Occupation and the Need for Resistance

by Tariq Shadid

This article was originally published at the Palestine Chronicle (2002), and is also present in the 358-page book ‘Understanding Palestine’ that contains many essays by this writer. It is available through Amazon. Click on the image to view/purchase.

 

Many admirable volunteers from countries all over the world have felt the urge to follow the voice of their internal instincts, revolting against injustice. Many of them have been putting their lives on the line at various flashpoints in the Palestinian lands occupied by Israel, displaying impressive courage and dedication. Unfortunately, the brave acts of these hundreds of unknown heroes, among whom there are many Europeans and Americans, go largely unreported in major news media.

Apparently, giving these unarmed heroes too much attention would destroy Israel’s projected media image, and ruin decades of immense efforts by these media to bias their reporting according to the tastes of American-Israeli international policy.

Most heroes of the unarmed struggle, of which there have been quite a few throughout history, still appear small when compared to the late Mahatma Ghandi, who taught the whole world a lesson in the power of non-violent resistance.

It truly takes a man or woman of great stature to excel in the difficult tasks of humbleness and non-violence. It is much easier to follow ones instincts which, in the case of a prolonged and humiliating occupation, will lead most men and women to advocate the infliction of hurt upon their enemies. Luckily, there are more great men and women in this world than meets the eye, or CNN’s camera lens, for that matter.

The lesson learned from people like Mahatma Ghandi is that non-violence works mainly because it leaves the enemy without a proper answer. A militarily superior force can certainly occupy lands, imprison people and even slaughter innocent children. However, it finds it much harder to subdue a people into slavery, if they are persistent in refusing to accept it.

Few tools are available to an occupying force to counter non-violent resistance, except for a violent intensification of the oppression. Putting a people under siege is an attempt to break the spirits of the struggling people. Some methods consist of attempts to drag the counterpart into armed confrontations that will most likely be won, in order to lower the morale of the occupied people.

But as long as the will to attain freedom exists, it is virtually impossible to impose ethnic and military supremacy on a people who have decided to remain where they are, and are engaged in massive civil disobedience.

In fact, the non-violent struggle is an absolute necessity in resisting a foreign occupation, and it is hard to imagine any kind of liberation from a militarily superior force to be able to succeed without it.

In Palestine, the people are collectively involved in an unarmed struggle on a daily basis. As anyone who knows the Palestinian rural and urban communities can confirm, few ordinary people have access to arms, and therefore struggle by merely trying to continue with their daily lives. This, in spite of being made virtually impossible by the Israeli occupying forces because of the roadblocks, the sieges and the often prolonged curfews, has enabled the Palestinian spirit to remain unbroken.

The defiance that the Palestinians are showing in continuing to struggle to provide for themselves, while being forced further and further into poverty and deprivation, is an immense and impressive display of non-violent resistance. It is exactly this factor that has been heavily underestimated by the Zionist occupiers. In spite of their experiences in Lebanon, they still fail to realize that these people too, are impossible to keep under occupation.

While non-violent resistance is a source of immense power, troubling occupying forces and making it hard for them to control stolen lands, this by no means excludes the legitimacy or even the necessity of armed struggle in specific situations.

No matter how one twists and distorts history, it is an established fact that the state of Israel was founded on already inhabited lands, with the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population.

Therefore, it is by definition erratic to describe the occupier as the one under attack. Or are we going to blame the Native Americans for having tried to resist, whether it be violently or non-violently, the invasion of the Europeans?

This situation unquestionably applies to the situation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as it does to the European colonization of the ‘New World’, including the present USA, and the Australian continent. In all these situations, the invading forces declared their intentions to take lands, colonize, and remain forever in power. The accompanying ideologies of racial superiority displayed by these nations in their violent births, were essential tools in maintaining the dedication of the invading nation’s civilians to continue exercising power over the indigenous inhabitants.

This is where Mahatma Gandhi’s battle had one great advantage, namely that India was indeed colonized, but was also part of a crumbling British world empire. For the British, this meant that losing the Indian continent would at the most severely damage, but never destroy Great Britain. Therefore, if pressured enough, there was a chance that they would relinquish their colony, like they did many other colonies afterwards, at least in the military sense.

However, in the cases of the aforementioned colonialist states, like Israel, the United States and Australia, their very existence is originally based on a self-proclaimed right to take and possess the lands they have invaded, with little or no regard for their original inhabitants. This explains the massive ethnic cleansing campaigns perpetrated against the Native Americans, the Aboriginals and the Palestinians.

While the non-violent side of resistance is an absolute necessity, these specific situations make armed struggle equally necessary. As long as the invader feels physically safe, he will instinctively and persistently pursue in his settler mentality, no matter how stubborn and disobedient his militarily weaker adversary is.

The death of eleven-year old Muhammad al-Durra, in front of the world’s tv-cameras, or the massive Palestinian casualties caused by the Israeli army’s aggression, did not shake the conscience of the Israelis. In those days, opinion polls in Israel showed continuous massive support for the Israeli government’s brutal suppression of the Intifada.

Now, the Israeli peace movement has suddenly awoken from its hibernation, and it is quite interesting to see how this coincides with a sharp increase in Israeli casualties.*

These peace movements, or anti-war movements, which should be considered positive forces, have a habit of emerging and becoming active when the battle is causing too much suffering in their own ranks.

I suppose that the Palestinians losing the battle, just like the Native Americans and the Aboriginals did, is a solution that would definitely suit many influential world powers, since it has proved to be a lasting and stable solution in those cases, and since the rights of the indigenous populations – let alone their immense civilian casualties – have been simply ignored.

If the Palestinian struggle would be confined to a non-violent resistance, the chances of an equally unfavourable outcome would greatly increase, simply because the aggressive intentions of the occupying forces are pre-existent, embedded in a racist ideology. In the case of Israel this is Zionism, which still is the main ideology of a large majority of Israelis, and will remain so unless countered and made unattractive to its adherers.

It is only by breaking this ideology that there is ever a chance for peace in the Middle East. And there are non-violent as well as violent ways to do this, and in case of emergency, specific targeted aggressive actions can be necessary. For sure, breaking this ideology will not result from accepting the governments of this ideology in our midst. Or are we required to make peace with racism?

Everyone remembers the peace accords signed by American leaders with the leaders of Native American tribes. Perhaps everyone also remembers, that barely any of these treaties were ever lived up to by the United States government, simply because there was no basis of power on the Native American side.

‘Negotiations’ conducted between an overwhelming power and a practically defenceless oppressed people, are simply dictates, or orders, since a negotiation can only be productive between two parties of equal strength. With the current inequality, they end up as a method for the occupying force to contain the indigenous population, and rule their demographic, economical and social situation.

An Israeli general once said during the Zionist occupation of Lebanon: “How are you going to deal with a person attacking you, who is already willing to die?”, referring to the phenomenon of suicide attacks, which was quite new at the time.

What a Palestinian might say, is: “How are you going to deal with a person attacking you, who is so willing to kill?”, referring to an Israeli soldier rampaging his house, like the Israeli army is doing today in the refugee camps of Nablus and Jenin**, causing massive casualties amongst civilians.

The answer should be to resist. And as to whether this should be a violent or a non-violent struggle, the answer should always be: both, and applied accordingly in full consciousness of all the factors involved in the situation as it develops.

Being extremist, both in violence and non-violence, is not the answer. A purely non-violent struggle is just as prone to failure, with rare exceptions due to specific circumstances, as a struggle that has no intrinsically embedded, non-violent strategies.

If the result has to be peace, then in the current time frame, resistance on both levels is a must, since justice, an essential ingredient for peace, can only be achieved by tackling Zionism and undermining the basis of this racist ideology. To suppose that this can be done in a purely non-violent way, is tantamount to severely underestimating its deep-rooted ambitions.

Would another equally racist ideology such as Nazism, not be in a flourishing condition today, had it not been countered militarily?

Mahatma Ghandi, the great and accomplished guru of non-violence, was not only a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, but also showed understanding for the Palestinian resistance, in the following excerpt from his article written as a part of his work, ‘My Non-Violence’, on page 358:

“I wish they (the Arabs) had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regarded as an unwarrantable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”

From: M.K. Gandhi, My Non-Violence. Edited by Sailesh Kumar Bandopadhaya (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1960)

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*): This phrase should be viewed in the context of the time it was written (the same goes for the other examples given in the article). Reading this in the current time frame only emphasizes the point that is being made: there is barely anything left of the Israeli peace movement now, since Palestinian resistance has been curtailed to a very large extent.

**): in the current context, one could use Gaza as a more contemporary example.