that shows up at a demonstration, but the person that LEADS primarily the clarification of what the movement is doing.
And, that includes the tangible goal of an action but MORE IMPORTANTLY the commitment, the action, of doing actual good in how one conducts every aspect of their dissent, from how they speak to others, to the actions chosen to address, to the training of those participating in the dissent to pursue ONLY non-violent action with no doubt in the world or in the opponent that one's action is non-violent.
The intifada's were NOT non-violent. When an Israeli soldier needs to think that he/she is risking their life whether or not someone behind the "non-violent" rock-throwing youth is carrying a sub-machine gun, that is NOT a non-violent action.
Its not non-violent itself, and not connected to the assertion of non-violence as life-way (not only as tactic).
"killed by the Israelis while pursuing non-violent protest, from Rachel Corrie"
A case of accidental suicide. Corrie, making a darwinian choice, believed her chosen enemies should give a shit about her life more than theirs. Thank God she didn't breed.
Yeah, by bringing up the International Solidarity House of Pancakes girl you really mmake an ass of yourself.
"Wait, why put the onus on someone else; where is your own protest movement? If something is so unjust that it requires a Gandhi, then why are you tolerating your country's support for it."
Abso-f*cking-lutely!
A great post — which reminds me once again why Mondoweiss is indispensable!
Only cowards (Witty) and Nazis (Barrel, Haygood imposter) want a Palestinian Gandhi.
Israelis prefer to fight women and children when the resistance is violent. So they'll rely on indiscriminate air-strikes after some Jew broke her fingernail in Tel Aviv. When it's non-violent? Someone just has to be a Mets fan to get tear-gas-cannister'd in the face.
You have your pick of subtle fascists (Witty) and flamboyant (and idiotic) fascists – Barrel-roll.
In India, Mahatma Ghandi faced a colonial power based thousands of miles away that had no real commitmment to colonization. Britain certainly did not make such a commitment after WW2. Basically Britain is a Christian nation.
In America, Martin Luther King faced an opposition which advocated policies which the rest of the nation had no real committment to. Basically, the USA is a heavily Christian-influenced nation.
The Palestinians, on the other hand, face an opposition that appears fully committed to its policies and which has faced no significant international pushback to its policies since Ike. Does anyone really doubt that the World would not have tolerated the treatment meted out in the occupied territories if Arabs were the occupier and Jews the occupied?
Americans need to do some soul-searching.
International and economic pressure, dis-investment campaigns and the U.S. making contingent any further economic/military aid with a halt and dismantlement of the settlements and serious steps by the Israelis toward a two-state solution (including negotiations with Hamas). Everything else is simply more of the same which for decades has simply led to more settlements and the tightening of Palestinian bantustans.
p.s. Can we really compare the freedom of movement and action that blacks experienced in the Jim Crow South with life for Palestinians under the military control utilized by the Israelis? I don’t recall the KKK operating tanks clearing black neighborhoods of their inhabitants.
Bin Laden’s stated reasons for attacking the United States were: 1- The US military presence in Saudi Arabia 2- US support for corrupt dictators such as in Egypt – the country that tortured his second in a reaction to the violent response of Egyptians to Sadat’s signing of a peace treaty with Israel and 3- Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, where according to Bin Laden seeing the destruction of buildings in Lebanon made him want to see the same happen to Israel’s patron, the United States.
Bin Laden’s third reason is directly Israel. That’s what Bin Laden said with in a tape in his own name.
Reason number 2, US support for unpopular dictatorships such as Egypt, also resolves to Israel. The United States supports and trains the dictatorship in Egypt because Egypt (like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, countries with similar arrangements) is relatively cooperative with Israel.
Reason number 1, US military presence in Saudi Arabia is similar to number 2, the purpose of the US military presence, from Bin Laden’s viewpoint, is to prop up an unpopular regime and in exchange this regime cooperates with US efforts to maintain Israeli regional dominance.
It is an uncomfortable truth (for supporters of Israel) that there is one dispute between the West and the Muslim world, which is over whether or not Israel is legitimate as a Jewish state. Every other dispute is either unimportant or a specific subinstance of that larger dispute.
Just as protests in Washington DC had a huge impact on the viability of Apartheid in South Africa, 9/11 was designed to impact the viability of Zionism in Palestine.
I've addressed this question a lot at my Just World News blog over the years…. Also, I have some reportage from the two occasions I've marched with the Bil'in marchers, etc, interviews with various other nonviolence activists in Israel and Palestine, etc.
One little-understood aspect of the situation has been the degree to which Hamas– like Hizbullah– has built its political strength precisely by using the techniques of mass nonviolent organizing. Like Mandela's ANC, these movements are mass movements that use a combination of nonviolent and violent tactics. Mandela, remember, was jailed because he was the head of the ANC's military.
My personal rule of thumb for opinionators at the Seattle Times or other institutions in rich, settled, western societies is that if they can't prove they've taken some public action to oppose our own countries' massive use of violence against others, then they have no reason to expect to be listened to when they to 'preach' nonviolence to people in much tougher situations around the world.
Yes, non-violence works when the people with decision-making power live far away and don’t particularly care about the fate of the people the non-violent protesters are protesting – it was northerners who ended Jim Crow, British people in Britain who closed down the Raj.
One would add that non-violence certainly doesn’t always work – we can note Ireland, where there was non-violent nationalist protest for years leading up to World War I, with no real effect except a deal for a very limited home rule for part of the island (as I understand it, the home rule envisioned in the 1914 bill was more limited than Scottish home rule as it exists now), which was immediately suspended indefinitely due to the war. It took actual fighting to end British rule in most of Ireland.
It also took violent resistance to get us to the Good Friday agreements .
Violent resistance was heavily involved in the end of French rule in Algeria; it also featured in a number of other colonial situations.
But all these situations have something in common which is, again, that the people making the decisions don’t actually care that much. French people didn’t care much about pied-noirs; the British didn’t like Irish Unionists very much; Northerners disdained the white south; people in Britain gradually got very sick of the Raj; and so forth.
This doesn’t apply to Israel, where all Israelis are implicated in the Occupation in a way that all Brits were not implicated in the oppression of Ireland or India; that all Frenchmen were not implicated in French rule in Algeria. This is why neither non-violence nor violence has had any particular effect in this conflict.
The only comparable example is, I guess, South African apartheid. Resistance to apartheid was kind of a mix of non-violence and violence. It’s also worth noting that the first steps in the fall of apartheid were taken due to military defeat abroad, in Angola. But White South Africans were really in a much weaker position than Israelis are. Israelis are more than half the population of the old British mandate; White South Africans were, what, a little more than 10% of the population? South Africa obviously also faced a lot more outside pressure than Israel has so far faced.
It’s worth remembering that it was military defeats by the Cuban Army and the Namibian guerrillas in Angola and Southwest Africa that eventually broke the back of South African apartheid, not ‘nonviolent resistance’. And Gandhi would have gotten nowhere if the British Empire had not been terminally weakened by the Second World War. Both those so-called nonviolent movements ’succeeded’ only because there was great violence going on in the background
If a peaceful Palestinian state covering essentially all of the West Bank and all of Gaza were the aim of the Palestian political class–or at least the controling faction of the political class–were the aim, could it have been accomplished via peaceful means 30 years ago? Could nonviolent resistance been more effective? Are people who think otherwise too emotionally invested in the notion of Israeli/Jewish malevolence to think straight? The Palestinians, and the Islamic world generally speaking, have never accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East. On the other side, the Palestinians were dispossed of their land back in 1948, have suffered increasing encroachments on land to which they have a legitimate claim since then, and have suffered often brutal repression. Moreover, various Israeli governments have undermined the Palestanian political factions that might be disposed to less than maximalist aims. (Hamas, after all, was seen as a useful counterweight to the PLO.) Real and grave injustices have been done to the Palestinians. But not all historical injustices can be undone. Can this one be undone only by dissolving the Jewish state?
Non-violence usually doesn’t work, but it’s really the only option for the Palestinians. They are so ridiculously outgunned that violence cannot work. You cannot fight the Israeli army with suicide bombers and win. And the Israelis have a very clear policy: if an Israeli dies, a hundred Palestinians must die in response. The only hope for the Palestinians is to gain the sympathy of an army that’s much more powerful than the Israeli army. And only non-violence can do that. But there are few armies that can go against Israel, and the United States army will always stand with Israel. If the Palestinians could somehow gain the sympathy of Russia, China, India, and Turkey, they could win their battle against the US and Israel. But that will never happen. Only one possibility really exists for the Palestinians: extermination. Given that, they might as well go down fighting. If there ever was a definition of hopeless, it’s the situation the Palestinians face. They have two choices: die quickly or die slowly.
Israel’s foreign decision-makers – the Northerners if Zionism is Jim Crow, the Brits if Zionism is India’s raj, the Western governments on which it depends if Zionism is Apartheid is again the Western governments on which it depends.
It takes a lot of western cooperation to prop up Israel. Without active and expensive intervention, especially by the US, Israel would face industrialized adversaries in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran that would have superiority in conventional arms, far more manpower and at least nuclear weapons capability if not arms to neutralize Israel’s nuclear threat.
In the face of this, Israel really would not have much choice other than to, in SLC’s words, go out of business. Accept the refugees, be a multi-ethnic state in a way that the populations of Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran consider just, and if there must be a Jewish majority state somewhere, get one established maybe somewhere in North America.
Israel is far more dependent on Western support for its continued existence as a Jewish state than South Africa was in maintaining Apartheid. The difference is that Afrikaaners, people who identified with White South Africans sometimes strongly, sometimes psychotically, were not well integrated and politically powerful in the US and other Western countries.
But the US is not a majority Jewish country or anything close to it. Sustained protests, violent or non-violent, directed against the United States does have the capacity to end US support for Zionism which would be enough to end Zionism more quickly than Apartheid ended when its US support dried ou
Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?
At the beginning of the first intifada (1988), Israel expelled Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American child psychologist who advocated Gandhian tactics for resisting the occupation. The Israeli government understood right away that nonviolent tactics had the potential to embarrass Israel, and was determined to stop him. This seems conclusive on the issue Phil raises once more. Unless you think the USA government would raise a protest, and preach to the public about it. LOL.
I doubt that I or Richard Witty would recognize a Palestinian Gandhi unless he was played by an englishman in a movie.
I forgot to add Iraq to the list of bigger, richer, more militarily powerful countries Israel would face if not for the US. How could I have forgotten? Also I really hope violent opposition to the US by Arabs and Muslims does not escalate. Hopefully the United States is already in the process of weaning itself out of its role as Israel’s guardian without further violent or non-violent opposition.
Iraq, well before the invasion of Kuwait was a potential strategic adversary of Israel. The starvation of Iraqis, the total destruction of the country after Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait, in other words the elements of US post-Kuwait Iraq policy that enraged Bin Laden and his followers were followed to reduce the strategic threat Iraq posed to Israel, not to Kuwait.
Keeping a tiny country like Israel militarily dominant in a region of rich countries and countries with multiples of Israel’s population imposes requirements on the United States that would not be present in Israel’s absence, or if the US was not committed to ensuring that Israel has a permanent Jewish majority.
The dismantlement of Iraq, at least from the refusal to negotiate a withdrawal from Kuwait by Hussein, through the sanctions that killed thousands of Iraqi children of cholera, through the invasion up to and including the current occupation of Iraq and the leverage the occupation gives the US over Iraqi policy were all motivated more by a desire to remove a strategic threat to Israel than by any loyalty to Kuwait, a country most Americans had never heard of.
The dismantlement of Iraq was not necessary to protect Kuwait. It was necessary as one part of an enormously expensive program in keeping Israel, a tiny country, viable in face of the opposition of its larger neighbors.
There really is only one dispute between the West and the Muslim world. It is over the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Without that dispute, the US would intervene in the Middle East no more than it intervenes in the Nigeria area, or the Venezuela area. Which is not none at all, but is not enough to turn the people of those regions into Bin Ladens
jdledell
I was in Israel dozens of time during the 70’s and 80’s and lived there in 1982 and 1983. I witnessed probably 100 or more non-violent Palestinian protests for a state or at least autonomy. Israel basically ignored their issues and gave them a giant middle finger, along with bumps and bruises from nightsticks. Israelis laughed at these feeble protests and it led directly to the first inifitada in 1987.
Do any of you old enough to remember recall reading anything in the US or European press about Palestinian protests? Probably not – I never did. The Israeli press back then was also not sympathetic. I am not optomistic that Israel will pay any more attention to non-violence now than they did back then.
My grandfather was Irgun and he always said Begin’s philosophy was power counts and nothing else is in second place. That is still Israel’s governing philosophy. Remember, Israel was born out of violence and the Brits finally got tired of it and left. Someone above said there is a major difference between an occupying power from far away vesus one next door. The former can be chased, the latter not so much.
The Palestinians face an almost impossible task. If they fight, the Israelis superior firepower will make violence ineffective and cause the Israelis to not believe peace is possible. If the Palestinians don’t use violence, then there is no need for a peace agreement and Israel is free to do as they wish with roads, settlements and fences. Syria has been non violent with Israel for 42 years and how much of the Golan have they won back
Israel cannot defeat Hamas and the Palestinians IF the Palestinians adopted EFFECTIVE terrorism strategies, unless Israel wants to commit a full scale genocide on the Palestinians. While Israel might be willing to do so, the Western world would not allow it.
Non-violence cannot work for the Palestinians. Effective terrorism can. Look, two Kennedys were killed, and ML King. Various things happened, or did not, in each case. The Pals need to learn to assassinate Likud leaders effectively; they need to study Israel's methods against their own leaders.
Where is the Palestinian Moses?
Most normal people, by which I mean ones who haven’t allowed Western liberalism to corrode their minds, hearts and souls, want to live in a community where they share something in common with people around them. More importantly, they also want the freedom to establish a set of values and ideals as the dominant ones in their community, to which all people should strive. These values might be Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Socialist, Communist, Feudalist or Anarchist. What’s important is that they do embody a moral ideal to which all people should strive. Living a good life is not something that can be done purely individually, it can only be done in community. That is why God has always necessarily been a Trinity- i.e. a community. You want to deny people one of the most fundamental freedom, the freedom to design their society to embody a set of values. How free are we if we are not free to give our lives meaning? And how, for thoughtful and sensitive people, can our earthly lives have meaning if we are not free to devote them to the great task of being the salt of the earth, and building the new Jerusalem? For Jews, that new Jerusalem is a Jewish State, but you want to deny them the right to have that. You want to deny us one of the most basic freedoms, sovereignal freedom, the freedom to try to change the world to embody one’s values.
It’s no accident that the two great forces currently tearing apart this world, in a duel to the death, are both gravely deficient ideologies, and for precisely the same reason. They were founded by men- Muhammed and Jefferson- who both denied the Trinity, and in so doing denied the principle that God, and by extension Man, is inherently a social and communal being. The desire of Liberal Capitalism to submit all men to the rule of the dollar and the ballot box is akin to the desire of Muhammed’s heirs to submit all men to the rule of the Quran. Indeed, Washington and Mecca have more in common than either would like to believe.
I wish for a future that is the exact opposite of yours. I would like to see the world divided up into lots of small, self-contained states that interact relatively little politically or economically. Jewish States, Christian States, Hindu States, communist states, anarchist states, capitalist states, and whatever else. Man thrives best under such conditions, and so-called multiculturalist cosmopolitan empires will inevitably go the way of pagan Rome.
Where is the Palestinian David?
There’s a large and growing body of knowledge on nonviolent struggle, based on historical case studies. Many of the comments above show an ingorance of some basic facts:
While nonviolent strategies do not always succeed, they have a far better success rate than armed struggle. In the last 33 years, 67 of the world’s countries made the transition from dictatorship or some form of authoritarian regime to some form of democratic rule. Nonviolent civic resistance was the key driving factor in 50 Of those 67 countries. (See “How Freedom Is Won,” Karatnycky & Ackerman, Freedom House, 2005)
Nonviolent movements do not require charismatic or saintly leadership (Gandhi, King). Most successful nonviolent struggles have not had such leadership.
Nonviolent success does not depend on the “conscience of the adversary.” The success of a nonviolent strategy is chiefly determined by the skill with which it is devised and pursued, whether the adversary is “civilized” or not. To prove the point – a few examples of nonviolent suceesses in which the adversary was ruthless or brutal: Chilean dictator Pinochet, defeated by a nonviolent pro-democracy coalition; Milosevic, the Serbian dictator; the Polish communist government defeated by the Solidarity trade union movement; Ferdinand Marcos, ousted by Philippine “people power.” And there are others: the Baltics, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Nepal, Peru, Georgia, Ukraine.
Nonviolent methods have been adopted by many Palestinian groups, but not with sufficient discipline to be effective, or at least, not so far. But the potential for nonviolent strategies against Israel is perhaps most evident in the fact that Israel works so hard to suppress them, sometimes very brutally. There’s a message here
Let's face it, so long as Israel has the USA security blanket it can continue to act like Chuckie The Doll baby. An earnest search for an Israeli FW de Klerk is long overdue. Clearly, it's up to Obama. Does he really have any balls? We will see.
http://warincontext.org/2009/03/29/editorial-the-missing-mandela/
What a bleak picture you create. If it comes to reality, then I promise you, Muslims the world over will dismantel Israel, be it a 100 years later or 200 years later after they wipe out the Palestinian nation completey. We will not forget that the Israelis wiped out an entire peoples while the Muslims were weak politicaly and militarily the world over.
So, for Israel's own good, and if it wants to remain a nation a 100 or 200 years from now, and if they have any fear of God in their hearts, they would do no such thing.
"Nonviolent methods have been adopted by many Palestinian groups, but not with sufficient discipline to be effective, or at least, not so far. But the potential for nonviolent strategies against Israel is perhaps most evident in the fact that Israel works so hard to suppress them, sometimes very brutally. There’s a message here"
!!!
The recent events in Gaza are a case in point.
Adopting the cease-fire was a non-violent choice by Hamas. It maintained discipline to a very large extent for more than half of the cease-fire period.
But, in choosing to drop the non-violent approach, it abandoned its success near the point when the combination of international acknowledgement of Hamas' discipline with the confidence that disciplined committed non-violence makes possible, would have resulted in serious negotiations and serious relaxation of border restrictions.
Instead, they gave Israel the reason to distrust, and in very quickly escalating to shelling Ashkelon and Beersheba, they indicated that they intend war.
Why fight a war that cannot be won? Hezbollah's declaration of "victory" for example was absurd.
The only choice is to keep fighting. Israeli society is only refraining from absolute extermination (1400 dead in 3 weeks is 'restraint' via Western standards) because outright genocide is not fashionable anymore.
I mean, it's unfair how Iraq is off the radar. The Israelis are fascists and racists – no doubt – but it pales in comparison to what WE'VE done in Iraq.
And how well we live in comparison to the 'horde' we're fighting. This country is become more and more morally bankrupt like Israel. It has everything to do with the Jewish Establishment's offspring – Zionism/Neoconservatism/etc.
Palestinians should keep fighting til the very end. When the closest reasonable Jewish Zionist is a Richard Witty and the extreme is a Nazi like Barrel-roll, then what options do you have? Jews have money and money fuels the American political scene. You can't ignore the tribalism and sociological/political identity of Jewishness in the West. It's not bigotry or racism (Jews aren't a race) to point this out.
The ONLY reason why it's so sensitive is because of the vast socialization of goyim to internalize Jewish suffering (Kevin MacDonald illustrates this perfectly and is not a racist/bigot).
The same is true for Blacks. I mean, it's a joke that it took us this long to elect a black president. Blacks are more American in most ways than any other ethnic minority.
They were kidnapped from their homes. Their culture and identity was tortured out of them. They coped in their own ways. But over time they assimilated and became American. What other identity do they have? They have to educate themselves to 'remember' who they are and where they came from.
We haven't learned a damn thing about racism or bigotry because we have not recognized the principles and social variables that transcend all these unique situations – in-turn making them less unique.
The Jewish Establishment keeps telling us that the Holocaust was unique and Jewish suffering is unique and hence, Israel is unique and anyone who attacks them is unique like the Nazis were unique.
Just look at the bile that Barrel-roll spews regularly about being 'chosen'. Or the sanctimony that Witty parades in all his posts.
The Palestinians have to live side-by-side with Zionists – the worse strain of the political Jewish identity.
Americans are too divided and too unorganized. Too cowardly and too ignorant.
No one – NO ONE – should ever have to depend on us. We couldn't save the Vietnamese, could we? How can we save the Palestinians or Iraqis? We can't. They have to do it themselves. Be ruthless but principled. Fight Israeli SOLDIERS. Be ruthless. Remember your dead – remember all those children. Not just since 2000. But since before 48'. That's how long this is.
Even Truman acknowledged the selfishness of Jewish tribalism. You don't make peace with Zionism. You destroy it just as Nazism was destroyed. Just as all forms of Fascism should be destroyed.
What ever happened to the Jewish Ghandi? Where was the man to convince the Jews after WW2 that a violent response, like the seizing of Palestine for a Jewish State, was not the answer?
Where was our Ghandi? We could have spent the last 60 years making money and children, instead of chasing a losing investment in the sands of the Middle East through the chimera of violence.
Yup, too bad we never had a Jewish Ghandi. Maybe it will turn out to be Philip Weiss! Stranger shit has happened!
"Richard Witty said in reply to Richard Witty…"
That about pretty much sums that up. And perfectly!
Where is the Palestinian Patton?
I agree, Mooser. More often than not, Witty seems to be talking to himself. It's very frustrating reading him. Can you imagine the frustration one must feel when people actually have to deal with and talk to Zionists like these on the negotiating table? No wonder nothing seems to come of all the talks.
Yes. 1.5 BILLION muslims were powerless in the face of a mere few million Jews. Seems like it is a good time for the Jews to dismantle the islamic world.
Now that you have threatened us with genocide, you have given us good reason to destroy the war making power of every single islamic nation.
Thank you very much. As if I didn't already have enough to do this afternoon.
Where is the Palestinian equivalent of the Irgun? Because then they would have had their state by now.
Answer me this, Palestinians! Where is the Palestinian George Gershwin? Where is the Palestinian Leonard Bernstein? Huh?
And if you don't believe in the untrammeled right of Zionism to rule Greater Judea by now, well, just ask yourself "where, oh where, is the Palestinian Jimmy Hendrix?"
Yes, where are all the Palestinian intellectuals?
They are in Israel. They were palestinian Jews and now they are israeli Jews.
Reminds me of the German's who went backstage to ask the Jewish comedian why Germany didn't have people who could make them laugh like that. The answer was obvious.
Why is there no Palestinian Ghandi, Patton, or Gershwin? Because the Islamic fascist palestinians murdered them.
And you can thank mooser the loser for bringing this sad tale to you.
Anybody see Jordanian King Abdullah on Meet the Press?
Slaeema, Witty is really something, but I doubt he is at all anything like a Zionist. He's an American Zionist Supporter, a different and subsidiary variety.
As far as he's concerned, the State of Israel exists, in some weird way, for his emotional benefit. And we just don't want him to feel good, for some reason he (thankfully, he tells himself) doesn't understand. Why on earth would we want to harsh his New-Age, Jew-age, mellow?
It's cause we're "vicious"!
Yes, Chris, please tell Richard Witty your opinion of Jordan's King Abdullah.
I'm sure you too, steeped in the same ideology and traditions, will be in complete agreement on his positive qualities.
And generally, Richard, I can assume you agree with Chris about the mental capacities of Palestinians? Zionism can't procede without unity, Richard.
Sounds like mooser the loser hates losing.
Don't be so haughty and arrogant Chris Berel. Don't forget God allowed the enslavement of the Jews for a long, long time in Egypt. Nations fall and rise. Power is an ever swinging pendulum.
Jews were powerless and then became powerful. Muslims were powerful then became powerless. And there will come a day when there will be other nations on this earth that will rule with a might fist, for that is the nature of power, and the old powers will cower in the corner.
Don't you think it's in Israel's best interest that it not ethnically cleans the Palestinians, so that history doesn’t come back in the future to bite them in the ass?
In December I listed some things about Obamaland that did not make me happy; excerpt:
Failure to condemn the slaughter in Gaza.
Failure to mention peace in listing the causes that Martin Luther
King, Jr., championed.
Failure to retract Obama's grotesque plan to escalate military force
in Afghanistan.
Failure to take a firm stand on holding Bush and the other war
criminals accountable.
Failure to take a firm stand against using taxpayer money to maintain
excessively greedy executive compensation at banks and auto companies.
Failure, in sum, to make much of the promised change credible.
Rev. King talked about the saving the soul of the country — but
after Vietnam and Iraq, what hope can there be? Consider that the
Commandant of West Point, a high ranking general, viewed the massacre
at My Lai for two hours from a helicopter before an underling stopped
it. Consider that Lt. Wm. Calley, after ordering and participating in
that massacre, and after being sentenced to life at hard labor, was
given a pardon by Nixon and married a Georgia jewelry heiress.
Consider that The New Yorker and Harvard University, by complicit
ultra-Zionism, continue to support the neocons' ultra-warriorism. [end excerpt]
The response to my posting, from a Jewish lawyer in Washington, DC, was [DIRECT QUOTE] SHUT THE FUCK UP [CLOSE QUOTE] Would that every bumper in the US had a sticker, REMEMBER THE 350.
–
Aloha ~~~ Ozzie Maland ~~~ San Diego
Holmes, All of your examples of successes are of people rising up against their own governments rather than successfully throwing off a foreign oppression. And for most of your examples many of the governments fell from the weight of their own mismanagement more than as a result of a sustained non-violent counter movement.
None of those examples apply to the conditions facing the Palestinians. Under normal circumstances, those examples might give hope to Palestinians seeking to overcome Palestinian corruption, but no hope to Palestinians seeking to overcome Israeli occupation and oppression. Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc. never had a successful non-violent movement against the wishes of the then powerful USSR.
The question is of a choice that the Palestinians must make themselves.
The violent approach has failed, and it nearly alone continues to justify violence and suppression by Israelis.
Their traumas at the experience of very vicious bombings of civilians is not easily forgiven, especially given the repetition of violent means still from Gaza.
What is different is the attitude of the rest of the Arab world to be willing to make peace with Israel.
Only a very few states are unwilling, and except for Hezbollah, even they would accept a democratic Palestinian plebiscite.
67 borders should be so close to a done deal, that just the details are in process.
But, NOT instigated by Palestinians violence, but by the offer to actually reconcile, the NON-VIOLENT approach.
Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? I don't know, but I do know what Israel would do if he were to show up.
Israel would send in the mistaravim — Israelis dressed up as Arabs who mix with the demonstrators to stir up trouble and justify the IDF's repression. See here for an Israeli general's admission that the mistaravim throw rocks.
Then, the West would take Israel's word that the Palestinians attacked the soldiers. After all, they're Arabs, hence barbarians, as Hollywood teaches; they're unable to hold a peaceful rally.
Chris- Are you ready to put your body on the line? I am, quite literally. You perceive a threat of genocide; to do so requires that you ignore all those who state loudly and repeatedly that this is a misperception. I will repeat: I perceive danger to anyone based on identification of that person as a Jew as a personal danger to me. No one is safe if anyone is rendered unsafe because of such an idenfification.
Israel's has a problem: in defining those who are Jewish as being within my kin group, I redefine those Israel would claim, while excluding me, in terms that contradict Israel's. And I am legend.
Please, no.
Instead IMO it is far more purposeful for the Palestinians to continue to call for recognition of its efforts and its people. Targeted assassination is an evil act. It would be more useful for the US to take out one of the Israeli leaders than for Palestine to do so, and one prays that the US will never do so.
If, as appears there is reason to wonder, Israel is implicated in the assassination of any US political leaders, then truly it needs to be made one of the United States, brought within the dominion of laws that apply to such acts and put on it's honor (about which it may need to be taught.)
In lieu of which there are always international courts of law.
Which also is in answer to Witty's student; grow up, already.
I am not impressed by the efficacy of non-violent acts in the absence of violence that answers the State directed terrorism of Israel. Israel is acting; stop it -stop the expansion of settlements, the daily imprisonment and death, demolition and dispossession, and see what happens. I dare you.
Great image, Citizen!
I think Obama's listening for the voice of We, the People.
And here we are.