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A Palestinian defends violent resistance to occupation

One of the most interesting moments during Amer Shurrab’s appearance in New York Thursday night was the exchange above, when an audience member who gave his name as Bob Herbst asked Shurrab if he could respond to charges against Hamas: that it should be engaging in nonviolent resistance rather than shooting rockets and that, per Israel, it is firing from civilian areas.

Shurrab responded in part by defending violent resistance. Here is an excerpt [beginning at 2:10]:

Let’s be clear: It’s not only Hamas, it’s the Palestinian resistance. All Palestinian factions have been involved in this, and they are fighting against Israeli occupation. The right to resist an occupation is guaranteed by international laws and conventions. [Audience members say, That’s right]. If the Mexicans or the Canadians or the Chinese or the Russians invaded the U.S., we’re not going to sit here and watch them kill our kids. We are going to do whatever is necessary to fight back.

And, as for the nonviolent resistance, it’s also– it’s there, but, how can in Gaza– you are locked in the ghetto, you are totally locked out with people shooting at you at will whenever they feel like it. From the sea, from the land, from the air. Almost every day. And you cannot even see them or touch them. How are you going to resist nonviolently against them? Are you going to protest against them? They are not even going to see you. Are you going to go on strike? They don’t care. Especially in Gaza, it’s really hard.

As for the rockets, Shurrab says, they have had chiefly military targets, and Israel responds by “shelling neighborhoods randomly.” Shurrab states that of the three civilian Israeli deaths, one foreign worker was killed, a Bedouin was killed surely in some part because no bomb shelters or warning sirens were provided to his community, and the third civilian was someone bringing food to an Israeli base in solidarity.

The moment was interesting because while the talk’s sponsor, Jewish Voice for Peace, had expressly stated at the start that it supports nonviolent resistance to occupation, Shurrab’s defense of violent resistance plainly struck a chord in the crowd of 100 (most of whom, or of the ones I knew, were Jewish). The exchange demonstrates one of the outcomes of the massacres in the American discourse: Palestinians are in many cases grieving their own relatives’ killings (as Shurrab is), they are frightened and enraged, and so anyone engaged in Palestinian solidarity has to honor those feelings.

Shurrab’s questioner would seem to want to occupy a middle ground, of nonviolence, but the middle ground is disappearing by the second. The staggering violence has produced a which-side-are-you-on moment; it is a crisis in an intractable struggle, like John Brown’s raid in 1859 or the violent Algerian resistance in Algiers 100 years later. Those actors gained support from activists in Boston and Paris respectively.

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What comes to mind is this poignant quote from The Great Debaters spoken by James Farmer, Jr. – St Augustine said, “An unjust law in no law at all.’ Which means I have a right, even a duty to resist. With violence or civil disobedience. You should pray I choose the latter.

The world should pray that the path to our freedom remains nonviolent.

1S1P1V through BDS, ICC, ICJ, and UN. But other means may become necessary as it’s been over a century. Enough already. We want, need, crave, deserve peace and dignity even if the path to it may be forced upon us to be “not clean”. After all, birth is painful and messy but does have a happy ending.

As regards the duty to resist it is absolute, who now recalls the displaced in the camps, the only reason anyone is paying attention to Gaza is because of Hamas ability to inconvenience the annexors, nonviolence requires an audience.

The thing is, discussing Palestinian violent resistance is largely theoretical. Except with resistance fighters engaging in combat with invading murderous soldiers, we are usually talking about the threat of violence-which rarely hurts anyone, but tends to interfere with people’s daily routine and has the actual effect that most civil disobedience actions have-stopping traffic and slowing down commerce. When Hamas shoots rockets blindly into Israel, even if no one gets hit, everyone has to stop their car and lay down on the ground. A pain in the ass to be sure, but is it violent? Borderline, in my opinion. Even when kids throw stones at soldiers, the effect is to interfere with the routine of occupation. The soldiers aren’t going to get hurt unless they engage the protesting civilians-and even then, they are most likely only to get bruised.

If we are going to discuss violence, we should be less generic-or else we fall into the trap of conflating suicide bombings with throwing rocks.

He is absolutely right. I just came from a Lion’s club meeting, in which, after we worked on organizing a fund drive for the local hospice, I directed the members to spy on the government in odder to destroy society. It was great fun.

What a wonderful simple and devastating logic:

“If Hamas is hiding in the tunnels, why do you bomb hospitals?”

“If you are afraid of the tunnels, why don’t you approach them from their end in Israel?”

“How to protest non-violent against invisible bombing & shelling planes, ships and tanks?”